Gender-Sensitive Object-Relational Family Therapy With Depressed Women

Difficulties on interpersonal and familial functioning are significantly associated with depression in women. However, there is a paucity of work addressing gender-sensitive marital and family therapy with depressed women. This article reviews the literature on depressed women's family functioning and discusses a gender-sensitive object-relational approach to marital and family therapy with depressed women. In work with depressed women and their families, the central themes that emerge are the imbalance in power and the lack of intimacy. Characteristic interactional patterns are marked by negative affect, coercion, and rejection. Thus family interventions should emphasize altering family interactional patterns to promote a more adaptive balance of intimacy and power in which the depressed woman, her spouse, and her children feel empowered, interpersonally connected, and affectively integrated.