Ten million children have experienced parental incarceration (National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2009). Incarceration can disrupt entire family systems, affecting psychological, physical, emotional, and financial well-being (Kitzmiller, Cavanagh, Frick, Steinberg, & Cauffman, 2020; Tadros, Fye, & Ray, 2020). Incarcerated individuals’ families face numerous hardships and are among the most underprivileged societal groups (Markson, Lamb, & Lösel, 2016). Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy created Contextual Family Therapy (CFT), a multilateral family therapy approach focusing on relational ethics and understanding complex intergenerational and integrative relationships in which people engage (Adams & Maynard, 2004; Beckenbach, Patrick, & Sells, 2010; van der Meiden, Noordegraf, & van Ewijk, 2019; van der Meiden, Verduijn, Noordegraaf, & van Ewijk, 2020).
CFT proposes that pain is the felt experience of perceived or genuine imbalance in relationships, inducing adverse emotional responses to perceived mistreatment, including an expansive scope of undesirable feelings (Beckenbach et al., 2010). CFT connects an individual’s needs with the relational aspect of one’s being, including the roots and the logic behind one’s behavior or feelings (van der Meiden et al., 2019). Boszormenyi-Nagy created contextual therapy strategies to identify dysfunctional patterns that will enhance and enrich current and future relationships by focusing on interventions that will improve relationship aspects of loyalty, trustworthiness, entitlement, and fairness (Beckenbach et al., 2010).
In relationships, pain materializes and increases when partners place unfair demands and expectations on one another, implying that attachment security is under threat, eliciting an individual to implement defensive approaches to obstruct the deterioration of one’s protected backdrop (Beckenbach et al., 2010). However, an individual’s resilience is impacted by multi-level, biological, dynamic, psychological, and social methodologies that deviate across individuals, including circumstances, problem classifications, and time (Markson et al., 2016). CFT can be beneficial for families of incarcerated individuals to reduce symptoms of depression and increase healthy communication patterns amongst families who have endured multigenerational dysfunction. CFT can be applied to incarcerated families to instill a healthy level of resilience to the intersectional context of incarceration and its adverse impact on individuals, families, and communities.
Research on CFT has found that the dimensions of family conflict interactions are systematic, involve individual psychology, and include relational ethics, whereas children are entitled to parental care and compensation (Adams & Maynard, 2004; van der Meiden et al., 2019). The intersectional consequences of mass incarceration can be compared with losses equivalent to terrorist attacks or war in terms of adverse outcomes on their survivors and disrupting community social structures (Schneider, 2018). Parental incarceration is identified as an adverse childhood experience (ACE), which is differentiated from other adverse childhood experiences by the distinctive blend of shame, stigma, and trauma (National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2009). Meaning the unique experience of incarceration can be restrictive towards a child’s healthy developmental maturation into adulthood (Kitzmiller et al., 2020; Markson et al., 2016; Ruch & Yoder, 2018; Tadros et al., 2020). According to CFT, children who lack parental nurturing and support experience injustice, as children require and are entitled to receive adequate care from their parents (Metcalf, 2019).
Familial incarceration can be described as an ambiguous loss rendering disenfranchised grief (National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2009). Disenfranchised grief is characterized as a personal loss that is not candidly recognized, publicly grieved, or socially substantiated (Doka, 1989). Incarceration is a public health issue that may cause intergenerational family trauma (Kitzmiller et al., 2020; Yi, Turney, & Wildeman, 2017). For instance, approximately 15‐20% of children going into the child welfare system have an incarcerated parent (National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2009). Individuals with a history of incarceration may have life dissatisfaction due to an inadequate social life and exhibit symptoms of major depression and mood disorders, including dysthymia (Yi et al., 2017). A parent’s current or previous incarceration is associated with symptoms of emotional and physical stress, anxiety, depression, and financial strain for the non-incarcerated parent (Emory, 2018; van der Meiden et al., 2019). For instance, justice-involved men are twice as likely to produce biological children with more than one partner, which is connected with lower paternal engagement with children before incarceration and limited co-parenting support (Dyer, Fagan, Kaufman, Pearson, & Cabrera, 2018). A cornerstone of CFT is a requirement for attainable, close, dependable, and enduring connections and an advantageous atmosphere in which children develop and thrive to become responsible agents of subsequent generations (van der Meiden et al., 2020). Moreover, models of relationship restoration are advantageous in familiarizing couples with the conflict and emotional management tools required to recover from relational damage and avert further rotations of destructive disputes and injury (Beckenbach et al., 2010). Stimulating an authentic discussion depends on the “persisting ‘ontic dependence’ between closely relating people” as the ever-present and most necessary means to restoring relationships (van der Meiden et al., 2020).
