Individual Therapy, Family Therapy

Cultural, religious, and racial differences are expressed in families and couples more fully than in individual therapy. Therefore, these differences and how they are handled can play a pivotal role in the therapy success. This area is covered more thoroughly in Chapter 13, but its importance cannot be underestimated.

Shifting from Individual to Couple or Family Therapy As noted throughout this chapter, interviewers should treat all couple and family members equally. We also have emphasized the tendency of relationship partners and family members to triangulate interviewers in an effort to have greater power or control in the therapy and family settings. For these reasons, we usually avoid the ubiquitous temptation to shift from individual to couple or family therapy with people from the same family system. We also advise against simultaneous individual and couple or family work by the same counselor. Our rules for handling this issue are:

• Once an individual client, always an individual client. Generally, we will not do individual counseling with someone and then initiate couple or family work that involves that person. Instead, we refer those involved to a competent colleague.

• Following completion of couple or family counseling, on rare occasions, we might

consider working in individual therapy with one of the family members. However, when doing so, we always make it clear: Once we start individual therapy, we will not return to couple or family therapy.

For a number of reasons, many therapists do not abide by these suggestions; consider the following scenarios: An individual client says something to the therapist such as, “Because we’ve already been working together, I trust you. I don’t want to start all over and go see someone else for marriage therapy. And my husband says he doesn’t mind.” Interviewing Couples and Families 365A teenage boy and his therapist mutually conclude that family therapy is needed. The boy states, “I absolutely refuse to go to therapy with anyone else but you! There is no way I’m going to see a different shrink!” Therapists may want to prolong therapy with a person because they enjoy working with that client or because they need to maintain their caseload for ?nancial reasons.