Psychology of family relations. Subject and objectives of the study.

Family psychology- a relatively young branch of psychological knowledge, which is in its infancy. It is based on the richest practice of family psychotherapy, the experience of psychological assistance to the family and family counseling, the practice of psychological counseling of parents on the upbringing and development of children and adolescents. A distinctive feature of family psychology as a scientific discipline has become its inseparable connection with psychological practice.

Theoretical basis of family psychology began research in social psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, clinical psychology. Social psychology, based on the idea of ​​a family as a small group, studies the issues of the role structure of the family and leadership in the family, the stages of development of the family as a group, the problems of choosing a marriage partner, problems of family cohesion, conflicts in the family and ways to resolve them.

The subject of psychology families are the functional structure of the family, the main patterns and dynamics of its development; personal development in the family.

The tasks of family psychology include:

study of the patterns of formation and development of the functional-role structure of the family at various stages of its life cycle;

study of the premarital period, features of the search and choice of a marriage partner;

the study of the psychological characteristics of marital relations;

study of the psychological characteristics of child-parent relationships;

study of the role of family education in the development of a child at various age stages;

study of non-normative family crises and development of strategies to overcome them.

Distinctive features of the formation of family relations in Russia in the current socio-cultural situation.

In our time, the view of the family as a means for the birth of a child is gradually becoming a thing of the past; more often, the family is seen as a means of satisfying the emotional and intellectual needs of a person. However, in the context of globalization, the acceleration of the pace of life, the family is often seen as a safe rear, a guarantee of stability, sometimes as a creative or business alliance.

Thus, in our time, Russia is gradually coming to a variety of forms of family structure, among which there are both traditional types of device and modern ones, in addition, a significant contribution to the variety of types is made by the features of the family ways of the national republics of Russia.

Changes in the spiritual values ​​of Russians in the modern period.

If the orientation towards spiritual and moral values ​​does not provide a minimum or prosperity declared by society, then serious conflicts occur in the social mood of people. So, according to the laboratory of social psychology of the Research Institute for Comprehensive Social Research of St. Petersburg University, in the hierarchy of value orientations of the population, the value of one of the most important values ​​in the 1960s and 80s, “work” in the wording “interesting work”, has most sharply decreased. She dropped to 12th place from 2nd 3rd, which she occupied in the early 80s. (The survey in 1990 covered 1000 people from all socio-demographic groups of the population from St. Petersburg.) In a short list of 9 values, "material wealth" was in 3rd place (after "health", "family"). It turned out some kind of "scissors": people justifiably want to live in prosperity, but at the same time, the main means of achieving it, work is attributed in their sense of life to the background. Sometimes in sociology the concepts of "positive" and "negative values", as well as "approved" and "denied values" are used. At the same time, the differentiation of values ​​into approved and denied has nothing to do with dividing them into positive and negative.

Patriarchal, feminist, partnership ideas about gender relations.

The patriarchal (traditional) family is the most archaic type of family: it has many children and different generations of relatives and in-laws live together; national and religious customs are strictly observed.

In most feminist theories, patriarchy is viewed as an unjust social system that oppresses women and men and restricts their social roles to certain criteria. According to feminism, the construction of the distinction between masculinity and femininity that occurs in patriarchy is a political distinction between freedom and submission. As a rule, feminism describes patriarchy as a social construct that can be overcome by critical analysis of its manifestations. One of the key problems of patriarchy is that it erases the personal qualities of both women and men, driving them into the framework of "feminine" and "masculine" behavior. As a result, individuals whose social behavior goes beyond the dualistic model of gender roles become the object of discrimination and condemnation. Patriarchy distinguishes only two genders - male and female, and also puts an equal sign between gender and sex.

Contrary to the predictions of the radicals, monogamous marriage and legally unformed permanent partnerships are by no means dying out. The family as such does not disappear. However, family values ​​themselves are differentiated, indicators of subjective well-being come to the fore. If traditional marriage is a fairly rigid social institution, then modern partnerships and marriages tend to be self-worthy relationships based on mutual love and psychological intimacy, regardless of the way they are socialized. Such relationships are less stable than an indissoluble church marriage and even a marriage of convenience based on the community of property interests. This will lead to an increase in the number of divorces, and the urgent task of society is not only to strengthen the family, but also to increase the culture of divorce, from the lack of which children suffer the most. So-called serial monogamy becomes a typical form of relationship between boys and girls, when a person lives with only one partner / partner, but these relationships do not last all his life, but only some more or less long period. Such relations between a man and a woman contradict, on the one hand, the idea of ​​a lifelong marriage union, and on the other hand, the ideas about the uselessness of marriage in general. Such relationships make a person more free and less responsible, but this situation is unreliable, unstable. Thus, the further development of relations between men and women presupposes the recognition by society of their equality, equivalence and equality.

Modern research in the field of psychology of family relations.

In the realities of the 21st century, questions are even more acute about how we can find a stable, harmonious union with another person and how to maintain this union throughout our lives.

The problem of the psychology of family relations arises in terms of the implementation of a person's life and personal ideology, in terms of the formation of a person's family scenario and in terms of the realization of the meanings and goals of family life. This was best expressed by S.L. Rubinstein: “Relationship to another person, to people is the main fabric of human life, its core. The “heart” of a person is all woven from his human relations with other people; what it is worth is entirely determined by the kind of human relations a person aspires to, what kind of relations he is able to establish with people, with another person. The psychological analysis of human life, aimed at revealing relationships with other people, is the core of true psychology.

The main functions of the family.

The family, like any system, implements a number of functions in a hierarchy that reflects both the specifics of it, the family, cultural and historical development, and the originality of the stages of its life cycle:

economic (material and production), household

reproductive (childbirth and reproduction of the population)

child-rearing function. The family acts as an institution for the primary socialization of the child

sexual and erotic

the function of spiritual communication, involving the spiritual mutual enrichment of family members

recreational (restorative) - the function of providing conditions for the restoration of neuropsychic health and mental stability of family members;

the function of social regulation, control and guardianship (in relation to minors and incompetent family members)

Family structure.

There are many different options for the composition, or structure, of the family:

- "nuclear family" consists of a husband, wife and their children;

- "replenished family" - an enlarged union in its composition: a married couple and their children, plus parents of other generations, such as grandparents, uncles, aunts, who live all together or in close proximity to each other and make up the structure of the family;

- "mixed family" is a "rebuilt" family, formed as a result of the marriage of divorced people. A blended family includes step-parents and step-children, since children from a previous marriage merge into a new family unit;

- “single parent family” is a household that is run by one parent (mother or father) due to divorce, departure or death of a spouse, or because the marriage was never consummated

E. A. Lichko (Lichko A. E., 1979) developed the following classification of families:

1. Structural composition:

Complete family (there is a mother and father);

Incomplete family (there is only a mother or father);

Distorted or deformed family (having a stepfather instead of a father or a stepmother instead of a mother).

2. Functional features:

Harmonious family;

Disharmonious family.

Types of family structures according to the criterion of power (Antonov A.I., Medkov V.M., 1996) are divided into:

patriarchal families, where the head of the family state is the father,

egalitarian families in which there are no clearly defined family heads and where the situational distribution of power between father and mother prevails.

Historical forms of family and marriage relations.

A distinctive feature of the traditional Russian family was living in undivided multi-generational families. In fact, family and clan were inseparable concepts. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the rural population prevailed, life and the family were subject to patriarchal relations. A man - a breadwinner, breadwinner and protector is traditionally opposed to a woman - a mother, the keeper of the hearth. The man was in charge of external life, social relations, the woman was in charge of the whole way of life and the inner world of the family.

At that time, patriarchal Russian families had their own specifics: the wife of the head of the family, the “big woman”, had a fairly serious influence on other family members and on her husband. No wonder there has long been a proverb: "The husband is the head in the house, and the wife is the neck, as she turns, so be it."

In the ancient Russian family, three types of relationships were characteristic: consanguinity, adoption-adoption and property. The property implied kinship by marriage, that is, the relationship between one spouse and blood relatives of the other spouse, as well as between relatives of the spouses. Marriages between relatives were not allowed, as well as between blood relatives.

In different periods of Russian history, there were several forms of marriage. In the pre-Christian period, forced abduction - the “kidnapping” of the bride - was widespread in the Slavic tribes. With the passage of time and the strengthening of relationships between clans and tribes, violent abduction began to be replaced by symbolic ones, in agreement with relatives and the bride. It was from those pagan times that the playful custom of hiding the bride at the wedding, when the groom must find her and even pay a ransom, has survived to this day. In some national cultures, the rite of bride kidnapping is still alive.

I must say that much later, already in the Christian period, the time of marriage was linked to the calendar of agricultural work. The church strictly followed this, forbidding or allowing weddings to be played at certain times of the year.

There was another form of marriage - casting. It consisted in the fact that the bride was taken to the groom's house with a dowry and left there.

It must be remembered that at that time, and much later, the acquaintance of the bride and groom was optional. Love and mutual sympathy have never been considered necessary for marriage. Since then, the saying has come down to us: "To endure - fall in love." They will become young husband and wife, and then love or habit will come.

Modern socio-psychological model of family relations.

The socio-psychological model of family relations reflects the typology of families, the structure, forms, styles of education, as well as the problems of the modern family.

The family is a complex social entity. Researchers define it as a historically specific system of relationships between spouses, between parents and children, as a small group whose members are connected by marriage or kinship, common life and mutual moral responsibility, as a social necessity, which is due to the need of society for the physical and spiritual reproduction of the population.

Family relations are governed by the norms of morality and law. They are based on marriage - a legitimate recognition of the relationship between a man and a woman, which is accompanied by the birth of children and responsibility for the physical and moral health of family members. Important conditions for the existence of a family are joint activities and a certain spatial localization - housing, house, property as the economic basis of its life, as well as a general cultural environment within the framework of the common culture of a certain people, confession, state. Thus, a family is a community of people based on a single family-wide activity, connected by ties of matrimony - parenthood - kinship (blood and spiritual), carrying out the reproduction of the population and the continuity of family generations, as well as the socialization of children and support for family members. The forms of families are diverse, their typology depends on the subject of study.

There are monogamous and polygamous families. A monogamous family consists of a married couple - husband and wife; polygamous - this is the marriage of one with several (polyandry - the marriage of one woman with several men, polygyny - the marriage of one man with several women).

Family ties define a simple, nuclear, complex, extended, family type. Typologising family structures, it should be noted that the most common in modern urban agglomerations (urbanization [from lat. urbanus - urban] - the concentration of material and spiritual life in cities; agglomeration [from lat. agglomerare - to attach, accumulate] - accumulation) are nuclear families , consisting of parents and children, i.e. from two generations.

An extended family unites two or more nuclear families with a common household and consists of three or more generations - grandparents, parents and children (grandchildren). Together with spouses in repeated families (based on remarriage) there may be children from this marriage and children of spouses from a previous marriage, brought by them to a new family.

Social orientation and capacity of the family.

The following types of social and axiological orientation of the family are distinguished:

socially progressive (support for the values ​​of society, unity of views, good interpersonal relations);

contradictory (lack of unity of views, relationships at the level of struggle of some tendencies with others);

antisocial (contradiction of value ideals to the ideals of society).

Distinguish also the capacity and activity of the family. The capacity of the family may be:

limited (due to psychosomatic, age characteristics, its members are unable to independently earn a livelihood and fit into the system of social relations - pensioners, disabled people);

temporarily limited (psychosomatic, age-related characteristics only temporarily limit socio-economic independence; for example, families experiencing any kind of social cataclysms, including unemployment, having children who have not reached working age, families of disabled people);

unlimited (family members have a full range of opportunities to fit into the social space and adapt to changing conditions that do not have the character of a social cataclysm).

The formation of a married couple.

In the formation of a married couple, two periods are distinguished: premarital (before the couple decides to marry) and premarital (before the conclusion of a marriage union).

It has been empirically proven that the source of difficulties in family life may become features of the choice of a partner, the nature of premarital and premarital courtship, the decision to enter into marriage.

When examining a married couple (marriage union) who applied for psychological counseling, it is necessary to understand what brought the spouses together and still supports their marriage, how the process of forming a married couple took place, how each of them chose a partner - based on the mere similarity with itself or relying on more complex emotional and environmental factors.

One of the first to think about the reasons for marriage was the founder of classical psychoanalysis 3. Freud. His psychoanalytic theory is based on the assumption that children are attracted to parents of the opposite sex. Through a complex unconscious process, they can transfer the love they feel for this parent to other, socially approved objects - to their potential spouses. This is probably why many young men would like to meet a future life partner who looks like their mother, and very often girls pay attention to boys who look like their fathers.

