Role Playing in Couple and Family Therapy

Synonyms

Role-taking

Couple and family therapists use role-play interventions to provide clients with opportunities to practice new skills or patterns of interaction. Role plays appeared early in systems-based approaches to therapy, and possess a long history in the field as a pliable intervention useful for a variety of purposes.

Role plays are most strongly associated with cognitive-behavioral models and some family therapy approaches. Specifically, Cognitive-Behavioral Couples Therapy (Epstein and Baucom 2002) and Structural Family Therapy incorporate role-play interventions as substantive components in the therapy process. Research studies of behavioral couple therapy for substance abuse also highlight role-playing as a common intervention (Baucom et al. 1998).

Although role plays permit a wide range of expressions depending on the nature of the therapy and the purposes of the intervention, they tend to take on one of a few typical forms. These forms include communications skills...