SFR Training Curriculum
Counselor Training Curriculum Highlights
Structured Family Recovery®
Addressing ASAM’s Six Dimensions
As a foundation for the Structured Family Recovery® (SFR) Counselor Training and all subsequent advanced SFR trainings, students will explore how SFR addresses ASAM’s Six Dimensions in a way we have not done in our field before. The book It Takes a Family: A Cooperative Approach to Lasting Sobriety (Hazelden, 2014, foreword by Robert L. DuPont, MD) has created a framework for family recovery teams that actively impacts all six dimensions. (The first two being primarily physical in nature also require patient willingness, which is often a factor of a well trained, family team’s influence.) As Robert L. DuPont writes in the foreword to the book:
“In this book, Debra Jay unlocks the secrets of this revolutionary new approach to addiction [i.e., The New Paradigm]. She adds a significant new dimension by focusing on the role of the family both in creating this system of care management and making it work long term.”
Understanding Success in Terms of Intervention, Treatment, and the Continuum of Care:
Professional Limitations and Questioning the Rubrics Used to Measure Success
It’s long been understood that relapse has been an enduring issue in the alcohol and drug treatment field. Unable to measure accurately the relapse rates post-treatment, the statistical spread commonly used is a relapse rate of 50 to 90 percent in the first year after treatment.
Students will review the different ways, as a field, we have tried to improve these numbers, but without consistent and dependable results. Exercises will include ways we have attempted to change definitions of success and expectations of what happens after treatment, and how these efforts do not match what families want and what they think they are paying for. We will then compare results for the general-public with results for impaired professionals engaged in diversion programs.
Physician Health Programs and the Eight Essential Elements: Lasting Sobriety for a Small Subset of Addicted People
Receiving exceptional support that includes eight essential elements, 78 percent of doctors have a zero relapse rate over five years post-treatment (“Setting the standard for recovery,” DuPont, et. al.). Students will learn about the eight essential elements and how SFR creates a pathway for people to implement these elements into their families, which includes the newly recovering person. DuPont writes in the discussion section of the study on PHPs that these elements can be successfully used as a chronic care model for the general population of addicted people. Students will learn the process of implementing these eight essential elements in a palpable manner to the entire family through the SFR process.
As Dr. DuPont wrote: “On the basis of these findings, there is reason for renewed optimism for individuals with [addictions] and their families.”