2023 Summer Intensive: Integrating Family Therapy with Children and Adolescents: Know Where You Are, Where You're Going, and How to Get There
There has been significant research to show that family therapy is an effective treatment for working with children and adolescents, but many therapists don't provide family therapy because they feel undertrained or intimidated by working with more than one client at a time. In this workshop, we will ground ourselves in the family systems theoretical orientation, to see how it can inform case conceptualization of families and larger systems (e.g., extended family, community, schools, organizations). We will review core concepts in family therapy that guide assessment and treatment. We review principles of Behavioral Family Therapy, Attachment Based Family Therapy, Structural Family Therapy, Strategic Family Therapy, and how to use this principals to create lasting change in families, and provide tools in order for the therapist to know where they are and where they’re going when working with families. We will discuss various disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, eating disorders), and how these principles can help in creating lasting change, and additionally understanding how high Expressed Emotion is key in relationship to relapse prevention.
W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist and director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. He has been working with children, adolescents and their families since 1998 in teens shelters, a residential treatment program, a wilderness program, drug and alcohol outpatient program, schools, community clinics, an in-home therapy program, and in private practice. Dr. Sutton is trained in Narrative Family Therapy, Brief Strategic Family Therapy, Family Based Therapy for Anorexia, Attachment Based Family Therapy, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, Strategic Family Therapy, MRI Model of Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy, Parenting with Love and Limits, and Behavioral Parent Therapy. Dr. Sutton was on the Strategic Family Therapy team at the Mental Research Institute, and currently teaches and supervises therapists and therapists in training in family therapy through his Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy and it’s associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling. He and his colleague, James Keim, LCSW, have developed their integrative, transdiagnostic four stage approach to working with families called Evolving Structural-Strategic Family Therapy (ESSFT).