Social Work Practice with Families

Goal Set and Intervention

Need: Family needs a better way of communication

Goal: Family members will attend weekly family therapy sessions for the next 12 weeks. The father and mother will have a couples session once a week for six weeks. The goal is to assist the family members in developing better methods of communication and expressing themselves.

Intervention/Theory: Transformational Family Systems

Application to Family: Transformational family system is used within the family structure to improve communication and relationships (Sinan, 2020). The intervention addresses personal actions, perceptions, and emotions related to each persons dynamic in the family unit. For the Maxson family, transformational family systems will assist the family members in building better relationships with each other and improve their communications skills. Currently, the family members are not living together as a family unit because each person has their individual needs, and they ignore each other. None of the family members says exactly what they need to say, and they prefer to keep to themselves in certain matters. Troy does not communicate to his son Cory the reason he does not want him to play football. Instead, he is adamant that Cory should look for a job. However, had he expressed his fears based on what had happened to himself, they could have come up with a solution suitable for each other. Troy does not know how to communicate with his family members because of how he was raised. Troys father used to tell him what he needed to do, and he had to do it. With his family, Troy is using the same strategy, and it is not working. Therefore, he needs to go through family therapy to unlearn his current communication methods and learn new communication methods.

Rose and Troy do not have a cordial relationship, which results in them arguing most of the time. After discovering Troy has a child with another woman, Rose shuts him out completely, and she only speaks to him about what needs to be done in the house. Their communication can be rectified if they attend couples therapy to express their feelings and learn how to communicate with each other even when they are disappointed by the other person.

Need: Family needs a healthier way of dealing with emotions

Goal: The family members...…be intact, and Troy should not have gone and had an affair. However, his excuse was that he felt stuck in the relationship with Rose. Instead of having an affair, he should have worked towards rectifying and improving his relationship with Rose. SFT can address these issues because the therapist will enter into the family system to understand the relationships between family members. Conflict can be reduced if each family member respects the other. Tory and Cory have a tense relationship because Troy has an idea of what he wants Cory to do, which conflicts with what Cory himself wants. The conflict can be resolved if they both communicate and express their reasons for what they want. However, my way or the highway strategy employed by Troy increases the tensions between the family members.

SFT would assist Troy in seeing how his communication and desires are not favorable for the other family members, and he can learn how to handle conflict in the family (Byers et al., 2021). Understanding the different family subsystems allows the family members to know where they fit and their role in the family structure. Therefore, there will…