Full Answer
What is Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT)?
Brief Strategic Family Therapy® (BSFT®) is designed to: Prevent, reduce, and/or treat youth behavior problems. Improve family functioning, including effective parental leadership and involvement with the youth.
What is the goal of family based therapy?
The goal of BSFT, therefore, is to change the patterns of family interactions that allow or encourage problematic adolescent behavior. By working with families, BSFT not only decreases youth problems, but also creates better functioning families (Santisteban et al., 2003).
How do I contact the Brief Strategic Family Therapy® Institute?
Please contact the Brief Strategic Family Therapy® Institute at 305-243-7585 ([email protected]) to learn more about supervision to competency, consultations, assessments, outcome evaluations, booster workshops and site licensing. What is the BSFT® Program?
Who wrote Brief Strategic Family Therapy?
Title Brief Strategic Family Therapy Author By José Szapocznik and Olga Hervis Created Date 11/20/2019 1:15:02 PM
What is the basic process of Brief Strategic Family Therapy?
The three primary components of the intervention are: Joining—understanding resistance and engaging the family in therapy. Diagnosis—identifying the interaction patterns that encourage problematic youth behavior.
What are the three central constructs of Brief Strategic Family Therapy BSFT?
Joining - forming a therapeutic alliance with all family members. Diagnosis - identifying interactional patterns that give rise to/encourage/enable problematic youth behavior. Restructuring - the process of changing the family interactions that are directly related to problem behaviors.
What is Haley and madanes strategic family therapy?
Haley focused more on restoring power to the parents, while Madanes focused more on creating new and pleasurable interactions for the parent and child. Madanes developed a classification system for families, as well as guidelines for when to use hers, Haley's, or MRI techniques.
What is strategic therapy approach?
Strategic therapy is a form of interactional therapy because it does not focus on the root causes of the client's problems but instead tries to increase competency and develop problem-solving skills that will help the client in her interactions with others.
What is the main goal of strategic family therapy?
The goals of strategic family therapy are to solve problems, achieve the family's goals, and ultimately, change an individual's dysfunctional or problematic behaviors.
What are the three models of strategic family therapy?
Core Concepts of Strategic Family Therapy There are three principles that guide SFT: all family members are connected, a family's habits impact the behavior of its members, and intervention needs to be targeted to the problem and meet the needs of the family.
Who founded Brief Strategic Family Therapy?
José SzapocznikJosé Szapocznik is the developer of the Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT).
What is the difference between structural and strategic family therapy?
Structural therapists focus on resolving structural problems in the family, whereas strategic therapists focus on the presenting symptom.
Is strategic family therapy evidence based?
Austin and his colleagues found that Brief Strategic Family Therapy® (BSFT®) and Multidimensional FamilyTherapy are the most effective among the family-based interventions, meeting the criteria for probably efficacious according to the criteria developed by Chambless and Hollon (1998).
What is brief therapy model?
Brief therapy is a systematic, focused process that relies on assessment, client engagement, and rapid implementation of change strategies. Brief therapy providers can effect important changes in client behavior within a relatively short period.
What is structural strategic family therapy?
Structural therapy focuses on adjusting and strengthening the family system to ensure that the parents are in control and that both children and adults set appropriate boundaries.
What typically happens before the end of a session with a strategic family therapist?
What typically happens before the end of a session with a strategic family therapist? The therapist gives the family a task or a reframe, with instructions to complete the task.
What does MST multisystemic therapy focus on?
Program Overview. Multisystemic Therapy (MST) is an intensive family and community-based treatment for serious juvenile offenders with possible substance abuse issues and their families. The primary goals of MST are to decrease youth criminal behavior and out-of-home placements.
What is brief therapy model?
Brief therapy is a systematic, focused process that relies on assessment, client engagement, and rapid implementation of change strategies. Brief therapy providers can effect important changes in client behavior within a relatively short period.
What is solution focused brief approach?
Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) is a strength-based approach to psychotherapy based on solution-building rather than problem-solving. Unlike other forms of psychotherapy that focus on present problems and past causes, SFBT concentrates on how your current circumstances and future hopes.
What is Bowenian family therapy?
Bowenian family therapy is an approach to treatment that was developed by the psychiatrist Murray Bowen. Bowen believed that patterns persist in families across generations, and problematic behaviors can be passed down and create similar conflicts.
How to do family therapy?
