Do you happen to have a household where your teenager or a child is going through a negative thought process and is therefore contributing to the fault lines in the household? There is something that can help deal with it in a prompt manner and that something is strategic family therapy. In the following words, we’ll describe what brief strategic therapy is and how it can be beneficial for your family:
What is Strategic Therapy?
It is inherently a family therapy, especially when stripped off to its bare bones. Also called strategic intervention therapy or brief strategic therapy. It is a goal-oriented and short-term version of family therapy, which is often used for treating children and adolescents who have behavioral problems. This kind of therapy involves a therapist creating and designing different types of interventions to induce positive behavioral changes by directly resolving problems that might be stemming from the fault lines via depression or anxiety contributed by the family rather than just gaining insight on these problems (APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.).
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Main Features and How Family Warrants Into It
It should only take 12 sessions and is super useful for treating specific behavioral problems such as delinquency, drug use, and high-risk sexual behavior (Szapocznik, 2012). It is built upon the foundation that family is important for shaping the behaviors we often display, especially in childhood and adolescence. Based on this foundation, strategic family therapy tries to identify and change the problematic patterns that might stem from the interactions between the family and the affected individual. This is how it differentiates itself from other types of therapy such as psychotherapy: Addressing family behaviors as a whole so they don’t contribute to problems and helps a family function better, so the children or adolescents can function normally (Szapocznik et al., 2012). What’s more is that this kind of therapy is highly integrative with others that are found in the same spectrum such as family systems therapy, functional family therapy, structural family therapy, or even marriage therapy (if the problems originating in the marriage are affecting children or adolescents).
What Are The Three Major Goals of Strategic Family Therapy?
These are as follows (Szapocznik and Hervis, 2020):
- To fully or partially (enough) eliminate the problem that is wreaking havoc on the family
- To make a family competent enough that the members of that can manage on their own
- To reduce chronic negativity resulting from unresolved conflicts, increase the family member’s sense of belonging and cohesion, and improve the family members’ ability to parent through ways that improve family functioning by correcting interactional patterns that might also come as a result of something like PTSD.
The main goal of the family therapy interventions that are found in strategic family therapy is to turn the negative into positive, from conflict to collaboration, from anger to love, and finally from habit to proactive action.
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What Are These Strategic Family Therapy Techniques?
As it should be, strategic family therapy interventions and techniques help an expert cater to the unique needs of subjects found in the affected individuals. Let’s start with one of the best kinds of strategic family therapy techniques called Joining:
Joining
In this technique of strategic family therapy, the first step is always therapeutic alliance, where the therapist makes the family feel that he or she is on their side. This allows the therapist to become sort of an “adoptive” figure in the family, which in turn gains them acceptance into the family, in the process also giving a therapist proxy to better understand the family’s experiences, relationships, and interactions and resolve them accordingly (Szapocznik et al, 2015) otherwise it will contribute worse problems into a child, for example, anxiety related to family may contribute to insomnia.
Diagnosing and Tracking
Once the therapeutic alliance is in place, it is time to learn more about the family’s interactional pattern and the related problems that stem from it. This way, a therapist will be able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the family, for which a treatment plan will be curated. This directly forms the one halve of the gist of strategic family therapy.
Restructuring
At this stage, a therapist will use the identified strengths and weaknesses to formulate different types of strategic interventions such as behavior management, communication, parenting skills, and conflict resolution to help address the problems with behaviors and relationships that are contributing to a child or adolescent’s behavioral issues (Szapocznik et al, 2015). As a result, there will be more productive, constructive interactions that will motivate participants (especially adolescents and children) to change their problematic ways.
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What Does Strategic Family Therapy Treat?
The family therapy strategies in this kind of therapy have evolved over time to treat issues such as:
- Aggressive and violent behaviors, usually are the result of problematic household and lifestyle but can also stem from mental issues such as psychosis or schizophrenia
- Delinquency and non-compliance, are often the result of conduct disorders
- Substance use disorder or alcohol dependence
- Impulsivity which can be a result of something like, such as risky sexual behavior
These issues often lead the affected adolescents and children into the jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system. All of these above can be avoided by improving the interactional patterns (which can also be present due to something like bipolar disorder, further creating a gap in the family and contributing to the family not understanding the affected individual) between the members of the family and the affected adolescents and children.
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Conclusion on Strategic Family Therapy
If your question was, “What is Strategic Family Therapy,” then we hope you have a comprehensive answer. There are numerous strategic family therapy interventions examples that have contributed to resolving many issues of many different families. If you are looking forward to this kind of therapy, or something similar such as couples therapy, or perhaps something alternative like telepsychiatry then contact the experts at Solid Foundation Psychiatry.