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SECURE TEST BANK
Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy
Chapter 6: Experiential Family Therapies
1. Each of the following therapies fall into the category of experiential family therapies
EXCEPT?
a. Satir growth model
b. Symbolic-experiential therapy
c. Emotionally focused therapy
d. External family systems
2. Which of the following experiential family therapies is the leading evidence-based
approach to couples therapy that uses experiential, systemic, and attachment theories?
a. Satir growth model
b. Symbolic-experiential therapy
c. Emotionally focused therapy
d. Internal family systems
3. It is said that rather than focus primarily on behavioral interaction sequences, experiential
family therapists focus more on the __________ layer of those interactions.
a. emotional
b. internal
c. external
d. intermittent
4. Experiential therapists assert that warmth and empathy are essential to effective therapy.
To foster an environment where this is evident, a therapist must do which of the
following?
a. Make a strong, affective connection with clients to create a sense of safety,
allowing clients to explore areas of emotional vulnerability.
b. Acknowledge that the client is the expert in their own life and the therapist is
merely there to facilitate the process of self-discovery.
c. Fully explore the amount of empathy the members of the family have for each
other.
d. All the above.
5. The Satir growth model focuses mostly on which of the following?
a. Fostering individual growth and improving family interactions
b. Reframing the problem in a completely positive light
c. Creating a sense of safety for interpersonal learning
d. Realigning the patterns and alliances the family has adhered to
6. According to the Satir growth model, there are five communication strategies for
survival. Which of the following suggestions would be best for a therapist working with
clients who have adapted the placator stance or role?
a. Encourage the client to take a firm stance from the onset of therapy.
b. Use less directive therapy methods, such as multiple choice questions and open-
ended reflections, to require them to voice their opinion and take a stand.
c. Use therapeutic techniques, such as reflecting, to highlight hidden emotions.
d. Applaud the placator; after all, they can be the easiest people to get along with.
7. When a Satir-oriented therapist is working with a client who takes on a blamer stance, the
therapist should NOT do which of the following?
a. Placate the client by not speaking honestly and directly to them.
b. Increase the client’s awareness of the thoughts and feelings of others.
c. Help the client to communicate their personal perspectives in a way that is
respectful of others.
d. Directly confront the client when necessary.
8. When a Satir-oriented therapist is spending time “floating” along with the client’s
distractions to identify the unique “anchors” of the client’s reality that the therapist can
tap into, they might be working with what type of client?
a. Placator
b. Blamer
c. Superreasonable
d. Irrelevant
9. Satir’s six-stage model of change is best described by which of the following statements?
a. The model emphasizing the therapist perturbs the system, shakes it up and
respects its ability to naturally reorganize itself in a more useful way.
b. The model identifies the different communication stances each family adapts to
through the process of therapy.
c. The model addresses conflict resolution and recovery in the family system.
d. The model highlights the inconsistencies and patterns the family system has fallen
into.
10. There are four primary assumptions about people and therapy according to Satir and her
associates. Which of the following is NOT one of those assumptions?
a. People naturally tend toward positive growth.
b. All people possess the resources for positive growth.
c. Every person, thing, or situation impacts and is impacted by everyone and
everything else.
d. Therapy is a process that involves interaction between therapist and client; in this
relationship, the therapist is responsible for him/herself and the client.
11. Satir’s work and relationships with clients was characterized by her foundation of warmth
and humanity. These conditions can be achieved by other therapists practicing the Satir
model by doing which of the following?
a. Emulating Virginia Satir
b. Reading Carl Roger’s On Becoming a Person
c. Systematically developing accurate empathy
d. Being congruent
12. The importance of making contact and establishing credibility with clients, according to
the Satir model, can be established doing which of the following?
a. Using paradoxes in therapy
b. Asking family members to rearrange themselves in the therapy room
c. Sitting or standing at the same physical level so that eye contact is easy
d. Asking the family to engage in an enactment
13. A Satir-oriented therapist says, “I believe this child’s exaggerated acting out and drug use
may serve to reduce tension in his parents’ marriage by getting his parents to focus on
him.” What is the therapist doing?
a. Determining the family life chronology
b. Viewing the symptoms as having a role in the family system
c. Figuring out the survival stance of the family
d. Using a mandala to understand the child’s drug use
14. Power struggles, parental conflicts, lack of validation, and lack of intimacy, are
considered what according to the Satir model?