The 4 steps of the intervention consist of: 1 Organizing a therapist-family work team. Developing a therapeutic alliance with each family member, and with the family as a whole, is essential for success. 2 Diagnosing the nature of family strengths and problematic relationships. The therapist emphasizes those family relationships that are supportive or problematic and on the impact, they have upon the children’s behavior and the parental figures’ ability to correct inappropriate responses. 3 Developing a treatment strategy aimed at capitalizing on strengths and correcting problematic family relations to increase family competence. 4 Implementing change strategies and reinforcing family behaviors that sustain new levels of family competence. Important change strategies include the use of reframes to change the meaning of interactions; shifts alliances and interpersonal boundaries; building conflict resolution skills; and providing parents with guidance and coaching.
How long is a family therapy session?
A typical therapy session lasts 60 to 90 minutes. The 4 steps of the intervention consist of: Organizing a therapist-family work team. Developing a therapeutic alliance with each family member, and with the family as a whole, is essential for success.
Why is BSFT important?
In addition, because the efficacy of BSFT does depend on family’s abilities to come into the session, BSFT provides specialized engagement strategies for bringing families into therapy.
How many families can a BSFT therapist treat?
On the average, a BSFT therapist can typically treat 25 - 55 families to completion within one year.
What is BSFT model?
The BSFT model was originally developed with Hispanic/Latino families but was subsequently tested with African American families as well. More recently it was selected by NIDA to be the adolescent treatment model to be tested as part of the National Clinical Trials Network. It was tested in 8 sites throughout the country with populations of all ethnic groups. The model is currently utilized in a wide variety of geographical settings. It has proven to be successful with foster---as well as intact---families of varied ethnic backgrounds, and with deaf and/or hearing impaired families.
What is BSFT in the community?
They include community social services agencies, mental health clinics, substance abuse prevention and treatment clinics, health agencies, and family clinics. Because BSFT works with the whole family, the program usually operates during afternoons, evenings and Saturdays.
What is BSFT in psychology?
The BSFT model uses a structured, problem-focused, directive, and practical approach to the treatment of child/adolescent conduct problems. Common such problems include drug use, associations with antisocial peers, truancy, bullying, and other recognized youth risk factors. It uniquely addresses cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of family life. The BSFT model incorporates effective processes of change from other models including strategic and structural approaches, existential/emotive therapy, eco-systemic approaches, and cognitive behavioral approaches.
What are the components of BSFT?
There are three intervention components in the BSFT® Program: joining, diagnosing, and restructuring. Joining occurs at two levels. At the individual level, the therapist establishes a relationship with each family member. At the family level, the therapist joins with the family system to create a new therapeutic system.
What is BSFT in adolescence?
The BSFT® Program considers adolescent symptomatology to be rooted in maladaptive family interactions, inappropriate family alliances, overly rigid or permeable family boundaries, and parents’ tendency to believe that a single individual (usually the adolescent) is responsible for the family’s troubles. The BSFT® Program operates according to the assumption that transforming how the family functions will help improve the youth’s presenting problem. The focus of the work is on how interactions occur. The emphasis is on identifying the nature of the interactions in the family and changing those interactions that are maladaptive.
What is BSFT video feedback?
The BSFT® Program’s unique video feedback allows the trainer and the therapist to observe and communicate during case supervision and consultation, while reviewing actual video recordings of the therapist’s work with individual families. The BSFT® Program helps families grow through strengthening relationships, building connections and creating long-lasting change.
What is BSFT diagnosis?
In the BSFT® Program, diagnosis refers to observing how family members behave with one another, in order to identify interactional patterns that allow or encourage problematic youth behavior.
What age is BSFT?
The BSFT® Program targets children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 17 who are displaying or are at risk for developing behavior problems, including substance abuse, conduct problems and delinquency. The BSFT® Program has been implemented as a prevention, early intervention and intervention strategy for delinquent and substance-abusing adolescents.
How many sessions are there in BSFT?
The BSFT® Program is typically delivered in 12 to 16 family sessions, depending on the severity of the communication and management problems within the family. Sessions are conducted at locations that are convenient to the family, including the family’s home in some cases. The BSFT® Program has been implemented with Hispanic, African-American and white families.
What is the BSFt number?
Please contact the Brief Strategic Family Therapy® Institute at 305-243-7585 ([email protected]) to learn more about supervision to competency, consultations, assessments, outcome evaluations, booster workshops and site licensing.
How to Use
Use the table of contents on the left side of the resource page to navigate through the sections of information. The FAQ provides a great overview of how the program works and who can most benefit from its services.
Who Should Use
This resource is helpful for parents interested in learning about Brief Strategic Family Therapy services for their family, particularly parents of young adolescents (12-16).
Scientifically Validated
This resource represents a scientifically-validated form of therapy and notes the following citations and studies as evidence of its effectiveness.
