Deliberate Practice in Systemic Family Therapy

By Deb Miller, Ryan Seedall, Adrian Blow

Deliberate practice exercises allow students and trainees to rehearse systemic family therapy (SFT) skills to develop basic competence and hone their own personal therapeutic style.

In these exercises, two or more trainees role-play couples or family therapy sessions with one trainee acting as the therapist and the others acting as clients, rotating through these roles under a supervisor's guidance. The trainee playing the therapist improvises appropriate and authentic responses to client statements organized into three difficulty levels--beginner, intermediate, and advanced--that reflect common problems and concerns encountered by SFT practitioners.

The first 12 exercises each focus on a single skill, such as building a therapeutic alliance, deescalating conflicts, establishing rules and boundaries, and addressing diversity issues. These are followed by two comprehensive exercises--an annotated transcript and free-form mock therapy sessions--in which trainees integrate these essential skills into a single SFT session.

Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering each skill, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

To demonstrate how deliberate practice can be fully integrated into a professional curriculum, this series features exercises developed and refined within the clinical training curriculum at the Sentio online/hybrid marriage and family therapy (MFT) therapist training program in California, which is where we started developing this series. These exercises, which have been tested at clinical training sites around the world, are used to enhance clinical outcomes within the first hybrid MFT program approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences to fully integrate deliberate practice into its entire curriculum. By integrating these models into its hybrid MFT program in California, Sentio University demonstrates that therapist training graduate programs can use deliberate practice to bridge the gap between theory and clinical mastery through repetitive, feedback-informed practice to support the development of modern, outcome-focused clinicians.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1433837633
• ISBN13: 9781433837630
• Release Date: October 2022
• Publisher: American Psychological Association
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.5" x 10.9"