How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | страница 48

What Is Not the Focus of Brief Strategic Family Therapy?
BSFT has not been tested with adult addicts. For this reason, BSFT is not considered a treatment for adult
addiction. Instead, when a parent is found to be using drugs, a counselor needs to decide the severity of the
parent's drug problem. A parent who is moderately involved with drugs can be helped as part of his or her
adolescent's BSFT treatment. However, if a parent is drug dependent, the BSFT counselor should work to
engage the parent in drug abuse treatment. If the parent is unwilling to get drug abuse treatment, the BSFT
counselor should work to protect and disengage the adolescent from the drug dependent parent. This is done
by creating an interpersonal wall or boundary that separates the adolescent and non-drug-using family
members from the drug dependent parent(s). This process is discussed in Chapter 4 in the section on
"Working With Boundaries and Alliances".
This Manual
This manual introduces counselors to concepts that are needed to understand the family as a vital context
within which adolescent drug abuse occurs. It also describes strategies for creating a therapeutic relationship
with families, assessing and diagnosing maladaptive patterns of family interaction, and changing patterns of
family interaction from maladaptive to adaptive. This manual assumes that therapists who adopt these BSFT
techniques will be able to engage and retain families in drug abuse treatment and ultimately cause them to
behave more effectively. Chapter 2 will discuss the basic theoretical concepts of BSFT. Chapter 3 will
present the BSFT diagnostic approach, and Chapter 4 will explain how change is achieved. Chapter 5 is a
detailed discussion of how to engage resistant families of drug-abusing adolescents in treatment. Chapter 6
summarizes some of the research that supports the use of BSFT with adolescents. The manual also has two
appendices, one on training counselors to implement BSFT and another presenting case examples from the
authors' work. Concepts and techniques discussed by Minuchin and Fishman (1981) have been adapted in
this BSFT manual for application to drug-abusing adolescents. Additional discussion of BSFT can be found
in Szapocznik and Kurtines (1989).

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