Stop Treating the Behavior: An ESFT Approach to Mapping and Interrupting Family Interaction Cycles

LCCNC invites you to attend:

Stop Treating the Behavior: An ESFT Approach to Mapping and Interrupting Family Interaction Cycles
Friday, October 2
12:00 PM – 01:00 PM Eastern
ZOOM
Click Here to Register

When clinicians focus exclusively on a child’s or adolescent’s presenting behavior, they often miss what the behavior is communicating about the family system around it. Acting out, withdrawal, school refusal, and emotional dysregulation frequently function as visible endpoints of invisible relational cycles — patterns of interaction that family members repeat, often without awareness, in ways that maintain the very symptoms the family is seeking to resolve.

This session introduces practitioners to an Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) framework for identifying, mapping, and interrupting those cycles. Participants will explore how ESFT conceptualizes behavior as embedded in family structure and relational sequences, and will practice applying this lens to clinical material drawn from real-world community mental health and school-based contexts.

The session moves from theory to application. Participants will learn to construct a visual interaction cycle map — a clinical tool that makes the relational pattern visible to both the clinician and the family — and will examine practical strategies for creating a structural interruption: a deliberate therapeutic move that shifts the sequence before it completes. Attention is given to cultural responsiveness, the impact of trauma on family interaction patterns, and the clinical decisions involved in timing an interruption effectively.

This is a skills-focused session. Participants will leave with concrete tools they can apply in their next session.