How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 81

Among families who were admitted with poor family functioning, the results showed that those assigned to
BSFT had a significant improvement in family functioning, while those families assigned to group
counseling did not improve significantly.
Among families who were admitted with good family functioning, the results showed that those assigned to
BSFT retained their good levels of family functioning, while families assigned to group counseling showed
significant deterioration. These findings suggest that not all families of drug-abusing youths begin
counseling with poor family functioning, but if the family is not given adequate help to cope with the
youth's problems, the family's functioning may deteriorate.
One Person Brief Strategic Family Therapy
With the advent of the adolescent drug epidemic of the 1970s, the vast majority of counselors who worked
with drug-using youths reported that, although they preferred to use family therapy, they were not able to
bring whole families into treatment (Coleman and Davis 1978). In response, a procedure was developed that
would achieve the goals of BSFT (to change maladaptive family interactions and symptomatic adolescent
behavior) without requiring the whole family to attend treatment sessions. The procedure is an adaptation of
BSFT called "One Person" BSFT (Szapocznik et al. 1985; Szapocznik and Kurtines 1989; Szapocznik et al.
1989a). One Person BSFT capitalizes on the systemic concept of complementarity, which suggests that
when one family member changes, the rest of the system responds by either restoring the family process to
its old ways or adapting to the new changes (Minuchin and Fishman 1981). The goal of One Person BSFT is
to change the drug-abusing adolescent's participation in maladaptive family interactions that include him or
her. Occasionally, these changes create a family crisis as the family attempts to return to its old ways. The
counselor uses the opportunity created by these crises to engage reluctant family members.
A clinical trial was conducted to compare the efficacy of One Person BSFT to Conjoint (full family) BSFT
(Szapocznik et al. 1983, 1986). Hispanic families with a drug-abusing 12- to 17-year-old adolescent were
randomly assigned to the One Person or Conjoint BSFT modalities. Both therapies were designed to use
exactly the same BSFT theory so that only one variable (one person vs. conjoint meetings) would differ
between the treatments. Analyses of treatment integrity revealed that interventions in both therapies adhered
to guidelines and that the two therapies were clearly distingu