How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 58

Life Context
While the dimensions of family functioning discussed up to now are all within the family, life context refers
to what happens in the family's relationship to its social context. The life context of the family includes the
extended family, the community, the work situation, adolescent peers, schools, courts, and other groups that
may have an impact on the family, either as stressors or as support systems.
Antisocial Peers
A careful analysis of the life context is useful in many situations involving the treatment of substance abuse.
For example, a youngster who uses drugs may be involved with a deviant or antisocial peer group. These
friendships affect the youth and family in an adverse way and will certainly need to be modified to
successfully eliminate the youth's drug use. Parents need help to identify less acceptable and more
acceptable adolescent peers so that they can encourage their teens to associate with more desirable peers and
discourage them from associating with less desirable peers.
Parent Support Systems and Social Resources
Parenting is a difficult task. Parents often lack adequate support systems for parenting. Parents need support
from friends, extended family members, and other parents (Henricson and Roker 2000). The availability of
support systems needs to be assessed, particularly in the case of single-parent families. The availability of
social resources needs to be assessed, both in terms of what is already being used or what could potentially
be used.
Juvenile Justice System
Increasingly, probation officers and the courts have become critical players in the families of drug-abusing
adolescents. It is the BSFT counselor's job to assess how juvenile justice representatives such as probation
officers interact with the family to determine whether they are supporting or undermining the family. One
way to assess the probation officer's role, for example, is to invite him or her to participate in a family
therapy session.
Identified Patient
The "identified patient" is the family member who has been branded by the family as the problem. The
family blames this person, usually the drug-abusing adolescent, for much of its troubles. However, as
discussed earlier, the BSFT view of the family is that the symptom is only that: a symptom of the family's
problems. The more that family members insist that their entire problem is embodied in a single person, the
more difficult it will be for them to accept that it is the entire family that needs to change. On the other
hand, the family that recognizes that several of its members may have problems is far healthier and more
flexible and will have a relatively easier time of making changes through BSFT. The BSFT counselor
believes that the problem is in the family's repetitive (habitual, rigid) patterns of interaction. Thus, the
counselor not only will try to change the person who exhibits the problem but also to change the way all
members of the family behave with each other.
The other aspect to understanding a family's identified patient is that usually families with problematic
behaviors identify only one aspect of the identified patient as the source of all the pain and worry. For
example, families of drug-abusing youths tend to focus only on the drug use and possibly on accompanying
school and legal troubles that are directly and overtly related to the drug abuse. These families usually
overlook the fact that the youngster may have other symptoms or problems, such as depression, attention
deficit disorder, and learning deficits.

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