213 In this workshop, a veteran therapist with 30 years experience in community mental health in inner-city New York will explore the lessons the field has learned about working with multiproblem families since Salvador Minuchin's landmark book Families of the Slums. We'll use videotaped family sessions to examine the relevance of "traditional" therapeutic qualities like curiosity, patience, concern, and persistence. We'll explore how to adapt structural family therapy methods to meet the needs of today's poor families. Participants will learn strategies for reestablishing family connectedness in multiproblem families, how to use symbolic structural family therapy techniques, and what therapeutic approaches help clients work through traumatic experiences. The session will promote greater awareness of the fundamental skills necessary in a therapist who does this work, of the values differences that exist when working with poor, multiproblem families, and of the dilemmas and challenges of maintaining a therapeutic relationship with "difficult" families.