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FIVE-DAY INTENSIVE TRAINING IN COLLABORATIVE STRENGTHS-BASED THERAPY WITH CHALLENGING CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS:

Children and adolescents presenting with long treatment histories for school disruptive, oppositional, violent, delinquent, heavy substance abuse, bulimic, and self-harming behaviors can be a real nightmare to manage for school professionals and even the most seasoned of therapists. Often, these children and adolescents come from family backgrounds of parental marital discord and post-divorced conflicts, inconsistent parental limit-setting, emotionally invalidating and other destructive family interactions, unresolved losses, experienced multiple treatment failures, and in some cases, family secrets. In addition, they may be entangled in family-multiple helping system knots, which often occur with these at-risk children and youths’ treatment situations when involved helping professionals from larger systems have different agendas, expectations, and goals than the families. The breakdown in communications among the various members of the family-multiple helper problem system can further perpetuates the children and adolescents’ and his/her families’ difficulties.

Since these family case situations can be quite complex, they require a collaborative, flexible, and integrative family therapy approach that targets interventions at the child/adolescent, family, peer group, school, and other larger systems levels to co-construct solutions together. The collaborative strengths-based therapy model integrates the best elements of solution-focused, positive psychology, client outcome-informed, narrative, strategic, postmodern, and expressive therapy approaches. This highly respectful and competency-based approach invites children and youth and their families to define their goals, co-construct their treatment plans, and select which therapeutic experiments and treatment modalities can best meet their needs. The main emphasis of this strengths-based approach is on what is right with the clients, not on what is supposed to be wrong with them.

In this intensive training course, participants will master the major therapeutic strategies and techniques of the collaborative strengths-based therapy; several creative ways to use themselves outside their comfort zones with challenging clients; accurately assessing at what systems levels to target interventions; effective strategies for engaging difficult children and adolescents and reluctant family members; use therapeutic questions to establish well-formulated treatment goals, elicit untold family stories and secrets, and co-create compelling future realities; select, design, and match therapeutic experiments with clients’ theories of change, stages of readiness for change, key strengths, and goals; effective goal-maintenance tools and strategies to keep clients on track; and how to establish meaningful and successful collaborative relationships with helping professionals from larger systems. Applications of the collaborative strengths-based therapy approach to group work for adolescents and parents will also be discussed.

The course format will combine information-rich didactic presentation, extensive use of videotape examples of major therapeutic strategies and techniques, live family therapy and family-multiple helper systems consultations, and skill-building exercises. Participants will have the opportunity to bring in their most challenging clients for live case consultations, bring in videotapes of stuck cases, or present their stuck cases for group input.

Matthew D. Selekman, MSW, LCSW  

Matthew D. Selekman, MSW is a family therapist and addictions counselor in private practice and the co-director of Partners for Collaborative Solutions (www.partners4change.net), an international family therapy training and consulting firm in Evanston, Illinois. Matthew received the Walter S. Rosenberry Award in 2006, 2000, and in 1999 from The Children’s Hospital in Denver, Colorado for having made significant contributions to the fields of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences. Matthew is the author of numerous family therapy articles and four professional books: Working with Self-Harming Adolescents: A Collaborative Strengths-Based Therapy Approach, Pathways to Change: Brief Therapy with Difficult Adolescents (Second Edition), Solution-Focused Therapy with Children: Harnessing Family Strengths for Systemic Change, and Family Therapy Approaches with Adolescent Substance Abusers. He has presented workshops on his collaborative strengths-based family therapy approach with challenging children and adolescents extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, and Australia.