Theory of complementary needs (complementary needs) R. Winch is based on the age-old principle that opposites attract. R. Winch writes that in choosing a spouse, each individual is looking for someone from whom he expects the maximum satisfaction of needs. Lovers should have similar social traits and psychologically complement each other.

An instrumental theory of mate selection developed by R. Centers, also prioritizes the satisfaction of needs, but at the same time argues that some needs are more important than others, some of them are more inherent in men than women, and vice versa. According to R. Senters, a person is attracted to someone whose needs are similar to his own or complement them.

Psychological theories of marriage partner choice.

There are several theories that describe how we choose our marriage partners.

Proponents of the theory of homogamy argue that not every man and woman can be "exchanged", but only those who have the same "social value", or homogamy. In other words, we try to choose a partner for ourselves within our social level, in territorial proximity, among people of our race.

The theory of "complementary needs"(Winch R.) lies in the assumption that the principle of "homogamy" works only in the socio-cultural sphere. And when it comes to character, opposites attract. So, for example, a powerful man will be attracted to a meek woman, and a calm and gentle man can be attracted to an energetic and direct woman.

instrumental theory Matchmaking, developed by Senters, also prioritizes the satisfaction of needs, but argues that some needs (such as gender and belongingness) are more important than others, and that some needs are more masculine than feminine, and vice versa. According to Centers, a person is attracted to someone whose needs are similar to or complement his own.

Theory "stimulus-value-role", created by B. Merstein is based on two important assumptions:

1) at each stage in the development of the relationship of partners, the strength of the relationship depends on the so-called equality of exchange (the pros and cons of each are taken into account, each person tries to marry the most attractive partner for himself);

2) marriage selection includes a series of successive stages, or filters. There are three stages: stimulus (attractiveness of the partner) - value (similarity of views) - role (correspondence of the role behavior of the chosen one to their expectations).

The specifics of the premarital period.

The results of many studies have shown that the combination of premarital factors that prompted young people to enter into a family union significantly affects the success of the adaptation of spouses in the first years of marriage, the strength of marriage or the likelihood of divorce. These premarital factors are:

place and situation of acquaintance of young people;

first impression of each other (positive, negative, ambivalent, indifferent);

socio-demographic characteristics of those entering into marriage;

duration of the courtship period;

the initiator of the marriage proposal: boy, girl, parents, others;

the time of considering the marriage proposal;

marriage status;

age of the future couple;

parents and the attitude of the latter to the marriage of their children;

dynamic and characterological features of the spouses;

family relationships with siblings.

It is established that they have a beneficial effect on marital relations:

acquaintance at work or in an educational institution;

mutual positive first impression;

courtship period from one to one and a half years;

the initiative of the marriage proposal on the part of the man;

acceptance of the proposal after a short deliberation (up to two weeks);

accompaniment of marriage registration with a wedding celebration.

Short (up to six months) or long (more than three years) courtship period. For a short time, as a rule, young people cannot get to know each other deeply and check the correctness of their decision to marry, and over a long period of courtship, communication monotony, stereotyping in the behavior of partners often occur, which can lead to cooling in relationships - such a couple either does not create a family, or breaks up.

Motivation for the decision to marry.

The most significant for the premarital period is the motivation for marriage. Decision making is often polymotivated, the following motives can be distinguished: love, duty, spiritual intimacy, material calculation, psychological conformity, moral considerations.

Any of them can be the leader, but young people most often put in the first place love.

Within the framework of psychological science, a systematic analysis of the problems of love began in the 40s. 20th century The first writings about love were mostly theoretical, nowadays there is much more empirical research.

Psychologists consider love to be a selective attitude towards a representative of the opposite sex as a unique holistic person. The focus on the object of love should not be one-sided, selfish and involves identifying oneself with the object of love, replacing "I" with "we" (but without losing one's individuality).

In modern psychology, there are models of love that are conventionally divided into "pessimistic" and "optimistic".

Theorists of the pessimistic direction emphasize the moment of the lover's dependence on the object of his love and the connection of love with negative experiences, primarily with the fear of love. Love, according to the authors of "pessimistic" models, makes a person anxious and dependent, hinders his personal development. One partner, as it were, "dissolves" in the other, losing his individuality. In such a pair, there is no replacement of “I” with “we”. In extreme cases, love can be a symptom of a personality pathology.

"Optimistic" models of love associated with the concept of A. Maslow and other representatives of humanistic psychology.

Love in these models is characterized by the removal of anxiety and complete psychological comfort. The cornerstone of "opta mystical" models is the idea of ​​the lover's independence from the object of love, which is combined with a positive attitude towards him. According to the theorists of the "optimistic" direction, such love makes people happy and provides opportunities for personal growth.

A study of the motives for marriage in dysfunctional families was conducted by domestic family psychotherapists E.G. Eidemiller and V. Justickis. They were able to identify the following motives: flight from parents, duty (marrying out of a sense of duty), loneliness, following traditions (parents' initiative), love, prestige, the search for material wealth.

The motive "escape from parents" often means a passive protest against the power of parents, an inability to perceive life in all its real fullness.

Marriage on the motive of "should" very often means that the partner became pregnant or sexual intimacy was accompanied by feelings of guilt.

The motive "loneliness" is found in people who have moved to a new place of residence. They entered into marriage with those people whom they knew before or who were recommended by colleagues (“You live alone, and your mistress has a daughter in Kazan. She is so good and lonely, look ...”). In other cases, loneliness was a consequence of experiencing existential emptiness. The formation of a married couple is a complex process, associated with various difficulties and problems. It is good if young people find effective ways out of these problems on their own, otherwise they need psychological help, which they can receive in youth centers and palaces, in psychological counseling at the registry office.

Factors of family well-being.

The first condition for family well-being, of course, is the love and affection of the spouses. And the importance of such feelings in this matter is unlikely to be denied by anyone. Along with this, it should be noted that only on love, marriage cannot last for a long time. After all, the mutual passion and romantic mood that characterizes the initial period of the relationship do not last as long as we would like.

Experts have identified the main factors of family well-being that should be taken into account by everyone who is going to start a life together with a loved one: Focus on the spouse; Sympathy and trust; Communication without conflicts; Understanding; sexual satisfaction; Material well-being.

Focus on spouse is the most important condition for family well-being, since it is the basis of mutual understanding. It involves an attentive attitude to the interests, preferences, habits of a loved one. Ideally, spouses should take their actions only taking into account the desires and needs of each other.

Sympathy and trust are also necessary factors for family well-being, because if you do not feel sympathy for the person with whom you are going to live, the marriage union is doomed to failure. And when there is no trust in a relationship, love gradually fades away, as eternal suspicions, jealousy and discontent take its place.

normal communication without constant quarrels and conflicts should be present in every good family. People need to share their emotions, impressions and experiences with loved ones, so you need to create an atmosphere at home that disposes spouses to mutual frankness and trusting relationships. Understanding is one of the most important conditions for family well-being. In order to achieve it, the spouses will need a lot of time and trials. But the key point here can be called indulgence and tolerance towards each other, which are excellent qualities for creating a strong family.

sexual satisfaction also very often comes with years of living together, since partners do not immediately recognize each other's preferences: this takes time and desire. When people are connected by a mutual strong feeling, almost all problems of a sexual nature are solvable. This is due to the strong desire of both to please their spouse. An important factor in family well-being is also financial security of the family. It's no secret that financial difficulties, which are chronic, very quickly affect the relationship of a married couple. Domestic problems that cannot be solved, debts and nervous stresses caused by all this prevent people from enjoying their feelings and living in harmony. After all, the lion's share of family conflicts is related to the topic of money.

Psychological health of the family. Prosperous families. Dysfunctional families.

Social and psychological support may be necessary for any family, although to varying degrees. Passive families especially need help. They have little potential of their own to resolve crises. Families are distinguished by ways of responding to stressful, conflict situations and normative crises (associated with certain stages of family functioning). This typology is based on the phenomenon of the psychological health of the family - an integral indicator of its functioning, which reflects the qualitative side of the socio-psychological processes of the family, an indicator of the social activity of its members in intra-family relations, in the social environment and in the professional sphere, as well as the state of mental psychological well-being of the family, ensuring regulation of the behavior and activities of all its members adequate to living conditions. This indicator characterizes two main types of families.

Prosperous families. Their problems, as a rule, are caused by internal contradictions and conflicts that are associated with changing conditions of life in society: 1) with an excessive desire to protect each other, to help other family members (condescending, indulgent hyperprotection and excessive guardianship); 2) with the inadequacy of correlating one's own ideas about the family and those social requirements that are placed on it at the this stage social development (difficulties in perceiving the contradictions of modern society). Dysfunctional families(problematic, conflict, crisis). Psychological problems arise due to the dissatisfaction of the needs of one or more family members under the influence of super-strong intra-family and general social life factors.

The classification of criteria that determine the well-being and socio-psychological health of the family was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). It includes the following options:

The presence of both parents who are in a legitimate (legally registered) marriage, and children who are brought up on the basis of the continuity of generations.

Spiritual and moral well-being.

Medical wellbeing.

Social welfare.

Material well-being.

Absence of chronic family conflicts.

Satisfaction with marriage, relationships in it.

A unified approach to the upbringing of children by parents.

Healthy family lifestyle.

The main problems of economically vulnerable and dysfunctional large families can be divided into the following blocks:

economic and logistical(extremely low family income, poor living conditions, lack of necessary things, etc.);

medical and social(impaired health of family members due to poor nutrition, inability to use high-quality medicines and paid medical services, development of chronic diseases, in cases of dysfunction - low sanitary and hygienic culture, neglect of children's health);

psychological and pedagogical (limited educational potential of the family, due to the inability to pay sufficient attention to each child, in case of dysfunction - violations of the psychosocial development of children, conflicts and destructive interpersonal relationships). Among asocial families, alcoholized and drug-addicted families are singled out, as well as families with delinquent members (including those who have been prosecuted) and families in which violence is committed.

Critical periods in the development of marital relations.

By definition: "a family crisis is a state of the family system, which is characterized by an imbalance, which leads to the inefficiency of the usual ways of relationships in the family, and the inability to cope with a new situation using old patterns of behavior."

All families go through stages of development, and at each stage they face certain tasks. These tasks must be solved, otherwise, by moving to the next stage, these unresolved tasks will hinder the family from passing through the next stage of development.

First normative family crisis is the assumption of marital responsibilities.

It is experienced by a young family without children during the transition from single to paired existence - this is a period of getting used to, grinding in. The main task of this period is the adaptation of spouses to family life and to each other. Family development tasks at this stage:

1. Establishment of internal boundaries of the family and boundaries of communication with friends and relatives.

2. Resolution of the conflict between family and personal needs.

3. Solving the problem of family hierarchy and areas of responsibility.

4. Achievement of sexual harmony (sexual adaptation).

5. Solving housing problems and acquiring your own property.

The danger of this period is that the ideal appearance of the chosen one or the chosen one is increasingly overgrown with real features, not always pretty. An understanding comes of who fate brought together and how easy or difficult it is to find a common language with a partner.

Second responsible period is the birth of the first child.

The crisis period of family life consists in mastering parental roles by spouses and accepting the fact of the emergence of a new personality in the family. The main task of the development of a young family with a child is the reorganization of the family to solve new problems, such as:

1. Caring for a small child.

2. Alignment of personal and family goals.

3. Spouses mastering new roles - parental.

4. Overcoming the difficulties of distributing attention, love and care already between three close people.

5. And also, on a new level, building relationships with parents who have become grandparents.

Third crisis period(five - seven years of marriage) is associated with the child's admission to school or preschool, that is, to external social structures. The fact is that the “product of the educational activity of parents” turns out to be an object of public review. The family, as it were, is “tested for the effectiveness of the rules of upbringing” that the child receives in it. If the child, as a "family representative", going out into the outside world (going to school) copes with school requirements, then the family is "effective". If not, then the child can fall into the role of a person who “dishonors” the family. An “unsuccessful” child usually does not receive support and assistance in such an “inefficient family”, because there are no internal rules in it, all family rules are attached to social ones. (In such a family, the teacher is always right, an adult cannot be criticized, he got a deuce - he is to blame).

Fourth critical period associated with the acceptance of the fact that the child enters adolescence, which is often complicated by the coincidence with the personal crisis of midlife in parents (the time for summing up intermediate life results). This stage of a mature marriage, usually the spouses are 37-40 years old and they lived together for about 10-15 years. The main tasks of family development at this stage:

1. Redistribution of autonomy and control between parents and children.

2. Changing the type of parental behavior and roles (adult-adult communication).

3. Preparation for the adolescent's departure into adulthood (choosing a profession, experimenting with his independence).

