The goals of multifamily therapy are:
Working with multiproblem families – Ingredients and Principles
- Overcoming Isolation
- Overcoming Stigmatisation
- Creating Solidarity
- Mutual Support and Feedback
- Creating New, Multiple Perspectives
- Learning from Each Other
- Active User Involvement
- From ‘Helpless’ to ‘Helpful’
- Experimenting with Surrogate Relationships
- Hot House Effect
- Injection of Hope
Working with multiproblem families – Ingredients and Principles
- No secret meetings or communications with referrers prior to contact with family
- Initial network meeting with professionals, family and family’s significant network
- Clear and comprehensible definition of concerns and aims of therapeutic / assessment work
- Focus on family’s strengths and resources
- Total transparency of and continuous sharing of team’s views (‘Reflections Meetings’)
- Working with concrete aims initially – ‘in vivo’
- Emphasis on work and play (action –reflection)
- Provision of continuously changing contexts (time frames, transitions, tasks, roles, settings, clinicians)
- Involving families in their own and each other’s recovery
- Collaborative problem solving
- Observing others – seeing oneself through others’ eyes
- Emphasis on community based interventions
- Out-reach work: reaching out to families
- High Intensity Therapeutic Context: Whole Days and Weeks
