ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a variety of tools and techniques that clinicians can use to supplement their assessment, facilitate problem-solving, improve client communication, increase the client’s own self-awareness and coping skills, and help clients move out of relationship roles and into the adult. The point of experiential techniques is to get the clients out of their heads and into the experience itself. Enactments were a mainstay of Minuchin’s structural therapy approach. Business meetings are a way of helping couples and families change the process at home. It offers a structured exercise that moves the clients out of their emotional brains and into their rational ones, so they can be understood and problems can be solved. Check-ins are about helping clients monitor their emotional states, and are both proactive and preemptive. Assertiveness is a foundational skill for success within couple and family relationships, and it is its absence that fuels the rescuer, victim and persecutor roles.
