Living on the Razor's Edge:
Solution-Oriented Brief Family Therapy with Self-Harming Adolescents

Matthew D. Selekman

Praise for Living on the Razor's Edge

"Selekman presents an integrative and flexible solution-oriented brief family therapy model for self-harming adolescents that integrates the best elements of solution-focused, narrative, postmodern, strategic, cognitive, and expressive therapy approaches with Native American healing methods and rituals."
—Family Therapy

Overview – Excerpt – Table of Contents

Filling the gap in both the brief therapy and family therapy literature, Living on the Razor’s Edge breaks new ground by providing therapists with a practice-oriented guidebook for working with this rapidly growing and challenging treatment population. Matthew Selekman presents an innovative and flexible client-informed solution-brief family therapy model for self-harming adolescents that integrates the best elements of solution-focused, narrative, postmodern, strategic, cognitive, and expressive therapy approaches with Native American healing methods and rituals. Numerous connection-building therapeutic experiments and rituals are presented for helping foster closer and more meaningful relationships between parents and adolescents. Many of the therapeutic techniques and strategies presented in this volume are empirically supported by research on adolescent development, protective factors of resilient children and adolescents, and treatment outcome studies. The book is packed with case examples and interview transcripts of culturally diverse clients. Selekman also demonstrates how to do one-person family therapy with adolescents where conjoint family work proved to be futile due to serious parental or marital difficulties, a lack of family support, or to better meet the developmental needs of older adolescents.

Since adolescent self-harming problems can be quite complex and often attract the involvement of many helping professionals from larger systems, Selekman provides a highly practical and comprehensive multisystemic family assessment framework to guide therapists in determining at what systems levels to target interventions. Another exciting feature of this book is Selekman’s Stress-Busters’ Leadership group. This 8-session skill-building psychoeducational group was specifically designed to meet the unique needs of self-harming adolescents and can be implemented in any school or treatment setting.

About the Author

Matthew D. Selekman, MSW, has a private practice and provides family therapy training and consultation in Evanston, IL. He is a member of the training faculty for the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change in Evanston, IL.

ISBN 10: 0-393-70335-5
2002 / 320 pages / hardcover