Evaluation : Client And Family Evaluation

Making a genogram can enhance one’s training as a helping professional by laying out points in a person’s life and family that have caused distress and could affect practice in the future. By self realizing the crisis points in one’s family it can help to identify triggers that could lead to countertransference as well as resurfacing of old traumas during counseling or leading a group. Plotting out one’s life is a way to organize a family especially if there are multiple marriages of parents and non-traditional family ties within a standard family tree. By knowing where you come from and the experiences that shape your family you can better

The family has a central role to play in the treatment of any health problem, including substance abuse. Family work has become a strong and continuing theme of many treatment approaches , but family therapy is not used to its greatest capacity in substance abuse treatment. A primary challenge remains the broadening of the substance abuse treatment focus from the individual to the family.The two disciplines, family therapy and substance abuse treatment, bring different perspectives to treatment implementation. In substance abuse treatment, for instance, the client is the identified patient (IP)—the person in the family with the presenting substance abuse problem. In family therapy, the goal of treatment is to meet the needs of all family members.

As we see from the system theory family are an important part of what contributes to a person addiction. It’s not done maliciously, more so to cope and survive the dysfunctional environment they must survive in. Unfortunately some “treatment facilities don’t have the qualified staff or resources to provide the kind of therapy a family needs” ((Stevens & Smith, pg. 253). It’s proven that family therapy can be a “powerful adjunct in the treatment of substance abusers” (Stevens & Smith, pg. 253). If the family receives treatment then the substance abuser will go back to a “different environment where the enabling and silence has stopped” (Stevens & Smith, pg. 253).

For this paper, I am focusing on two models; the Family Disease Model and the Multisystemic Family Therapy Model (MSFT). The Family Disease Model is based on the concept that addiction is a disease, and that this disease affects the whole household. Family members who are not addicted may become codependent on the addict for their emotional or material support. This model aims to treat the entire family by approaching addiction as a condition that can be addressed through modifications in behavior or environment. Family therapy in substance abuse treatment has two main purposes. First, it seeks to use the family’s strengths and resources to develop ways to live without substances of abuse. Second, it ameliorates the impact of chemical dependency on both the Identified Patient and the family. The person abusing substances is regarded as a subsystem within the family unit. Relationships within this subsystem are the points of therapeutic interest and intervention. The therapist facilitates discussions and problem-solving sessions, often with the entire family group or subgroups, but sometimes with a single participant, who may or may not be the person with the substance use disorder.

Gruber, K.J., & Taylor M.F. (2006). A family perspective for substance abuse: Implications from the literature. Journal of Social

Drug and chemical abuse affect many families and that particular family that lives through a loved one who is an addict and the priority is to get help for the individual. In any intervention that involves drug addicts, a family's disposition is very important. Full recovery of any drug addict involves the restoration of the person's life as well as ensuring that those who are around the addict have the best ability when it comes to helping with abstinence which is a long-term goal. Abusers are often in denial or even believe that they are totally in control of their use of drugs

After assessing my nuclear and extended family using a genogram, it was apparent that a history of mental illness was a pattern within my paternal extended family. My family never went to therapy, but I truly think that it would have been beneficial throughout my childhood and teenage years. Solution-focused therapy, narrative therapy, and intergenerational therapy and three therapies that can aide families in healing processes from lack of unity, communication, and negative patterns.

The intergenerational factors that influence family relationships and behaviors can be mapped out in a genogram. These maps assist counselors in getting to know their patients, the family, and the family dynamics (Galvin, 2010). When gathering the information for my own family, there was not any new or shocking revelations. However, when the data was presented in the genogram, it became a revealing diagram of patterns and non-patterns of substance use and mental illness.

A person, especially a parent, who is dependent on alcohol or drugs destroys a family because family members not only see how miserable the addicted really are, but they also witness, firsthand, the way substance abuse can deteriorate a person’s physical and mental body, as well as the fact that family members notice the money that is spent on the abused substances, which sometimes leaves families living in poverty for no reason other than the simple fact the addict has to have their fix. Addicts are the destroyers of happiness, self-worth, and any amount of money.

It is important to understand the complex role that families can play in substance abuse treatment. They can be a source of help to the treatment process, but they also must manage the consequences of the IP’s addictive behavior. Individual family members are concerned about the IP’s substance abuse, but they also have their own goals and issues. Providing services to the whole family can improve treatment effectiveness. Meeting the challenge of working together will call for mutual understanding, flexibility, and adjustments among the substance abuse treatment provider, family therapist, and family. This shift will require a stronger focus on the systemic interactions of families. Many divergent practices must be reconciled if family therapy

Family therapy and education – Education and training for family members to help them in understanding addiction and learning how to live with an addict.

Addiction is a disease that not only affects the person with the addiction but the family as well. The children that grow up in this environment take on different roles in their family to try and cope with their environment. According to American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, there is an estimate of 26.8 million children that are exposed to alcoholism in the family (2015). As these children grow up they develop many common characteristics into adulthood. These characteristics have a lasting impact on their lives.

In life things do not always go as planned, sometimes we make some tough choices, which may cause burdens to the ones that love us the most our family (Intervention Videos, 2012). I will be conducting a family analysis on twenty- one-year-old Kaylene from Bernardsville, North Carolina (Intervention Videos, 2012). Kaylene has been battling her drug addiction since the age of thirteen where she started using cocaine and marijuana (Intervention Videos, 2012). For five years now she has been addicted to prescription drugs and she also sells them for money. It all began in Kaylene’s childhood she was abused as a child for some of the simplest things by her estranged father who was an alcoholic at

Over the years in the field of addiction, more therapists and agencies are seeing the value of adopting a family systems approach in therapy and beginning to appreciate the need to treat an individual within the context of the cultural, societal and family systems (Smock, Froerer, & Blakeslee, 2011). In fact, some treatment outcome studies propose that family therapy is more effective in the treatment of drug abuse especially in the areas of engagement and retention (Stantan & Shadish, 1997; Thomas & Corcoran, 2001). Some models of family and couple therapy have been specifically designed to address substance use problems, and received empirical support to be highly promising, such as the multidimensional family therapy, the behavioural couples therapy, and the family behaviour therapy (Donohue, et al., 2009; Fals-Stewart, Lam, & Kelley, 2009; Liddle, 2010). However, it seems that most agencies and addiction counsellors continue to work individually and use individual therapy models in their work with clients.

Thus, intergenerational and psychoanalytic family therapies “share several key concepts and practices: examining a client’s early relationships to understand present functioning; tracing transgenerational and extended family dynamics to understand a client’s complaints; promoting