Talking Societal Discourses Into Family Therapy: A Situational Analysis of the Relationships Between Societal Expectations and Parent-Child Conflict

Abstract

Using the processes of Research As Daily Practice, we looked for the connections between parent-child conflict and the messages society promotes as to how parents and children should behave together. In our family therapy practices we noticed parents and children relating to each other in ways that seemed to resemble efforts to try to follow the more than engaging in local or situation-specific ways that reflected their circumstances. If our hunch was valid, we wondered how we might include talk about these societal discourses in therapy sessions to help families deal more effectively with the stress and conflict within their families. We conducted a situational analysis using data consisting of clinicians' impressions of (a) the pathologizing interpersonal patterns (PIPs) within their client families and (b) the societal discourses believed to be taken up by families. The result was practice-based evidence in the form of a set of clinical questions that invite societal discourses into family therapy conversations.