Attachment-Based Considerations for Addressing Adolescent Substance Use (ASU) in a Family Context

In this article, we highlight adolescence as a transitional period of great importance to families, outline the risk of adolescent substance use (ASU), and discuss the challenge of family therapists to adequately address issues of substance use in the therapy process. We also mention the increasing use of attachment theory as a conceptual tool, and discuss how it has recently been used to understand ASU. In this article, attachment-based considerations are proposed to address mild/moderate ASU issues that arise in the context of family therapy. A clinical narrative is provided to further illustrate the application of these considerations.