The Strategic Family Therapy Center carries forward the work of Jay Haley, MRI's first Research Director, one of its founders and a pioneer in family therapy.
Haley called the therapy Strategic because "it is a therapy where the therapist initiates what happens during therapy, designs a specific approach for each person's presenting problem, and where the therapist takes responsibility for directly influencing people.
After leaving MRI, Haley collaborated for a number of years with Salvador Minuchin where they mutually influenced each other's thinking. Minuchin's structural family therapy is a part of Haley's strategic model.
He described the therapy in one of his many notable books-"Problem-Solving Therapy," which helps to describe the therapy. He encouraged live supervision, whereby beginning therapists learn the art and skill of this new way of doing therapy by practicing in front of a one-way mirror, supervised by a team that assists the trainees in how to be most effective at helping clients to solve problems. That tradition is carried on here at MRI.
The theory underlying Strategic therapy has been the basis for most of the significant evidence-based family therapies of today.
The Center was established at MRI in 2001 through the vision of Eileen Bobrow, M.A., MFT. The Center offers therapy to individuals, couples, families, children and adolescents. Therapy fees are affordable and based on ability to pay. Clinic hours are flexible.
Under the direction of Ms. Bobrow, the Strategic Family Therapy Center also provides training, consultation and live supervision to interns, licensed therapists and agencies interested in learning the model. Ms. Bobrow has more than 32 years of experience helping families, couples and individuals. She received extensive training in Strategic Family Therapy with Jay Haley and Cloe Madanes and was a regional faculty member of their Family Therapy Institute of Washington D.C.
She has trained mental health professionals from around the nation and the world both through the Strategic Family Therapy program at MRI and as a consultant and teacher throughout her long career.
