Family Choreography, Family Members

Identi?cation, Projection, Joining, and Avoiding Working with couples and/or families comes as close to proving the existence of the unconscious as any professional activity we can think of. You will ?nd it challenging to keep your own early learning, beliefs, attachment issues, and the resulting current struggles from affecting your professional work with couples and families. The common term for this reaction is countertransference, mentioned in Chapter 5. Couples and families elicit signi?cant countertransference reactions worthy of consideration.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that effective assessment and assistance is enhanced by interviewers’ life experiences. Even if it were possible to exclude your own personal family and relationship issues from your work , it would be inadvisable. Common experiences form part of the foundation of any relationship and assist us in understanding other peoples’ experiences. Individual and Cultural Highlight 12.1 describes a technique to help you explore your own relationship and family issues.

Working with couples and families usually involves a joining that is more pronounced than in individual work. It is analogous to empathy but perhaps more incluInterviewing Couples and Families

Family Choreography

Family choreography is a technique developed by Peggy Papp and used in many treatment programs. To explore some of your own family of origin material, choose members of the class to represent all the salient members of your family of origin and position them physically according to the roles they played in your family. Then position yourself in your own role. You can hold a particular arrangement for a minute or two and feel the power of the rigid positions, or direct movement and interactions that represent your family dynamics. Then have someone stand in for you and walk around the creation you have fashioned, observing the stand in family members. Finally, change the action or structure in some way that would have been positive for you. Move positions, change interrelationships, remove members. Do whatever you like and, again, view what you’ve done.