CREATIVE USES OF CONSULTATION TEAMS IN FAMILY THERAPY

Historically, observing consultation teams have played an integral role across many major schools of family therapy in an effort to optimize for positive treatment outcomes and for the management of stuck and difficult family cases. Clearly, having three or four heads is better than one in co-generating a multiplicity of ideas and potential high quality solutions to offer the therapist and the family. More recently, a variety of innovative uses of consultation teams and formats are being practiced, such as: the use of family members’ friends and other key members of their social networks serving as team members, therapists’ alumni guest consultants serving as reflecting teams, and calling into the therapy room specific family members during the session to serve as advisors to the therapist regarding what he or she could do differently with them. As a result of attending this “hands-on,” practice-oriented workshop, participants will come away well prepared to use a wide range of consultation team strategies and formats in their practice settings. The following objectives will be achieved in this workshop:

• Use consultation team formats and methods from Solution-Focused, Strategic, Narrative, Ackerman Family Institute, and the Reflecting Team approach
• Recruit and use peers of clients and other key resource people from their social networks and therapists’ alumni consultants as reflecting team members
• Guidelines for preparing powerful team messages and reflections that emotionally resonate with clients
• Use innovative live supervision methods that tap the expertise of the clients
• Guidelines for team intervention design, selection, and implementation
• Guidelines for determining which team strategy or format to use that best fits the clients’ unique clinical dilemmas
• Use reflection-on-action to critically evaluate team performance
• The key characteristics of strong virtuoso teams
• Guidelines for determining when the use of a consultation team is contraindicated

The workshop format will combine didactic presentation, live family therapy case consultations using a variety of team formats and methods, and skill-building exercises.