What is BSFT family therapy?
The BSFT intervention was therefore formulated as an integrative model that combines structural and strategic family therapy techniques to address systemic/relational (primarily family) interactions that are associated with adolescent problem behaviors. The structural components of the BSFT treatment draw on the work of Minuchin (Minuchin, 1974; Minuchin & Fishman, 1981). The strategic aspect of the BSFT approach was influenced by Haley (1976)and Madanes (1981). The integration of structural and strategic approaches to family therapy led us to develop a treatment that is problem-focused, planful, and practical—focusing primarily on identifying and enacting the changes necessary to ameliorate the adolescent’s presenting problems. Other family issues, such as problems between the parent figures, are not addressed unless they are directly related to the adolescent’s problem behaviors, such as drug use or risky sexual behaviors.
What is BSFT in a family?
BSFT is a short-term (approximately 12 sessions), family-treatment model developed for youth with behavior problems such as drug use, sexual risk behaviors, and delinquent behaviors. Developed over nearly 40 years of research at the University of Miami’s Center for Family Studies, the BSFT approach operates based on the premise that families are the strongest and most enduring force in the development of children and adolescents (Gorman-Smith, Tolan, & Henry, 2000; Steinberg, 2001; Szapocznik & Coatsworth, 1999). BSFT targets families in which youth engage in clusters of risk-taking or problematic behaviors, including drug and alcohol use, delinquency, affiliation with antisocial peers, and unsafe sexual activity (Jessor & Jessor, 1977; Willoughby, Chalmers, & Busseri, 2004). Families of behavior-problem youth tend to interact in ways that permit or promote these problems (Véronneau & Dishion, 2010). The goal of BSFT, therefore, is to change the patterns of family interactions that allow or encourage problematic adolescent behavior. By working with families, BSFT not only decreases youth problems, but also creates better functioning families (Santisteban et al., 2003). Because changes are brought about in family patterns of interactions, these changes in family functioning are more likely to last after treatment has ended, because multiple family members have changed the way they behave with each other.
What is BSFT intervention?
BSFT is a manualized intervention (Szapocznik, Hervis, & Schwartz, 2003) that targets structural, interactional patterns in the adolescent’s family environment, and that creates changes in these patterns by strategically intervening to disrupt or alter these interactional patterns. There are three core principleson which BSFT is built. The first is that BSFT is a family-systems approach. “Family systems” means that family members are interdependent. The experiences and behavior of each family member affect the experiences and behavior of other family members. According to family-systems theory, for example, the troubled adolescent is a family member who displays risk-taking behaviors such as drug use and unsafe sexual activity that reflect, at least in part, what else is going on in the family system (Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1989). As such, the adolescent’s behavior can be said to reflect maladaptive family interactions. We define maladaptive interactions as those exchanges in which the family repeatedly engages in the intent to achieve a certain outcome (e.g., eliminate adolescent drug use), but that continue to be used, despite clear evidence that these interactions do not work.
How are BSFT interventions organized?
BSFT interventionsare organized into four theoretically and empirically supported domains (Robbins et al., 2011a; Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1989). Each of these domains of intervention is used throughout the treatment process, although some are used more often than others in specific phases of treatment. Early sessions are characterized by joininginterventions intended to establish a therapeutic alliance with each family member and with the family as a whole. Joining requires that the therapist demonstrate acceptance of and respect toward each individual family member, as well as acceptance of and respect toward the way in which the family as a whole is organized. Early sessions also emphasize tracking and diagnostic enactmentinterventions that are designed to systematically identify adaptive and maladaptive family patterns of interactions, and to use these patterns of interactions to build a treatment plan. A core feature of tracking and diagnostic enactment techniques is that the therapist encourages family members to behave as they would if the counselor were not present. This means encouraging family members to speak with each other about the concerns they raise in therapy, rather than directing comments to the therapist. Indeed, when family members do address the therapist, the therapist asks the family member to redirect the statement or question to the person referenced in the statement. For example, if a father says to therapist, “You know, my wife is all wrapped up in our son and has no time for me,” the therapist will ask the father to direct this concern to his wife. Once this happens and the wife responds, an overlearned family pattern of interaction is likely to be enacted in the present in front of the therapist. As noted, although therapists are most likely to encourage family interactions and diagnose interactional patterns in early sessions, these techniques are used throughout the course of therapy.
What is BSFT in mental health?
BSFT is a flexible approach that can be utilized with a broad range of family situations (e.g., two-parent families, single-parent families, stepfamilies, multigenerational families), in a variety of service settings (e.g., mental health clinics, drug-abuse treatment programs, and other social-service settings), and in a variety of treatment modalities (e.g., as a primary outpatient intervention, in combination with residential or day treatment, as an aftercare/ continuing-care service to residential treatment, and for family preservation or reunification). Moreover, the BSFT approach is applicable across a range of ethnic/cultural groups.
