Blueprints
Promising Programs Fact Sheets
| Brief Strategic
Family Therapy (BSFT) |
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Program Overview
Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) adopts a structural
family systems framework to improve youth's behavior
problems by improving family interactions that are presumed
to be directly related to the child's symptoms.
Program Targets
The target population in general are children and adolescents
between 8 and 17 years of age displaying or at risk
for developing behavior problems, including substance
abuse.
Program Content
BSFT is a short-term, problem-focused intervention with
an emphasis on modifying maladaptive patterns of interactions.
Typical sessions last from 60 to 90 minutes, with 12-15
sessions over three months. Therapy is based upon the
assumption that each family has unique characteristics
that emerge when family members interact, and that this
family "system" influences all members of
the family, thus the family is viewed as a whole organism.
The repetitive interactions, or ways in which family
members interact and behave with regard to one another
can be either successful or unsuccessful. BSFT targets
these interaction patterns that are directly related
to the youth's behavior problems and establishes a practical
plan to help the family develop more effective patterns
of interaction.
The three primary components of the intervention are:
- Joining: understanding resistance and engaging
the family in therapy;
- Diagnosis: identifying the interaction patterns
that encourage problematic youth behavior; and
- Restructuring: developing a specific plan to help
change maladaptive family interaction patterns by
working in the present, reframing, and working with
boundaries and alliances.
Program Outcomes
BSFT adolescents showed significant reductions in Conduct
Disorder and Socialized Aggression from pre- to post-treatment,
while group therapy adolescents showed no significant
changes. There were also clinically significant changes
in Conduct Disorder and Socialized Aggression favoring
the treatment group over the control group.
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