The Family Strengthening Practice (FSP) model is a strength-based, culturally sensitive model adaptable to a wide range of human service settings, including treatment foster care, psychiatric rehabilitation, community mental health, and a wide range of other mental and behavioral health services. This therapeutic, evidence-informed model is an innovated form of the Structural Family Therapy (SFT). This innovative model emphasizes the improvement of communication patterns, identifying family structure and order, skillful reflection of family enactments and interactions, and disciplined focus on strengths. As a result, families experience sustainable change and stability despite numerous challenges.
The model’s holistic core competencies offer skills which: orient families and family workers to focus on the family’s sufficiency, competency, and strengths; assists families with establishing realistic expectations, showing understanding for each others issues, and solidifying rules, limits and consequences; facilitate the process of joining and reflecting the family’s behavior and communication patterns; engages individuals, families and practitioners with exploring the structure, communication, and inter-relational enactments of their family. Additionally, the Family Strengthening practice model utilizes Family Meetings, an innovative form of the SFT Family interview, that occurs primarily in the family’s home (but can occur within a family therapy office). It provides a venue for skillfully shaping the structure, communication, and inter-relational interactions within the family.
Culturally relevant communication and intervention skills help to establish authentic interactions. A replicable sequence of process and response techniques will be introduced that produce sustainable, measurable, and actualized change and stability. Family Strengthening facilitates healing through identifying the individual and family’s inherent strengths.