Family Therapy and Methods - Essay Example

Simple narration of personal experiences gives counselors a view of the nature of the family and things that precipitate a particular problem(s). Certain techniques of Solution-Focused and Narrative Therapies can incorporate with other types of family therapy. To begin, the narrative aspect of Narrative Family Therapy can be compatible with Experiential Family Therapy. This relates to the fact that Experiential Family Therapy focuses on encouraging individual family members to communicate their emotions freely and honestly.

Disclosing and sharing emotions enable therapists to understand clients and demonstrate appropriate sympathy. In the same manner, Narrative Therapy focuses on encouraging disclosure of unpleasant experiences, which then eases when therapists sympathize and delink clients from the problems (Nichols, 2013). A therapist can use Narrative Therapy to initiate narration of stories that disclose a client’s experiences and then introduce Experiential Approach to identify negative emotions and guide the client in reducing impacts of the emotions on the health of a family.

The fact that Solution-Focused Family Therapy views family problems as results of failed and relaxed attempts to resolve family issues makes it easy to incorporate with the Structural Approach that considers problems as maintained by dysfunctional family structures. The goal of Structural Therapists is to alter dysfunctional systems (Nichols, 2013). The goal of Solution-Focused Therapists is to challenge families to explore alternative solutions to their problems. When incorporated, Structural Approach will help a therapist to alter dysfunctional systems to ease tension(s) and use a Solution-Focused Approach to help family members identify alternative solutions to the given problem(s).