a. Family life chronology
b. Survival stances of the family
c. Family dynamics
d. Family role
15. The use of which metaphor allows Satir practitioners to use six levels of experience to
help clients transform their feelings about feelings to make lasting change and more
effectively meet their underlying need for love and acceptance?
a. Ice cube
b. Iceberg
c. Ice age
d. Iceland
16. Sacha, a Satir-oriented therapist, notices that her client, who often reports feeling
overwhelmed, is often ill and exhausted. What might Sacha be doing during her
assessment of the client?
a. Making a mind-body connection between her client’s emotional issues and how
they are manifesting in his or her body
b. Considering the specific aspects of self her client values and the aspects of which
he or she is ashamed.
c. Assessing the motivation behind the client’s problematic behaviors and
interactions
d. Viewing the context for the potential problems and determining the client’s
potential weaknesses
17. What is the heart of relational goals in Satir’s approach?
a. Restructuring the family boundaries
b. Reconfiguring the family’s interaction sequences
c. Congruent communication for all family members
d. Reducing emotional reactivity through detriangulation
18. The overarching individual goal of Satir’s approach is consistent with other humanistic
approaches. Which of the following is the individual goal?
a. To promote self-actualization of members of the system
b. To promote independence of all members of the system
c. To promote interdependence of all members of the system
d. To promote self-assurance of all member of the system
19. The ingredients of an interaction intervention detail the internal communication process
of clients and can be used to teach clients about internal and relational processes. This
intervention can be use with which type of clients?
a. Individuals
b. Couples
c. Families
d. All of the above
20. A Satir-oriented therapist working in a session with a client said the following: “As I
listen to you explain what happened to you during that argument with your sister, I am
getting a sense that you were feeling hurt. Does that sound right?” What is the therapist
attempting to do with the client?
a. Understand the ingredients of the interaction.
b. Facilitate emotional expression.
c. Soften the family rule.
d. Coaching communication
21. A Satir-oriented therapist working with a couple asks the partners to turn their chairs
toward each other and gives the following prompt: “Tell your partner how you feel about
what happened New Year’s Eve.” The therapist might be doing which of the following?
a. Understanding the ingredients of an interaction
b. Creating an enactment
c. Softening the family rules
d. Coaching communication
22. Satir’s most distinctive intervention is family sculpting, which is done either with the
family or in a group setting. How is sculpting accomplished?
a. By enacting a new way of interacting and communicating among family members
b. By allowing individuals to convey how they believe they are viewed in the
system, therefore “sculpting” their image
c. By putting family members in physical positions that represent how the “sculptor”
sees each person’s role in the family
d. By self-reflecting in order to determine areas in need of personal growth and
fostering an environment where the individual can “sculpt” how they want to
improve
23. In most cases, sculpting is a highly-effective __________ confrontation that bypasses
cognitive defenses.
a. nonverbal
b. artistic
c. creative
d. problematic
24. When a Satir-oriented therapist is working with a client by facilitating a process in which
the client is better able to accept different aspects of self and to identify the contexts in
which they have been useful, the therapist might use which of the following
interventions?
a. Ingredients of an interaction
b. Sculpting
c. Touch
d. Parts party
25. Symbolic-experiential therapy is an experiential family therapy model developed by
whom?
a. Virginia Satir
b. Carl Whitaker
c. Susan Johnson
d. Richard Schwartz
26. Similarly to the Satir model of family therapy, Whitaker’s symbolic-experiential model
focuses on family structure and which of the following?
a. Behavioral sequences
b. Cognitive processes
c. Emotional Process
d. Structural Sequences
27. The therapist needs to win the battle for structure because they are responsible for setting
up a program for change and need to ensure a structure for change is in place. Which of
the following factors is NOT noted for contributing to the structure for change?
a. The necessary people attend therapy
b. The therapy occurs frequently enough to produce progress
c. The session content goes into depth or cover necessary areas
d. The session process will produce change
28. Which of the following statements most accurately summarizes Whitaker’s concept of
the battle for initiative?
a. Therapists should avoid tension and crisis in therapy at all costs.
b. Therapists should never work harder than their clients.
c. Clients should not initiate change, the therapist should.
d. Clients should allow their therapist to be overly helpful, push their change.
