How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 69

son on regular outings. The counselor also may arrange the seating in counseling sessions to help strengthen
some alliances and loosen others.
In addition to bringing family members closer together, the counselor may need to strengthen the
boundaries between enmeshed family members to create more separation. One example is the
mothergrandmother parenting system in which the grandmother enables her grandson's drug use by
protecting him from his mother's attempts to set limits. Rather than confronting the grandmother-adolescent
alliance directly, the counselor may first encourage the mother and grandmother to sit down together and
design a set of rules and responsibilities for the adolescent. This process of designing rules often requires
the parent figures to work out some of the unresolved conflict(s) in their relationship, without the counselor
having to address that relationship directly. This brings the mother closer to the grandmother and distances
the grandmother from the adolescent, thereby rearranging the family's maladaptive hierarchy and subsystem
composition.
It should be noted that, in this case, the counselor tracks the family's content (grandmother hiding
adolescent's drug use from mother) as a maneuver to change the nature of the interaction between the
mother and the grandmother from an adversarial relationship to one in which they agree on something. The
adolescent's drug use provides the content necessary to strengthen the boundaries between the generations
and to loosen the boundaries between the parent figures.
Clearly, bringing the mother and grandmother together to the negotiating table is only an intermediate step.
After that, the tough work of helping mother and grandmother negotiate their deep-seated resentments and
grievances against each other begins. Because the counselor follows a problem-focused approach, he or she
does not attempt to resolve all of the problems the parent figures encounter. Instead, the counselor tries to
resolve only those aspects of their difficulties with each other that interfere with their ability to resolve the
problems they have with the adolescent in the family.
Behavioral Contracting as a Strategy for Setting Limits for Both Parent and Adolescent
From a process perspective, setting clear rules and consequences helps develop the demarcation of
boundaries between parent(s) and child(ren). Sometimes when a parent and an adolescent have a very
intense conflictive relationship in which there is a constant battle ov W"F