TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 3-FULL ISSUE

360 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 3 Lastly, the model using family functioning to predict suicidal SIB was not able to successfully converge because of reaching the iteration limit, possibly because of the small sample size. After examining the suggested modification indices, the model was still not able to converge. Thus, we concluded that the suicidal SIB model was a poor model, meaning that family functioning alone was not predictive of suicidal SIB in our sample. Discussion The goals of the current study were to examine the family environment of adolescents seeking treatment for symptoms of BPD, as well as their experiences of SIB, and to better understand what aspects of family functioning relate to SIB. Unique strengths of this study include the emphasis on assessing models of family functioning as it relates to SIB and exploring differences between SIB intent types (suicidal SIB, nonsuicidal SIB, and SIB with ambivalence toward life). Further, because participants were clients seeking counseling from community-based master’s-level clinicians and no clients were excluded from participating in this study, results may generalize to other community samples. We found that adolescents and caregivers often reported family functioning scores that met criteria for distressed families. Interestingly, adolescents and caregivers agreed on a majority of the subscales of family functioning, suggesting that the distress is mutually experienced. Adolescents and their caregivers only differed on reports of behavioral control (e.g., “[my family does not] hold any rules or standards”) and communication (e.g., “when someone [in my family] is upset the others know why”). This self-reported familial distress supports the social component of the biosocial theory (Linehan, 1993) in that the adolescents with traits of BPD engaged in SIB and experienced unhealthy family environments. Additionally, we found high lifetime rates of SIB in our sample of adolescents. As in previous studies (e.g., Anestis et al., 2015), adolescents in the current study engaged in nonsuicidal SIB more frequently than suicidal or ambivalent SIB, and cutting was the most common method. Notably, our model of family functioning successfully predicted higher levels of both nonsuicidal SIB and ambivalent SIB. In particular, problem-solving, conflict, and adolescent-reported communication had consistently large effect sizes, suggesting that these subscales contributed more to SIB than other subscales. Although no previous studies have examined adolescent SIB and familial problem- solving to our knowledge, the findings that SIB was related to familial conflict (Huang et al., 2017) and communication (Halstead et al., 2014) corroborate the results of previous studies. The success of the family functioning model in predicting SIB aligns with family systems theory. Specifically, adolescents in our sample may engage in SIB as a coping skill because their family lacks healthy problem-solving skills and thus models poor coping (which aligns with a description by Halstead et al., 2014). Additionally, adolescent SIB may function to temporarily end conflict in the family because it diverts the family’s attention away from the immediate problems. For example, Oldershaw et al. (2008) found that parents avoided conflict and felt like they were “walking on eggshells” (p. 142) after learning of their adolescents’ SIB. Another possible explanation is that the adolescents in our sample may serve as scapegoats within their family, acting as a focal point of a disturbed family system. From a structural family systems perspective, when there are problems within family subsystem relationships, oftentimes the child—typically the most vulnerable one— becomes the focus of the family’s problems (Wetchler, 2003); this trend is consistent with our findings.