Personal Reflections of A Family Therapist*

In this informal paper I discuss my personal evolution as a family therapist, developments in the field, the politics of a systems approach in conventional settings, resistances to family and marital therapy by other professionals, some still puzzling aspects of family therapy, whether family or marital therapy works and what do we mean by working, directions my own work has taken, some comments about the nature of family life, the satisfactions and frustrations and stresses of being a family therapist, some hidden agendas of family therapy practices, how one's own personal family relationships affect and are affected by this kind of work, the casualties among family and marital therapists, and, finally, whether family therapists should have family therapy for themselves and their own families.     

The Discourse of Dress and Appearance: Identity Talk and a Rhetoric of Review

This article examines how identities are constructed and maintained via talk about personal dress and appearance. In this article, we introduce the concept of rhetoric of review, which is defined as the taken-for-granted rules that guide the evaluations of the appearances of self and others. Three basic components of a rhetoric of review are identified: moral precepts, program neutralizations, and review neutralizations. Data were derived from eight in-depth interviews with eighteen sorority members from a single university in the Southeastern United States. These data were used to expand Stone's (1962) conceptual framework of program and review by including Sykes and Matza's (1957) neutralization techniques. The purpose of this article is to bridge the interactionist perspectives on appearance and identity talk so as to augment our understanding of the discourse of appearance.     

Clinical and Supervisory Considerations for Transgender Therapists: Implications for Working with Clients

Transgender therapists have unique and valuable perspectives into how gender organizes the therapeutic process. Currently, in the MFT field, there is discussion of the cisgender therapist's experience in the therapy room, but no known articles on the transgender therapist's experience. This article provides insight into the experiences of transgender therapists around issues of self‐disclosure, social locations of both therapist and client, and clinical supervision. Drawing from our clinical experiences as transmen, we highlight special considerations for working with cisgender, queer, and transgender clients. Implications for supervision of transgender therapists are also discussed. As more gender diverse students seek MFT training, there is an urgent need to acknowledge their perspectives. This article is a call for beginning conversations in this direction.     

Relationship Dynamics and Healthy Exchange across the Family Life Cycle: Implications for Practice

The capacity to form and develop healthy interpersonal relationships with others is fundamental for human development. In the realm of practice, the theory of social exchange is among the most prominent conceptual frameworks for examining and understanding human behaviors and relationship dynamics. While interpersonal bonds may take several forms across the family life cycle, this article addresses how healthy social exchange can provide a basis for establishing a mutually fulfilling alliance by examining three different types of interpersonal relationships: dating relationships, marital relationships, and parent–child co-residential relationships. Interventions aimed at marriage and family therapists as well as social work practitioners working with couples and families facing relationship troubles are discussed.     

Hospitality in Family Therapy Practice: A Further Engagement with Jacques Derrida

Derrida's concept of hospitality has been proposed by some authors working from a collaborative perspective as an interesting tool to reflect on the therapeutic relationship as an ethical relationship in which the therapist develops a welcoming openness to the client. In this paper, we engage with this recent emphasis on the therapist's ethical position of welcoming the client's otherness and turn to Jacques Derrida's original texts with the aim of developing an in‐depth understanding of what exactly is at stake in this therapeutic position of hospitality. This reading evolves into an understanding of how Derrida's notion of hospitality invites clinicians to identify how the therapeutic position intricately intertwines healing and violence. The concept of hospitality calls on therapists to accept the complexity of therapeutic responsibility as a form of supportive presence that necessarily and simultaneously involves the violence of appropriation and power difference.     

Art,Science and Curiosity: Research and Research Methodologies in Australian Family Therapy 1979–2000

This article presents an historical analysis of the development of research and research methodologies in an Australian context. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy was chosen as the site of the analysis. The first section of data consists of the articles that represent themselves as ‘research’ in the period from 1979 (the journal's inception) to 2000. These texts have been analysed using bibliometric analysis. The second section of data consists of commentary articles about research in family therapy. This data has been analysed using discourse analysis. Overall, I have been interested in how family therapists have defined ‘research’; how family therapists have chosen to inquire; representations of the researcher in Australian family therapy; associations between theoretical or clinical developments and the methodologies that have been chosen for inquiries. Findings from the study reveal very limited representations of research in the journal for the period under review, and an apparent struggle for family therapists to undertake a discussion about what research actually is. Questions are raised around how this has occurred, and some ideas are presented as to how research knowledges can be included in debates around theory diversity in family therapy.     