According to CFT, family entitlement relates to the individual members and is accomplished when individuals in the family set aside personal interests and focus on the well-being of other family members and the family as a whole (van der Meiden et al., 2019). In high-risk settings, positive relationships between children and parents are linked to favorable child behavioral effects (Markson et al., 2016). Applying the CFT approach can increase social connectedness associated with beneficial emotional outcomes, including reduced anxiety, psychological distress, and perceived stress, thus improving family bonds and entitlement (Folk, Stuewig, Mashek, Tangney, & Grossmann, 2019). Family connections significantly affect children’s development as the relationships between parents/significant others and between children and parents/significant others are the most influential social persuasions, and attachment theory furnishes a theoretical justification for their importance (Markson et al., 2016). Parental incarceration can reduce family contact, which produces mental distress such as stress, borderline personality disorder, and depression (Folk et al., 2019). Within CFT, the therapist’s objective is to be a catalyst for the resources already theoretically available when the family arrives at the session for support (van der Meiden et al., 2020).
The premise of CFT concentrates on bolstering or restoring previous, present, and forthcoming connections (van der Meiden et al., 2020). For instance, incoming phone calls from prisoners include exorbitant fees, causing an economic hurdle, and many prisons are not accessible by public transportation, limiting family visitation (National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2009). Therefore, in therapy, a family might reveal that a parent’s incarceration produced divided loyalty amongst the children, forming a sense of destructive entitlement for the child with unmet needs, which can have a multigenerational impact (Adams & Maynard, 2004). Boszormenyi-Nagy conveyed several methodologies of CFT free of “prescriptions and techniques requiring therapeutic impositions of any kind,” so therapists have space to prompt improvisational actions, decisions, and possibilities (van der Meiden et al., 2020). Therefore, within CFT, the therapist remains neutral as the treatment includes committing to and siding continuously and sequentially with each member involved in the familial relationship, affected by the therapeutic process regardless of active participation in every session (Gangamma, Bartle, Holowacz, Hartwell, & Glebova, 2015). By participating in CFT, each participant perceives fairness in the relationship, and the preservation of long-term, oscillating balance among family members that leads to benefits on both sides of the relationship (van der Meiden et al., 2019).
Incarceration impacts individual family members and disrupts family systems by producing adverse psychological, physical, emotional effects (Kitzmiller et al., 2020). Positive and supporting family connections can protect children regarding parental abuse, cumulative stress, deprivation, and divorce, implying that they are critical for resilience development (Markson et al., 2016). Therefore, CFT may be effective when working with families impacted by incarceration because CFT enables therapists to be mindful of the balance of ledgers in family relationships which is the framework for unfairness, pain, and loss of trust (Adams & Maynard, 2004). CFT is founded on the belief that human beings rely on one another for their existence and that they are in tandem with having an intrinsic disposition to provide care and commit justice to each other (van der Meiden et al., 2020). In addition, CFT can teach individuals, couples, and families about forgiveness to assist with mending the familial connection damaged by previous conflict, stress, and pain which can help restore the love and trust between family members (Beckenbach et al., 2010). Thus, MFTs should strive to identify and discover the family member’s life circumstances even when the client implies that, for example, the incarceration did not impact them (Metcalf, 2019). The CFT approach would be a beneficial treatment while working with families of incarcerated individuals to reduce symptoms of depression and increase healthy communication patterns amongst families who have endured multigenerational dysfunction. Future research may explore if CFT effectively treats families separated by military deployment or divided due to missionary work.
Positive and supporting family connections can protect children regarding parental abuse, cumulative stress, deprivation, and divorce, implying that they are critical for resilience development
Eman Tadros, PhD, is an AAMFT Professional Member holding the Clinical Fellow and Approved Supervisor designations and an assistant professor at Governors State University in the Division of Psychology and Counseling. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, MBTI certified, and the Illinois Family TEAM leader. Her research follows the trajectory of incarcerated coparenting, incorporating family therapy into incarcerated settings, and the utilization of family systems theories within these settings.
Antonia Guajardo is an undergraduate psychology major at Governors State University and is an advocate focusing on trauma-informed intervention.
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