Four Useful Interventions in Brief Family Therapy*

At the Brief Family Therapy Center we have developed some interventions that have repeatedly been found useful. Once a generalizable intervention is designed for a particular case and found effective, the team attempts to replicate by using it in other appropriate situations. When a pattern of usefulness emerges, it is time to think about and study what is going on that makes the intervention useful. The purpose of this paper is to describe four such interventions, the situations in which to use them or not use them, and our thinking about what is going on in each example.