Family Support Groups for Family Members of Mentally Ill Offenders: Therapeutic Factors

This study investigates therapeutic factors of a Family Support Group (FSG) intervention for family members of mentally ill offenders. Seventeen family members completed the ‘Group Therapeutic Factors‐Client Questionnaire’ (GTF‐CQ‐28) during four sessions of two FSGs. Results indicate that family members experienced the following therapeutic factors over the course of treatment: the relational climate, interactional confirmation, expressing and experiencing mutual positive feelings, forgetting own problems, hope from seeing progress in others, guidance from therapists, and getting interpersonal feedback treatment. The therapeutic factors, including learning by observation, support from the group, and universality of problems, correlated with a decrease in self‐blame, improved emotional well‐being, and experiencing less loss of control over one's life, respectively. Further, family members were satisfied with what the FSG has provided for them personally and for the relation with their relative. Finally, clinical implications of the FSG are discussed. The study sheds light on valuable therapeutic factors within an FSG and the important role of therapists.     

The Discursive Performance of the Alliance in Family Therapy: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Following the ‘discursive’ turn in family therapy, the attention of practitioners shifted towards understanding how culture and language shape meaning‐making in therapy. In this article, we demonstrate how conversation analysis (CA) can be used to examine the processes and outcomes of systemic/constructionist practice. We used CA to study collaborative interactions of a renowned constructionist therapist Karl Tomm and one client‐family. Viewing collaboration as a pivotal aspect of the therapeutic alliance, we demonstrate how the ‘split’ within‐system alliances were developed and sustained in the course of therapy and how they were discursively transformed into ‘intact’ alliances. The therapist's efforts to align with perspectives of family members (and subsystems) seemed pivotal in this process.     

Predictors of Family Support and Well-Being Among Black and Latina/o Sexual Minorities

ABSTRACT

Sexual minorities are receiving an increasing amount of attention within sociological research on families. However, much of the existing work on these families has been limited to largely White, middle-class, and highly educated individuals. Using national data from the Social Justice Sexuality Project, this study fills a much-needed gap by exploring predictors of family support and the relationship between family support and well-being among Black and Latina/o sexual minorities. We find that sexual identity, how out one is to one's family, and relationship status predict levels of family support. In addition, we find that among Black and Latina/o individuals, family support is an important factor influencing health and well-being. Other social statuses such as gender identity, sexual identity, and relationship status are associated with happiness and self-rated health as well. Our work suggests that sexual minorities of color have unique family dynamics that should be studied from an intersectional perspective. Further investigation into the family dynamics of sexual minorities of color should pay particular attention to individuals' positionality within systems of gender, racial, and sexual identity disadvantage to help understand their health and well-being.     

Visions and Revisions in Family Therapy in Africa

This paper reviews the changes that have taken place in the field of guidance given to the family in Africa in the last one hundred years. It distinguishes several eras in ideas about the family and ways of working with the family in Africa. It traces adaptations in both orientation and technique made by contemporary family therapists in Africa to respond to the changing needs and problems of today's African client family. The essay is restricted to the experience of family therapy in Africa south of the Sahara, excluding South Africa.     

Telephone Troubles: Interactional Breakdown and its Management by Stutterers and Their Listeners*

While both face-to-face and telephone interaction involve problems of management for stutterers and their listeners, the absence of visual cues in telephone talk poses special problems which can lead to interactional breakdown. These problems are accentuated by factors such as an individual's pattern of stuttering and adaptations to stuttering, the awareness context in which interaction takes place, and the nature of the relationship between the speakers. The author's sociological perspective goes beyond the clinical perspective of speech pathology in helping to understand the interactional and identity troubles of stutterers. His analysis also shows how both stutterers' breaches of conversational norms and the practices used to remedy these breaches illuminate taken-for-granted expectations in telephone interaction.     

From Transgression to Suppression: Implications of Moral Values and Societal Norms on Emotional Labour

This article endeavours to develop a conceptual perspective of moral values and societal norms, and how they impact on emotion regulation within employment contexts. The article draws on social psychology and emotional labour literature to explore the concept of contextual emotional labour. I argue that the conflicting requirements of one's societal and employment contexts may require one to transgress one's moral values to fulfil job requirements. I also argue that it is important to examine the aversive state(s) that may follow one's transgression and how this is managed in the workplace.     

