Engaging resistant children and parents in effective trauma treatment is difficult at best. Conventionally, engagement and rapport building begins in the first face-to-face session. More often than not it’s a harsh start-up. Parents and kids enter the first session angry, frustrated, and hopeless. Arms are tightly crossed, and at the slightest provocation, all hell breaks loose with open conflict and confrontation between parent and child.
Jay Haley, the founder of strategic family therapy, stated: “For therapy to end properly, it must begin properly.” At the Family Trauma Institute, we believe that trauma treatment begins before the first session by using the 15-minute Motivational Interview (MI) Phone Call, one of our 18 Family Systems Trauma (FST) Techniques.
Using the MI Phone Call Technique, parents and older children move from anger, defensiveness, or resistance to hope, excitement, and anticipation for the first session. From this place of hope, parents are more cooperative and willing to bring in the entire family and extended family to the first session.
Read the full article here at the Family Trauma Institute.
For more information on the MI Phone Call technique, please join the Family Trauma Institute’s upcoming webinar on August 28, 2018, with audio excerpts from an actual MI phone call.
Scott P. Sells, Ph.D., MSW, LCSW, LMFT, is the author of three books, Treating the Tough Adolescent: A Family-Based, Step-by-Step Guide (1998), Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager: 7 Steps to Reestablish Authority and Reclaim Love(2001), and Treating the Traumatized Child: A Step-by-Step Family Systems Approach (2017). He can be contacted at spsells@familytrauma.com or through LinkedIn.
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