James W. Jordan, Jr.
Point Of View
Family support is vital to achieving Results Worth Striving For. As family members, we are advocates, but also emotionally invested loved-ones who want wellness and happiness for our family as a whole. We also want to see the success of each member of our family. A well-informed family member who is engaged in the process can be a key component of success.
Family members develop a profound understanding that each individual must express self-determination as the foundation of personal growth and true change. One family member's diagnosis does not make the rest of the family perfect. Family members will have to set their own goals of growth and understanding too. Ultimately, there is only one person we can change, and that is ourselves.
Integration With Team
Family members offer critical and sometimes otherwise missing information to the team. The family member offers first-hand experience in the long-term support of a client working toward wellness, having personally witnessed personality and mood changes along with diagnosis-related behaviors and symptoms. Where the client may not fully agree with assessments or treatments advocated by the other team members, the family member can provide another point of view in accepting or rejecting ideas for treatment.
The family embarks on an educational adventure by taking part in this journey. By seeking out information, taking workshops, attending therapy sessions, and participating with the team members, the family is included and essential to success. Learning as much as we can about our own thoughts and actions and the effect these have on family dynamics will lead family members on their own journey of personal growth.
Assessment Process
Assessments provided by a family member are invaluable to the team and the client's eventual wellness. A family member can speak to the unique challenges and responsibilities inherent to the current family situation. The family member contributes insights and information to the team that do not turn up in the other assessments.
Where there is a disparity between what the client reports and what the family observes on a daily basis, the assessment process will help to clarify the situation. Many family members remark that they wish the treating psychiatrist or therapist could come home with them. When clients leave out information, present well, and are delusional regarding their own state of well being, the therapist is being asked by the client to treat a mythological person. The family lives with the truth on a daily basis.
The client and family can only work together on the Life Plan when there is agreement about where they are on the map. The assessment phase serves that purpose for the entire family.
Goal Setting
The unique perspective of a family member enables the client or the team to evaluate if goals are mindful of the client's living arrangements, relationships, and family responsibilities.
The family works to recognize what it will take to maintain appropriate balance and dynamics while undergoing personal growth and change. Goal setting clarifies the role of individual family members in relationship to the client's own goals.
Family relationship dynamics will become very evident when setting goals. This is why education and counseling in relationships is important to the success of any Life Plan. The family accepts that the client's goals include transition stages of change and growth as part of an organized plan. When setting goals it is important to admit that each individual within the family group does not have the same view of progress or of the future. These differences will have to be reconciled or at least acknowledged for optimum outcomes to be achieved by the entire family.
Treatment
While the family may not consider themselves to be in treatment with the client, the contributions that they can make to the success of the treatment phase are considerable. Families that thrive do so in part because of their ability to move away from the concept of illness. An important part of the treatment process is accepting that well-being, health, and confidence will to return to the family unit.
The client is asked to acknowledge that family members are learning new information and undergoing a process of change almost equal to their own. For this reason, a spirit of cooperation, understanding, and acceptance of each others struggles and pitfalls is essential. Acceptance, openness, and improved communication skills will help to reduce the tendency to take on unhelpful roles, like surveillance or deception.
Everything that is accomplished in therapy should not be undone when the client arrives back in the family unit. The family can avoid becoming an unwitting source of confusion by participating with the integrated team from the very beginning. The family is essential to the original assessments and the on-going process.
Developing patience cannot be understated. Personal growth doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to assimilate new information and tools, incorporate them into our thinking, and put them into practice. During on-going treatment it is important for the family to support the goals and to not expect the client to change lifetime habits immediately.
Comments are closed.