Contextual Therapy: Study for CA MFT Licensing Exam

- A state in which a child unconsciously tries to pay a debt to his parents, even to his own detriment
- Often represent the pathology of the family as well as its potential health
- Title of book that Nagy wrote

Loyalty, trust, and relational ethics

- Trained as a psychoanalyst
- Applied psychoanalytic ideas to family therapy
- Best known for developing the contextual approach to family therapy
- Student of Virginia Satir
- 1920-2007

1) Facts - i.e. genetic input, physical health, ethnic-cultural background, basic historical facts, events in a person's life cycle2) Individual psychology
- The domain of most individual psychotherapies3) Systemic transactions
- The domain covered by classical systemic family therapy - i.e. rules, power, alignments, triangles, feedback, etc4) Relational ethics

- The ethical or "justice" dimension of close relationships
- Focuses in particular on the nature and roles of connectedness, caring, reciprocity, loyalty, legacy, guilt, fairness, accountability, and trustworthiness - within and between generations

- The main methodological principle of Contextual Therapy
- Consists of a sequential, empathic turning towards member after member (even absent members), in which both acknowledgment and expectation are directed at them

Multidirected partiality

Legacies of invisible loyalties and obligations from the past that are passed on through generations

Trust and caring break down in a family

- Facing repressed emotional conflict
- Renegotiating relationships
- Facing rational and irrational guilt
- Creating accountability
- Creating environment of trustworthiness

- What one has coming to him
- Contextual Therapy term

- A psychological accounting system that is maintained over generations and includes information about what has been given to whom and who still owes something to someone else
- Contextual Therapy term

- Refers to the expectations that are handed down from previous generations
- Contextual Therapy term

- The allegiance children feel towards their parents based on parental fairness
- Contextual Therapy term

- What one owes and to whom
- Contextual Therapy term