Salvador Minuchin's theory - Case Study Example

Sheila (not her real name) has coerced George’s children to also hate Mary. This has created a cycle that may shatter the relationship between George and Mary if something does not change. As an example, George’s daughters are very cruel to Mary and they do their best to manipulate her. If they do not treat her in this way, they feel they are betraying Sheila. George does not pay attention to this situation and feels that Mary is just feeling insecure and fearful. This has made Mary feel that she is going to lose George because he will eventually want a divorce because she is talking against his children.

George’s son is also rude and nasty although he tries to be civil sometimes. George’s daughter seems angry with life in general and the son seems withdrawn and is not doing well in school. Salvador Minuchin’s Structural Family Theory The most obvious problem in this situation is that the families have not bonded. George’s children have bonded with Sheila but they have not bonded with Mary. George has not done anything to improve the opportunities for bonding. One of the first things that Minuchin’s theory would do is to help the family see the relationship between the subsystems and boundaries they are working within (Paratore and Nichols, 2012).

Minuchin’s theory would see this family as one that is isolated and detached. The case study family has no real boundaries as to what they should do within the family. There are definite “roles and rules, boundaries, power, and hierarchy “(Navarre, 1998, p. 558) that seem to have been set up by Sheila. There are no boundaries between Sheila’s children and Mary. According to Minuchin, the family structure should be one of nurturing, support, and socialization with family members (Navarre, 1998).

Also, the family does not have a clear structure of parents and children because Sheila’s children are allowed to treat Mary poorly. This creates no opportunity for a family to be created between Mary and George’s children. The system that this family is working within would be a rigid family structure, which Minuchin defines as, “family members are disengaged or isolated from one another, and individuals are characterized as self-reliant and segregated” (Navarre, 1998, p. 559). Although Sheila may think that her family is in tact, they are not because she is allowing her children to be dysfunctional.

Basically, her children are afraid of her and she has manipulated them into thinking that they are being loyal to her. Bouchard and Doucet (2010) suggest that the way that these adult children are acting is because the children of divorced parents often have weaker ties with their parents and this can create a more difficult transition for them in the family. This can be seen in the case study family. Interventions In order to help this family, a first step would have change the family structure.

The first thing to do would be to bring both families together (hopefully through family counseling) and begin to talk about the structure that is in place now and how it must be changed. The family is dealing with two different families now that need to come together in order to have more harmony in both families. This could be done by creating a genome of both families independently. Mapping this out in a visual format would provide the families with an understanding of what is happening now.

The point of this visual would be to point