Building an Expanded Therapeutic Alliance: A Task Analysis with Families Trapped in Parental-Adolescent Conflict

Parental-adolescent conflict is part of the normal developmental cycle of families, but when it occurs in a dysfunctional way, it is associated with the appearance of various harmful conditions for the family system and for the adolescent in particular. Family therapy is one of the main options for psychotherapeutic intervention in these cases and has ample evidence of its effectiveness. The success of this intervention is conditioned to the construction of an adequate therapeutic alliance with the family, but the process of this task has not been clarified yet. The present study is a task analysis, the purpose of which was to create a heuristic model of how an expanded alliance may be built in these kinds of cases. The model was revised and improved from the intensive analysis of six cases. The resulting model can be a useful guide for family therapists in that it describes the specific client and therapist behaviors involved in balancing the alliance, as well as the potential obstacles and suggested ways to resolve them.