Before considering couples or family counseling, evaluate the client's history of violence, particularly in family contexts. The following sections discuss these factors.ĭomestic violence is a serious issue among people with SUDs. Several factors, including the presence of violence in the family, can influence your decisions about involving family members in treatment. Integrated family counseling is often an excellent way to approach the treatment of SUDs, but you may sometimes need to rule it out because of safety, health, or legal constraints. Only in rare situations are family-based interventions and counseling inadvisable, inappropriate, or counterproductive. However, engaging clients and their families in family-based interventions without first carefully assessing for such constraints, and particularly for violence in the family, can result in less effective treatment and increased risk of physical or other forms of abuse. Generally, you can use integrated family counseling to treat SUDs when there are no health or legal constraints and no current risk of intimate partner violence in the family or couple with whom you are working. It is your responsibility to provide a safe, supportive environment for all participants in family counseling. Social support, bonding with family members, goal direction, and monitoring by families help clients’ recovery efforts ( Moos, 2011 Moos & Moos, 2007).Įngaging family members in treatment is the key to decreasing interpersonal conflict among family members and increasing family bonding and other elements of recovery support for the client.Īppropriateness of Integrated Family Counseling for SUDs These associations occur in diverse populations with people who use various substances. Positive social/family support (especially support for recovery) is related to long-term abstinence and recovery, and negative social/family support (e.g., interpersonal conflict, social pressure to use) is related to increased risk for returning to substance misuse ( Brown, Tracy, Jun, Park, & Min, 2015 Cavaiola, Fulmer, & Stout, 2015 Moos & Moos, 2007 Worley et al., 2014). The size, norms, and values of a person's social network and the quality of social and family support affect the recovery of the individual with an SUD.

Who are the significant people in the client's life who can support the client's recovery and also benefit from family-based interventions? Because most SUD treatment services and reimbursement are geared toward individuals who initially present for treatment, the first step in providing integrated family counseling for SUD treatment is to ask the individual client whom he or she considers to be family. Whether you provide individual or group treatment, family member psychoeducation, or counseling for couples or families as part of your organization's treatment program, it is important to keep a family-centered focus. It also summarizes the goals of family involvement in a client's SUD treatment and identifies your role in providing integrated family counseling, along with the stages of family counseling.įamily involvement can positively affect SUD treatment engagement and retention. This chapter will help you determine when to use family-based interventions across the continuum of care, whom to involve in those interventions, and what to consider when providing screening and assessment in a family context. It also presents family-centered counseling strategies you can use to overcome these challenges. Integrating family-based counseling techniques into substance use disorder (SUD) treatment is possible along a continuum of care, from assessment through the various stages of family counseling.Ĭhapter 4 discusses common issues you may face as an SUD treatment provider using an integrated family counseling approach. However, some family members are willing to attend at least an initial session. Many families or family members may be hesitant to participate in treatment at first.

Consider the family from the client's point of view-that is, whom the client would describe as a family member or a significant other.

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