PCB 4024 : SPECIAL CHILDREN AND FAMILY COUNSELING

Course Leader: Puan Hajah Sabariah Siron

TOPIC 8: STRATEGIC MODEL OF FAMILY THERAPY

INTRODUCTION
Strategic Family Therapy - A therapy based on strategy.  The therapist devises
and initiates interventions for solving the families presenting problem.  Strategic
therapists are concerned with dysfunctional hierarchies and repetitive sequences
of behavior between family members and, as appropriate other systems that help
maintain the presenting problem.  Problems are believed to be maintained through
attempted solutions of the problem at the wrong hierarchic level, denying the
presence of the problem or inventing a problem when there is none.

The Strategic Family Therapy Center carries forward the work of Jay Haley,
MRI's first Research Director, one of its founders and a pioneer in family
therapy.

Haley called the therapy Strategic because "it is a therapy where the therapist
initiates what happens during therapy, designs a specific approach for each
person's presenting problem, and where the therapist takes responsibility for
directly influencing people.

After leaving MRI, Haley collaborated for a number of years with Salvador Minuchin
where they mutually influenced each other's thinking. Minuchin's structural family
therapy is a part of Haley's strategic model.

He described the therapy in one of his many notable books-"Problem-Solving

Therapy," which helps to describe the therapy. He encouraged live supervision,
whereby beginning therapists learn the art and skill of this new way of doing therapy
by practicing in front of a one-way mirror, supervised by a team that assists the
trainees in how to be most effective at helping clients to solve problems. That
tradition is carried on here at MRI.

In these families, it was quite common for conflicts to emerge or intensify when
the children or adolescents began to behave in ways that were not consistent with
the families’ traditional cultural values. Typically, these conflicts occurred as
children and adolescents assimilated more rapidly than their parents to the
bicultural environment in which they were living, and often involved a clash
between the American value of individualism and the Hispanic value of familism.

Such intergenerational (parent versus adolescent) and cultural differences often

yielded intense conflict within the family and resulted in parents and adolescents
feeling alienated from one another. In 1975, the Spanish Family Guidance Center
adopted structural family therapy (SFT) as its core approach, and SFT has been at the

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heart of the Center’s efforts to develop interventions for use in culturally diverse
contexts (Szapocznik and Kurtines, 1993). Over time, the structural approach of SFT
has been refined to meet the needs of the Hispanic community in Miami. For
example, SFT uses treatment methods that are both strategic (i.e., problem
focused and pragmatic) and time limited. Thus, the structural approach has
evolved into a time-limited, family-based approach that combines both
structural and strategic interventions. This approach, called brief strategic
family therapy (BSFT), has become the most common intervention used by the
Spanish Family Guidance Center for families that include youth with behavior
problems.

To improve youth behavior, BSFT attempts to change family interactions and

cultural/contextual factors that influence youth behavior problems. BSFT is
based on the fundamental assumption that the family is the “bedrock” of child
development; the family is viewed as the primary context in which children learn
to think, feel, and behave. Family relations are thus believed to play a pivotal
role in the evolution of behavior problems and, consequently, they are a primary
target for intervention. BSFT recognizes that the family itself is part of a larger
social system and—as a child is influenced by her or his family—the family is
influenced by the larger social system in which it exists. Sensitivity to contextual
factors begins with an understanding of the influence of peers, schools, and
neighborhoods on the development of children’s behavior problems. However,
BSFT also focuses on parents’ relationships with children’s peers, schools, and
neighborhoods and on the unique relationships that parents have with
individuals and systems outside the family (e.g., work or groups such as
Alcoholics Anonymous).

TRIANGLES, SEQUENCES AND HIRARCHIES

Problems in families often involve the interaction of at least three parties : not
only between spouses but rather the effect of others ( children, in-laws, work
associates ) on couples.

Strategic therapists also track interactional sequences of events, which of course are
likely to be circular. In the case of shoplifting by a teenager involves a sequence of
events involving peers and parents. Rather than focus on treating the individual
offender, strategists focus on changing the relevant interactional sequence of the
presenting problem.

Hierarchies in family structure is considered by strategist who wants to know

what roles each member plays and whether problems arise because people are
unhappy with their roles. A child who is functioning as an adult within a family
is not a problem in and of itself; but the child’s role becomes a problem if
unhappiness develops in the family because he or she is assuming the adult role.

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MITIGATING RISK FACTORS

Immigration. Many of the families served by the Spanish Family Guidance Center
have recently immigrated to the United States. The immigration process creates
specific problems that must be addressed in treatment. For example, many families
emigrate in stages; it is not uncommon for one parent, usually the mother, to come
to the United States alone to establish a place and economic means for the family, and
then bring the children to this country. For many families, this process is protracted,
and they are separated for many years. Moreover, the reunification process often
fails to meet family members’ expectations. Children are often disappointed when
they arrive in the United States and see that they are living in an impoverished,
dangerous, inner-city community. Likewise, parents are often disappointed when they
are confronted with angry and emotionally detached children. As a result, treatment
often involves attempting to reestablish parent-child bonds and create new family
structures that include the parent who was separated from the family.

