Family Change and Crisis

Reproducible Activities to Address the Change and Crisis Challenges Families Face Today

The beauty, distinction, and uniqueness of this particular series:

EVERY family member has the opportunity to complete a scale on how they feel about themselves, about other family members, as well as how they perceive the other family members feel about them.

At some time or another, most families experience changes, then experience stress resulting from the changes, and then go into crisis mode. However, not all families have a crisis due to the stress of change. Resilient families can rebound from adversity, flex in response to the pressures and strains of everyday family life, become stronger after the change, and adapt with more resources at their disposal. Resiliency refers to the coping strengths of the individual members and the combined coping strengths of the family as a whole. Families who exhibit resiliency are flexible when dealing with stress, have coping strengths that can be called upon when experiencing a stressor, and can reorganize to become stronger and better.

To maintain a functional and helpful family unit, family members must develop skills for managing change, coping with stress, and building resiliency from external and internal stressors. The Family Change & Crisis Workbook provides assessments and self-guided activities to help family members explore old patterns of interaction and behavior that are no longer effective and identify ways to develop more effective interactions and behaviors. Many choices of self-exploration assessments and activities are provided for family members to use collaboratively with other family members to build a healthy family unit.

Use the Family Change & Crisis Workbook independently or as part of an integrated curriculum. You may administer any of the assessments and the guided self-exploration activities to an individual or multiple family members with whom you are working, or you may distribute any of the activities over multiple sessions. Feel free to pick and choose those assessments and activities that best lead to the desired outcomes. The assessments and activities are divided into four chapters to help you identify and select assessments easily and quickly.

• Chapter I: Family Changes
• This chapter helps family members explore the types and intensity of the stressful changes the family is currently going through.
• Chapter II: Family Stress
• This chapter helps family members explore how well they manage their current family stress and explore ways to cope more effectively with change and stress.
• Chapter III: Family Crisis
• This chapter helps family members explore how difficult a change can be for some or all family members and ways to manage and cope with issues and crises.
• Chapter IV: Family Resilience
• This chapter helps family members explore ways that the family can come together and build resilience as a family after stressful changes and crises.

This workbook is also available in PDF eBook format, making it simple to store on your computer or mobile device and access with a PDF viewer. The PDF format allows you to easily print copies of the activities and worksheets during therapy and counseling sessions.

Family Change & Crisis Card Deck

Need a creative way to start your session? Use the Family Change & Crisis Card Deck. The open-ended questions will break the ice with both kids and adults and stimulate conversation. Use them alone or in conjunction with the corresponding page in the book.

Sample Questions:

What are the biggest stressors affecting your family?

Think about the change or changes that are currently occurring in your family. How do you feel about these changes? How do you wish things were different?

Showing kindness toward family members can help develop resiliency. To which family members do you show kindness? How do you show kindness to these family members?