How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 74

treatment. From a family-systems perspective, resistance is nothing more than the family's display of its
inability to adapt effectively to the situation at hand and to collaborate with one another to seek help. Thus,
the key to eliminating the resistance to counseling lies within the family's patterns of interaction; overcome
the resistance in the interactional patterns and the family will come to counseling.
In working to overcome resistant patterns of family interaction, tasks play a particularly vital role because
they are the only BSFT intervention used outside the therapy session. For this reason, tasks are particularly
well-suited for use during the engagement period, when crucial aspects of the family's work in overcoming
resistance to counseling need to take place outside the office--obviously--because the family has not yet
come in.
The central task around which engagement is organized is getting the family to come to therapy together.
Thus, in engagement, the counselor assigns tasks that involve doing whatever is needed to get the family
into treatment. For example, a father calls a BSFT counselor and asks for help with his drug-abusing son.
The counselor responds by suggesting that the father bring his entire family to a session so that he or she
can involve the whole family in fixing the problem. The father responds that his son would never come to
treatment and that he doesn't know what to do. The first task that the counselor might assign the father is to
talk with his wife and involve her in the effort to bring their son into treatment.
The Task of Coming to Treatment
The simple case. The counselor gives the task of bringing the whole family into counseling to the family
member who calls for help. The counselor explains why this task is a good idea and promises to support the
family as it works at this task. Occasionally, this is all that is needed. Often people do not request family
counseling simply because family counseling is not well known, and thus it does not occur to them to take
such action.
Fear, an obstacle that might easily be overcome. Sometimes, family members are afraid of what will happen
in family therapy. Some of these fears may be real; others may be simply imagined. In some instances,
families just need some reassuring advice to overcome their fears. Such fears might include, "They are
going to gang up on me," or "Everyone will know what a failure I am." Once these family members have
been helped to overcome their fears, they will be ready to enter counseling.
Tasks to change how family members act with each other. Very often, however, simple clarification and
reassurance is not sufficient to mobilize a family. It is at this point that tasks that apply joining, diagnostic,
and restructuring strategies are useful in engaging the family. The counselor needs to prescribe tasks for the
family members who are willing to come to therapy. These need to be tasks that attempt to change the ways
in which family members interact when discussing coming to therapy. In the process of carrying out these
tasks, the family's resistance will come to light. When that happens, the counselor will have the diagnostic
information needed to get around the family's patterns of interaction that are maintaining the symptom of
resistance. Once these patterns are changed, the family will come to therapy.
It should not be a surprise that families fail to accomplish the task of getting all of their members to
counseling. In fact, the therapist's job is to help the families accomplish tasks that they are not able to
accomplish on their own. As discussed earlier, when assigning any task, the counselor must expect that the
task may not be performed as requested. This is certainly the case when the family is asked to perform the
task of coming together to counseling.
The application of joining, diagnosing, and restructuring techniques to the engagement of resistant families
is discussed separately below. However, these techniques are used simultaneously during engagement, as
they are during counseling.
Joining
Joining the resistant family begins with the first contact with the family member who calls for help and
continues throughout the entire relationship with the family.
With resistant families, the joining techniques described earlier have to be adapted to match the goal of this
phase of therapy. For example, in tracking the resistant family members to engage them, it is necessary to
track through the caller or initial help seeker and any other family members who may be involved in the
process of bringing the family to counseling. The counselor tracks by "following" from the first family

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