Fifth difficult period in the life of the family is associated with the leaving of the grown-up children of their father's house, their acquisition of emotional and financial independence, the creation of their own families. The main task of family development at this stage is to create conditions for the correct departure of grown children from home. If there is a conscious attitude towards joint development with a partner and difficulties in relationships are detected in a timely manner, it becomes possible for spouses to correct their behavior and jointly overcome difficult moments in family life.

Family conflicts and their prevention.

What types of stages of family development can be called crisis?

The "grinding" period, when the newlyweds learn to live like a married couple;

The birth of the first child and the development of the role of mom and dad;

The birth of subsequent children;

When the child goes to school;

Children enter adolescence;

Growing up children and leaving the parental home;

Marriage midlife crisis;

Spouses' retirement

Each of these stages can create various stressful situations, which, in turn, can serve as a potential cause of family conflict.

Changes in marital status and family affairs can also contribute to tension. It could be:

Divorce or separation of spouses;

Moving to a new place of residence;

Business trips over long distances and for a long time;

The need to work in another state;

Change in the financial situation of the family

Psychologists distinguish different types of family conflicts:

Actually conflicts. Even in a happy, healthy, well-functioning family, quarrels happen from time to time. Confrontations can be caused by inconsistencies in the views and goals of different family members. Conflicts can be resolved, and then they do not threaten the stability of family ties. Contradictions in the family can arise at all levels, that is, brothers and sisters, spouses, as well as parents and children can quarrel among themselves.

Tension. Psychologists call tension long-standing, unresolved conflicts. They may be obvious and overt, or they may just be temporarily suppressed. In any case, they accumulate and cause negative emotions, leading to constant irritability, aggressiveness and hostility, which ultimately causes a loss of contact between family members.

A crisis. It can be spoken of when conflict and tension have reached a stage in which all models of negotiation that have been operating so far begin to fail, and, consequently, the real needs of individuals or a whole group of households remain chronically unsatisfied. Crises often lead to disorganization of the family, that is, certain obligations of the spouses to each other, or the obligations of parents towards children are no longer performed properly. And the disorganization of the family, in turn, often ends with its disintegration.

Here are some examples:

Inability to express your feelings. In families with an unhealthy psychological climate, its members, as a rule, hide their feelings and reject their manifestations by other people. They do this mainly to avoid mental pain and psychological trauma.

No connection. In dysfunctional families, open communication between relatives very rarely occurs. If family conflicts arise, family members begin to avoid each other, emotionally moving away and withdrawing into themselves.

Manifestations of anger. If there are any problems, the unhealthy family tries to hide them, instead of meeting them face to face and trying to solve them. In such a family, there are often disputes about who is responsible for the occurrence of a particular problem, and such disputes most often lead to outbursts of anger and even to the use of force.

Manipulation. Manipulators express their anger and frustration in the only way they can: they try to pressure others to make them feel guilty and ashamed. In this way, they try to get others to do what the manipulators themselves want.

Negative attitude towards life and to each other. In some families, everyone treats the others with some suspicion and mistrust. They do not know what optimism is, and they usually have no sense of humor at all. Relatives have very few common interests and rarely find a common topic for conversation.

It all depends on the specific situation and the specific family. Here are the main "tools" with which you can fix a difficult situation:

Problem identification;

Clarification of the reason for the position taken and the manifestation of empathy (empathy);

Taking measures to eliminate the conflict;

Change of attitude to a similar situation: understanding the position of the opposing side eliminates possible conflicts in the future. Understanding is the best prevention of conflicts.

Divorce as a socio-psychological phenomenon.

The problem of divorce is closely related to the change in the type of relationships in the modern family: new family models give rise to their own forms of breaking these relationships.

Divorce, as a rule, is not a one-time event and has its own history of development. According to a study conducted in the late 1990s 20th century V. V. Solodnikov, in a pre-divorce situation, spouses seek help not from family and marriage counseling, but from relatives and friends: mother - 75.8%, friends - 51.8%, father - 39.2%, as well as lawyers - 10.2%, psychologists and doctors - 4.9%. Expecting support and sympathy from friends and parents, a person who finds himself in a pre-divorce situation is often in a state of confusion, loss of life values.

Researchers highlight the causes of divorce:

strengthening the economic independence and social equality of women;

orientation when creating a family for personal happiness, primarily for mutual marital love, increased requirements for a partner chosen for love;

insufficiently developed sense of duty in one of the partners;

the destruction of the family in the case when love is sacrificed for a casual relationship.

Most often, the following motives for divorce are distinguished: lack of common views and interests (including religious differences), inconsistency (incompatibility) of characters, violation of marital fidelity, absence or loss of a sense of love, love for another, frivolous attitude to marital duties, bad relations with parents (intervention of parents and other relatives), drunkenness (alcoholism) of the spouse, lack of normal living conditions, sexual dissatisfaction.

When studying divorces, four groups of factors are considered (W. Good).

Probability connections between the social origin of a person and his attitude to divorce. As you know, the urban population is divorced more often than the inhabitants of rural areas.

different types social pressure on the individual in connection with the divorce. For example, disapproval of marriage or divorce by relatives or persons significant to him.

Way choice of marriage partners.

Ease or difficulty marital accommodation between people of different social backgrounds.

Divorce doesn't happen overnight. It is usually preceded by a period of tension or conflict in the family.

During a divorce and a period of legal disputes, the abandoned spouse experiences self-pity, helplessness, feelings of despair and anger. Time for self-exploration and rebalancing after divorce. The main problem of this period is loneliness and conflicting feelings that accompany it: indecision, optimism, regret, sadness, curiosity, excitement. Behavior takes on a new direction: the search for new friends begins, activity appears, a new lifestyle and daily routine for children are stabilized, new responsibilities are formed for all family members. Psychological divorce - on an emotional level - is readiness for action, self-confidence, energy, self-worth, independence and autonomy. On the cognitive-behavioral level - the synthesis of a new identity and the end of a psychological divorce; search for new objects for love and readiness for long-term relationships. Therapeutic assistance is possible in the form of parent-child, family, group therapy for children and adults.

psychoanalytic approach. The focus is on child-parent relationships, which determine the development of the individual and the success of her family life in the future. The unit of analysis is a personality in its relationship with a partner, the main patterns of these relationships are the Oedipus complex and the Electra complex. It is assumed that in marital relations, patients unconsciously tend to repeat the basic patterns of relationships with their own parents. By the way, it is this circumstance that is the reason for the transmission of family experience and the construction of family events from one generation to the next. The achievement of autonomy by the individual and the restructuring of relations with the family of origin is the main goal of the therapeutic process. Psychological work is focused on the reconstruction and recreation of the past, awareness of the repressed and repressed. Symptoms of marital difficulties are seen as a marker of past unresolved conflicts and repressed drives in relationships with parents. In psychoanalysis, symptoms act as the basis for identifying the causes, great importance is attached to the client's tracing the mechanism of symptom formation and awareness of the causes of the difficulties experienced, building bridges between past conflicts and the problems of today's family relations.

behavioral approach. The importance of the balance of mutual exchange (give and receive) is emphasized. The unit of analysis here is the personality in relationships and interactions with family members. The emphasis is shifted to the ability to resolve problem situations and the formation of special performance competence (communication skills and problem solving skills). The genetic-historical aspect of the emergence of the problem within the framework of behavioral counseling is insignificant. The focus here is not on deep causes, but on the erroneous behavior and actions of family members, which act as an obstacle and an obstacle to solving problem situations. Within the framework of behavioral psychotherapy, we can talk about the theory of social learning (A. Bandura) and the theory of operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner). Accordingly, the main mechanisms for the formation of incorrect behavior leading to family problems are recognized as inadequate social models of behavior in the family, ineffective control and reinforcement. If we take into account such an explanation for the emergence of problems and difficulties in the family, the focus of the work of family behavioral psychotherapists on child-parent relationships becomes shattered. Within the framework of the behavioral approach, various forms of training work with parents have become widespread. Work with suvrugs is based on the theory of social exchange, according to which each individual seeks to obtain the maximum reward at the lowest cost. The principle of reciprocity - the equivalence of exchange - suggests that marital satisfaction increases when the number of rewards received compensates for the costs. A well-designed and operationalized system for diagnosing the characteristics of the mutual behavior of spouses and parents with children, clear behavior modification procedures, a carefully thought-out system of homework and exercises provide a fairly high efficiency of the behavioral approach in helping families solve their problems. A feature of behavioral work with the family is the preference for dyadic interaction as a unit of psychological analysis and influence. The choice of a dyad (for comparison, in systemic family psychotherapy, work is carried out with a triad that includes spouses-parents and a child) is justified by the supremacy of the principle of social exchange in the analysis of the patterns of family functioning.

Phenomenological approach. The individual in the family system is considered as a unit of analysis. The basic principle of "here and now" requires focusing on the events taking place in the present moment.

families in order to achieve a high level of their feeling and experience. The reality of communication and interaction as a system of verbal and non-verbal emotionally loaded communicative acts is the subject of psychological analysis and psychotherapeutic influence (V. Satir, T. Gordon). Identification of the content, rules of construction, the impact of communication on the life of the family as a whole and on each of its members is the content of work with the family. The formation of communicative competence, skills of open effective communication, increased sensitivity to one's feelings and states and feelings of a partner, amplification of the experience of the present are the main tasks of family psychotherapy within the framework of this approach.

Experience-based family therapy (K. Whitaker, V. Satir) focuses on personal growth, achieving autonomy, freedom of choice and responsibility as the goals of psychotherapy. Dysfunction of the family is derived from violations of the personal growth of its members and in itself should not be the target of influence. Interpersonal relationships and interactions constitute the conditions for personal growth when communication is open and emotionally rich. The causes of difficulties in communication turn out to be insignificant, the work focuses on revising beliefs and expectations, stimulating their changes.

Systems approach. The family is considered as an integral system, its main characteristics are the structure of the family, the distribution of roles, supremacy and power, the boundaries of the family, the rules of communication and its recurring patterns as the causes of family difficulties, which are primarily seen in the dysfunctional family and are resolved in the reorganization of the family system.

Structural family psychotherapy (S. Minukhin), as one of the most authoritative areas in family psychotherapy, is based on the principles of a systematic approach. The family acts as a system striving for the preservation (the law of homeostasis) and the development of relationships. In its history, the family consistently and naturally goes through a series of crises (marriage, the birth of a child, the child entering school, graduation from school and self-determination, separation from parents and leaving, etc.). Each of the crises requires the reorganization and restructuring of the family system. The family is considered as a basic system that includes three subsystems: marital, parental, and sibling. The boundaries of the system and each of the subsystems are the rules that determine who and how participate in the interaction. Boundaries can be too rigid or flexible, which consequently affects the permeability of systems. Excessive flexibility leads to boundary diffusion, i.e. to the fuzziness of interaction patterns, and makes the family system or subsystem vulnerable to outside interference. Behavior that intervenes due to the blurring of family boundaries leads to the loss of autonomy and the ability of family members to solve their problems on their own. On the contrary, excessively rigid boundaries make it difficult for the family to contact the outside world, making it isolated, disunited, with limited opportunities for contacts and mutual support.

Family dysfunction is defined as the inability of a family to meet the needs of all its members, which is reflected in the symptomatic behavior of any of them. Behavioral disorders and emotional and personal disorders of one of the family members, according to structural family psychotherapy, are an indicator of family dysfunction as a single holistic organism. The therapist's attention is focused on the processes taking place in the family at the present time, without distant excursions into the past. The way to overcome family problems is to change inadequate patterns of transactions, loosen the old family system and establish new boundaries that ensure its balanced functioning.

Strategic family therapy (D. Haley) is an integration of problem-oriented therapy with communication theory and systems theory. The unit of analysis here is the family as an integral system striving to maintain homeostasis and patterns of interaction. The emphasis is shifted to the present, the here-and-now principle works, since the dysfunction of the system is supported by current interactions. Finding causes is not the task of therapy, since the existence of problems is supported by ongoing interaction processes that must be changed. Symptom - a metaphorical expression of the problem and the designation of a certain stereotype of behavioral reactions, which, by agreement between family members, performs a certain function in interpersonal interaction, is one of the forms of controlling the behavior of family members. The role of the therapist is active, in the process of work he offers family members directives or tasks of two types - positive, if the family's resistance to change is small, and paradoxical, encouraging the symptomatic, i.e. inadequate, the behavior of family members, if the resistance is great and the implementation of negative tasks is likely to be blocked. The widespread use of metaphors in working with the family helps to establish an analogy between events and actions that, at first glance, have nothing in common with each other. Metaphorical understanding of the family situation allows you to identify and see the essential characteristics of the family process.

