Restoration Therapy: Understanding and Guiding Healing in Marriage and Family Therapy

244 Pages·2011·1.132 MB·English

by  Terry D. Hargrave, Franz Pfitzer

Restoration
Therapy
Restoration
Therapy
Understanding and Guiding Healing
in Marriage and Family Therapy
Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer
New York London
Routledge Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Hargrave, Terry D.
Restoration therapy : understanding and guiding healing in marriage and
family therapy / authored by Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-87625-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-415-87626-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Family psychotherapy. I. Pfitzer, Franz. II. Title.
RC488.5.H357 2011
616.89’156--dc22 2010049069
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
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To my wife and partner, Sharon. Everything good in my life is
connected to you. To my children, Halley Anne and Peter. Helping you
grow up has restored much love and trustworthiness with me.
Terry Hargrave
To my wife, Evelyn Seidel-Pfitzer, and our children, Martin, Lara, Anna,
and Lukas. Your love and trust have made me change and grow.
Franz Pfitzer
Contents
Preface ix
SectIon I Understanding Pain, Coping, and
Assessment
1 Love and trustworthiness: the theory of Relationships 3
2 Coping With Pain: Understanding Behavior and self-Reactivity 3 3
3 the Process of Pattern 6 3
SectIon II the therapeutic Work in
Restoration therapy
4 Becoming a Wise therapist 9 1
5 the techniques of Working With Love and trustworthiness 113
6 Consolidating Change in the Brain 153
vii
Contents
SectIon III Utilizing the Restoration
therapy Model
7 Restoration therapy and Couples 175
8 Using Forgiveness in Restoration 195
References 219
Index 225
viii
PReFaCe
We started work on this particular book with much contemplation and
self-inventory. We both come from a background of identifying ourselves
as contextual family therapists in the tradition of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
(Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986). We both have been personally
helped by this approach and have used it successfully in our therapeu-
tic work through the years. Because we believed the concepts of justice
and trustworthiness to be so profound and useful in relational processes,
we have seen much of our efforts in the field of psychotherapy help the
approach become more well known and better understood. In writing
this book, we had to look at ourselves carefully and evaluate if we were
actually ready to leave this contextual tradition.
In the end, we have found that we can neither totally leave our con-
textual roots nor exclusively identify ourselves as contextual therapists
any longer. Much of what those familiar with the contextual approach
will find in this volume will look familiar as we do incorporate the con-
cepts of trustworthiness, justice, entitlement, destructive entitlement, and
multidirected partiality. Of these things that we have spoken about, writ-
ten about, and taught over the years, we still believe in earnest and have
much gratitude to our history in the contextual approach. But, we have
also felt the need to speak more freely about the advances in our thinking
concerning the importance of love and its ability to have an impact on
individual identity. We have become convinced that trustworthiness has
not only a relational resource that can promote giving but also an essen-
tial nature that shapes the individual perspective on the ideas of safety in
relationship. Mainly, we have become convinced that these two elements
of love and trustworthiness are sufficient and necessary as the twin pil-
lars of relationship and the organizing principle around which we can
understand not only individual and relational health but also dysfunc-
tion. Thus, while we see ourselves emerging from the contextual tradi-
tion, we now organize our thoughts and therapy around what we call
restoration therapy.
In addition to organizing our thoughts around these essential ele-
ments, we have felt the freedom to start expanding our views of what
makes for good interventions in efforts to restore love and trustworthiness
ix
PrefaCe
to individuals and relationships. We have been using interventions for
years that have been directed at helping the individual and family achieve
better insights into past damage and use this knowledge to formulate new
experiences that can heal. But more recently, taking note of the literature
on the brain and more specifically on how individuals make and sustain
change, we have been working to develop interventions that focus on skills
that sustain the insights and gains that clients make in the therapy room.
Like many others in the field, we have learned that if we want the client
or patient to maintain the insights and motivations made in the therapy
