The Concept of Strategic Family Therapy

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Introduction

The contemporary world witnesses global youth distress and unrest.
Coupled with family hardship, youths are engaging in risky activities.
Medical practitioners have felt the concern to find possible solution.
Milton Erickson spurred emergence of Brief Strategic Family Therapy.
Since 1960s-70s, SFT has proven imperative in curbing youth unrest.
However, little remains known about its functionality.

Developers of SFT : Jay Haley & Cleo Madanes

With no clinical credentials, Jay Haley & Cloe Madanes were the developers of SFT.
Jay Haley initially started from his writing which went through terrible sarcasm.
Jay joined Salvador at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic 1967.
Jay met Cloe Madanes in 1976, when they founded Family Therapy Institute.
In 1995, relocated to English and finally died in 2007, leading a blueprint in therapeutic activities.

Goals of Strategic Family Therapy

SFT is a 12 sessions family-treatment model for youth with behaviour problems (Robbins & Szapocznik, 1999).
SFT approach rests upon the notion that families possess enduring power to change teenagers.
The approach normally targets families with children possessing antisocial behaviours.
SFT processes includes brief therapy, problem assessment, interactional, goal setting, and task-setting stages.

Brief Therapy Stage

It deals with what kind of behaviours have been involved in family member interactions and the circumstances on how they occur.
It begins with critical examination of family relationship factors including family interaction and family structure.
“SFT process responsibly identifies and ameliorates patterns of interaction in the family system relating to behavioural symptoms” (Santisteban et al., 2012, p.260).
This is where therapists and counsellors examine adolescent attitude and behaviour in the process known as ‘system focus’
Measurable nature of interactions including communication, including verbal, emotional maladaptive behaviours can be fixed from here.

Problem Assessment Stage

After comprehensive examination family interaction in SFT process, determining the problems is the next stage.
The therapist and the family counsellor as mentioned earlier play the most significant part and in fact the achievement and results.
Together with the family, there needs to be cooperation between the family and the problem-solving team.
This stage primarily exists to determine possible behavioural factors that may hamper the therapist from conducting the SFT process.
Also, it enables therapists and counsellors to set possible solutions that may fix certain behavioural matters that affect cohesion.
Problem examination is primarily the responsibility of the therapist with the assistance of the family counsellor.
Problem diagnosis may involve a continuum of activities between the therapist, the counsellor and the participants.
The diagnosis process also goes hand in hand with examining interactional patterns since such problems are what attribute to conflicts.
The therapists undertakes assessment of psychological factors like attitudes, beliefs, intelligence levels and even psychopathology.

Interactional Stage

The SFT as described earlier is a systematic approach that requires understanding of all processes.
After comprehending the problem assessment process and how it significantly influences interaction interactional stage emerges.
While undertaking the procedural events in , one will notice that each stage of the process proceed in subsequent manner.
Therefore, it is after determining possible problems affecting the interactional patterns that cohesion begins to strengthen.
This juncture discusses disagreements against certain aspects among participants that significantly affects cohesion amongst them.
The interactional stage principally entails the therapist bringing the family together by discussing their problems harmoniously.
Therapists develops a change strategy that enables them capitalise certain strengths that help them correct problematic relations.
SFT evaluates the manner of a family’s conflict settlement and comes up with certain intervention measures.
The therapist with the aid of the counsellor may sit down to determine well planned interventions.

Goal Setting Stage

After extensively discussing problems and sentiments between family members, a positive climate continues to grows.
Each family is unique and this uniqueness comes out when its members interact.
From here, family members with the aid of the therapist and the counsellor understand what they need to address as a family.
This is where the stage pertaining goal setting emerges with the aim of highlighting specific issues discussed.
During the goal setting process, the therapist and family engage in examining circumstances leading to behavioural problems.
Strategically, this section may also involve issues pertaining to integrating protective measures towards family relationship (Szapocznik, 2012).
Depending on impelling factors, of certain issues, the therapist can formulate an objective targeting eradicating drug abuse.
If its biological aspects such as the living environment, the objectives may focus on addressing family related matters.

Task-setting Stage

This is the final stage after ensuring that the all procedures have exhausted all the important steps involved.
This finalising process does not exclude anyone and in fact requires attention of every member involved in the process.
This is a phase that entails putting the therapist into task of designing, developing and implementing desirable change strategies.
The plight and sentiment of each member must receive substantial attention while the therapist considers the interventions to incorporate.
More often, therapist may include reframing approaches that aim at reducing negativity associated with certain members.
Reframing serves to turn negativity into positivity.
Under restricting of behaviour where reframing fits; joining, diagnostic enactment, tracking through psychological counselling.
Where psychological medical interventions are significant the therapists should consider diagnosing recommending for the same.

Interventions in SFT

When the strategy manages to identify a problem within a family, the therapist recommends certain interventions .
Interventions recommended in SFT are normally solution centered and practical in their application.
Among the common interventions in SFT , prescribing the symptoms, relabeling and paradoxical interventions are common.
In prescribing the symptom, the therapists tries to explain specific symptom elements to the family to enhance understanding of its impact.
The prescribing process is also the diagnosis process.
Relabeling or reframing as earlier stated is undertaken during the SFT sessions by therapist to change certain perceptions on symptoms.
Finally, the last intervention is paradoxical interventions, which entail changing family’s low expectations.
All this helps the therapist to make critical judgments about the problems and resolve them amicably.

Triangulation

Triangulation can be another imperative strategic intervention technique in family therapy.
It’s a situation where a conflict between two family members can be solved by diverting the tension between them to another family member.
Though it is an unhealthy interaction technique used in the counseling process, it may significantly improve family rapport.
The third member helps to redirect the tension existing between two involved family members.

Reference List

Robbins, M., & Szapocznik, J. (1999). Brief Strategic Family Therapy. Web.

Santisteban, D., Suarez-Morales, L., Robbins, M., & Szapocznik, J. (2012). Brief Strategic Family Therapy: Lessons Learned in Efficacy Research and Challenges to Blending Research and Practice. Fam Process, 45(2), 259-271.

Szapocznik, J., Schwartz, S., Muir, J., & Hendricks, C. (2012). Brief Strategic Family Therapy: An Intervention to Reduce Adolescent Risk Behaviour. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, 1(2), 134 –145.