Chapter 7 Experiential Family Therapy

Family Therapy as an Emotional Encounter

Learning Outcomes

· Describe the evolution of experiential family therapy.

· Describe the main tenets of experiential family therapy.

· Describe healthy and unhealthy family development from an experiential perspective.

· Describe the clinical goals and the conditions necessary for meeting those goals from an experiential perspective.

· Discuss and demonstrate the assessment and intervention techniques of experiential family therapy.

· Discuss research support for experiential family therapy.

An experiential branch of family therapy emerged from the humanistic wing of psychology that, like the expressive therapies that inspired it, emphasized immediate, here-and-now experience. Experiential therapy was popular when family therapy was young, when therapists talked about systems but borrowed their techniques from individual and group therapies. From Gestalt therapy and encounter groups came techniques like role-playing and emotional confrontation, while other expressive methods such as family sculpting and family drawing bore the influence of the arts and of psychodrama. In focusing more on emotional experience than on the dynamics of interaction, experiential therapists seemed out of step with the rest of family therapy. Indeed, by emphasizing individuals and their feelings, experiential treatment may never have been as well suited to family therapy as were approaches that dealt with systems and interaction. With the passing of the inspirational leaders of this tradition, Virginia Satir and Carl Whitaker, the methods they popularized began to seem a little dated, more a product of the 1960s than of today’s world. Recently, however, experiential approaches have been enjoying a revival and, as we will see, two of the newer models—Johnson’s (2004) emotionally focused couples therapy and the internal family systems model (Schwartz, 1995)—have combined the emotional impact of an experiential focus on the individual with a more sophisticated understanding of family systems. As the first great cathartic therapist, Sigmund Freud, discovered, getting in touch with painful feelings is not by itself a complete form of psychotherapy. On the other hand, ignoring or rationalizing unhappy emotions may cheat clients out of the opportunity to get to the heart of their problems. Thus the experiential emphasis on emotional expression may be a useful counterweight to the reductionistic emphasis on behavior and cognition in today’s problem-solving approaches.

Sketches of Leading Figures

Two giants stand out in the development of experiential family therapy: Carl Whitaker and Virginia Satir. Whitaker was the leading exponent of a freewheeling, intuitive approach aimed at puncturing pretense and liberating family members to be themselves. He was among the first to do psychotherapy with families, and although he was considered a maverick, he eventually became one of the most admired therapists in the field. Iconoclastic, even outrageous at times, Whitaker nevertheless retained the respect of the family therapy establishment. He may have been their Puck, but he was one of them. Whitaker grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. Rural isolation bred a certain shyness but also conditioned him to be less bound by social convention. After medical school and a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, Whita