Blogging on Good Therapy

Jennifer Bullock, M.Ed., M.L.S.P.,LPC, NCC

Click here to contact Jennifer and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

In our current over-scheduled, over-pressured world, families are confronting problems they have little capacity to do anything about. We can tend to cope by getting stuck in a narrow range of behaviors and responses even if they are not helpful. A child who has learned to have temper tantrums when she is angry, and her parents who have learned to punish or pamper her, are stuck in maladaptive, non-growthful environments—‘a bad play’. It’s like playing the same part in the same play on the same stage day after day.

A key component in this play is often our children’s behavioral, emotional and leaning difficulties that are so disruptive or dysfunctional - all we want to do is stop it. As parents, educators and fellow child / family therapists, we can understandably respond by focusing on getting rid of the most glaring and painful symptoms. Another way to handle these situations is to focus on development as the key to transforming our lives and our children’s lives—including maladaptive behaviors.

The Family Development Program does just that. The goal is to help children, parents, and families develop and grow emotionally and socially. How? Well, families, in a combination of group and individual therapy and coaching, are helped to practice new ways of relating to each other where it’s possible to impact positively on each other. We can create new plays, try out new parts, change the stage, i.e.) reshape the environments we are in, into ones that allow us all to create new possibilities and make new choices.

Children who have been identified as having learning disabilities or Pervasive Developmental Disorders, or who are using drugs, or are having trouble getting along with peers, teachers or their parents, can, along with their families, become active creators of new learning and emotions. How? By learning to reshape the various maladaptive and non-developmental environments they inhabit into developmental ones.

The A Family: Three siblings - Middle and Jr. High school aged. The youngest, we’ll call John, was diagnosed with ADHD and ODD, has fits/ outbursts that are very annoying, disruptive and sometimes scary to the rest of the family. John’s role in the family play was clearly the unmanageable ‘crazy’ one, even according to him. That is his label. We had a series of group sessions where we created other roles for one another to help shake up the stuckness and change the increasing destructiveness between them. Instead of getting ‘the bad boy’ to stop, we worked on creating various ensemble performances between them, including:
1-John performing as a positive leader to his older, ‘healthy’ siblings,
2-Scenes where they all had fits then practiced various ‘take twos’
3-Siblings arranging a ‘fit competition’ between one another
4-Presenting/performing their new strategies to their parents and shaping new roles for the parents to play in the ‘fit’ scenes.

This helped the A Family see the choice making element to their lives, to take responsibility for working more effectively as a sibling and family team, and to practice other roles.

In this way, we were stimulating development versus changing a particular behavior. It was no longer a problem that demanded a solution or a behavior that needed changing, but a stimulus and resource for development. John didn’t get ‘fixed’, but instead became a creator of an environment in which he and others could learn about attending to one another and to the total environment.

Through the use of play, improvisation, creative imitation and performance, we help children take responsibility for their learning and emotions. Adults are able to break out of coercive methods that have little to do with developing children as active and responsible. Our capacity to perform is very important to our emotional growth and development. As performers in every day life, we can constantly create and recreate what we do. For example, we can ‘take two’: “I’m not sure if this conversation is going so well for us, can we take two/ try again/ start over” -Like scenes in the play of life.

The Family Development Program helps children and adults to develop socially, emotionally and cognitively by supporting them in doing what they don’t know how to do. Creating something new is what development is all about.

Jennifer Bullock, M.Ed., M.L.S.P.,LPC, NCC. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Jennifer and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Family Therapy, Psychotherapy: Approaches, Models, & Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.