Transnational Intersectionality in Family Therapy With Resettled Refugees

In this article, we discuss incorporating the transnational intersectionality framework in family therapy with resettled refugees. Transnational intersectionality is an extension of the framework of intersectionality which helps to better understand complexities of power and oppression across national contexts and their influence on refugees' lives. Adopting this framework alerts family therapists to: (a) develop critical awareness of refugee's transnational contexts; (b) understand differences in experiences of social identities across contexts; (c) acknowledge postmigration factors of oppression affecting resettlement; and (d) critically reflect upon therapist–interpreter–client intersectionalities. This shifts our conceptualization of therapy with refugees to actively consider transnational contexts which refugees uniquely occupy. We describe the framework and provide two case illustrations to highlight its usefulness.     

The Family Rule Concept in the Theory of Family Therapy**

This paper is an exploration of the usefulness of the concept of a family rule in systems thinking. Wittgenstein's analysis of rule conforming behaviour is considered alongside the early contributions of Jackson, Haley and others. Confusion has resulted from using the word “rule” in both its everyday sense and as a theoretical construct. A parallel confusion shows Itself in the activity of reframing where the selection of an alternative context is often theoretically based while the client receives an explanation in the language of everyday intentional actions.     

Communicating for the good of the state: A post-symmetrical polemic on persuasion in ethical public relations

As inarguably one of the most influential theories in public relations scholarship, the symmetrical theory devalues the most common public relations objective, persuasion. This article deconstructs Grunig's work and re-constructs classic rhetoric to provide a post-symmetrical direction for public relations scholarship devoted to influencing behavior. By viewing the practice of persuasion from the perspectives of Aristotle, Plato, Isocrates, Burke, Nietzsche and others, this paper provides ethical and procedural guidelines on how today's public relations scholars can refocus the public relations agenda to focus more on real-world issues.     

Co-evolving with Anorectic Families Difference is a Singular Moment

An individual practitioner's development as a family therapist occurs in the context of the family therapy movement, most manifestly present in its literature and in seminars and workshops offered by its leading exponents. The process by which the therapist interacts with the broader field and consequently incurs shifts in perspective is rarely decribed, or theoretically elucidated. In this current paper, the author's changing orientation to the treatment of anorexia nervosa is viewed via theoretical discussions and case illustrations. The concept of co-evolution, as defined by both Bateson and Jantsch, is invoked to explain how interaction with other practitioners and literature can produce changes in therapeutic emphasis, and Prigogine's concepts of dissipative structures and bifurcation points are utilised in locating both therapeutic and theoretical shifts in time. The discussion briefly considers how therapists can co-evolve with conservative work situations to produce broader contextual changes.     

Family Therapy and Lithium Deficiency*

Lithium carbonate's usefulness in relieving the more dramatic symptoms of bipolar-affective disorder can obscure the family systems components of this illness. A compromised form of family therapy results which may stabilize the marriage but cause troubles for the larger family system. This paper offers a partial modus operandi for keeping family therapy systems oriented and avoiding the infantilization of the identified patient which occurs when the importance of purely medical treatment is overplayed.     

Integrating Reflective Practice in Family Therapy Supervision

This paper discusses how to integrate reflective practice in the family therapy supervisory relationship. This enables family therapists to think creatively, be insightful, and develop a range of perspectives regarding systemic formulation and practice. It encourages review of the past and promotes understanding in the present with the aim to improve therapists work with families in the future. Reflective practice encourages independent thinking and learning and helps therapists to develop a systemic process of critical enquiry to investigate and critique their own practice. It encourages therapists to be self‐reflective and develop confidence to think hypothetically regarding change. This allows them to pose questions for exploration, construct a new lens to conceptualise therapy and the therapeutic relationship and develop awareness of the personal as well as the professional self.     

The Marriage and Family Therapy Practice Research Network (MFT‐PRN): Creating a More Perfect Union Between Practice and Research

This article describes the Marriage and Family Therapy Practice Research Network (MFT‐PRN). The MFT‐PRN is designed to build a professional community based on practice‐informed research and research‐informed practice, increase the diversity of participants in MFT research, and unify researchers and clinicians. Clinics choose measures from a list that best represent their clinic needs. Clients' outcomes are assessed regularly, and therapists receive immediate graphical feedback on how clients are progressing or digressing. Data are pooled to create a large and diverse database, while improving client outcomes. We will discuss advantages of the MFT‐PRN for researchers, therapists, clients, and agencies, and provide one model that we hope will inform other collaborative clinical‐research models in the field of marriage and family therapy. Video Abstract is found in the online version of the article .