29. In symbolic-experiential therapy, absurdity is used to do which of the following?
a. Perturb the family system in a compassionate and caring way.
b. To render the family system into a state of confusion.
c. Condition the family system into a meaningless existence.
d. Disturb over-involved family relationships in a shocking way.
30. If a symbolic-experiential therapist is bored in session and shows it to their client or says
something about feeling bored, this is considered the therapist’s what?
a. Absurdity
b. Integrity
c. Authenticity
d. Professionalism
31. In symbolic-experiential therapy, what is the therapist’s primary responsibility?
a. Be responsive to the family without being responsible for them.
b. Be responsible for the family without being responsive to them.
c. Both A and B.
d. Neither A nor B.
32. Whitaker believed that therapists should walk away from therapy with which of the
following?
a. Growing and becoming more fully authentic
b. Not having allowed therapy to transform them
c. Feeling more fully in charge of the process of therapy
d. Feeling they are the same person they were when they began working with the
client
33. During the assessment process, symbolic-experiential therapists attend to two broad
patterns in the family: the __________ of the family and the emotional processes and
exchanges within the family.
a. cognitive sequences
b. behavioral actions
c. triangulation
d. structural organization
34. Symbolic-experiential therapists have three primary long-term goals for all clients. They
include all of the following EXCEPT?
a. Increase family cohesion by creating a sense of nurturance and confidence in
problem-solving.
b. Enact effective parental hierarchy and the severing of cross-generational
coalitions.
c. Promote personal growth by supporting the completion of developmental tasks for
all family members.
d. Expand the family’s symbolic world.
35. Symbolic-experiential family therapy involves increasing family cohesion and the
authenticity of family relationships. Therapists accomplish this goal by focusing on
which two key areas?
a. Intrapersonal boundaries and transgenerational boundaries
b. Transgenerational boundaries and self-actualization
c. Interpersonal boundaries and self-actualization
d. Interpersonal boundaries and transgenerational boundaries
36. More than many other family therapists, symbolic-experiential therapists focus on
increasing the sense of family cohesion. Family cohesion is defined as which of the
following?
a. The symbiotic relationship the family has in place for all to benefit
b. Clear communication patterns between generations
c. A strong sense of belonging, being loved, being wanted and loyalty
d. There is no clear definition since each family system is affected by different
cultural and economic tendencies
37. How will a therapist know when their client achieved personal growth and has
successfully navigated developmental tasks, a process also referred to as self–
actualization?
a. Self-actualization is a lifelong process; therefore, only the client will know when
they have achieved self-actualization.
b. The therapist will know that their client has achieved self-actualization when the
client is no longer attending sessions regularly.
c. The therapist will know that their client is making progress towards self-
actualization when the client is no longer experiencing symptoms at the individual
level and they are able to function in most areas of daily life.
d. There is no clear definition of self-actualization; therefore, one can never fully
achieve it.
38. In the early phases of symbolic-experiential family therapy, therapists create which of the
following to break the family out of their rigid interaction patterns?
a. Confusion and disorganization
b. Hear-and-now experiencing
c. Redefining and expanding of Symptoms
d. Spontaneity and craziness
39. A symbolic-experiential therapist working with a family says to the mother, “When did
you divorce your husband and marry your son?” The therapist is attempting to do which
of the following?
a. Deeply offend the family to the point of changing out of embarrassment.
b. Affectively confronting the family to interrupt rigid patterns.
c. Help the client to separate personal issues from interpersonal issues.
d. Expand the symptom from an individual matter to a family matter.
40. When a client is unrealistically hopeless, the therapist might augment the clients despair
and amplify it so the client can see how the despair and negative assumptions are out of
proportion with the facts. This is also known as what type of technique?
a. Reframe
b. Triangle
c. Paradox
d. Boundary
41. When conceptualizing a case from a symbolic-experiential framework, it is important to
assess each of the following areas EXCEPT?
a. Structural organization
b. Emotional process
c. Lack of competency
d. Symptom development
42. Aside from its shared humanistic assumptions common to all experiential approaches,
internal family systems is an integrative theory, integrating elements of which of the
following?
a. Solution-focused, strategic, cognitive behavioral, and collaborative
b. Structural, strategic, cognitive behavioral, and collaborative
c. Structural, solution-focused, intergenerational, and narrative
d. Structural, strategic, intergenerational, and narrative
43. The fundamental premise of internal family systems include all of the following
EXCEPT?
a. Each person’s inner life has multiple parts that form a system that functions like a
family system.
b. Each person’s inner world is characterized as having various parts that interrelate
as a coherent system with the same dynamics one would see in a family.
c. When people experience trauma, family imbalance, or polarized relationships,
their inner system of parts takes on mild roles to cope with added stressors.
d. Each person has a Self — that is its core and distinct from its parts — that has
vision, compassion, and confidence. The goal of therapy is to have this Self
provide inner leadership to the various parts.
