Hello all,

 

We have a case of a poor family at the University of São Paulo and we are having some doubts about how to deal with this condition: we have three therapists, each one is seeing different members of the family in individual therapy.

Therapist 1 - seeing a 9 years old boy.

Therapist 2 - seeing his brother, a 10 years old boy.

Therapist 3 - seeing their mother.

 

As we started the group of supervision, some years ago, we could notice some advantages discussing the case of this family because we could have so many informations and more access to the controlling variables of all the members of the family. We discussed the complementary patterns, some likeness. We could see that one intervention of the therapist 1, for exemple, could produce a change in the other member and so on. After that, we could notice some disavantages: what we could consider as an improvement to one client could unbalance the family and its dynamics and some consequences were not so good. Then, all the interventions needed to be synchronized (a hard thing to do). We went to school and to their home and what should have been good (to go to the enviroment and look and observe) brought some strange feelings to the therapists: they felt like they were impotent to deal with all the varibles and information. So now, we stopped the case because many other problems were showing (schedule problems, family without money to come to the university...).

 

Well, now we are discussing the limits of this, what went wrong, what was good, and the role of a supervision in this case.

We were wondering if anybody knows any reference about this kind of situation or if had any similar experience. I can give more details about the case.

 

Thanks,