Reflection Paper On Family Therapy

While working at MSPCC there are at times individuals that do not want to be in family therapy. I remember one individual in particular that just did not want to be part of therapy. He would get verbally aggressive with his grandfather and often stormed off slamming their house front door. This was one of the few cases I managed that involved substance abuse this past year. The client was 17 at the time and he smoked marijuana every day before and after high school. His grandparents and legal guardians were concerned that he would get in trouble if he kept hanging out at late times of the day with his group of friends. Friends that had a bad reputation in the town that the family lived in. They were also scare for their safety as they do not know what his friends were capable of if they had any issues with the client. It was hard to get the client to join the session and to get the client to communicate was a more difficult task.
I tried seeing the client separately to talk about his resistance in taking part in the family therapy. This, I thought, helped give an outlet for the client to express his concerns and

I feel that while I worked with the client separately I was able to get more of a connection and build a relationship to allow space for him to reflect. However, I feel that the client believed the IHT team sided with the parents which created a dissonance and subsequent resistance towards therapy or the IHT team. It was a sense of distance and lack of report that grew, in my opinion, because of miscommunication about the purpose of the therapy. While we attempted to communicate this purpose, the client was not engaged. This has to be distinguished from sustain talk in that it was not an argument about sustaining the use drugs. While he did have sustain talk, it was more about the connection and relationship with the