Transgenerational approach. Aimed at integrating the ideas of psychoanalysis and systems theory. The unit of analysis is the whole family, in which relations between spouses are built in accordance with the family traditions of the parental family and the models of interaction learned in childhood. The choice of a partner and the construction of relations between spouses and parents with children is based there on the mechanism of projection of feelings and expectations formed in the previous object relations with parents, and an attempt to “adjust current relationships in the family to previously internalized models of family behavior (D. Framo). The principle of historicism within the framework of the transgenerational approach is the key one. Thus, an intergenerational family (M. Bowev) is considered as a family system, and the difficulties of family functioning are associated with a low level of differentiation and autonomization of the individual from the family by birth. Past relationships influence current family dynamics. The processes of personality differentiation, triangulation as the formation of a triangle of relationships and the family projective process, according to Bowen's theory, determine the emergence of family problems and open the way for their resolution. Interpretation and analysis of transference as key techniques of the transgenerational approach indicate that focusing on the causes of difficulties in family life is an important principle of it.

Despite the significant differences between the above approaches in their views on the causes and ways to overcome problems, in theoretical explanatory models, one can single out the general goals of family psychotherapy:

Increasing the plasticity of the role structure of the family - the flexibility of the distribution of roles, interchangeability; establishing a reasonable balance in resolving issues of power and supremacy;

Establishing open and clear communication;

Solving family problems and reducing the severity of negative symptoms;

Creation of conditions for the development of self-concept and personal growth of all family members without exception.

"Family Psychology: Theoretical Foundations of Family Psychology"

“Family is a cell (small social group) society, the most important form of organizing personal life, based on marital union and family ties, that is, relations between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and other relatives living together and leading a common household "(Soloviev N. I.).

The family plays a huge role both in the life of an individual and in the whole society. The importance of the family is illustrated, if only by the fact that the vast majority of people live in a family. The most important characteristics of the family are its functions, structure and dynamics, which will be discussed later.

A lot of research has been devoted to the family and marriage from antiquity to the present day. Even the ancient thinkers Plato and Aristotle substantiated their views on marriage and the family, criticized the type of family of their time and put forward projects for its transformation. Science has extensive and reliable information about the nature of family relations in the history of the development of society. Family change has evolved from promiscuity (promiscuity), group marriage, matriarchy and patriarchy to monogamy. The family passed from a lower form to a higher one as society ascended the stages of development.

Based on ethnographic research, three eras can be distinguished in the history of mankind:

savagery, barbarism and civilization.

Each of them had its own social institutions, dominant forms of relations between a man and a woman, and its own family. A great contribution to the study of the dynamics of family relations in the history of the development of society was made by the Swiss historian I. Ya. Bachofen, who wrote the book Mother's Right (1861), and the Scottish lawyer J.F. .

For the early stages of social development was characterized by promiscuity of sexual relations. With the advent of childbirth, a group marriage arose, which regulated these relations. Groups of men and women lived side by side and were in a "communal marriage" - each man considered himself the husband of all women. Gradually, a group family was formed, in which the woman occupied a special position. Through heterism (gynecocracy) - relations based on the high position of women in society - all nations passed in the direction of individual marriage and the family. The children were in the women's group and only when they grew up they moved to the men's group.

Initially, endogamy dominated - free ties within the clan, then, as a result of the emergence of social "taboos", exogamy (from the Greek "exo" - outside and "gamos" - marriage) - the prohibition of marriages within "one's" clans and the need to enter into it with members of other communities. The genus consisted of halves arising during the union of two linear exogamous tribes, or phratries (a dual-clan organization), in each of which men and women could not marry each other, but found a mate among men and women of the other half of the genus .

The taboo of incest (the prohibition on incest) was investigated by E. Westermark. He proved that this powerful social norm strengthened the family. A consanguineous family appeared: marriage groups were divided by generations, sexual relations between parents and children were excluded.

Later, a punaluan family developed - a group marriage that included brothers with their wives or a group of sisters with their husbands. In such a family, sexual intercourse between sisters and brothers was excluded. Kinship was determined on the maternal side, paternity was unknown. Such families were observed by L. Morgan in the Indian tribes of North America.

Then a polygamous marriage was formed: polygamy, polyandry. Savages killed newborn girls, because of which there was an excess of men in each tribe, and women had several husbands. In this situation, when it was impossible to determine paternal kinship, maternal right developed (the right to children remained with the mother). Polygamy arose because of the significant loss of men during the wars. There were few men, and they had several wives.

The leading role in the family has shifted from the woman (matriarchy) to the man (patriarchy). At its core, patriarchy was associated with inheritance law, i.e. with the power of the father, not the husband. The task of the woman was reduced to the birth of children, the heirs of the father. She was required to observe marital fidelity, since motherhood is always obvious, but fatherhood is not.

In the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, several millennia BC, monogamy was proclaimed, but at the same time, the inequality of men and women was fixed. The master in a monogamous family was a male father, interested in keeping property in the hands of blood heirs. The composition of the family was significantly limited, the strictest marital fidelity was required from the woman, and adultery was severely punished. Men, however, were allowed to take concubines. Similar laws were issued in ancient and middle ages in all countries.

Many ethnographers have noted that prostitution has always existed as the antithesis of monogamy. In some societies, the so-called religious prostitution was widespread: the leader of the tribe, the priest or other representative of the authorities had the right to spend the first wedding night with the bride. The belief prevailed that the priest, using the right of the first night, sanctified the marriage. It was considered a great honor for the newlyweds if the king himself used the right of the first night.

In studies devoted to the problems of the family, the main stages of its evolution are traced:

in almost all nations, the account of kinship through the mother preceded the account of kinship through the father; at the primary stage of sexual relations, along with temporary (short and occasional) monogamous relationships, extensive freedom of marital relations prevailed; gradually the freedom of sexual life was limited, the number of persons having the marriage right to this or that woman (or man) decreased; The dynamics of marital relations in the history of the development of society consisted in the transition from group marriage to individual marriage.

The relationship between parents and children has also been transformed throughout history. There are six styles of relationships with children.

Infanticidal - infanticide, violence (from antiquity to the 4th century AD).

Throwing - the child is given to the nurse, to a strange family, to a monastery, etc. (IV-XVII centuries).

Ambivalent - children are not considered full members of the family, they are denied independence, individuality, "molded" in the "image and likeness", in case of resistance they are severely punished (XIV-XVII centuries).

Obsessive - the child becomes closer to his parents, his behavior is strictly regulated, the inner world is controlled (XVIII century).

Socializing - the efforts of parents are aimed at preparing children for independent life, the formation of character; the child for them is an object of upbringing and education (XIX - early XX century).

Helping - parents seek to ensure the individual development of the child, taking into account his inclinations and abilities, to establish emotional contact (mid-20th century - present).

In the 19th century empirical studies of the emotional sphere of the family, the drives and needs of its members appear (primarily the work of Frederic Le Play). The family is studied small group with its inherent life cycle, history of emergence, functioning and decay. The subject of research are feelings, passions, mental and moral life. In the historical dynamics of the development of family relations, Le Play stated the direction from the patriarchal family type to the unstable one, with the fragmented existence of parents and children, with the weakening of paternal authority, leading to the disorganization of society.

Further, studies of relationships in the family are concentrated on the study of interaction, communication, interpersonal consent, closeness of family members in various social and family situations, on the organization of family life and the factors of stability of the family as a group (the works of J. Piaget, Z. Freud and their followers).

The development of society determined the change in the system of values ​​and social norms of marriage and the family that support the extended family, the sociocultural norms of a high birth rate were supplanted by social norms of a low birth rate.

Until the middle of the XIX century. the family was considered as the initial micromodel of society, social relations were derived from family relations, the society itself was interpreted by researchers as a family that had grown in breadth, moreover, as a patriarchal family with the corresponding attributes: authoritarianism, property, subordination, etc. Ethnography has accumulated extensive material reflecting the national characteristics of family relations. Yes, in Ancient Greece dominated by monogamy. The families were numerous. There was an incest taboo. The father was the master of his wife, children, concubines. Men enjoyed greater rights. Women for treason were subjected to severe punishment, but the Spartan could give his wife to any guest who asked him about it. Children of other men remained in the family if they were healthy boys.

AT Ancient Rome monogamy was encouraged, but extramarital affairs were widespread. According to the laws of Roman law, marriage existed solely for the purpose of procreation. Great importance was attached to the wedding ceremony, extremely expensive, painted to the smallest detail. The authority of the father was exceptional, the children obeyed only him. A woman was considered part of her husband's property.

Science has extensive information about the impact of Christianity on the institution of the family in many countries of the world. Church doctrine sanctified monogamy, sexual purity, chastity, anathematized polygamy and polyandry. However, in practice, the clergy did not always follow the church canons. The Church extolled virginity, abstinence in widowhood, virtuous marriage. Marriages of Christians with non-Christians were considered sinful. A liberal attitude towards them was only in the period of early Christianity, since it was believed that with the help of marriage, a Christian could convert another erring one to the true faith.

In early Christianity, marriage was considered a private matter. In the future, the norm of marriage with the consent of the priest was fixed. Even a widow could not remarry without his blessing. The church also dictated the rules of sexual relations. In 398, the Karfanes Cathedral decided that the girl had to keep her virginity for three days and three nights after the wedding. And only later was it allowed to have sexual intercourse on the wedding night, but only on condition that the church fee was paid. Formally, Christianity recognized the spiritual equality of women and men. However, in reality, the position of women was humiliated. Only certain categories of women - widows, virgins, serving in monasteries and hospitals - had authority in society, were in a privileged position.

In Russia, family relations became an object of study only in the middle of the 19th century. The sources of the study were ancient Russian chronicles and literary works. Historians D. N. Dubakin, M. M. Kovalevsky and others gave a deep analysis of family and marriage relations in Ancient Russia. Particular attention was paid to the study of the Domostroy family code, a literary monument of the 16th century, published in 1849. In the 20-50s. XX century research reflected the development trends of modern family relations. So, P. A. Sorokin analyzed the crisis phenomena in the Soviet family: the weakening of marital, parent-child and family ties. Kindred feelings have become a less strong bond than party camaraderie. In the same period, works devoted to the "women's issue" appeared. In the articles of A. M. Kollontai, for example, the freedom of a woman from her husband, parents, and motherhood was proclaimed. The psychology and sociology of the family were declared bourgeois pseudosciences incompatible with Marxism. Since the mid 50s. family psychology began to revive, theories appeared that explained the functioning of the family as a system, the motives for marriage, revealing the features of marital and parent-child relationships, the causes of family conflicts and divorces; family psychotherapy began to develop actively (Yu.A. Aleshina, A.S. Spivakovskaya, E.G. Eidemiller, etc.).

Concept of marriage and family

The family is based on marital relations, in which both the natural and social nature of a person, both the material (social being) and spiritual (social consciousness) spheres of social life are manifested. Society is interested in the stability of marital relations, therefore it exercises external social control over the optimal functioning of marriage with the help of a system of public opinion, means of social influence on the individual, and the process of education (Trapeznikova T. M.).

Modern sociologists define marriage as “a historically changing social form of relations between husband and wife, through which society regulates and sanctions their sexual life and sees their marital and parental rights and obligations” (A. G. Kharchev).

The separation of matrimony as a structural unit occurred in the historical aspect relatively recently as a result of serious socio-economic transformations of modern society, which created conditions for an equal (social, legal, moral) man and woman. Marriage is a personal interaction between husband and wife, regulated by moral principles and supported by its inherent values. (Hunger S.I.).

This definition emphasizes: the non-institutional nature of the relationship inherent in marriage; equality and symmetry of moral duties and privileges of both spouses.

The family is a more complex system of relations, it unites not only spouses, but also their children, as well as other relatives or just those close to spouses and the people they need (Kharchev A.G., 1979, p. 66).

According to the definition of A. I. Antonov, a family is a community of people based on a single family-wide activity, connected by ties of matrimony-parenthood-kinship, and thereby carrying out the reproduction of the population and the continuity of family generations, as well as the socialization of children and the maintenance of the existence of family members. Antonov believes that only the presence of such a triune relationship allows us to speak of the construction of the family as such in its strict form.

The fact of one or two of these relationships characterizes the fragmentation of family groups that were formerly proper families (due to the maturation and separation of children, the breakup of a family due to illness, the death of its members, due to divorce and other types of family disorganization), or which have not yet become families (for example, families of newlyweds, characterized only by marriage, but not by parenthood and consanguinity).

For all these fragmented, “fragmented” forms of the family, the term “family group” is better suited, which means a group of people who lead a joint household and are united only by kinship or marriage (Antonova. I., Medkov V. M.).

