Family-based Treatments for Adolescent Substance Use PMC

Overall, these procedures combine aspects of social control and behavior economic theories with the principles of social control and social learning theories (Table 4). Social workers can help by using trauma-informed, attachment-informed, and systems-based approaches to direct practice in individual therapy and family therapy with special attention to multigenerational trauma and substance abuse. The role of the social worker may include substance abuse counseling providing in-home therapy supporting parents in being more effective with parental supervision, providing structure, and facilitating healthy caring communication. Social workers may serve on multidisciplinary teams to advocate for a child who is adjudicated, abused, and/or neglected. In addition, social workers may provide expert testimony in courts and participate in permanency planning for children in out-of-home placements.

Online Therapy Can Help

• The coping skills training approach to alcoholism treatment addresses a client’s behavioral deficits, responses to antecedents, and the consequences of drinking.
• Even so, it can be difficult for providers and programs to fit family services into existing schedules filled with the demands of SUD treatment and related services.
• Please note that each family member may be at a different stage of change or level of motivation regarding the behavior change that he or she needs to make to improve family functioning.

The focus on enhancing clients’ self-efficacy and coping skills and supporting their autonomy and responsibility for change is consonant with stress and coping theory. Family counseling may not be helpful for clients who are actively suicidal or psychotic. Families of clients in these states may have other goals they would like to address in family counseling.

How Can Family Systems Theory Help Addiction Recovery?

Family counseling is a collection of treatment approaches and techniques founded on the understanding that if change occurs with one person, it affects everyone else in the family and creates a “change” reaction. Subsystems are groupings in the family that form according to roles, needs, interests, and so forth. Subsystems appear in most families among parents, siblings, and couples (Gehart, 2018). For example, in a healthy family, a parental subsystem (including one or more members) maintains some privacy, takes responsibility for providing for the family, and has power to make family decisions. Although many people view “family” as the group of people with whom they share close emotional connections or kinship, there is no single definition of family. Diverse cultures and belief systems influence definitions, and because cultures and beliefs change over time, concepts of family are not static.

Family Counseling: What Is It, and Why Is It Useful?

In general, models of treatment assume that there are relatively robust connections between specific components of treatment and changes in clients’ personal and social resources. Thus, the CBT emphasis on self-efficacy and coping skills should enhance clients’ status on these personal resources. TSF’s focus on bonding with family members and friends, involvement in self-help groups, and participation in rewarding social activities should enhance clients’ social resources in these areas.

• This can be accomplished by helping the client’s partner learn skills for managing alcohol-related situations.
• Twelve-step facilitation (TSF) treatment is based primarily on principles of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and a disease model of addiction.
• Family members assume certain roles, which often relate to generation (e.g., parent, grandparent), cultural attitudes, family beliefs, gender, and overall family functioning.
• This theory is highly researched, and as the field of neuroscience advances, counselors are finding how psychodynamic theory can actually positively affect a client’s brain.
• Other therapies such as EMDR and 12-step facilitation therapy are alsobacked by a plethora of research.

Clients routinely may have tended to resolve problem situations, even when they were unrelated to drinking, in ways that automatically resulted in drinking. Training in problem-solving and decisionmaking skills can improve the clients’ ability to cope more effectively and anticipate the consequences of their actions. Decades of scientific research on addiction treatment have found behavioral, motivational and family-based therapiesto effectively treat substance use disorders.

12-Step Facilitation Treatment

Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches