Family Therapy
Family therapy is a particularly relevant counseling procedure because it helps maintain the communicative interaction, which can readily be lost if the child is severely hearing impaired or deaf. Although typically the child may have difficulty in following the verbal interchanges, all attempts should be made to involve the child. If language has already been learned, amplification and speech reading will certainly enhance the communication process.
Family therapy is educational as well as therapeutic helps remove the stigma of the “identified symptom or patient.”
The education and therapeutic process
Consistent with the theme of this text, we believe family therapy to be a more thorough means of assisting the family to cope with many of the difficulties confronting it, and no less so for the hearing-impaired family. Although it could be argued that the affected child should not be subjected to one more situation in which it feels cut off from communication and that traditional parent counseling will conveniently protect the child from being exposed to material that could be emotionally harmful, we suggest a different point of view.
The child, depending on the nature and degree of the hearing loss itself, already is likely to feel thwarted in understanding what is occurring in the immediate perceptual environment. Confused and bewildered, children may feel detached, isolated, and in some cases alienated from those around them, but the family therapy situation need not exacerbate these feelings. On the contrary, it could well enhance positive attitudes of belonging, self-identity, and self-worth merely by including the child in a process that at least will provide visual and perhaps some auditory input.
We also question the notion of shielding children from material to which they had already been exposed during daily family interactions. It is better that these elements be brought out into the open in the nurturing atmosphere of family therapy than allowed to fester in a milieu where communication is either closed or incongruent.
Family therapy is family counseling and more. It gives all family members an opportunity to learn, on differing levels, how to discover specific ways, with each other’s assistance, to best contend with the reality of hearing loss. It also provides the right set of circumstances in which family members can assist themselves and each other to feel better, mature emotionally, and most important, make the best of what previously may have appeared to be an impossible situation. Also obvious is that hearing parents of deaf children who sign be skilled in signing as well, to readiy facilitate the family therapy process.