Empowerment Family Services focuses on providing highly effective treatment for acting out adolescents and children through a comprehensive, in-home model that emphasizes a family focused and community based approach.  This approach emphasizes treatment of the child through a focus on the entire family system. Services are tailored to identify and address the family’s unique, core issues, while teaching the parents effective skills and in-home structure to successfully impact and redirect the specific, problem behaviors and dysfunctional family patterns.

The in-home structure is tailored to treat not only the symptomatic, problem behaviors, but the roots of their cause that have lead to the correlated, dysfunctional patterns.  Sessions are provided within the environments the child or youth is displaying difficulties, typically home and school.  Services provide: an in-depth and individualized assessment, short and long-term treatment plans, effective and researched communication and parenting skills customized to the family’s specific needs, linking to ongoing resources within their schools and communities, identification of related psychotherapeutic familial issues and intensive discharge planning to normalize the family back to healthy independence. 

The treatment intervention is brief, intensive and solution focused, averaging 2-6 months at 2-5 visits per week, depending on the level of the family’s need or crisis.  Treatment benefits from increased initial visits to successfully implement the comprehensive changes required to achieve the family’s goals.  Sessions then focus on tapering significantly towards discharge.  This level of treatment can be used to prevent escalating or predictable problems, as well as providing crisis intervention, concrete services and intensive therapeutic treatment. 

Focus on the Family System:  Most children and youth experiencing crisis behaviors are reacting to the environments of their home and peer group.  If these do not change, a child completing a successful in-patient treatment intervention could regress to meet the homeostasis of the family’s original coping environment.  Empowerment Family Services has discharged 95% of referrals successfully without the need for a more restrictive environment, avoiding recommendations for lengthy, in-patient residential treatment.

The focus of this type of service emphasizes comprehensive change of the family’s overall functioning.  The parents are trained as experts in setting highly effective, in-home structure that positively impacts targeted behaviors.  This model emphasizes positive incentives and effective redirecting techniques, appropriate for even severe acting out behaviors.  Corrective skills, in and out-of-home consequences and detailed structure are also consistently utilized, but the dominant focus is continually directed towards prevention, incentives and solution-focused goals.  Preventative teaching skills are considered foundational to effectively shift from a home environment of crisis management which typically reinforces the child’s acting out behaviors.  Highly specific communication and relationship building skills are taught to the parents to impact the overall calm and healthy tone of the home environment.  The parents then become role models and teachers of the specific behavioral and emotional changes the child needs to sustain long-term, positive change.

An additional aspect of treatment is the support of parents in identifying their own unresolved emotional issues that are directly impacting their child’s functioning.  This aspect of treatment is followed only by a strong therapeutic rapport coupled with the parent’s willingness to explore their personal coping limitations or historical issues that are clearly affecting their children’s reactive behaviors.  Parents are then able to address unique vulnerabilities they present which have affected their children, both positively and negatively.

The Goal of Services is to teach and empower families with specific skills and resources to effectively change their entire family system through a normalized approach that builds on their strengths and goals, while targeting their vulnerabilities and negative cycles.  This type of treatment model impacts the identified child indefinitely, as the treatment environment is maintained through the parents and siblings as the child grows into adulthood and beyond.

Description of The Family Preservation Model

Empowerment Family Services emphasizes philosophies of the Family Preservation approach.  The Family Preservation Model is a practice philosophy guided by values which uphold the uniqueness, dignity, and the essential role which a family plays in the health and well being of its members.  Services range from in-depth assessment, preventative and positive skill/environment building to corrective and/or intensive, crisis intervention.  Children’s emotional and behavioral problems are impacted at their source, while empowering the parents with effective skills to achieve their family’s goals on a daily and long-term basis within the home.  Family preservation services utilizes a “big picture” approach to assess and treat the entire family system, focusing on the core, foundational problem areas which have caused and/or maintained the emotional/behavioral problems identified in the youth.

Family Systems and Brief, Solution Focused Models

A variety of aspects from family systems and brief, solution focused models are utilized to provide parenting information which focuses on effective communication skills, in-home structural skills, while adding psychotherapy and coaching for deeper emotional issues.  Every parent’s treatment is tailored to their key issues and main goals.  Teaching the parents effective motivational and disciplinary techniques to use within the home environment has a dramatic, long-term impact since that is where most behaviors and coping skills are directly or indirectly learned or reinforced.  Many parents also need to heal or transform from their own dysfunctional patterns or history to effectively become the solution for their family system.  Family members are encouraged and supported to invest in their treatment outcome as their long-term life direction.  With effective tools to identify and shape problem behaviors, the caregivers become the child’s most influential teacher or guide.  Regressive tendencies are predicted and targeted through flexible concepts and tools that can be evolved to accommodate future difficulties. 

                   Commitments to Family Empowerment

Values:

• The definition of “family” is varied and each family should be approached as a unique system.
• People of all ages can best develop, with few exceptions, through the unified growth of their entire family system or through the support of primary family members as an important resource.
• Every family system holds an incredible potential to change and most troubled families have a strong motivation to achieve this potential.
• The dignity and right to privacy of all family members should be respected.
• Family members themselves are crucial partners in the healing process.
• The family’s ethnic, cultural, and religious background, values, and community ties are important resources in the helping process.

Implications:

• A systems perspective is used for assessment and change.
• The family’s strengths and resources are central to identify and impact vulnerabilities and negative coping skills that have sabotaged targeted needs and goals.
• A working partnership is established with the family.
• A holistic view of the family is maintained, including physical, environmental, historical, emotional, and spiritual aspects.
• Mutuality among family members and their therapist is maintained during assessment, treatment plan development, and treatment implementation.
• The specific and unique values and goals of each family are central, while increasing skill development, use of resources, effective communication and successful follow-through.
• Treatment services utilize solution-focused and brief therapy techniques, focusing directly and consistently on targeted goals.
• The family is regarded as the expert regarding its history, relationships, needs, and goals.
• Treatment aims to prevent out-of-home placements and significantly increase the family’s confident independence.

 Logistical Parameters:

• Services are primarily provided within the family’s home.  Treatment also coordinates and builds upon existing resources from school, mental health, and community agencies.
• Sessions average one to two hours, two to four times per week
• Treatment interventions average three to four months, significantly tapering session time and frequency towards closure.
• Crisis phone contact is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
• Follow-up support is available for 3 months after closure to reinforce successful independence.
• Referrals typically come from an in-patient hospitalization, an out-patient therapist or a school or family referral due to severe emotional and/or behavioral problems being displayed.

Lilly J. Landikusic, L.M.F.T. has been working with severely emotionally disturbed children and youth for over 20 years in a wide variety of diverse and creative treatment settings.  She received her Masters in Counseling Psychology with a Holistic Specialization from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California.  She is 2nd year certified in the Teaching Family Model.  She also has Practitioner’s Certification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  She has developed several creative programs for inner city and emotionally disturbed youth, throughout the states of Connecticut, California and Utah, one winning a national award for innovation from the Y.M.C.A.

Empowerment Counseling Services has typically been reimbursed by the following insurances, with limitations depending on specific benefits:  Tricare, UNI EAP, CHIP and UBH.  Valueoptions, Cigna and other insurances have covered our services through special circumstances or more severe need.  When seeking services, it is recommended that parties contact their individual insurance to learn how to best access the most ideal treatment services needed within their specific insurance and benefits.

We offer private pay options depending on intensity and frequency of need.  Please call Clinical Director, Lilly J. Landikusic, LMFT at (801) 604-1134 for more information.