Personal Theory of Marriage & Family Counseling Int

Although I favor the general systems approach to marriage and family counseling, I tend to advocate an eclectic approach. In other words, I believe that general systems theory is large enough that it can be used as a conceptual foundation even when methods, and notions are incorporated into it from other psychological schools of thought.

I would say that my overall theoretical approach to counseling is multifaceted in that I have conceptual views not only about counseling goals, objectives and specifics (such as preferred therapeutic interventions and strategies) but also about ethical concerns, the training of counselors and pre-marital counseling. My views in each of these areas are delineated below.

I feel that the best approach to marriage and family counseling is general systems theory. This theoretical view characterizes marriage/family as resembling a living system. The theory views the marriage or family as an "open system" with the properties of:

(1) wholeness, in that whatever affects one part of the system affects the entire system;

(2) equifinality, in that an open system may attain a state independent of initial conditions and determined only by system parameters; and

(3) feedback, (that part of a system's output which is reintroduced into the system as information about the output and the process of the system) were feedback in the therapy context can be related

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rrelated with low marital distress. However, I do not think that strengthening and improving communication should be the only objective of marriage and family counseling. In addition, I believe that marriage and family counselors should have as the goals of therapy/counseling the objectives of facilitating: increased positive regard for the relationship, intimacy, understanding, sensitivity, respect, and trust. Moreover, the effective counselor should have as one of his or her most important goals that of teaching family members new and more viable ways of handling interpersonal differences, and conflicts. Achieving the objectives of marriage and family counseling requires the use of effective intervention techniques and strategies. I would argue that effective counseling strategies are those developed based on the assumption that the reasons giving rise to family conflict almost always have strong emotional components which must be brought to the awareness of family members. In other words, emotion gets in the way of objective consideration and discussion between husband and wife, or parent and children and the counselor serves as a disinterested friend whose purpose is to work with the family to voice their feelings
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2695
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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