Welcome to the Clinical Professionals Page:
Why pair with us? We all want the best therapeutic
outcomes for our
clients. We are learning how education about healthy traits
can assist in
a client’s motivation for change. However many therapist have
competing
constrains on their time, and they may not have the forum to offer top
quality
marriage and family education. Also many therapists do not
have the availability
to administer family assessments. By refereeing your clients
to us we can
manage both of these for you.
We can provide easy to access and top quality marriage and
family
education. You can help your client access the level of
education that
you think will best help them. For example: refer a client to
listen to a
specific podcast on a marital pattern that they struggle with, or they
can read
a blog article about parenting styles. You may choose for
your client to
come back to your next session with a formal evaluation that allows you
some insight
or validation about their families interaction pattern. For
example you
may have the family take the FACES or FAD assessment and come back to
your
office and show you the results. They can even take RELATE a
full marital
evaluation. You may want a couple or family to take a MAT,
OQ, or URICA,
on a weekly or monthly basis to track progress between
sessions. You can
even up the level of education a client gets by referring to a marriage
or
parenting class that they can take online with others like them.
In this format they both learn and
build a cohort of peers to normalize their experiences.
Essentially we offer you a resource and partnership to improve
your outcomes
with little or no cost to your clients. The payoff for you
and your
client can be great. This is particularly true of families
who are facing
a crisis in their family. Maybe a family is facing sending a
family
member away to costly treatment. These treatments work best
when the
family makes required changes before the residential treatment is
over.
If these changes do not occur the family will most likely slip back
into old
ways quickly after the residential treatment. It is critical
that
families do all they can, to prepare for family change. This
is best accomplished
with a variety of services not just one: residential, face to face
therapy, and
education. By referring families to the education on this
site, you
increase the chances of success and that changes made in expensive
treatment programs
will stick around.
This is not a “cure all” or a “fix”. However that is why we are creating these resources, so that families and marriages can make changes stick.
How change happens and how we help:
To better understand this let me give some examples of what I
am talking
about. Most people who go looking for treatment are often
desperate and
in crisis. They are in the blame game: something or someone
is broken and
they want “it” fixed right now! They identify who the
problem is,
label them, and pursue them to get help. While this IP is
getting help,
those who blamed feel validated and relived but make little change
themselves. While in treatment we see improvements in the
“broken” person
so we discontinue treatment. The IP reintegrates with the
family but
finds that symptoms are recurring. Blame resumes and
frustration and despair
occur.
A specific example could be: a child with ADHD: the
parents are
flustered and blame the child for being so irresponsible with school
and reroll
the child in CBT therapy and maybe a residential school.
Improvements are
made in attention and grades improve. Parents declare the
child “cured”
and resume school and family as “normal”. The first two days go well,
but then
behavior and grades start to slip, again. Within two weeks we
have had a
few major incidents. CBT therapy resumes on an out patient
basis.
By the end of the semester we are back to, or worse, than
before.
What happened? Unless change occurs in three levels,
not just one, change
can not be maintained. What are those three areas?
Researches Dr.
Jeffry Larson and Thomas Bradbury identify them as: 1) individual
traits (like
the ADHD), 2) family traits (a positive or negative interaction style
is one of
the most important), and 3) context issues (like academics and peer
group).