Reunification Family Therapy: A Treatment Manual, by Jan Faust, Hogrefe Publishing (2017)

• Date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12399
• Published date: 01 January 2019

THE BOOK SHELF

REUNIFICATION FAMILY THERAPY: A TREATMENT MANUAL,

BY JAN FAUST, HOGREFE PUBLISHING (2017)

Matthew J. Sullivan

Jan Faust’s (2017) book entitled Reunification Family Therapy: A Treatment Manual, is a well-organized, evidence-based resource

for clinicians who intervene in one of the most challenging and complex problems in high conflict shared custody-parent-child

contact problems. She provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for this work, which is grounded in Family Systems, and

details morespecific interventions that address individual, relationship and larger system issues. The addenda contain useful too ls

and resourcesto structure treatment,including a 14-sessionFundamental TreatmentPlan.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:

•This book provides a comprehensive review of social science literature relevant to reunifying a child with their

parent.

•Grounded in family systems theory, the author draws on evidence-based techniques and methods to address the chal-

lenging aspects of these cases.

•Chapters in this book address therapeutic work with individuals and family relationships in a clear, detailed sequence.

This book provides useful and practical treatment templates to assist the practitioner with their work.

Keywords: Alienation; Estrangement; Parent-Child Contact Problems; Reunification.

Mental health professionals who work on parent–child contact problems (Fidler, Bala, & Saini,

2013; Judge &, Deutsch, 2017) enter a complex clinical undertaking, and the difficulty of the work

is amplified by the family court involvement that often accompanies the intervention. Some of the

challenges include that clients, particularly the timesharing parent and child(ren), are quite resistant

to interventions whose goal is reunification of a child with the nontimesharing parent. Although the

nontimesharing parent may express motivation and cooperation to engage in the treatment initially,

they see the changes that are needed to improve their relationship with their child as being with

others, not themselves, and they quickly manifest similar opposition and resistance to an essential

focus on their contribution to the parent–child relationship problem. Progress in resolving parent–

child contact problems almost always involve the need for both parents to change their parenting

and co-parenting behaviors to achieve their reunification goals. In this sense, all family members

are involuntary clients. If this challenge was not enough, these cases have a prevalence of personal-

ity pathology in the parents and significant psychological vulnerabilities in the child(ren) that add to

the challenges of building and maintaining a working alliance with family members. Further adding

to the challenges to effective treatment the likelihood that one parent will initiate court involvement

to terminate the treatment always looms large, which is a process that, regardless of the outcome,

typically destroys any possibility of continued work once the treatment has been the subject of liti-

gation (Sullivan, in press). Finally, at a broader socio-cultural level, the understanding of and inter-

ventions for parent–child contact problems are a highly controversial, emerging area in the family

law field, with a degree of polarization in advocacy groups that is unlike any I have experienced.

Corresponding: sullydoc@aol.com

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 57 No. 1, January 2019 118–120

© 2019 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts