How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families

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). 48

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