Family life cycles

According to D. Levy, the study of the family life cycle requires a longitudinal approach. This means that the family in its development goes through certain stages, similar to those that the individual goes through in the process of ontogenesis. The stages of the family life cycle are associated with the creation of a family, with the appearance of new family members and the “leaving” of old ones. These changes in the composition of the family change its role functioning in many ways. Carter and McGoldring (1980) distinguish six stages in the family life cycle:

1) out-of-family status: single and unmarried people who have not created their own family;

2) the family of the newlyweds;

3) a family with small children;

4) a family with teenagers;

5) exit of grown-up children from the family;

6) a family at a late stage of development.

V. A. Sysenko highlights:

1) very young marriages - from 0 to 4 years of marriage;

2) young marriages - from 5 to 9 years;

3) average marriages - from 10 to 19 years;

4) elderly marriages - more than 20 years of marriage.

G. Navaitis considers the following stages of family development:

Premarital communication. At this stage, it is necessary to achieve partial psychological and material independence from the genetic family, gain experience in communicating with the other sex, choose a marriage partner, gain experience in emotional and business communication with him.

Marriage is the adoption of marital social roles.

Honeymoon stage. Its tasks include: accepting changes in the intensity of feelings, establishing a psychological and spatial distance with genetic families, gaining experience of interaction in solving issues of organizing the everyday life of a family, creating intimacy, and initially coordinating family roles.

Stage of a young family. The scope of the stage: the decision to continue the family - the return of the wife to professional activities or the beginning of the child's visit to a preschool institution.

A mature family, that is, a family that performs all its functions. If at the fourth stage the family was replenished with a new member, then at the fifth stage it is supplemented with new personalities. Accordingly, the roles of parents change. Their ability to meet the needs of the child in care and security should be supplemented by the ability to educate and organize the child's social ties.

The stage ends when the children achieve partial independence from the parental family. The emotional tasks of the family can be considered solved when the psychological influence of children and parents on each other comes to balance, when all family members are conditionally autonomous.

Family of older people. At this stage, marital relations are resumed, new content is given to family functions (for example, the educational function is expressed by participation in the upbringing of grandchildren) (Navaitis G.).

The presence of problems among family members may be associated with the need for the family to move to a new stage of development and adapt to new conditions. Usually the most stressful are the third stage (according to the classification of Carter and McGoldring), when the first child appears, and the fifth stage, when the family structure is unstable due to the “arrival” of some family members and the “leaving” of others. Even positive changes can lead to family stress.

Unexpected and especially traumatic experiences such as
unemployment, early death or late childbearing can
make it difficult to solve the problems of family development and its transition to a new
stage. Rigid and dysfunctional relationship style
family also increase the likelihood that even normal family changes will be experienced as a crisis. Changes in the family are seen as either normal or "abnormal". Normal family changes are those transformations that the family can expect. And the “abnormal”, on the contrary, are sudden and unexpected, such as death, suicide, illness, flight, etc.

According to D. Levy, there are the following types of changes in the family:

¦ “departure” (loss of family members for various reasons);

¦ "growth" (replenishment of the family in connection with birth, adoption, arrival of a grandfather or grandmother, return from military service);

¦ changes under the influence of social events (economic depression, earthquake, etc.);

¦ biological changes (puberty, menopause, etc.);

¦ change in lifestyle (solitude, relocation, unemployment, etc.);

¦ "violence" (theft, rape, beating, etc.).

In the course of psychotherapy, it is checked to what extent the family adapts or does not adapt to these changes, how flexible the family is in adapting. It is believed that an open and flexible family is the most prosperous and functional. There is a continuum of families from optimal (well organized, relatively open to change) to significantly dysfunctional (chaotic, rigid, closed systems that do not interact well with the outside world).

Family myths

Family legends (myths) are a collection of well-integrated, though implausible, beliefs shared by all family members.

These beliefs are about their relationship and are usually not questioned by those involved, despite the distortions they may contain. Legends are a kind of homeostatic mechanism, their purpose is to maintain a "steady state". The family legend serves to justify the stability of the relationship and protects the individual from a critical view of reality. According to V. Satir, family disorders are often the result of existing myths that keep family life within certain limits.

The legend may have a clear connection to cultural myths, such as the idealized representations of marriage and family life presented in television, films, and literature.

Some of the most common myths (legends):

¦ happy spouses do not argue, most people find satisfaction of all their needs in the family system;

¦ Spatial proximity is essential for family cohesion. This myth creates huge problems in cases where the absence of any of the family members is inevitable in the event of marriage, death, admission of children to educational establishments etc.;

¦ in successful marriages, spouses always tell each other everything;

¦ people who really love each other should be aware of all the desires and needs of a partner;

having a child, having a love affair or getting a divorce will solve all problems More closely related to family dysfunctions are specific family legends. For example:

¦ all of our children get excellent grades at school;

¦ women in our family are a little crazy;

¦ Our family works hard, and other people probably always receive benefits.

Other examples of family myths can be: "Mother is a sick person", "I only want good for you", "John is just a child."

Kratochwill relates to the myths of married life the idea that if something is wrong, then one of the spouses is to blame; and, as a rule, the other one is guilty: “It's your fault” or “If you changed, everything would be all right” (Kratochvil S, 1991).

A. Ya. Varga gives an example of family myths "We are heroes" (2001).

family rules

The family can be considered as a system functioning according to certain rules. Based on this, its members behave in accordance with the relative organizational, repetitive pattern of relationships with each other.

Some family rules are made openly, such as "Children must not talk when grown-ups are talking", "Knock before you open the door", "You can't eat food from the fridge without your mom's permission", "Never raise your voice", "You can't hit girls » etc. Other rules are hidden, they are usually derived from repetitive situations that occur in the family. Hidden rules are very powerful, as they are set behind the scenes and create a sense of mystery: "Don't talk about anything sexual, it will upset mom", "Girls should be taught to do household chores, while boys should do men's work."

Hidden rules can be realized by family members either through family therapy or through interaction with another family that has different rules. Awareness allows you to change the rules that have caused family troubles.

The rules are transferred to a new family - regarding housekeeping, conflicts and ways to resolve them, the family budget

(Richardson R.). Expectations for a spouse are conscious and unconscious and are also based on the perception of roles in the parental family. Marital agreement.

Many authors, mostly in family therapy, attach great importance to the marital contract. By it, psychotherapists understand the unformed individual contract, or agreement, including the hopes and promises that each of the partners entering into marriage brings (Martin, 1974; Sager, 1976). This agreement is reciprocal in that it contains what each intends to give and what he intends to receive. The agreement may be:

a) conscious and verbalized;

b) conscious and non-verbalized;

c) unconscious.

It can relate to all aspects of family life, such as successful promotions, physical health, sex, spending free time, money, children, relationships with friends, etc. The elements of individual agreements are determined by the needs and desires of the individual. The latter may be healthy and realistic, or neurotic and conflicted. Here we are not talking about an agreement in the literal sense of the word - just the partners behave as if each of them approved and signed such an agreement.

In a balanced marriage, such an agreement is observed, but in cases where one of the spouses is ready or able to violate it and change his partner, disharmony arises.

Similar prerequisites for disharmony exist in families where the mutual expectations of partners are too different. For example, a husband may expect his wife to be obedient, caring, and sexually active. The wife, in turn, expects romantic love, help with housekeeping, and infrequent sexual intercourse. As a result, each of them behaves differently from what is expected of him, there is a feeling of deception and a feeling of anxiety (Kratochvil S, 1991).

With various changes and events in the family, such as, for example, an extramarital affair of one of the spouses, it is necessary to renew the contract, find a new psychological basis for the marital union, while the help of a psychotherapist is useful or even necessary (Varga A. Ya., 2001).

The influence of the parental model on marital relations was studied on several thousand married couples using the Leary test (interpersonal ties). It turned out, in particular, that the model of the parental family largely determines the model of the family that their children subsequently create. For example, a child from a patriarchal family will tend to establish patriarchal relations in his family, that is, to implement the learned model. The desire to repeat the model of relations of his parents persists even when overly pronounced tendencies traumatized him in childhood. In the marriage of partners from families that represent clearly opposite models, there is a constant struggle for power (or their erroneous behavior is noted). The probability of a harmonious union is the higher, the closer the models of families from which the spouses come.

The Essence of the Modern Family and Marriage

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of incomplete families in Russia. This category includes those in which one or more children are raised by one of the parents. There are 3 types of incomplete families:

One of the parents left or died, and the second did not remarry;

A single person officially adopted a child;

An unmarried woman raises a child alone outside of marriage.

A specific type of incomplete families are mixed families in which foster or adopted children are brought up. Statistics show that in modern society There are more and more families like this. The following types of mixed families are distinguished:

A woman with children marries a man without children;

A man with children marries a woman without children;

Both the man and the woman have children from previous marriages.

One of the most common problems of mixed families is the problem of interaction between children and non-native parents (stepmothers and stepfathers). According to L.E. Schneider, stepfathers evaluate themselves as a father somewhat lower than fathers by blood, they take a more passive position in relation to the child, considering him less happy than other children. Studies devoted to the study of the position of the stepmother in the family are practically not presented in the literature, although this situation of marriage and family relations is quite well known and described in folklore (an evil stepmother and a weak-willed father in many Russian and foreign fairy tales), which leaves a certain imprint on the modern public assessment of social stepmother position.

Families based on remarriages differ in some ways. So, V. Satir emphasizes that in such families there is a subconscious attitude that the new spouse should be better than the previous one. Its formation is associated with the disappointment already experienced once, which, to a greater or lesser extent, led to the development of distrust towards the opposite sex. A woman with children who remarries often believes that children are her property. From her point of view, she cannot impose children on a new husband, because. he would never have the same relationship with them as he had with her. At the same time, a man himself is not always ready to immediately take on the role of a father.

New husbands are often faced with the fact that a woman wants her stepfather to demonstrate a "firm man's hand", to show strength and authority, which, of course, he does not yet have in the eyes of his children. In this regard, husbands often try to live up to their wife's expectations, but as a rule, such behavior, not based on real respect and acceptance, leads to the development of severe protracted conflicts, which are most acute if the child is in adolescence.

To avoid such problems, spouses remarrying should reconsider their parental positions. They need to be ready to raise their own children and the children of their partner, neither neglecting nor deceiving anyone. All children entering a new family should be perceived and accepted by their parents as their own.

In addition to the increase in the number of incomplete and mixed families, alternative forms of marriage and family relationships are also appearing in Russia. Some of them were formed quite a long time ago, while others appeared and openly manifested themselves only in recent decades, having formed in the countries of the West and some Scandinavian states that have more free sexual traditions and views. L.B. Schneider identifies a number of such alternative forms.

Loneliness

1. An increase in the level of education of women, which determines her views on self-realization. A woman begins to look for opportunities to realize herself in the professional sphere, in spiritual quests, in the field of hobbies. These attitudes “take away” a woman from burdensome, in her opinion, family ties. In addition, getting a good education takes time and a woman sometimes simply "misses" the childbearing period.

2. The predominant number of women of marriageable age, one of the reasons for which is the higher mortality of the male population, including as a result of accidents, murders, military operations. In this regard, inevitably a certain number of women will still remain in a celibate state, as a result of which the number of women who initially refuse to look for a partner increases, using this position as a kind of protective mechanism.

3. Spreading the point of view that in modern conditions it is easier to live alone. The benefits from the psychological comfort of living in a family are overlapped in this case by the socio-economic costs.

It has been empirically established that women endure loneliness much more easily than men. At the same time, the educational level, career, mental health, and home life of single women are higher than those of single men. It should be noted that single men and women can be in more or less long-term and permanent sexual relationships without losing their autonomy. Setting on loneliness may not be lifelong. It is noticed that in women it most often changes at 30-35, and in men at 40-45 years old, when attempts to find a life partner are activated. Unregistered cohabitation

This form of marriage and family relations has become widespread in Russia under the name "civil marriage". Today, the literature is actively discussing the question of whether unregistered cohabitation is a historical alternative to marriage and family relationships. R. Zider believes that this form can be considered both as a preliminary stage to the subsequent marriage (“trial marriage”), and as an alternative to traditional marriage.

Relations in an unregistered marriage are differentiated into formal, short-term and deep, long-term. In the case of the former, married life does not last long, but at the same time, the number of cohabitants increases, differing from ordinary spouses only by the presence of a stamp in the passport.

Spouses living in such a marriage note the following advantages of unregistered cohabitation

This form of relationship can be seen as a kind of training in married life (“trial marriage”);

There is an approbation of forces and compatibility of partners;

More than open relationship, there is no coercion;

It is believed that this form of relationship provides more spirituality and satisfaction, which, in our opinion, is quite controversial.

