ABSTRACT
This chapter describes enduring concepts and practices related to brief and strategic family therapy. It illustrates how therapists can integrate principles of sociocultural attunement and offer practice guidelines. Rather than being neutral observers who intervene to remove symptoms, therapists take a number of steps including broadening the circle, thinking counterintuitively to counter hegemony, including societal power imbalances in hypotheses, affirming symptom free resistance, and intervening to support just relationships. According to Andrae Brown, circular thinking must include therapists’ awareness of their own beliefs and values as well as the impact of dominant social discourses on families and presenting problems. Being able to take a meta-view of dominant social discourses and the dynamics of broad societal systems allows therapists to develop the critical consciousness necessary to think counter hegemonically as well as counter intuitively. The chapter describes a case illustration to demonstrate how integrating societal systems and attention to power can lead to third order change.
