ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the nearly forty-year history of the Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) approach to treating adolescent problem behaviors. BSFT was developed in the mid 1970s as a response to the increased number of Cuban immigrant adolescents in Miami who were involved with drugs. The BSFT intervention was formulated as an integrative model that combined structural and strategic family therapy concepts and techniques to address systemic/relational repetitive patterns of interactions that are associated with the adolescent’s presenting problem behaviors. One of the major innovations of the BSFT approach has been the principle that challenges in engaging families into treatment are derived from the same interactional problems that maintain the adolescent’s symptoms. The parents’ negativity toward the adolescent serves only to increase the youth’s problematic behaviors, and the adolescent’s problematic behaviors further increase the parents’ negativity. Research on the BSFT approach and other models demonstrate that fidelity is essential to achieve the desired outcomes.