The literature describes the characteristics of people prone to unregistered cohabitation. They are characterized by more liberal attitudes towards life, less religiosity, a high degree of androgyny, low school success during childhood and adolescence, less social success, despite the fact that these people come from fairly socially successful families. "Experimental" forms of living together require a higher level of reflection and communication, as well as the presence of psychological forces to resist the pressure of social norms. Their distribution does not depend on the level of education and social affiliation of the partners. In addition to psychological, there are socio-economic reasons for choosing unregistered cohabitation. In Russia, these are housing problems, registration issues, the possibility of receiving child benefits as a single mother, etc.

Deliberately childless marriage

According to statistics, 10% of women in industrialized countries, which are characterized by mass sterilization, and 1% in Russia, where mass abortions are more often used, consciously do not want to have children.

Researchers single out social and socio-economic factors as the primary factors of birth control ( general position affairs in the country in the economy, urbanization processes, unemployment, uncertainty of the future, military conflicts, etc.). Secondary factors include cultural and demographic factors (maternity and childhood protection, the timeliness of payment and the amount of child benefits, pensions, women's economic independence, reduction in general and infant mortality, etc.).

The literature presents the point of view that in the human population there are no biological laws that force a person to have children. A person's sexual desire is transformed and bifurcated: on the one hand, the reproductive function is preserved, on the other hand, sexual life itself is a pleasure (it has been proven that no other creature in the animal world is able to experience orgasm except for a person). Today the second aspect sexual life began to displace the first: partners actively use contraceptives, abortion, sterilization and other means that limit childbearing. Thus, in human society, fertility is more regulated by social laws.

The initiator of the refusal to bear children in marriage can be both a man and a woman. When making such a decision, the subject demonstrates not only his limited need for children, but also the desire to satisfy some other socio-psychological needs. Therefore, in this case, it is more appropriate to speak not about the presence or absence of a need for children, but about the strength of competing needs.

The literature provides a description of the socio-psychological characteristics of women who do not want to have children. They are characterized by a late age of marriage, often experienced divorce, high level education, the desire for intellectual and creative work, the availability of a good, well-paid job. Studies show that most often they themselves were the eldest or only children in the family, and their birth had a negative impact on the marriage of their parents. Also, such women are characterized by high psychological stability, pronounced androgyny.

Childless families experience strong social pressure. At the same time, the person himself, if he consciously made his choice and bears responsibility for it, most often does not experience psychological discomfort and torment.

open marriage

One of the main problems of traditional marriage is the impossibility or, at least, significant difficulties of combining intimacy and personal autonomy, free personal growth. In an open marriage, the spouses live together, but relatively independently of each other, each of them, in addition to the family, has the right to privacy. The purpose of such a marriage is to increase openness, self-expression and authenticity of relations, increase partners' tolerance towards each other. Each partner in an open marriage has the right to his own personal life, his personal, psychological space is closed from the intervention of a partner. In fact, an open marriage legitimizes adultery: The question arises, is it possible in this case to recognize such relationships as family and marriage? The main feature of this form of relationship, which distinguishes it, for example, from neighborhood, etc., on the basis of which it is recognized as a marriage, is the presence of an unspoken or voiced agreement on living together and maintaining a common household

It is believed that this form of marriage arises on the basis of a protest against the ways of behavior in family relations of previous generations. In an open marriage, each spouse is free and free to do what he wants. Its supporters believe that if marriage exists only on a sense of duty, then it, in fact, exhausts itself.

S. Kratokhvyal, defining the basic principles of open marriage, refers to them: the desire to build life on the basis of the present and on the basis of realistic desires; respect for the partner's privacy; openness, mobility and flexibility of role communication; open partnership (right to own interests, own circle of friends, etc.); equality of spouses and trust in relation to each other.

Spreading open forms marriage was based on the proclamation of the thesis of the polygamy of human nature and the rejection of traditional monogamous marriage. Today, this discussion is also underway, incl. and in scientific circles, however, evidence of natural human polygamy has been found to date Extramarital sex and intimate friendships

This form of relationship is based on an extramarital relationship of an intimate nature. At the same time, some participation of the spouses (or one of them) in the joint management of the household is allowed, and the appearance of illegitimate children is also possible. There is a clear trend towards an increase in the number of children born outside of official marital relations. It can be assumed that the statistics of recent years will give even higher figures.

As a rule, extramarital intimate relationships are not long-lasting: they either develop into marriage (or some kind of marriage), or become a burden for a person and stop quite quickly. Each of the partners in extramarital sex can have a primary, original family. Intimate friendship does not always threaten the stability of the primary marriage, sometimes (although not often) it can last quite a long time, and in combination with a fairly high level of intimacy and trust in the primary couple.

swinging

Swinging is a rather new form of family relations, which involves the exchange of marriage partners. The exchange of marriage partners originated in the 1970s. in Scandinavia, so sometimes this type of marriage interaction is called the “Swedish family”. Currently, this type of relationship is typical for 2% of the US population. Studies show that partners who practice swinging are less likely to bond with their parents childhood, and themselves demonstrate an almost complete lack of contact with their own children. Men are more often the initiators of swinger relationships. There is also a high self-esteem of both spouses in a couple using this form of relationship.

homosexual couples

Homosexual marriage is based on same-sex love. Studies show that its psychophysiological prerequisites are identical to heterosexual, and the final ratio of both is determined only in the process of development. The origins and forms of homosexuality are varied. Despite the possible genetic predisposition, in general it is built on the basis of individual experience and learning. Homosexual couples in the process of developing family relationships face the same problems as heterosexual couples: infidelity, jealousy, monotony, inconsistency of role attitudes and expectations, etc.

The available research data on the characteristics of the personal and psychosexual development of homosexuals are few and contradictory. The vast majority of them were obtained from a male sample. According to some researchers, the life path and personal characteristics of homosexuals are specific, in particular, they are distinguished by a lack of male influence in childhood, negative relationships with fathers, a special attitude of mothers who had a puritan character, whose sons were favorites and they (mothers) wanted to be in the center their attention, early homosexual contacts with brothers and peers, etc. According to other data, differences in the characteristics of upbringing and personality were not found.

The attitude towards homosexual couples in society is different, but, as a rule, it is always pronounced from the death penalty (Mauritania, Tunisia, Arab countries) to the official recognition of such a couple as a family with the legalization of relations (Denmark).

group marriage

According to L.B. Schneider, active criticism of the social functions of the family, which unfolded in society in the early 1970s. gave rise to attempts to oppose it with an alternative in the form of group marriage. Initially, this form of relationship was radical and even political in nature, it was associated with drug orgies, group sex and terrorism. Today group marriage has been transformed into residential communities and communes. V. Satir uses the term "collective family" to designate them.

From the point of view of the structure of relations, the following types of residential communities are distinguished;

Residential communities of several couples;

Residential communities of several persons not related by pair relationships;

mixed forms.

It is not uncommon for residential communities to include children. Within their framework, one group rarely remains unchanged; there is a tendency to change partners and change the structure of the community In this sense, residential communities meet the requirements of flexibility and mobility to a greater extent. In communities, there is a high degree of material security for an individual, because in moments of lack of earnings, the solidarity of the group protects the individual from moral and physical decline. Collective ownership reduces the need and importance of personal ownership. Personal needs are largely under the control of the group.

It should be noted that in Russia residential communities as a form of marriage and family relationships are practically not common.

To date, alternative forms of marriage are supported by a minority of the population. A strong argument in favor of traditional relationships is the interests of children. However, increasing societal tolerance for alternative forms and increased opportunities for the dissolution of traditional monogamous marriages reinforce the trend towards their increasing prevalence. Traditional forms are beginning to be perceived today (especially by young people) as less durable, less uncontested and less taken for granted. Tolerance towards the minority who adhere to alternative forms increases significantly. At the same time, the requirements for the quality of their own family and married life are increasing among the majority of people who adhere to traditional forms of marriage. The described trend, along with the above, is another form of transformation of the family structure in modern society, which determines the prospects for its development and change.

Continuation. - Imagine yourself a different child or the same one, but who ended up in a different family. It's a completely different atmosphere here. You feel naturalness, honesty and love. You feel that your soul, heart and mind are in perfect harmony. People around you express their love, respect for each other. Here you will always be listened to, and you will listen with interest to others. You are considered, you can openly show your joy and pain, you do not need to hide. Talking about failure, you are not afraid that you will be ridiculed, because. everyone in this family understands that along with the risk, with trying something new in life, you can make a mistake, which only means that you grow and develop. The people in this family look different. Their movements are graceful and free, their facial expressions are peaceful. People look at each other, and not through each other or at the floor, they are sincere and natural in their relationship with each other. Members of this family feel so free with each other that they are not shy about talking about their feelings. Everything can be expressed - disappointment, fear, pain, anger, criticism, as well as a joke and praise. This family is capable of productive and coordinated planning of its life, however, when the life situation changes, these changes are calmly assessed and the plan is flexibly transformed, corresponding to new conditions. Members of this family are able to respond without panic to various changes in life. In this family, it is clearly seen that human life and people's feelings are the most important, much more important than anything else. Parents feel like inspirational leaders, not authority figures. Their actions do not match their words. Parents know that initially children cannot be bad. They never react to the behavior of the child in a way that humiliates his dignity. On the contrary, they ask about what is happening, listen, try to better understand and delve into the experience of the child, taking into account the natural desire of the child to learn new things and be good. You feel like a full-fledged person in this family, loved, valuable in itself, needed, surrounded by people who expect love, recognition and respect from you.

Theory. There are two types of systems: closed and open. The main differences between them are determined by the nature of the reaction to internal and external changes. In a closed system, its parts are fixedly connected. In any case, the exchange of information between the elements does not occur, regardless of where the information comes from - from the outside or from the inside. Open - one in which the parts are interconnected, mobile, receptive to each other and allow information to pass inside it or go beyond it. V. Satir believes that a closed system functions in dysfunctional families, and an open system - in harmonious ones.

Schemes of functioning of systems:

closed system

In closed systems, a sense of self-worth is secondary to power and performance; actions depend on the whim of the boss / authority / senior; any change must be resisted.

open system

In open systems, a sense of self-worth is primary, power and performance are secondary; actions reflect the principles of man; changes are welcome, considered natural and desirable.

Topic: Basic theoretical provisions about the family as a psychological category.

Theory. As mentioned earlier, the family in systemic family therapy is seen as a system. And each system, as you know, has its own dynamics - the ability to change. The functions and structure of the family may change depending on the stages of its life. Change is something that every family has. The family is the only social group that has adapted to the many events that follow each other in such a small living space over such a short time.

Based on the study of the structure and dynamics of the family, psychologists and sociologists distinguish such concepts as types and types of families.

Typology of family models.

According to the size of the family, they are divided into:

• Nuclear - consist of adults and children who depend on them (two generations). They can be complete (both parents) and incomplete (one of the parents is missing). Incomplete are divided into actually incomplete (as a result of divorce / widowhood) and maternal (illegitimate birth and upbringing of children).
• Extended - include the nuclear family and relatives (three generations: grandparents, grandchildren, sisters, brothers, etc.).
• Binuclear - when, after a divorce, parents create new families, as a result of this, the child has, as it were, two pairs of parents between whom relationships are maintained. The child periodically lives with one or the other, sometimes two families spend their free time together.

According to the consistency of the role positions of men and women:

• The patriarchal (dominator) family is a male leader, his power over all family members is unlimited. Also called traditional.
• Matriarchal (matrimonial) - authoritarianism comes from the feminine.
• Egalitarian (partnership or biarchy) - power is evenly distributed between a man and a woman, built on the interchangeability of role positions.
• Child-centered - the child is psychologically dominant, his needs are whims. The main task of parents is to ensure the "happiness of the child." Symbiosis of an adult and a child. As a result of upbringing in such a family, the child develops an inflated self-esteem, a sense of personal significance, but the likelihood of conflict with the environment outside the family increases. Therefore, children from such families may assess the world as hostile.

Comparison of normative attitudes of gender-role behavior in families:

Dominant family

Partner family

Uneven distribution of power, abuse of it. Leadership based on strength. Rigidity of sex roles Polotized family responsibilities and gender segregation of interests Rigid rules of family life Destructive way to resolve conflicts Failures and mistakes are hidden, condemned, remembered for a long time, amenable to obstruction. Lack of respect for personal affairs, personal secrets, total control of behavior Feelings of insecurity, subordination, loneliness, feelings of guilt, anxiety, depression The closeness of family life, family relations from social life Raising children in conditions of hypercontrol, subordination, obedience.