How long does BSFT therapy last?
Therapy took much longer to administer than expected. The usual expectation is that BSFT therapy should last approximately four months, which is consistent with our implementation experience. However, the median length of treatment for those participants who were retained in treatment across both conditions was approximately 8 months for both conditions. As discussed later, this difference between prior and current experiences in delivering BSFT may have occurred because BSFT was implemented by therapists who had additional caseloads, often involving other treatment approaches, in addition to their BSFT caseload for the study.
How effective is BSFT?
The two treatment conditions, implemented by highly experienced therapists, were found to be equally efficacious, and more efficacious than recreational control, in reducing children’s behavioral and emotional problems and in maintaining these reductions at 1-year posttermination. However, at 1-year follow-up, the BSFT condition was associated with a significant improvement in independently rated family functioning, whereas individual psychodynamic child therapy was associated with a significant deterioration in family functioning.
How do You Become a Strategic Family Therapist?
If you have a passion for working with families, and are interested in using solution-focused interventions such as strategic family therapy, consider a master’s degree or Ph.D. in a counseling field like marriage and family therapy (MFT). To practice as a therapist or counselor, states require licensing, and each state has specific requirements in meeting its licensing requirements.
What is Family Therapy?
Family therapy, also called family systems therapy, considers families as systems, systems that organically develop rules and interactions, and systems that affect the psychological health of all those involved. Just as a governmental or organizational system affects individuals, so does the family system. Psychologists consider the family system, however, to have the greatest influence on individuals’ lives.
What is Strategic Therapy?
According to a website devoted to strategic therapy pioneer Jay Haley, “strategic therapy is any type of therapy where the therapist initiates what happens during therapy and designs a particular approach for each problem.”
What is required to practice as a therapist?
To practice as a therapist or counselor, states require licensing, and each state has specific requirements in meeting its licensing requirements. Additional coursework or certification in strategic family therapy is also required to utilize this specialized therapeutic model.
What is Haley's model of family therapy?
Haley’s model for effective family therapy can be summarized as follows: Individuals don’t develop problems in isolation, but as a response to their social environment. In strategic family therapy, the therapist develops techniques for solving problems specific to the family’s interactions and structure. The therapist sees the problem as part of ...
What is the emphasis of a therapist?
The therapist sees the problem as part of a sequence of interactions of those in the individual’s immediate social environment. Symptoms of a particular pathology or behavior must be studied in relation to the social unit or family system. The emphasis of the therapy is not on the individual but on the social situation or structure.
Who developed the family therapy model?
However, a significant part of the strategic therapy model incorporated the work of another family therapy pioneer, Salvador Minuchin. For more information read about Minuchin’s structural family therapy model. Minuchin’s model also stressed a solution-focused approach over psychoanalysis, or other types of intrapsychic exploration.
How many families can a BSFT therapist treat?
One full-time therapist can provide the BSFT intervention to 15-20 families, if conducted in the office, or 10-12 families if conducted at the home, clinic, or other location outside the office. On the average, a BSFT therapist can typically treat 35 - 55 families to completion within one year.
What is BSFT in therapy?
Brief Strategic Family Therapy ® (BSFT ®) is a culturally-competent, strength-based intervention for children and adolescents ages 6 to 18 years, who exhibit behavior problems such as substance abuse, associations with antisocial peers, bullying, truancy, and other recognized youth risk factors. At the same time, BSFT works to improve family functioning, increase effective parenting, and improve communication.
What is BSFT training?
BSFT ® full training to competency is needed to practice Brief Strategic Family Therapy. Therapists should be committed and enthusiastic, familiar with family systems approaches, and have an ease in working with all family members. They should also have a willingness to work evenings and Saturdays when families are available.
How does family therapy help adolescents?
The therapy targets the particular problem interactions and behaviors in each client family.
What is effective parenting?
Effective parenting, including successful management of children's behavior and positive affect in the parent-child interactions
Who developed BSFT?
BSFT was developed by Olga Hervis and Jose Szapocznik at the University of Miami in the 1970’s. Hervis is the Executive Director and Lead Master Trainer of the Family Therapy Training Institute of Miami (FTTIM) for the dissemination of BSFT ® training programs.
Does BSFT help with internalizing symptoms?
Most any family with a youth identified patient with either internalizing or externalizing symptoms will indeed respond favorably to the BSFT ® intervention.
