Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy最新文献

The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating role of experiential avoidance in relationships between triangling configurations (balanced, mediator, cross-generational coalition, scapegoating), anxiety, and negative self-image (NS). The study sample comprised 381 university students. Data were collected from these participants using the Triangular Relationship Inventory (TRI), the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II), the Negative Self and Anxiety Subscales of Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), and a demographic information form. Findings of the structural equation modelling analyses revealed that triangling configurations and experiential avoidance (together) explained 36% of the variance in negative self and 44% of the variance in anxiety. Regarding indirect effects, it was found that experiential avoidance fully mediated the relationships between triangling configurations (except scapegoating), NS, and anxiety. The mediator type of triangling was found to play a protective role against NS and anxiety—the literature delineates the study findings.

Treating anorexia nervosa is one of the greatest challenges faced by current health policies. This paper reflects on the social and cultural aspects of this type of eating disorder and proposes an intervention approach based on narrative therapy as a complement to existing treatments. This type of therapy requires a holistic and coordinated vision of the socio-cultural and community aspects that surround both the person dealing with anorexia and their closest social circle of friends and family. The effects of anorexia, when it becomes the dominant voice in a person's narrative, need to be understood within a broader and more inclusive social context without putting all the responsibility on the person who is being bullied by anorexia. Based on the qualitative results of the Archive of Resistance presented by the Anti-Anorexia League, narrative therapy is shown to have great potential for transforming the current approach to treating anorexia in English. This paper recommends use of the poststructuralist approach of narrative therapy to collaborate with the person affected by anorexia in Spanish-speaking cultures. At the same time, it opens a discussion on the need to establish a document database, an Archive of Resistance, in Spanish, to help mitigate the effects of anorexia.

Ethno-Eco-Systemic (EES) refers to a theoretical clinical perspective that we have been developing at the FyP (fundación Familias y Parejas) in recent years. This work was presented on the day of commemoration of the institution's 40th anniversary and is the result of a collective reflective process. We invite you to consider this perspective as an aesthetic of transdisciplinary thought, closer to art than to technique and which connects ethnographic, ecological, and systemic concepts. From the readings of some thinkers, especially Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, to mention some of the most influential Europeans; Suely Rolnik and Viveiros de Castro in Brazil; Tato Pavlovski and Gregorio Baremblit in Argentina; and so many others in South America, we have been urged to revisit Bateson and revalue the power of his thinking for the family psychotherapeutic clinic.

The Open Dialogue approach has gained increasing international interest outside of its origins in Finland. However, the central principle of promoting dialogue can be a difficult concept to teach and apply. In addition, there is a wide range of authors and articles about Open Dialogue and dialogical approaches creating a potentially overwhelming number of sources for clinicians to consider. In this narrative review, we describe and synthesise the wide range of writings on how dialogue may be promoted in family therapy. This article covers the various uses of the term ‘dialogue,’ the dialogical mindset of the therapist, recommendations on how to respond to clients during meetings, the involvement of the therapist’s ‘self’ in meetings, and the use of reflecting teams. We present a concise list of recommendations to aid clinicians and to promote further discussion about dialogical practices.

As a psychologist and family therapist my professional education has had a significant impact on my personal life and how I see the world. Over the past four years I have been privileged enough to work on a PhD, which has again changed my perspective. This research examines Open Dialogue sessions using conversation analysis, which focuses on normative conversational structures and how they are utilised to achieve social actions. Conversation analysis forced me to abandon previous therapeutic concepts and look at Open Dialogue and family therapy generally from an interdisciplinary perspective. Through this process I have noticed a few recurring ideas: interactions are sequential, psychotherapy involves abstraction, and power is unavoidable and not inherently ‘bad.’ In this article, I elaborate on these ideas in the first person and how they have changed the way I practice and think about family therapy with reference to the appropriate research and literature.

There are no published studies investigating the effectiveness of relationship counselling (RC) where only one individual attends (individual relationship counselling (IRC)), in improving client psychological distress (PD). This is important to investigate considering the high prevalence of PD in this client group and the potential for its negative effects to cascade into other domains of an individual’s life. The current study aims to address this gap by investigating the short-term effectiveness of IRC on PD. This study further builds on previous research by investigating variables that may explain changes in counselling outcomes, including client demographics, interpersonal factors, and therapeutic factors. Data were collected from a national sample of 273 individuals presenting for RC at an Australian not-for-profit organisation. Results from multilevel modelling showed a significant reduction in PD over time with moderate effect size. Further, relationship status, family functioning, and the Task subscale of the Working Alliance Inventory emerged as significant predictors of PD. The results of this study have important implications for routine practice in informing opportunities to target these key variables as an avenue to increasing the effectiveness of IRC.

In 2018 I wrote an auto-ethnographic paper about my relationship with Open Dialogue and how it helped me restore my interiority after a commitment of technique-oriented Post-Milan therapy. I attempted to document this as an emergent writing style, inviting you into my own momentary world (ing). This current paper serves as a second assemblage, one that surprised me, revealing itself fully this week, focusing instead on Matter, and how the post-humanist commitment to radically different ‘systems’ has led to new inchoate relations between my body, that of other species and actors. and caused me to associate further into the rhythms of the seasons, both ecological and in the lives of the families I work with as a therapist.

The paper builds on ethnographic, qualitative research that explores the ‘No Kids in the Middle’ program for high-conflict divorce families, as practiced in the Agder region of South Norway. Parent education programs targeting parents in divorce are generally found to be ‘effective’ in the sense that parents learn about the pitfalls of conflict and become socialised into less negative patterns of co-parenting. However, a narrow understanding of the potential of such programs as vehicles for the transfer of knowledge fails to attend to the relational sides of both education and therapy, and the existential sides of parenthood. Drawing on Gert Biesta’s articulation of education as a process working along three dimensions of purpose, the paper approaches the ‘No Kids in the Middle’ program as an educational practice. It aims to explore whether the educational ambitions of the ‘No Kids in the Middle’ program should be understood primarily in the general terms of qualification (i.e., parents acquiring knowledge and skills) and socialisation (i.e., parents gaining a specific orientation toward a set of norms and values), or if there were practices or elements that seemed directed at subjectification or bringing the ‘I’ of each parent into play. Analysing field notes from participant observation in a ‘No Kids in the Middle’ multi-family group and interviews with parents, therapists, judges, and child welfare caseworkers, the paper concludes that programs like ‘No Kids in the Middle’ provide a broad spectrum of educational opportunities. While some of these might be intended to instruct along pre-defined normative paths toward understanding and behaviour, such practices can also be seen as addressing parents in a different, more existential, way. In the particular local practice studied, the dimension of subjectification was perhaps most clearly in play in the informal settings surrounding the program itself.