Personal Reflection Paper on Family Strengths
Description and Instructions: This is a personal reflection essay on the topic of Family
Strengths. Please record your thoughts by using the following questions as a framework:
1. Do you believe that all families, no matter the severity of their current difficulties, have
strengths? Please provide a brief explanation for your answer.
2. When you evaluate the strengths of a family do you consider both the external structure
of the family, including the family’s interactions with its immediate environment, as well
as the internal functioning of the family?
3. Do you believe that the strengths of the family, as a whole, represent the cumulative
sum of the individual strengths of family members? Why or why not?
4. Do you believe that families could be assisted in therapy to operate in such a way that
individual family strengths get to build on each other to create a strong family instead of
canceling each other out? How would you accomplish this in family therapy?
5. Do you believe that that life is fluid and that there are always new opportunities for
building strengths? How can you help families capitalize on new opportunities for
growth?
6. Have you observed, in the families that you have worked with, that strengths which
served the family well at some point in time came to no longer be helpful to the family at
another point in time? How would you use this insight in family therapy?
7. What would make a family a “strong enough family”? How can you help all families to get
to that level of functioning?
8. What tools would you use to show family members the patterns existent in their family
system across generations and the interactions that they have (either supportive or
stressful) with their environment? To what extent do you think these tools are important
in building family strengths?
9. Do you think building insight and reflective capacity in individual family members results
in enhancing the strengths of the family as a whole? How about increasing the quality of
communication between family members? Please elaborate.
10. Was this assignment helpful in enhancing your own insights and reflective capacity
about family strengths? What are you planning to do with these new insights?
Length: 8–10 pages
Style: APA style is required for this paper including a cover page, page numbers, one-inch
margins, double-spacing, and 12-point Times New Roman or Arial font.
