Читать книгу The Creative Arts in Counseling - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 54

Music by itself may be beneficial to families or couples because of its ability to evoke feelings and promote cooperation. Family-based music therapy is a term used to describe clinical work with children and families (Pasiali, 2013). The primary therapeutic focus is the facilitation of interaction and communication between family members to strengthen relationships. Shared musical experiences during family-based music therapy provide a context that influences a parent-child relationship. Feelings are often ignited or rekindled by playing music (Gladding & Heape, 1987). If a family or couple experienced contentment or positive affect at a previous stage, the music of that time may spark memories that help individuals within these systems to remember specific behaviors that were helpful in achieving harmony. Such memories once triggered can aid the family or couple in getting unstuck from behavioral stalemates and positively reinforcing one another.

A similar method initiated by the counselor may be used in marital counseling. In such a situation, the counselor prescribes a song whose lyrics represent issues brought forth by the couple. For example, Paul Simon’s “Train in the Distance” is a song about yearning to live in a better time. The last verse of the song speaks powerfully to this point:

“What is the point of this story? What information pertains? The thought that life could be better is woven, indelibly, into our hearts and our brains.” Using that lyric as a cue, the couple is then asked to listen to the song at home, using it as a metaphor from which to initiate discussion of relevant thoughts, feelings, and issues. (V. Perry, personal communication, February 20, 1996)

Another way of working with couples is to involve spouses in taking turns improvising on percussion instruments to depict musically what they perceive their typical pattern of communication to be. While one spouse improvises, the other writes thoughts that result from what that spouse thinks the other is saying musically. The patterns for different feelings and times of communication are then discussed with the realization that some patterns of communication appear to be automatic and disruptive but that whatever the beat, the pattern can change (Botello & Krout, 2008).