In this episode, Scott discusses his beginnings as a family therapist and his struggles with helping families, which lead him to working with Charles Fishman, MD, an expert in Structural Family Therapy, and later Jay Haley. He discussed reviewing videotapes of their work and began to see the patterns in family therapy and got interested in process analysis research. He noticed that there were "key moments of change”, which lead him to create micro steps to help therapists develop their family therapy skills quickly, to be effective in treatment. We discussed his early work with families and teens and all the great, creative, strategic ways of helping parents to manage behavioral issues, and strengthen their relationships. He explained that he was able to do research on the approach about its efficacy and evidence basis, and also included the measures to help organizations to support their staff to utilize the model, and use technology to track progress and intervene when a therapist might be struggling in certain areas. Some years later, as he was reviewing cases where there were treatment “failures”, he described that he found how, when there is trauma involved, the family began to stabilize and become closer, but then not achieve the second order change because the trauma’s effect on the family system would become more apparent. He realized he did not have a model to address trauma, so he did the research trying to find an existing approach, but found there were no family therapy models with the micro steps to address trauma. He went on to write his most recent book, Treating the Traumatized Child, and teach it to clinicians and research its effectiveness, Scott discussed online trainings that he created to help make it available for therapists to gain the skills and utilize the methods in their practice. He shared that his work now is to help make family therapy accessible to organizations and clinics, so their clinicians can learn and use family therapy, without it needing to be a massive financial and time commitment as some of the other evidence based models. His hope is that this will reduce secondary trauma, and help with “the great resignation” of mental health workers that are burnt out, through increasing confidence and competency.

Scott P. Sells, PhD, MSW, LCSW, LMFT, is former tenured Professor of Social Work, Savannah State University, Savannah, GA and Associate Professor at UNLV in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of three best-selling books, Treating the Tough Adolescent: A Family-Based, Step-by-Step Guide (1998), Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager: 7 Steps to Reestablish Authority and Reclaim Love (2001), and Treating the Traumatized Child: A Step-by-Step Family Systems Approach (Springer, 2017). Scott is currently the founder and model developer of an evidence based model known as the Parenting with Love and Logic and the Family Systems Trauma Model that are being used by both juvenile justice and child welfare in over 14 states and in Europe. He provides training and resources through the Family Trauma Institute, which can be found at familytrauma.com