Family
Systems Perspective
(from “Genograms: Assessment
and Intervention, 2nd Edition” )
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Family
– those who are tied together through their common biological, legal, cultural,
and emotional history and their implied future together.
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Views
families as inextricably interconnected. Neither people nor their problems
exist in a vacuum. Physical, social and emotional functioning of family members
is profoundly interdependent, with changes in one part of the system
reverberating in other parts.
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Family
is the primary and, almost always, the most powerful system to which humans
belong.
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Family
consists of the entire kinship network of at least 3 generations, both as it
currently exists and as it has evolved through time.
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Family
interactions and relationships tend to be highly reciprocal, patterned, and
repetitive.
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Family
behaviors, including problems and symptoms, derive further emotional and
normative meaning in relation to both the sociocultural and historical context
of the family.
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Ethnicity,
race, religion, migration, class, and other socioeconomic factors, as well as a
family’s time and location in history, also influence a family’s structural
patterns.
Family
Systems Perspective Continued
(from “Genograms: Assessment
and Intervention, 2nd Edition” )
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Families
repeat themselves. What happens in one generation will often repeat itself in
the next. The same issues tend to be played out from generation to generation.
As a result, relationship patterns in previous generations may provide implicit
models for family functioning in the next generation.
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The
Vertical axis includes family history, patterns of relating and functioning
that are transmitted down generations, primarily through the mechanism of
triangling. At the sociocultural level, vertical axis includes cultural and
societal history, stereotypes, patterns of power, social hierarchies, and
beliefs.
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The
Horizontal axis describes the family as it moves through time, coping with
changes and transitions in the family’s life cycle. Horizontal axis relates to
community connections or lack of them, current events, and social policy as
they impact a family and the individual.
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Many
relationship patterns in families – distant, conflictual, cutoff, close, fused,
enmeshed, rigid, diffuse.
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Bowen
(1978) – two-person relationships tend to be unstable. Under stress two people
tend to draw in a third. The basic unit of an emotional system thus tends to be
the triangle.
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Members
of a family tend to fit together as a functional whole – behaviors tend to be
complementary or reciprocal. This does NOT mean that members have equal power,
it means that belonging to a system opens people to reciprocal influences and
involves them in each other’s behavior in inextricable ways.