16 Year Old Dylan Family System Theory

Working with Families in Substance Abuse Treatment
The Case of 16 year old Dylan
September 11, 2013

In Dylan’s case he is a sixteen year old adolescent that have been in and out of drug programs and even had to experience being placed in outpatient treatment within the last several years that was unsuccessful. He experience using marijuana at an early age and now is currently using any type of drug including crack cocaine. Dylan is on patrol for selling drugs, possession, and breaking into people homes. If one would over look Dylan’s behavior they could see that he is a nice child he just hangs around with the wrong. Dylan has the community in his corner that wishes he turn his life around,
Now as a therapist I will facilitate the best theory approach that will help this family to become functional. By doing this I will have to look at the family as a whole rather than concentrate on the client behavior itself. The reason for this is because if Dylan has receive no support from his family. Looking at the big picture it seems that the family would benefit from family therapy, which will help to reduce his behavior and increase the family structural relationship. I feel this theory approach that best suits this family would be the family system theory. Family system theory is a theory that focus not only on the client that is suffering from a particular behavior but it also facilitate on the family as a whole. This theory is incorporate with family therapy, which includes all family members not just mother, father, sister, or brother. In this world many family can be friends, step-mother or father, or anyone that will support you in your crisis situation. This theory is made up of team in order to service both male and female clients whether it’s for individual counseling or family counseling (www.thefreedictionary.com). Even though some part of family therapy underlies with behavioral psychotherapy, the broaden outlook comes from family system theory. The therapist role is to use an
Moving from the focus of (Dylan) who is the primary person that bought this family into counseling to the whole family is different so I will have to see how this change can be done. Change is not something that people take well, looking back toward the beginning will give me a better understanding of why Dylan abuse drugs and how the family approach will be added to his treatment. As you can see Dylan drug abuse is caused by his surroundings. He uses more because he worries about what is going on with his parents and feel he is the blame. If his parent would try and make a change, then it will help Dylan to stay clean and sober. Even though changing the relationship in the home will not decrease Dylan’s drug abuse, but it will help him realize that he is not the cause of his parent’s situation; therefore he will have to more time to focus on his addiction and what he can do to gain control of his life (McCollum & Trepper 2001). So the type of services that will be offered to this family will be verbalization, role playing, family therapy, individual therapy, and drug rehab for Dylan on an outpatient basis. Using these tools will help provide the family the understanding of what cause the dysfunctional situation at hand. It will also show each family member how to express their feeling in a calmer