Providing Innovative Solutions to Training and Implementation Challenges
Individual work with the adolescent.
CIFFTA prescribes individual work with the adolescent in each stage of the treatment to achieve the developmental goals that are important to the adolescent. This work starts with a focus on engagement and joining the adolescents around issues other than symptoms, assessing and increasing motivation to change, tracking high risk behaviors and the factors that contribute to them, and considering psychoeducational skills that provide the knowledge and life skills needed by that adolescent.
Therapists work to link psychoeducational skills options to the challenges the adolescents are facing, so that together, therapist and adolescent can select skills to work on (e.g., interpersonal effectiveness, avoiding substance use, healthy teen dating). Work with the adolescent can also include a focus on identity development (e.g., ethnic, race, sexual orientation, gender identity).
The CIFFTA family profile facilitates the identification of key family characteristics and experiences that can impact an adolescent’s well-being and therapy process. During our individual work, the adolescent also gains a new perspective on the family history and the therapist engages the adolescent into the formulation and treatment planning process.