From Family

From Family-Helping System Knots to Possibilities:

Co-Constructing Change Through Solution-Generating Dialogue

Clients presenting with severe and chronic difficulties often have experienced multiple treatment failures and may feel quite demoralized and stuck. The network of helping professionals from larger systems that have had extensive involvement with them may also feel quite pessimistic about these clients’ being able to or wanting to change. These helpers may cling to certain pathological explanations for the clients’ problematic behaviors, have unrealistic treatment expectations for them, or may be stuck engaging in unproductive attempted solution patterns that have inadvertently further exacerbated the clients’ difficulties. In some cases the clients’ systems dynamics ripple through the family-helping system fueling splitting, rescuing, power struggles, and hopelessness and despair. This can lead to family-helping system knots developing and therapeutic black holes where escape into workable realities seems impossible for all parties involved.

In this “hands-on” workshop, the presenter will discuss how to co-create a safe and respectful collaborative context where all views are honored, which can lead to the co-authoring of new solution-determined stories that can liberate the clients as well as the involved helpers from the shackles of their identified problems that had been pushing all of them around and fueling the family-helping system knot situations. As a result of attending this practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn the following:

  • Organizing social ecologies for change: From problem-saturated to solution-determined systems
  • Mobilizing solution-determined systems: Important considerations
  • Key characteristics of successful collaborative relationships
  • Facilitating solution-generating dialogues: Effective collaborative tools and strategies
  • Use collaborative questions that tap solution-determined system’s members’ expertise, concerns, reveal untold stories, and can co-create compelling future realities with them
  • Strategies for resolving solution-determined system’s dilemmas and impasses with school, juvenile justice, mental health, and social service larger systems
  • Covering the back door: Effective goal-maintenance tools and strategies

 

The workshop format will combine information-rich didactic presentation, use of videotape examples of major therapeutic strategies, skill-building exercises, a live family-multiple helper system’s consultation, and participants’ case consultations.