A Therapeutic Space for Individuals, Couples, and Families
All families have Rule Systems, but they may not even know it. In this case story, psychiatrist/family therapist Dave Keith treats a family with a child diagnosed with ADHD. Watch how he disrupts the Family Rule system. Good things happen for the child.
In contemporary culture, as portrayed in commercials for pharmaceuticals, family members are portrayed as bystanders to suffering, having to “manage” the symptoms of their bi-polar loved one, or “suffer” the effects of the depressed person’s symptoms or behavior. But families, couples, all of us, can unwittingly get stuck in patterns, sometimes destructive patterns, of which we are unaware. Those patterns can cause distress in ourselves and others, which can show up as a “symptom” in one person. This is rarely intentional, more a product of the tricky, powerful and subtle nature of relationship dynamics.
Eating disorders are no exceptions. Most of the clinical writing and popular assumptions about anorexia and other eating disorders note that these conditions are characterized by the need for individual “control”. There’s truth to this. But if you expand the lens to include the family, you learn a lot about what this “control” can look like.
In this post, Dave shares his clinical story about a young woman with severe depression and her recovery, without the use of medications. It again reminds us about the power of relationship, and the power of creative caring.
Dave: In an earlier post, Defiance in the Family: A Rebellion in the Name of Health, I described our idea
Dave: My riddle, “What is a child?” is still in the air. How we think about the questions is influenced
Dave: Our blog is set up to provide alternative ways of thinking about emotional, behavioral, mental, psychiatric problems. We are