How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 73

Dealing With Resistance to Engagement
When some family members do not want to participate in treatment, has called the counselor asking for
help, that parent is not powerful enough to bring the adolescent into counseling. If the counselor wants the
family to be in counseling, he or she will have to recognize that the youth (or a noncooperative parent
figure) is the most powerful person in the family. Once the reason the family is not in treatment is
understood, the counselor can draw upon the concept of tracking (as defined in Chapter 4) to find a way to
reach this powerful person directly and negotiate a treatment contract to which the person will agree.
Counselors should not become discouraged at this stage. Their mission now is to identify the obstacles the
family faces and help it surmount them. It is essential to keep in mind that a family seeks counseling
because it is unable to overcome an obstacle without help. Failed tasks, such as not getting the family to
come in for treatment, tend to be a great source of new and important information regarding the reasons why
a family cannot do what is best for them. The most important question in counseling is, "What has happened
that will not allow some families to do what may be best for them?"

In trying to engage the family in treatment, the counselor should apply the concept of repetitive patterns of
maladaptive interaction, which give rise to and maintain symptoms, to the problem of resistance to entering
treatment. The very same principles that apply to understanding family functioning and treatment also apply
to understanding and treating the family's resistance to entering counseling. When the family wishes to get
rid of the youth's drug abuse symptom by seeking professional help, the same interactive patterns that
prevented it from getting rid of the adolescent's sympto