WorksheetsFamily Theory
Total questions: 10
Worksheet time: 5mins
Bowen’s approach to family therapy focuses on the differentiation of members. A nurse using this approach would be looking for what type of outcome for the family?
Restructuring dysfunctional triangles.
Use straight messages without manipulation.
Achieve greater individuation for its members.
Assess itself in terms of life cycle stages.
Which situation is LEAST likely to place severe, disabling stress on a family?
The need for long-term care of a father following a severe brain injury in a family with a wife and two teenage sons.
The divorce of the parents of three children, ages 10, 8, and 2.
The death of a mother who leaves a husband and three sons under 12.
The family in which the son leaves for college and the father retires.
Scapegoating can be identified as occurring within a family when:
The family projects the inadequacies of the family onto a particular family member.
Messages of hostility are sent by the identified patient to family members.
The identified client threatens separation to induce feelings of isolation and despair.
Family members use nonverbal techniques to disguise or qualify the meaning of verbal messages.
The primary goal of Bowenian family therapy is to:
Increase the family's ability to solve everyday problems.
Enhance each family member's ability to experience and express feelings.
To improve the communication between each family member.
Increase the level of differentiation of self in family members.
Unresolved emotional reactivity from our families:
Leaves us vulnerable to repeat the unresolved patterns again.
Disappears as we get some distance from our families.
Is dissipated when we become adults.
Becomes finished business as we parent our own children.
Undifferentiated people are likely to react to family situations:
With strong emotionality because they are less able to think clearly.
Emotionally because that is what works best when people feel close to their family.
Non-emotionally because they can sort through what will help the family best.
Without personal feeling because that will serve the family best.
When parents transmit their unresolved emotional problems onto their children Bowen calls this:
Family Projection Process
Family Ejection Process
Emotional Reactivity
Family Cutoff Syndrome
When it comes to Sibling Position, Bowen believed:
That it had little influence on the level of differentiation a person could reach.
That sibling rivalry could not be explained as a triangulation process, and therefore was not a useful concept in Family Systems.
That it is a helpful idea in predicting what part a child will play in the family emotional process.
That sibling position was only important in the parents' process of transmitting unresolved emotional reactivity.
Larry is angry at his wife, so he ignores her and plays with their son. He is demonstrating:
Triangles
Emotional cutoff
Family projection process
Differentiation of the self
When a person has a hard time distinguishing herself from the other members of her family, she has:
Low self-differentiation
High self-differentiation
Emotional cutoff
Trianglation
