Vargas Family Psychodynamic Case Study

Vargas is able to connect with people who have anxiety and depression by showing how much he struggled in these same areas throughout his life. The stress caused by the question his Lola presented, “What will happen if people find out,” caused him tremendous emotional trauma and led to his bouts with anxiety and depression. This question comes up again and again throughout the story and was most likely a motivating factor in why he ended up telling everyone. By considering this emotional aspect of his life in his essay, not only does Vargas create an empathetic bond between him and people struggling with these mental disorders, but he also creates a sympathetic bond with other readers aware of this disorder and the devastating effects it can have on a person.

In this paper I will be describing how the first two session of the Brice family went. I will talk about what systems approach to therapy was used, and will include how Whitaker and Napier conceptualized the family’s difficulties. I will also describe how this differs from an individual understanding, and will talk about what specific interventions they used to support their systemic understanding of this family.

The family is made up of five people: Claudia, the IP; Carolyn, mother; Laura, the sister; Don, the brother; and David, the father. The family is coming into therapy because there have been mounting concerns about Claudia and her behavior—acting out, staying out late, some fairly typical teenage stuff. For the purpose of this paper, I will be starting at the beginning where the family is first coming into therapy. I will first school that I will apply is Structural Family Therapy and the second school is Bowen Family Therapy.

Haley and Madanes’ approach to strategic family therapy argues that change occurs through the process of the family carrying out assignments issued by the therapist. As described in Madanes’ Strategic Family Therapy (1981), “strategic therapists attempt to design a therapeutic strategy for each specific problem.” Therapists issue directives that are designed to shift the framework of the family to resolve the displaying problem. Treatment of these issues would include intense involvement, carefully planned interventions designed to reach clear goals, frequent use of therapist-generated directives or assignments, and paradoxical procedures.

The Sanchez family is the typical Latino family that you find in most neighborhoods. The mother Celia Sanchez doesn’t speak English since she’s surrounded by people who speak Spanish. As a Latino mother she’s very religious attends church and participates in church events where she gets food as well. Since Celia’s English is limited this has been an impediment during school conferences and other situations that she has faced. Celia wants to apply for food stamps but her husband Hector doesn’t agree and is completely against it. I kind of understand where Hector is coming from being the man of the house he feels that he needs to provide for his family and thinks he’s responsible for everyone. Thus, he doesn’t leave room for additional help and wants to everything himself.

The focus of this paper is on psychodynamic (intergenerational and psychoanalytic) family therapies; and how these concepts apply to helping the protagonist in the major motion picture Antwone Fisher overcome traumatic incidents he experienced during his childhood and adolescent years, as well as help him to manage his current anger issues.

Family therapy is a form of psychotherapy employed to assist members of a family in improving communication systems, conflict resolution, and to help the family to deal with certain problems that manifest in the behavior of members. In most cases, deviance in a family member is an indication of underlying family dysfunctions. This paper looks the counselling procedure that can be applied to help the Kline family solve their problems. It answers certain questions including those of the expected challenges during therapy and ways of dealing with the challenges.

Family therapy is a technique that has many alternative approaches to every aspect of treatment which Nichols (2014), states may present a challenge when describing a basic technique. The two models of family therapy in which I feel that I would be most effective and comfortable with would be, experiential family therapy and solution-focused brief therapy. I feel most comfortable with these models because, I adapt to the role of the therapist of both therapies naturally. According to Nichols (2014), when families seek therapy they are stuck in a life-cycle transition, sometimes they are obvious and sometimes they are not obvious. I’ve found that during the first session an excellent question is to ask the client why now so that they can

The battle for liberty has been fought on different scales with the beginning of thousands of revolutions in the history. The ideal liberty is an ultimate goal that inflames the minds of many people who yearn for individual freedom. In all these struggles, the definition of liberty is not the same for different people. According to the text, “the idea of liberty has played a powerful role in the history of Western society and culture, but the meaning and understanding of liberty has undergone continual change and interpretation.” For example in the Roman world, liberty meant the condition of being a free man. In the Middle Ages, liberty meant having special privileges or rights. However, the idea of liberty under religious dimension was rather new. Martin Luther King had interpreted another important foundation of liberty in his treatise On Christian Liberty: the important of faith and Scripture to Christian life.

Leader X’s case is well suited for conceptualization using cognitive behavior therapy. The CBT approach focuses on thoughts and how they influence behavior and feelings. The cognitive interventions aim to modify maladaptive cognitions while the behavioral interventions aim to decrease

During the second session, the family was provided individual opportunities to relate his or her perceptions of the struggles in the family. Using Claudia as the identified patient, the family related struggles directly associated with Claudia’s behavior (Nichols, 2013, p. 15). Whitaker (1978) conceptualized the issues in a different perspective stating, “sounds like Claudia is in charge of getting Mom and Dad to start fighting, and you and Laura are in charge of helping them stop” (p. 11). Whitaker also indicated the parallels involving Carolyn’s anger at Claudia for hiding in her room and David’s propensity to hide in his study (p. 11). Using the unconscious frame of reference from session one, another conceptualization that was presented was that of Don’s willingness to talk as the reason that the family had not wanted to bring him to the first session (p. 12).

This paper will use the book The Family Crucible to demonstrate the authors’ family systems approach to therapy. Narrative theory is compared and contrasted with family systems theory, and is ultimately integrated into my own theoretical foundation for practice as a social worker.

The family system is founded on the notions that for change to occur in the life of an individual, the therapist must understand and work with the family as a whole. In working with the family, the therapist can understand how the individual in counseling functions within his family system and how the client’s behaviors connect to other people in the family. This theory also holds the perception that symptoms are a set of family habits and patterns passed down by generation and not a result of a psychological problem or an inability to change (Corey, 2017). Furthermore, the family system theory holds the idea that when a change occurs everyone in the unit is affected by the change.

My first assumption of family therapy was to involve the parents and the individual that had the problem. This book explored further what it

This essay is intended to evaluate one therapeutic intervention or theory that may be used in Family therapy. The theory being examined is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or for short CBT. The essay will begin with defining CBT and discussing the underlying principles, techniques and concepts of the approach. Some practical examples and scenarios of utilizing CBT will then be explored. Then the essay will proceed to a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of this therapeutic intervention. Finally a conclusion regarding employing such techniques will be made.