How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 260

Therapist: That’s often the case with teenagers when major life changes occur to them. It may mean sitting
down and plotting a new course with them.
Client: I really can’t see the sense of doing this anger management thing for the courts when I’ve been this way
all of my life. That’s my personality. That’s me! Ever since I can remember I’ve been this way.
Therapist: The fact that you can talk about that experience with such feeling and determination and that you’ve
been angry all of your life is the first step on the journey. Welcome to the program.
Normalizing client statements involves the therapist’s respecting and accepting the client and the client situation
and acknowledging the client’s humanity and the client’s struggles and frailties. In agreement with Maslow’s
philosophy, normalization focuses more on the acceptance of and empathy for human struggles and less on
pathology. While normalization downplays the pathological implications of the human situation, there is a
corresponding reframing that focuses on acknowledging the individual’s efforts and struggles in dealing with
human challenges. Again, normalization is a special kind of reframe, and as with all reframes, it is an attempt to
accommodate the client and hopefully join the client sooner.

 OBSERVATION
Family units establish equilibriums to protect the family unit, but that equilibrium can cause an imbalance for
individual parts of the family. A clinical psychologist is trained to observed the family dynamic and monitor
both verbal and non-verbal cues. During the assessment phase and initial interviews, the family systems
psychologist will monitor how the parents interact with each other and how their children react to them. He or
she will compare his or her observations with testing data offered in both subjective and objective forms. The
subjective test data is gathered during the interview while the objective test data is gathered via clinical tests that
family members are requested to fill out and return to the psychologist.
Observation is an effective family therapy technique because it offers the psychologist the first real window into
the family dynamic. Family therapy may be recommended for any number of causes, but for the psychologist to
make a fair and accurate assessment, he or she must get a base measurement of the family's interactions,
emotional balance and initial dysfunction. During observation, for example, it may be revealed that a mother's
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