Strategic Family Therapy - Interventions

Interventions

Some less complicated but often used interventions in SFT would be, prescribing the symptom, relabeling, and paradoxical interventions. Prescribing the symptom would be when the therapist attempts to exaggerate a specific symptom within the family to help the family understand how damaging that symptom is to the family. The relabeling intervention is done within the session by the therapist to change the connotation of one symptom from negative to positive. In this way the family can view the symptom in a new context or have a new conceptual understanding of the symptom.

Finally a paradoxical intervention is similar to prescribing the symptom, but is a more in depth intervention than prescribing the symptom.

• Initially the therapist tries to change the family’s low expectations to one where change within the family can happen.

• Second, the issue that the family wishes to fix is identified in a clear and concise manner.

• Third, and in line with the goal-setting stage, the therapist seeks to get the family to agree to exactly what their goals are in addressing their problem.

• Fourth, the therapist comes up with very specific plans for the family to address their issue.

• Fifth, the therapist discredits whomever is the controlling figure of the issue.

• Next the therapist replaces the controlling figure with their own authority and issues a new directive to fix the family’s identified problem. The new directive for the family is usually to paradoxically do more of the problem symptom, and thereby to highlight it more within the family.

• Finally the therapist learns the outcome of the directive and seeks to push the paradox even further until the family rebels, or change occurs within the family.