room we must help them practice in a repetitive and skillful way that will
bring mindfulness into play. In short, we have learned that change means
that we must also work to change the brain. Insight is good and necessary,
but we have found it to be insufficient to maintain change. As a result,
readers of this book will find not only interventions that are familiar (e.g.,
understanding, working up and working down, and the work of forgive-
ness) but also identification of cyclical processes in what we call pain-and-
peace cycles and change using a method we call the four steps. Restoration
therapy is about combining the interventions of both insight and skills for
a powerful therapeutic “one-two punch” to produce change.
In Section I, “Understanding Pain, Coping, and Assessment,” we
unfold the organizing elements of love and trustworthiness in under-
standing and assessing human behavior. In Chapter 1, “Love and Trust:
The Theory of Relationship,” we seek to explain clearly why we see love
and trustworthiness as the essential elements in human existence and
relationship and why these elements are essential in formation of individ-
ual identity and sense of safety in interaction. In Chapter 2, “Coping With
Pain: Understanding Behavior and Self-Reactivity,” we give a perspec-
tive on understanding how human beings use power when they are con-
fronted in relationships with love and trustworthiness or the lack thereof.
In this section, we share our new insights and understandings regarding
the effects of human agency as well as what we have learned concerning
the reactivity of humans through blaming others, shaming self, control-
ling behaviors, and escape/chaos behaviors. Finally, in Chapter 3, “The
Process of Pattern,” we try to give a clear picture of how these forces or
self-reactivity form the basis for individual systemic processes that con-
fuse identity and make safety in relationships difficult. As well, we seek
to give a better understanding of how individuals interact in systemic
relationships that tend to reinforce and even provoke the violations of
love and trustworthiness that they feel. We feel that Section I gives a good
x
PrefaCe
understanding of the restoration therapy framework and the ability to
assess individuals and relationships properly.
In Section II, “The Therapeutic Work in Restoration Therapy,” our
focus is to give a sense of the characteristics that make this type of work
unique as well as the essential elements and interventions that become
the restoration therapist’s tools. Chapter 4, “Becoming a Wise Therapist,”
provides a sense of the important characteristics that we believe essential
in this type of work. We not only focus on the psychotherapist becom-
ing wise in terms of interpreting material from the client or patient but
also give our ideas of where the psychotherapist should focus his or her
attention during the process of therapy. In Chapter 6, “The Techniques
of Working With Love and Trustworthiness,” we clearly spell out the
insight-based interventions that we use in the restoration therapy model.
Readers of our work the new Contextual therapy (2003), will recognize
some of these therapeutic modalities of understanding, working up and
working down, and right script but wrong players, to name a few. We
have expanded these interventions to include demonstrations as well as
new and important clinical work on understanding how to intervene to
produce different beliefs concerning the truths about identity and safety
in relationships. Chapter 6, “Consolidating Change in the Brain,” repre-
sents some of our most important new work in this modality as we have
applied what we have learned from the emerging research on the brain
and how individuals change themselves as well as their actions in rela-
tionships. It is indeed an exciting chapter to us as it represents significant
application of how clients can use insights in a cognitive way to practice
both in and out of the therapy room.
In Section III, “Utilizing the Restoration Therapy Model,” we give
some solid therapeutic examples of the model at work. Although the entire
book is laced with clinical examples, in these final chapters we provide
certain aspects of therapy fuller and clearer explanation and demonstra-
tion. Chapter 7, “Restoration Therapy and Couples,” introduces a system-
atic and clear illustration of how to produce and consolidate change with
couples in conflict. We feel like the work in this chapter represents a clear
and desirable advance in couple’s work as it produces hopeful change
in a short time frame. In Chapter 8, “Using Forgiveness in Restoration,”
we close the book with some of the work that is closest to our therapeu-
tic hearts. We demonstrate the work of forgiveness using the restoration
model through four cases that apply the stations of insight, understand-
ing, giving the opportunity for compensation, and overt forgiving.
xi