Action Therapy with Families and Groups: Using Creative Arts Improvisation in Clinical Practice
Language: English
Pages: 299
ISBN: 1591470129
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This title introduces clinicians to innovative therapeutic options that can be used with families and groups: action methods or therapy approaches involving physical movement and expressive arts techniques. These methods provide clients and therapists new ways of both looking at problems and discovering solutions to these problems and are thus especially appropriate to skills training, role-development and expansion, relationship enhancement and short-term treatment with groups, couples and familes. Contributors provide a brief overview of featured action methods and illustrate the application of their particular method to specific therapy cases, discussing the rationale behind their clinical choices and how they handled any special challenges or complications. Chapters illustrate family therapy that focuses on dealing with grief and loss, family reorganization and the effects of trauma as well as group therapy approaches to the treatment of addictive and compulsive disorders, self-mutilation, substance abuse, autism, chronic mental illness and career difficulties.
play together and see if they could learn anything as a family about how they might change their behavior. It was important that the children wanted to attend the next session and that both they and their parents knew that they would be expected to play together. Evaluation Play The Greys were led into the playroom and asked to play a game of Follow the Leader, with everyone taking turns at being the leader. Mrs. Grey explained the game to both Brandy and Brian and asked which child would like to
go first. Brian nominated himself and began by bouncing a ball he found. He passed it to his mother, who did the same. Brandy then grasped the ball, threw it to the other side of the room, and laughed quite loudly. Mr. Grey verbally attempted to redirect his adoptive daughter, while Brian became quite angry. Mrs. Grey then began to skip and asked the other family members to follow her. Mr. Grey took Brandy’s hand to help her skip after Mrs. Grey. Brian protested. Brandy stated she wanted to be
replied, “I tell him he is a real loser, that he is a big disappointment to his wife and kids, and that they don’t really want him around.” “What is it Les has lost that makes him a loser?” asked the therapist. “Selfrespect—and the respect of his wife and kids,” he replied. Sarah, Marla, and Nicholas were then encouraged to tell Sadness whether Sadness was accurately describing how they felt about Les and to correct anything said by Sadness that was not true. All three adamantly denied that they
group therapy offers clients vivid experiences of affirmation, support, and prosocial playful interaction. These benefits fit well with the goals of more recently developed group approaches to substance abuse therapy, notably motivational enhancement therapy (Miller & Heather, 1986) and the stages-of-change transtheoretical model (Velasquez, Crouch, Maurer, & DiClemente, 2001). As noted by Rollnick and Miller (1995), “Readiness to change is not a current trait, but a fluctuating product of
property. Steve picked up on this and escalated his movement and voice tone to express frustration with the animal as it scampered up a pole to get away. The pesky animal became trapped in a burlap bag. Bob and Steve took turns wrestling with the animal until Bob took the bag to the woods, where he released the animal into the wild. The audience laughed, whistled, and applauded loudly. During this game, the players seemed to achieve mutuality of energy and purpose as though they had both