High conflict. Intense and persistent conflict is a common characteristic of

families of youth with behavior Problems. High levels of conflict interfere with
parents’ ability to resolve problems, communicate effectively, nurture, and guide
their children. BSFT focuses on assessing the family’s conflict resolution style
and developing specific interventions to help families negotiate and resolve their
differences more effectively.

Inner city. The powerful influence of neighborhoods cannot be ignored when

working with inner-city youth and families. In fact, accumulating evidence shows
that the positive changes made in family therapy are often overwhelmed by the
harsh and deteriorated conditions of the inner city. As a result, the focus of BSFT
has expanded from individual families to include the relationship between families
and the multiple systems that influence children. Developments in the clinical model
have been heavily influenced by the theoretical work of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977,
1979, 1986) and the groundbreaking clinical work of Scott Henggeler and his
colleagues (Henggeler and Borduin, 1990; Henggeler, Melton, and Smith, 1992). In
particular, BSFT has expanded to include attention to the relationship between
families, on one hand, and schools, peers, juvenile justice agencies, and
neighborhoods, on the other.

Enhancing Protective Factors

Extended families. One of the most effective protective factors is the availability
of strong extended family networks. It is not uncommon, for example, for treatment
to include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or even close friends (“fictive kin”)
who grew up with the child’s parents. Although these networks may also be sources
of problems for the family, they are frequently sources of strong support. In
BSFT, these networks are often used to bolster or serve the important functions of the
family. For example, extended family members are frequently engaged in
treatment to help monitor the children while parents are at work. At times,
members of the extended family or fictive kin assume primary leadership roles in
the family when parents are unable or unwilling to perform these tasks. In most

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instances, BSFT seeks to strengthen social connections by increasing mutual
support and decreasing tension and conflict between the family and the extended
support network.

Family Focus. A second protective factor that has helped minority families in Miami
is their strong sense of family unity. Highlighting the needs of the family above
the needs of individual family members motivates many adults to participate in
interventions. In fact, the Spanish Family Guidance Center initially selected a family
approach because of the Cuban (the target population in the 1970’s) emphasis on
family values. As the Center reached out to many different Hispanic populations in
the 1980’s and to African Americans in the 1990’s, the emphasis on the importance
of families remained consistent. Minority groups in the United States generally
place great value on their natural reference group (e.g., family, extended network, or
tribe).

SUMMARY
1. Communication theories, emerging from the research at the Mental Research
Institute in Palo Alto in the 1950s, have had a major impact on the family
therapy field by recasting human problems as interactional and situational
(tied to a set of circumstance that maintains them)
2. The introduction of this epistemology by Bateson, Jackson, and others laid the
foundation for the original interactive therapeutic approach of the MRI, now
best considered as a strategic family.
3. Particularly characteristic of this approach is the use of theraputic double
binds or paradoxical techniques of changing family rules and relationship
patterns.
4. Paradoxes – contradictions that follow correct deduction from consistent
permises – are used therapeutically to direct an individual or family not to
change in a context that carries with it the expectation of change.
5. The procedure promotes change no matter which action, compliance or
resistance is undertaken.
6. “Prescribing the symptom” as used by Jackson,watzlawick,and other
strategists is a paradoxical technique for undermining resistence to change by
rendering it unnecessary.
7. The interactional view of the MRI is today best exemplified by its Brief
Therapy Center activities.Here, the flawed or misguided solutions attempted
by families are considered to be the problems, and interventions are directed
at treating those previously failed solutions by offering novel, therapist-
designed directives.
8. Haley and Madanes offer a related verson of strategic family therapy.
9. Their approach is characterized by carefully planned tactics and the
issuance of directives for solving a family’s presenting problems
10. Haley in particular uses straightforward directives or task assignments as
well as indirect paradoxical interventions; the latter force the willing
abandonment of dysfunctional behavior by means of the family defying the
directive not to change.

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 11. Madanes employs paradoxical principles in the form of ‘pretend’ techniques,
nonconfrontational interventions directed at achieving change without
inviting resistance.
12. She is especially interested in a family’s behavioral sequences related to
the family hierarchy.
13. Working in the area of sexual abuse, Madanes has developed a 16-steps
therapeutic model for one therapist to simultaneously treat offenders and
their victims.
14. In resent years, the strategic approach has softened its earlier relience on
power and control issues with a family.Strategic therapist now take a softer,
more soothing approach, as the case of working with families where there
is oppositional behavior in children or adolescents.

sabariah_siron@email. unitar.edu.my 3.01. 2009