Everyone's authority, sharing power Leadership based on authority Interchangeability of sex roles Flexibility in the distribution of family responsibilities and activities Lability of the rules of family life Constructive way to resolve disputes, conflicts Failures and mistakes are not hidden, they are discussed without reproaches, they are forgiven and forgotten Respect for personal affairs, personal secrets, non-interference in the intimate world without an invitation Perception of the family as the safest place where self-confidence is obtained, doubts and anxiety disappear, mood improves Openness of family life to society, active participation of the couple in public life Education in terms of expanding the autonomy of the child, his full participation in the adoption of common decisions and self-determination

By blood ties:

• native family
• Foster family or foster family.

V.S.Torokhty distinguishes families according to the following features:

According to the number of children (childless/interventile, one-child, small, large).

By the quality and atmosphere in the family (prosperous, stable, pedagogically weak, unstable, disorganized).

By the nature of psychological health (healthy, neurotic, victimogenic).

According to the national composition (monoethnic and polyethnic).

Theory. The most common classification of interaction styles in the family.

Liberal style (permissive) - the absence in the family of any relationship between parents and children: alienation of parents from children, their complete indifference to the affairs and feelings of children. Such parents are prone to one of the well-known polar types of relationships - to hypoprotection (insufficient love, its absence). They hardly care about their child. They leave everything to chance, not revealing interest in relation to the child. The basis of fatherhood is a sense of duty, duty. There is almost no emotional warmth in the relationship with the child. In the parental relationship, ignoring the needs of the child predominates because of the depth in personal affairs and experiences. The child is left to himself. Hidden hypo-custody may take place (that is, control and care for the child are formal), but in this case, the parents do not satisfy one of the most important needs of the child - the need for love and acceptance. Children tend to: a feeling of "acquired insecurity" (hopelessness and humility, which is acquired when the child does not feel the possibility of control over recurring troubles), which, with further development, leads to the appearance of apathy and even depression, to avoid contact with new people, to a general distrust of people. These children are characterized by antisocial behavior. Lack of parental care is a very traumatic factor. Children may have a low level of intelligence, especially non-verbal, emotional immaturity, lack of intelligibility in contacts with others (they quickly become attached and quickly weaned). Often they are aggressive towards their peers, deprived of social activity.

Authoritarian style (controlling). Includes significant restrictions on the behavior of children, a clear explanation to the child of the content of the restrictions. Such parents constantly make different (sometimes quite difficult to fulfill) requirements for the child. There is hypercontrol. At the same time, parents do not notice the dominance of their behavior, or perceive it as normal and natural: “I only wish her well” or “I know better how to behave in such situations.” This can be called hyperprotection or symbiosis: an obsessive desire to keep, bind a child to oneself, deprive him of independence due to the fear that some kind of grief may happen to the child in the future. In this case, the decrease in the possibilities and abilities of the child leads the parents to maximum control and limitation. Such parents give preference to such kind of influence as order and violence. Children are fearful, lack of initiative, indecisive, unsure of themselves and their abilities, with poor self-control of behavior, inactive, or vice versa with tough self-guidance. Negative mood prevails. It is difficult for them to establish contact with peers. In relationships with their parents, such children can be hypocritical, lie, sometimes show outright hatred. In an authoritarian family, respect for the authority of elders is brought up. The main requirement is submission. The result of the child's socialization in such a family is the ability to easily "join" the vertically organized social structure. Children easily learn traditional norms, but have difficulty in forming personal families. Lack of initiative, inflexible, act on the basis of ideas about how it should be.

Democratic style (style of consent). It is determined by the following parameters: a high level of verbal communication between parents and children, the involvement of children in the discussion of family problems, issues (their opinion is taken into account), the willingness of parents to help if necessary, along with faith in the success of the child’s independent activity, limiting personal subjectivity in the vision of a child. Such parents bring up in children: independence, teach to define personal values, and to think independently. Relationships in such families involve cooperation, mutual assistance, a developed culture of feelings and emotions, as well as real and complete equality of all participants in the family union. Children are distinguished by social activity, the presence of an internal locus of control, and easily come into contact with peers. A good mood prevails in children, they are self-confident, with developed self-control of behavior, they strive for research, search, and do not avoid new situations. The goal is mutual trust, acceptance and autonomy of its members.

Topic: Family development.

Theory. Each group has its own "point of origin", the primary reason for the association. The family in this case is no exception. In this case, we are interested in what brought the spouses together and how the initial expectations are realized, what factors determine them, and on what principles marital relations are currently built. Interpersonal attractiveness is supported by factors that are of particular value to this or that individual or give him certain hopes that social contact with this partner will be favorable [Mikula, 1977].

One of the theories explaining the principles of choosing a marriage partner is the complex theory of Murstein (1976). According to this theory, three factors, three forces of attraction, act in the choice: motives, merits and role. These forces act sequentially in three phases, their value changes in each phase. What passes through the filter passes into the next phase.

In the first phase (motivation), such factors as external attractiveness and demeanor play a significant role. It is also important how these characteristics are evaluated by others. The meaning of a drive is thus relative within a given situation.

In the second phase (dignity), the center of gravity shifts mainly to the area of ​​similarity of interests, points of view, scale of values. Partners at a meeting get to know each other, receive information about the interests, the scale of values ​​of each of them. If significant discrepancies are revealed here and the detected shortcomings are not compensated by any advantages, the partners disperse, believing that they are not suitable for each other.

Current page: 22 (total book has 26 pages)

Font:

100% +

3. Behavioral model

Unlike the psychoanalytic model, the behavioral (behavioristic) model of family counseling does not aim to identify the deep causes of marital disharmony, research and analysis of family history. Behavioral counseling is aimed primarily at changing the behavior of partners, using the methods of conditioning and learning. The main theoretical provisions of the behavioral approach are presented in the works B.F. Skinner, A. Bandura, D. Rotter, D. Kelly.

The behaviorist approach to counseling is based on applied behavioral analysis - a method of researching the client and his environment. This method includes two stages: operationalization of behavior and functional analysis.

Operationalization of behavior allows you to very clearly define the problem and analyze behavior, presenting it as a chain of individual actions. This is done through observation of the family, during which the frequency of manifestation of certain types of behavior is recorded. The goal of operationalizing behavior is to translate vague, vague grievances and complaints from family members into objective, observable actions.

functional analysis involves tracking the sequence of events and is carried out according to the three-term formula:

♦ background;

♦ resulting behavior;

♦ the consequences of this behavior.

By establishing functional causal relationships, one can understand the sequence of events that underlie external behavior. Thus, marital behavior is influenced by stimuli that preceded marriage and stimuli that appeared after it. Properly chosen methods of influencing the behavior of spouses are the most important condition for effective family counseling.

...

Here is an example of how a behavioral consultant conducts a functional analysis (i.e., finds out what preceded the act, what act took place and what is its result), described by A. Ivey, M. Ivey and others.

Psychologist: So, as I understand it, you are depressed, you feel tired and stiff. Can you give a specific example of situations where you felt this way? I want to know what exactly happened before you got these feelings and what happens as a result. First, tell me about a recent similar case.

Client: It happened yesterday... (sighs). I came home from work and felt good. When I came in, my wife was not at home and I sat down to read.

Psychologist (interrupting): What is your reaction to the fact that your wife was not at home?

Client: I was a little disappointed, but not much. I just sat down.

Psychologist: Go ahead.

Client: Half an hour later, the wife came and walked by. I said hello, but she's been angry with me since last night when we had an argument. It's funny, but I feel relieved after we argued...

Client: I tried to talk to her, but she didn't answer. After about 10 minutes, I became very sad and dreary. I went to my room and lay down until supper. Before dinner, my wife came to me and said that she was very sorry ... But my depression did not decrease.

Psychologist: Let's try to build a sequence of events. You returned home in a good mood, but your wife was not at home, and then she did not react to your words, because she was angry. You tried to get an answer from her, but without success (preceding event), then you felt longing, went into the room and lay down (resultant action), she continued to ignore you for a while, then she came to you, and you ignored her (consequence) . The picture is similar to what you told me before: 1) you tried to do something, 2) she does not react, 3) you are discouraged, there is a feeling of depression - sometimes even tears and 4) she comes to you to apologize, but you you ignore her.

Thus, behavioral counselors believe that each person has their own system of rewards and punishments. If a psychologist can understand this system, he can influence behavior. Also, within the framework of the behavioral model, it is described “ good family” (which relationships can be considered “good”).

Wille, Weiss and Patterson characterize as “good” such family relationships in which spouses more often exchange positive emotions than negative ones, and due to the frequency of manifestation, positive emotions reinforce themselves. Azrin, Naster and Jones identify the following principles underlying marital disharmony:

♦ spouses receive few reinforcements in marriage;

♦ marriage satisfies too few needs;

♦ reinforcement in marriage does not bring satisfaction;

♦ new behavior is not reinforced;

♦ one of the spouses receives more than he gives;

♦ punishment prevails over reinforcement;

♦ extramarital sources of pleasure compete with marital ones.

The main directions of behavioral counseling the following: parenting skills training, communicative marital training.

Parenting training It is used in work with a family in which there are problems with a child. It aims to teach parents the basic ways to influence behavior. By learning to apply these methods, parents, in turn, will change the behavior of the child. An essential feature of the family within the described model is the fact that the training is based on careful observation. The object of psychological work is the parents and ways of their response, and the goal of psychological assistance is the changed behavior of the child.

Communicative marital training aims to improve communication in the family, which contributes to problem solving. The following main strategies for teaching spouses are distinguished:

♦ spouses are taught to express their grievances in true behavioral terms rather than unstructured complaints;

♦ spouses are taught new ways of communicating, emphasizing the effectiveness of positive reinforcement as opposed to negative reinforcement;

♦ spouses are helped to improve communication;

♦ spouses are encouraged to establish clear and effective ways of sharing power and responsibilities;

♦ Spouses are taught strategies for dealing with future problems.

Each of these strategies aims to increase the mutual satisfaction of family members based on positive reinforcement.

4. System approach

The systemic model of family counseling is considered to be one of the youngest schools that received its recognition at the end of the second half of the 20th century.

In this model, the family is considered as a kind of social system, as a complex of elements and their properties that are in dynamic connections and relationships with each other. This approach assumes in the process of psychological counseling reliance on the family as a unit of influence.

The conceptual basis of a systematic approach to understanding the family is general theory systems. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was talk of a systemic revolution and a systematic approach that characterized the new style and new methods of scientific and engineering thinking. When they characterize something as a system, they say that it is a complex unity in which the constituent parts - elements, as well as the scheme of connections or relations between elements - the structure can be distinguished.

Founder of the systems approach, Austrian biologist L. von Bertalanffy put forward the doctrine that the concept of a system is determined by a view of the world not as a mechanism, but as an organism (“organismic view of the world”). L. Bertalanffy in one of his works states that the system is closed if no information enters it; it can be considered open if there is an export and import, while changing its components.

Within the framework of a systematic approach to counseling, families can be distinguished as independent models:

♦ structural school;

♦ gestalt approach;

♦ experience-based counseling.

Structural school

...

It is founded S. Minukhin. In the late 1960s, together with his co-workers, he conducted psychotherapeutic classes in a boarding school for boys with delinquent behavior from single-parent families. From 1965 to 1978, S. Minukhin headed the psychological and pedagogical consultation in Philadelphia. He is still called the "Star of Family Counseling". It is generally accepted that thanks to his work, family counseling (in the context of family therapy) is recognized by the psychological community as an independent movement.

In the very term structural» focuses on using the concept of the family structure to provide counseling intervention. From the point of view of S. Minu-hin, the structural model gives the psychologist a specific conceptual map that allows him to see what is really happening in the family.

...

« The family is a natural troupe in which stereotypes of interaction arise over time. These stereotypes create a family structure that determines the functioning of its members, delineates the range of their behavior and facilitates interaction between them. One way or another, a viable family structure is necessary to fulfill the main tasks - to maintain individuality, while at the same time creating a sense of belonging to the whole.

Each individual member of the family, at one level or another of awareness and concreteness, is familiar with the geography of the family territory. Each member of the family knows what is allowed, what is the control system. But, being a lonely wanderer both in the territory of his family and in the world around him, he rarely perceives such a system as a complete whole. However, this system of intra-family interactions appears to the family therapist in all its complexity. He sees the whole. The family as a whole seems to be something like a colonial living organism - a creature consisting of various life forms, but at the same time they all form a composite organism, which in itself is a life form.».

The basic concepts of the structural model, according to S. Minukhin, are presented as follows:

♦ family structure;

♦ family subsystems(holons);

♦ borders.

