WORKING WITH CHALLENGING HIGH-RISK ADOLESCENTS: AN INDIVIDUALIZED FAMILY THERAPY APPROACH

Adolescents presenting with explosive and violent, highly oppositional, serious eating-distressed, heavy substance abuse and self-injury, and delinquent behaviors can be a nightmare to work with even for the most seasoned of therapists. Often, these youth come from families characterized by emotional disconnection, invalidation, and other destructive interactions. The adolescents’ extreme and provocative behaviors attract helping professionals and concerned members from their social networks like a magnet. To further complicate matters, the larger systems professionals often are divided regarding their problem explanations and what the best treatment approach and level of care setting is for the adolescents. How we optimize for treatment success is to combine what works from family therapy science with evidence-based practice wisdom.
In this “hands-on,” practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn how to tailor fit and individualize the family therapy approach to honor family members’ preferences, theories of change, and optimize for their goal attainment. As a result of attending this workshop, participants will come away with the following practical tools and strategies:

• Pathways to high-risk problem-determined systems: How they develop and are perpetuated
• Keys to building strong working alliances with high-risk adolescents and their families
• Use key empirically supported family research findings and evidence-based practice wisdom to inform your clinical decision-making
• Use of solution-determined collaborative teams comprised of key resource people from the family’s social network to co-construct high quality solutions
• Use of self to create therapeutic breakthroughs with challenging adolescents and their families
• Use therapeutic questions to elicit client expertise, established well-formed treatment goals, uncover secrets, and to co-create compelling future realities
• Identify and recruit the family’s solution-determined collaborative team
• Co-design, select, and tailor-fit therapeutic interventions to empower the adolescents and their families to achieve their goals
• Engage and foster cooperative partnerships with angry, highly pessimistic, laissez-faire, and mental health and substance abuse impaired parents
• Use mindfulness practices to aid adolescents in emotional distress tolerance and to help prevent acting out episodes
• Use effective family-social network relapse prevention tools and strategies
• Keys to fostering cooperative partnerships with helping professional from larger systems
• Use of one-person family therapy with either the individual adolescent or most concerned parent when other family members are reluctant to come