Family Therapy Article

Family Therapy Article
Locate a current article (from 2005 or later) in a peer-reviewed journal in the field of
counseling and psychology on the topic of family therapy. Focus your search on the use of
family therapy in relation to a population with whom you hope to work-such as adolescents
with eating disorders, families with a member who is terminally ill, single parents, and so
on.
(I hope to work with women that are survivors of abuse).
Find an article that describes or evaluates the application of this approach in a research or
clinical setting.
�Summarize the key points of the article.
�Evaluate the ways in which these authors discussed or demonstrated the effectiveness of
this approach in working with families.
�Identify various strategies you learned from this article that you can implement in your
practicum and internship.
Reference
Corey, G. (2013). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy (9th ed.). Pacific
Grove, CA: Cengage-Brooks/Cole.

Family Therapy Article

Article : The effects of forgiveness therapy on depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress for
women after spousal emotional abuse. Reed, G. L., & Enright, R. D. (2006).
Summary of the article’s main points
The study is based on the fact that women who have been emotionally abused in a relationship
tend to suffer the effects of what they went through long after the incident has taken place. They
basically exhibit PTSD like symptoms even beyond the end of not just the abuse but also the
relationship in which these things took place.

There are different approaches employed in helping women overcome this and the study focuses
on the comparison between forgiveness therapy and other measures. The results reveal that
forgiveness therapy is effective in dealing with the long-term effects of emotional abuse.
The authors demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach by breaking down the problem at
hand and then applying the two approaches at each stage of the problem to find out how the
dynamics played out. Different results of emotional abuse were also tackled.
The strategies that I learnt from this article which I can implement to my internship were mainly
to do with the narrowing down of a research project. In the case of this article, the main focus
group was women who had faced emotional abuse in previous relationships. The article did not
broadly focus on their lives. It instead focused on specific elements of their lives which were
used as indicators of the progress they were making towards wellness following the abusive
episodes of their lives. When I am doing my practicum, I will be adequately prepared to think
outside the box and use existing literature as guides for my research study (Corey, 2013).
References
Reed, G. L., & Enright, R. D. (2006). The effects of forgiveness therapy on depression, anxiety,
and posttraumatic stress for women after spousal emotional abuse. Journal of consulting and
clinical psychology, 74(5), 920.
Corey, G. (2013). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy (9th ed.). Pacific Grove,
CA: Cengage-Brooks/Cole.