44. Like other experiential approaches, the self-of-the-therapist is a key ingredient to
successful outcomes. Schwartz describes several common therapist parts that interfere
with effectiveness. These therapist parts include each of the following EXCEPT?
a. Striving managers
b. Approval-seeking managers
c. Caregiving managers
d. Positivity managers
45. In internal family systems, a part of the client may react to the therapist as if the therapist
was someone from the client’s past. The same can happen to the therapist, responding to
a client based on another past relationship. What is this concept known as?
a. Transference/countertransference
b. Ego/superego
c. Attack/assumption
d. Interpersonal/Intrapersonal
46. In internal family systems, the Self is the seat of consciousness and is considered the
natural leader of the internal family system. When problems occur, what happens to the
Self?
a. The Self remains the leader of the internal family system.
b. The parts protect the Self by balancing it with the other parts.
c. The parts remove the Self from leadership to safeguard it.
d. The Self takes on an extreme role to protect itself.
47. Which of the following best describes exiles?
a. It is their duty to keep managers locked up so they cannot take control.
b. They are an oppressed group kept from the conscious mind at any cost.
c. They forcefully keep firefighters in check.
d. They help the Self to stay in control.
48. The controller, the evaluator, the dependent one, the caretaker, and the worrier are all
examples of what kind of part?
a. The Self
b. Exiles
c. Managers
d. Firefighters
49. When parts assume leadership (rather than the Self) in order to protect the Self, and one
part shifts into an extreme position while others oppose the extreme role, this is known as
what?
a. Effectiveness
b. Polarization
c. Countermeasure
d. Imbalance
50. Effective family leadership results in the balance of each of the following EXCEPT?
a. Resources and responsibilities
b. Healthy boundaries between members
c. Nurturance for the leader
d. A shared identity of vision
51. An internal family systems therapist must also assess the relationship between parts of
individuals in relationships. Internal family systems therapists are looking for what types
of patterns?
a. Polarization and enmeshment
b. Triangulation and enmeshment
c. Polarization and paradoxes
d. Triangulation and paradoxes
52. Which of the following refers to conflicts that result when two people frequently relate
from one or more of their respective manager positions rather than relating from positions
of Self leadership or other parts?
a. Manager-manager polarizations
b. Manager-exile polarizations
c. Manager-firefighter polarizations
d. Enmeshment between parts
53. An internal family systems therapist observes that his teenaged client is rebelliously
acting out at home and her parents are frantically trying to manage her with greater and
greater punishments. How would the therapist identify this polarization?
a. Manager-manager polarizations
b. Manager-exile polarizations
c. Manager-firefighter polarizations
d. Enmeshment between parts
54. The ultimate goal and definition of healthy functioning in internal family systems is
defined by what?
a. Self indulgence
b. Self regulation
c. Self esteem
d. Self leadership
55. An internal family systems therapist asks questions such as “How do you feel toward this
part of yourself? How much influence do you have over this part? Where, when, and by
whom is this part activated?” The therapist is attempting to do what with their client?
a. Introduce the language of parts.
b. Assess and map the client’s internal relationships.
c. Control blending to prevent certain parts from activating.
d. Develop an image of the part.
56. When a client has a part that is overwhelming or elusive, the therapist will use what type
of technique to help the client deal with the part better?
a. The pretend technique
b. The blending technique
c. The directing technique
d. The room technique
57. Direct access in internal family systems refers to the therapist directly talking with parts
as the client speaks from various parts. This is similar to what other technique?
a. Gestalt’s empty-chair
b. Strategic’s pretend technique
c. Structural’s unbalancing the system
d. Satir’s sculpting
58. Which of the following factors has been researched and supported by the evidence base
related to experiential therapies?
a. The therapeutic relationship
b. The interventions
c. The client
d. The outcome