Narrative family therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and adoption: An intervention protocol

From the model of Narrative family therapy we use tales that could symbolically represent in therapy settings a person or a legal entity, both individual and collective, and which expresses a personal identification, a family tie, a community link or a socially recognized status or personal worth. Externalisation, in narrative family therapy, is a process to “get out” from the person any element or quality that is transformed in some with entity (White, 1991; White y Epston, 1993). In psychotherapy, externalising is the use of language to convert problems that affect the person or family on to an independent entity. This transformation allows people to fight against them or to view them from a new perspective. Externalisation technique through the metaphoric use of tales as external representation of family entity and individual’s worth inside the family system is applied in children adoption cases. The objective here is not to fight against the external representation of the family. We use tales inside the symbolic techniques that permits families to work together with meanings, individualism and cohesion within their members, and after adoption. We present a therapeutic protocol that combined EMDR and narrative family therapy externalisation techniques. We expose in a format of clinical case report the therapeutic work with a family that have adopted a child who suffer of a simple phobia. Using the protocol we describe above we carried out an analysis of the therapeutic issues and benefices of EMDR and narrative therapy in these family processes. This protocol has been useful to manage the phobia symptoms and to improve the adoptive family identity and cohesion. The combined approach we describe could help adoptive families to understand and to interpret the meanings from the construction that family systems make of their own world and relieve psychological symptoms that children could present.

Conference

English

V. J. Prado-Gasco
Marian Perez-Marin
Milagros Molero-Zafra

Prado-Gasco, V. J., Perez-Marin, M., & Molero-Zafra, M. (2010, July). Narrative family therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and adoption: An intervention protocol. Poster presented at the 27th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Melbourne, Australia