Integrative Systemic Therapy With Couples

Name: Integrative Systemic Therapy With Couples
Price: 109.95 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 978-1-4338-2727-3

With William M. Pinsof, PhD, ABPP, LMFT

ISBN: 978-1-4338-2727-3

September 2017

more than 100 minutes minutes

Item # 4310984

DVD [Closed Captioned]

$109.95

for member price

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Alexander Street Press

Part of the Series IV: Relationships

Available as part of the APA PsycTherapy database, through your or your institution’s subscription. Questions? Contact Psycdatabases@apa.org.

Description

In Integrative Systemic Therapy With Couples, Dr. William M. Pinsof demonstrates and discusses an approach that integrates diverse therapeutic strategies and techniques within a multisystemic sequential framework that transcends the notion of the individual, couple, or family.

Integrative systemic therapy intervenes in a client system, working with the members of that system who are directly involved in therapy while simultaneously considering the indirect system, those members of the client system not "in the room."

Although the direct client system in this work is typically the couple, the indirect system in which the couple is embedded — children, parents, siblings, and friends — remains part of the purview of the therapeutic work.

In this video, Dr. Pinsof demonstrates this approach with a young African American married couple coming into therapy to resolve issues surrounding their relationship.

Approach

Integrative Problem Centered Metaframeworks (IPCM) takes the couple's problem statement and sequentializes it — turning it into a description of a sequence of behaviors and experiences that include the problem itself (e.g. "arguing too much with each other," "sexual problems," "drifting apart," "lack of communication," etc.), the events that typically precede the emergence of the problem-antecedents, and the events that typically follow the problem's emergence sequelae.

IPCM transforms problem sequences into solution sequences. The solution sequence includes the antecedents of the problem sequence, but then changes the problem's emergence and sequelae.

IPCM rests on the "theory of constraints," asking the couple "What prevents you from doing what you need to do to solve your problem?" Constraints exist at multiple systemic levels and in multiple different domains or "hypothesizing metaframeworks," like biology, organization, mind, development, gender, culture, and spirituality.

The therapist and the couple hypothesize about the set of constraints that may be preventing them from implementing the solution sequence. Frequently, encouraging the client system to "just do it" reveals the constraints preventing change.

In IPCM, intervention is guided by a set of "planning metaframeworks" or sets of strategies for lifting particular types of constraints: Action, Meaning/Emotion, Biobehavioral, Family-of-Origin, Internal Representation, and Self.

Action includes strategies like behavioral exposure, enactment, and stimulating direct interaction between partners.
Meaning/Emotion identifies maladaptive cognitions, heightening adaptive emotions, elaborating adaptive narratives, and facilitating the constructive expression of emotion.
Internal Representation identifies internalized mental representations of self and other's from a client's early experience in their family of origin that are constraining the solution sequence.

The planning metaframeworks borrow strategies from specific models of therapy, facilitating their use independently of the core theoretical assumptions and beliefs of the "home" model. IPCM uses a set of therapeutic guidelines to structure the sequence of intervention, moving from the couple to the individual and from Action down to Self strategies.

If action strategies permit implementation of the solution sequence, the IPCM couple may stop at that point. If action strategies do not work, IPCM moves to Meaning/Emotion strategies. The progression through the planning metaframeworks is guided by the failure of the previous one to lift the constraints preventing change.

IPCM couple therapy aims to "teach" the couple the problem solving skills they need to solve the type of problems for which they are seeking help, leaving them stronger and more knowledgeable about themselves at the conclusion of the therapeutic episode.

Contributor bios

William M. Pinsof is the chief executive of The Family Institute at Northwestern University, the director of the Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies and a clinical professor in the department of psychology at Northwestern.

In addition to maintaining an active clinical practice in individual, couple and family therapy for more than 40 years, Dr. Pinsof's academic and intellectual work has focused on psychotherapy integration, couple and family therapy research, and the integration of scientific data into the practice of psychotherapy.

In 1995 he published Integrative Problem Centered Therapy (Basic Books), which outlined his approach to the integration of family, individual, and biological psychotherapies. More recently, with his colleagues at The Family Institute, he has published a series of articles and chapters on Integrative Problem Centered Metaframeworks, a comprehensive psychotherapeutic perspective for the conduct of an empirically informed, integrative and multi-systemic psychotherapy.

Initially his research focused on understanding the process and outcome of couple and family therapy, with particular emphasis on the role of psychotherapeutic alliance. This interest led to his current research focus — the development of the STIC^® (the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change), an internet-based system for:

the multisystemic and multi-dimensional assessment of client systems
tracking change within client systems over the course of therapy
feeding these assessment and change data back to therapists in real time throughout therapy so that they can facilitate collaborative assessment, treatment planning and progress evaluation

Dr. Pinsof is passionately committed to the utilization of science and technology to inform and enhance the art of integrative psychotherapy.

He received his PhD in clinical psychology from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

In addition to his 1995 publication on integrative psychotherapy, he has also edited four books: the volume that he co-edited with Jay Lebow, Family Psychology: The Art of the Science (2005), published by Oxford University Press; a special issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (1995) that he co-edited with Lyman C. Wynne, which reviewed all of the controlled research on the outcomes of couple and family therapy; a special issue of Family Process (Vol. 41, No.2, summer 2002) entitled, "Marriage in the 20th Century in Western Civilization: Trends, Research, Therapy, and Perspectives"; and the classic work he co-edited with Leslie Greenberg, The Psychotherapeutic Process: A Research Handbook (1986) New York: Guilford Press.

Additionally, Dr. Pinsof is a fellow of APA and a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology. In 2013 he received the Florence W. Kaslow Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Family Psychology, APA Division 43 (Society for Couple and Family Psychology). He also received the Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Family Therapy Research Award from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1996, the Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award from the American Family Therapy Academy in 2001, and the 2001 Family Psychologist of the Year from APA Division 43.

Dr. Pinsof is a licensed clinical psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist as well as an approved supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Suggested resources

Breunlin, D. C., Pinsof, W. M, Russell, W. P., & Lebow, J. L. (2011) Integrative problem-centered metaframeworks (IPCM) therapy 1: Core concepts and hypothesizing. Family Process, 50, 293–313.
Pinsof, W. M., Breunlin, D. C., Chambers, A. L., Solomon, A. H., & Russell, W. P. (2015). Integrative, multi-systemic and empirically informed couple therapy: The IPCM perspective. In A. Gurman, J. Lebow, & D. K. Snyder (Eds.), Clinical handbook of couple therapy (5th ed.) (pp. 161–191). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Pinsof, W. M., Breunlin, D. C., Russell, W. P., & Lebow, J. L. (2011) Integrative Problem-centered metaframeworks (IPCM) therapy 2: Planning, conversing and reading feedback. Family Process, 50, 314-336.
Pinsof, W. M., Tilden, T., & Goldsmith, J. Z. (2016) Empirically informed couple and family therapy: Past, present and future. In. T. L. Sexton and J. L. Lebow (Eds.). Handbook of Family Therapy: The Science and Practice of Working with Families and Couples (2nd edition), New York: Routledge.
Russell, W. P., Pinsof, W. M., Breunlin, D. D., & Lebow, J. L. (2016). Integrative Problem Centered Metaframeworks (IPCM) Therapy. In. T. L. Sexton and J. L. Lebow (Eds.). Handbook of Family Therapy: The Science and Practice of Working with Families and Couples (2nd edition), New York: Routledge.