“…treatment cannot progress unless key family members are engaged and actively participating in the treatment process – helping to define problems, setting goals, and implementing interventions to meet those goals.
The clinician may have developed a ‘brilliant’ set of intervention strategies, but such strategies will have little value in the absence of a strong therapeutic alliance.
Practitioners must remember that parents and other family members are essential to achieving positive outcomes, and such outcomes are almost always accomplished through hard work by family members.
Family members who are not engaged in treatment are unlikely to put for the effort needed for favorable outcomes. Hence, concomitant with a thorough assessment process, MST (Multi-Systemic Therapy) practitioners work toward achieving strong engagement from the time of their first contact with the family.
When clinical progress is slow or seems to have stalled, a common reason is that key family members (the child’s caregivers, those adults who control family resources or have decision-making authority) are not truly “on board” with the treatment plan.
Although the therapist may have believed that the family was engaged, a closer look might reveal otherwise. Often, we (therapists, supervisors, consultants) assume that family members are committed to a particular treatment goal that seems logical to us, but may not be viewed in the same way from the perspectives of family members. In any case, engagement is a precursor to successful outcome, and fortunately, the behavioral signs of engagement are available for observation” (Cunningham, 1999).
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