Family structure. It is formed by interaction stereotypes that determine the range of behavior, requirements and rules for the functioning of the family as a whole. The structure of the family includes a set of conscious and unconscious rules that determine the interaction in the family. A family structure functions effectively when rules are in place and behavior is predictable.

family subsystems. The structure of the family in its composition has three differentiated subsystems (parts): marital, parental and children. (In his works, S. Minukhin uses the term “holon” ​​proposed by him, which has a similar content, instead of the concept of “subsystem”.) The first of them includes marital subsystem. This subsystem arises earlier than others and determines the features of the functioning of the family as a whole. It arises at the moment when a man and a woman unite to create a family. The main functions of the marital subsystem are to ensure mutual satisfaction of the needs of the spouses without compromising the emotional atmosphere necessary for the growth and development of two changing individuals. This happens due to the development of boundaries that protect each spouse from the interference of other family members (children, relatives) and leave him the territory necessary to meet his needs. The viability of the family as a structure is determined by how adequate these boundaries are. The foundations of the subsystem are interaction stereotypes, patterns of transactions associated with showing attention to each other. Some stereotypes of interaction are developed easily (if the spouses, for example, both come from patriarchal families). Other stereotypes are the result of convention. Any deviation that differs from the usual causes a feeling of resentment, betrayal.

From the point of view of S. Minukhin, the marital subsystem influences the development of the child. It is in the marital subsystem that the child sees examples of how to show love, express affection, how to overcome conflicts on the basis of equality. In pathogenic situations, when the functions of the marital subsystem are disturbed, the child may be involved in a coalition (alliance) with one of the parents against the other.

The second family subsystem includes parent subsystem. It arises in connection with the birth of a child and is associated with the functions of care and upbringing. The composition of the parental subsystem can vary and include, in addition to the father and mother, an uncle, aunt, grandmother, and grandfather. One of the parents can be excluded from the parental subsystem (for example, upbringing functions can be delegated to the grandmother). Thanks to the parental subsystem (interacting with it), the child forms a sense of his adequacy. He begins to understand which types of his behavior are approved, encouraged, and which ones are negatively evaluated and blocked. The subsystem of parents changes and adapts to the changing (due to growing up) needs of the child.

One of the problems that this subsystem faces is management problems, since parents have the right to make decisions regarding the life of the family as a whole.

subsystem of children. For a child, his brothers and sisters (siblings) form a special group in the family in which he exists as an equal. Siblings develop their own interaction patterns. These stereotypes will be of great importance in the future when children begin to exist in non-family groups of equals (at school, at work).

The allocation of subsystems allows you to clearly identify the structure of the family. Relationships between subsystems are governed by boundaries. S. Minukhin highlights three types of borders:

♦ clear;

♦ rigid;

♦ diffuse.

clear boundaries allow subsystems of the family to feel a certain autonomy. They make it possible to establish effective communication between subsystems and facilitate the process of adaptation and coordination with each other, since the nature of the behavior of a representative of each subsystem with clear boundaries is known and easily predictable.

Rigid boundaries, compared to clear boundaries, separate family members from each other and from society as a whole. Subsystems function autonomously, without interaction with each other. Children raised in such families have difficulty negotiating and aligning efforts and resources with others when necessary.

diffuse boundaries provoke the phenomenon of psychological fusion, when, for example, children take the feelings of their parents for their own. In such a family, the boundaries of the marital subsystem dissolve into the parental subsystem. From the point of view of S. Minukhin, it is difficult for children from such families to create their own family, as they are deprived of the opportunity to build their own boundaries and lose the opportunity to experiment with relationships. According to S. Minukhin, the therapist, working with the boundaries of the family, can himself create subsystems with various goals. For example, the therapist might tell grandparents that because they have more life experience, it would be interesting for him to listen to their thoughts after they observe the dispute between children and parents without interfering in it.

The therapist may ask the child, who sits between father and mother, to switch places with one of the parents in order to give them the opportunity to talk to each other directly as husband and wife, and not through his head.

A characteristic technique for S. Minukhin is acceptance of boundary setting. It consists in changing the spatial arrangement of family members during the session and is considered a fairly strong methodological technique, since it is non-verbal, unambiguous and creates the level of emotional tension necessary for the change. The author's ("proprietary") action of S. Minukhin consists in transferring people from place to place during the session and moving himself, demonstrating changes in his emotional ties with family members. One of the patterns identified by S. Minukhin is as follows: vertical coalitions are dysfunctional and horizontal coalitions are functional. This means the following: when the proximity of people of the same generation in a family is much less than intergenerational proximity, the development of both the entire family system and the development of children drawn into alliances with one of the parents against the other parent is disturbed.

The goals of structural psychological assistance to the family, according to S. Minukhin, following.

♦ Creation of an effective hierarchical structure in which parents are the authority for children.

♦ Establishing an effective parent coalition in which parents support each other in making demands on their children.

♦ Expansion of the subsystem of children into the subsystem of peers.

♦ Create an age appropriate environment for children to experiment with autonomy and subsystems.

♦ Separation of the subsystem of the couple from the subsystem of the parents.

The main strategic direction that the psychologist should follow in the process of family counseling is to encourage the development of the family structure. There are three phases in family counseling.

First phase implies joining the psychologist to the family (to the style of communication, to the hierarchy of values), including himself in its structure as a leader. The psychologist is in the same boat as the family, but he must be at the helm. In most cases, the family agrees to regard the counselor as the leader in the partnership, but he must earn this leadership. Like any leader, he will have to adapt, coax, support, guide and follow others.

Second phase counseling – study of family structure. It is revealed from the psychologist's analysis of the interaction of family members with each other (including the verbal and non-verbal components of communication).

Third phase structural assistance to the family in the process of counseling - changing the structure of the family. A change in the family structure can occur through the direct intervention of the counselor, when he suggests changing the style of communication (recommends, for example, parents to talk to each other, not allowing the child to interfere). The psychologist can express his suggestions and interpretations regarding the "map" of the family, giving an assessment of what he saw.

The general idea of ​​​​S. Minukhin regarding work with the family consists in a kind of appeal with which the psychologist ultimately addresses the family members: “Help the other person change, and this will allow you to change in your relationship with him, and will change both of you within the subsystem.”

Gestalt approach

The ideas of the structural approach are meaningfully close to the field theory K. Levin, on which the Gestalt approach to counseling is based. You can find an idea in K. Levin living space. Living space contains the totality of possible events that can affect human behavior. It includes everything you need to know to explain and understand the specific behavior of a person in a given psychological environment at a given time.

K. Levin's field theory contains the idea borders and their role in the separation of the organism and its environment. The difference between open and closed systems is determined by the nature of the boundaries. According to K. Levin, fixed rigid boundaries have closed systems, while open systems have changeable, permeable boundaries. This is consistent with the statements of a famous biologist (methodologist, founder of a systematic approach) L. Bertalanffy that only open systems can be alive that support themselves by exchanging information with environment, constantly building up and destroying its components.

The ideas of K. Levin were used in the practice of counseling F. Perls. Although F. Perls has a negative attitude towards theorizing, his approach is based on basic ideas about the process of self-regulation of the organism and the ways of its contact with the environment. The process of self-regulation leads to the formation of a figure (gestalt). Gestalt – system concept, it can be defined as a pattern, structure, configuration, as a specific organization of parts that make up a certain whole, which cannot be changed without destroying it.

Under the gestalt understand the figure that the subject creates in his contact with the environment. The figure is determined by what a person organizes depending on their needs, desires or unfinished situations at the moment. When the need is satisfied, the gestalt closes, and what was a figure passes into the background. (Thus, for example, the feeling of hunger makes us focus on food, but as we are full, we can get in touch with other needs.) Incomplete gestalts are a source of personality neuroticism. Unfinished gestalts include the following: unreacted feeling, unfinished conversation, unfinished relationship. Thus, a psychologically incomplete divorce prevents contacts of former spouses with other men and women.

Gestalt counseling is a process that aims to accompany or restore the client's ability to control the figures, to build the figures in adequate relation to the background, to allow them to unfold and come into contact with them.

One of the leaders in the application of the Gestalt model in working with married couples and families is D. Zinker. He directed the Center for the Study of Small Systems in the United States. Key principles family counseling according to J. Zinker - observation and residence. The implementation of these principles in practice means the following. The psychologist, together with the patients, participates in a joint creative process. He takes part in the interaction of family members as an observer. The purpose of psychological intervention (intervention) is to awaken the participants' awareness of how they interact with each other. The therapist's remarks are directed primarily to revealing the strengths of family members (what they can do well), and then to what they should learn. The counselor organizes the situation in such a way that spouses or family members communicate directly with each other, without paying attention to him.

In his monograph “In Search of a Good Form”, D. Zinker highlights a number of principles which can help the psychologist navigate the Gestalt approach to family counseling. These principles are based on systems theory and the author's own experience.

♦ There is no linear progression in human relationships, there are no direct cause-and-effect relationships, but there is a complex set of interactions.

♦ All events, including human relationships, are in constant process.

♦ Relations tend to triangular configuration.

♦ The history of the family is not history, it is a lot of events happening at the same time.

♦ Even in complete isolation, each person exists in interconnection with other people.

♦ Any event (small or large) that occurs in a family has an impact on all others. No event can be viewed in isolation from the others.

♦ Decreasing the importance of what is happening is dangerous because it tends to hide problems or stimulates polarization and the desire to destroy the other.

♦ Only people who have achieved autonomy are able to have strong relationships with other people. Conflict relations (fusion) destroy the spirit.

♦ The couple and family are a “scattering structure” as they tend to deplete their energy at a certain stage of their development. The ideal restructuring of these steps involves moving up to a higher level of functioning.

The model of the work of a gestalt consultant with a couple or a family as a whole is based on the understanding of the dynamics of the formation of gestalts developed by F. Perls. D. Zinker calls this the Gestalt cycle of experience (see Fig. 4).

...

Rice. 4. Gestalt cycle of experience(main phases):

1 - Awareness, 2 - Energy / actions, 3 - Contact, 4 - Resolution / completion, 5 - Exit, 6 - "New" awareness

...

D. Zinker notes that this figure illustrates the “normal” cycle of experience: “ Ideally, our awareness should be clear and distinct. When awareness is fueled with sufficient energy, we can move directly towards what we want. Actions lead to contact with the environment and are accompanied by a sense of satisfaction, resolution and completion. We can get out of the situation, relax and leave. A clear and complete exit gives us a fresh experience and is not accompanied by a painful feeling of incompleteness. Then a new awareness comes and the cycle starts again. The task of the therapist is to help the couple or family understand how and where the system„slows down“its movement and how to use collective awareness and energy to overcome the place of inhibition of its interaction».

...

Let us cite as an example one of the episodes of D. Zinker's work with a married couple who came for a consultation because a “crack” appeared in their relationship, boredom and indifference to each other appeared. The counselor in this episode helps the couple identify the problem - state it, and then understand each other's position.

Counselor: I would like you to turn to each other and talk about something that is important to both of you. I will sit by and listen, and if you find it difficult or need my help, please contact me, I will be happy to help you. Good?

John: I've talked to her hundreds of times and always heard back that it was all my fault, that I was saying or doing something wrong.

Consultant: I'm glad you were able to say that. Now say the same to Diana, and I will see if something like this really happens between you. I promise to comment on this.

John: Like I said, you always blame me for everything.

Diana(starts crying softly): I am a romantic woman, and when we were in New York last summer, I asked you to go with me to one special place, a place for the two of us. And what? We went there with other people. Why did you do this to me?

John: I took you everywhere with me, I paid for you everywhere. I thought you would appreciate my generosity.

Diana: I'm not talking about your generosity.

After this remark, there was a long silence, the spouses were depressed and discouraged.

Consultant: You both started wrong and now you've reached a dead end. In the beginning, you were quite energetic. Is this what happens at home?

Diana: Yes. After a while, we both get tired, and then we are silent for a long time.

Counselor: You have strong feelings, but you don't listen well to each other. Each of you says something important, but the other does not accept it. Is not it?

When analyzing this episode, it is obvious that the couple failed in trying to understand each other. This is due to the fact that they spent their energy too early and got into the phase of awareness. Their difficulty lies in the fact that they are not able to talk for a long time and maintain a conversation, while maintaining energy. Further work of the Gestalt consultant may be aimed at helping the spouses hear each other, explore experiences together and establish contact. Each family has its own style of going through the phases of the cycle of experience. From the point of view of D. Zinker, during a period of trouble, all families have characteristic points of inhibition of the process of normal life. The counselor helps the family to experience the successful full completion of the cycle, developing a sense of a fulfilling existence.