About The Family Recovery Institute

The Institute promotes hope and help for people with complex emotional and interpersonal problems including addiction, the family members who love them, and the professionals who treat them.

“Small shifts produce big results” is one of the Institute’s foundational beliefs. Our work shows family members and therapists how to create shifts in the family toward wellness and freedom from despair, chaos, pain and loss. New ways of talking, thinking, and participating in the family arrangement can be practiced and implemented right away. If even one family member reads and attempts our approach the cycles of relapse, loss, pain and disease can be interrupted.

Most family solutions provided these days for addiction or mental illness focus on the addict, the patient, and their disease. If they do focus on the family, they discuss ways the family can cope with, manage or otherwise get rid of the illness (or the person with it). Employing Dr. Perlmutter’s ground-breaking model of “Stress-Induced Impaired Coping (SIIC),” The Institute guides family members toward understanding their system, their position in it, and the steps necessary to help everyone get well.

Kenneth and his teams have been treating families caught in inter-generational cycles of addiction and mental illness for nearly 30 years. More than 3000 family members have been treated employing the SIIC model. A small group of national-level treatment teams today incorporate the model and its engagement strategies for families.

The Institute strives to breathe hope into seemingly impossible conditions. We practice intentional ways of interacting, listening, and loving to empower our clients to shift toward wellness and interrupt impaired coping in the present and future generations.

FRI’s primary activities include:

  • Providing multi-family, multi-day relationship and communication healing workshops

  • Developing assessment (testing) protocols to measure family system distress and measure family system health and healing

  • Training clinicians in the SIIC model

  • Consulting to treatment centers regarding family programming and team building

  • Offering a professional training certificate (FSAT) in Family Systems and Addiction Treatment

  • Promoting the critical importance of treating the family system as an integral part of any behavioral healthcare treatment service through publishing, blogging, lecturing and workshops

Why FRI?

– Helps Clinical Teams do their best work

– Builds Family Programs

– Trains Clinicians in the proven SIIC model

FRI incorporates a systemic approach including family systems therapy, systemic family assessment and the Stress-Induced Impaired Coping (SIIC) model into clinical programming in order to:

  • Engage the most complex and challenging clients and their wounded family members

  • Improve clinical outcomes by involving family throughout the treatment process

  • Examine and interrupt inter-generational distress and its epigenetic transmission

  • Evaluate, diagnose, and treat wounded family systems

  • Measure family system change and healing

  • Redirect disabling counter-transference responses with difficult family members

  • Deepen team cohesion and shared sense of commitment