Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy最新文献

This paper introduces diunital therapy, a multidimensional therapeutic approach rooted in diunital logic, an Indigenous African wisdom tradition and a decolonial healing framework. It examines how the legacies of colonisation, White supremacy, patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism have shaped therapy theory and practice. Drawing upon concepts developed in Indigo Alchemy: Diunital Healing, Multi-Dimensional Wellbeing, my forthcoming book, this paper describes how diunital therapy integrates storytelling, body–mind awareness, land-based belonging, community care and spiritual resilience with selected elements of Western therapies, while maintaining a critical lens on systemic oppression. Healing and therapy are presented as inseparable from liberation, with personal restoration, ancestral memory and social transformation woven into a single, relational process.

This paper is an invitation to think about our relationship with more-than-human worlds and how this influences wellbeing, or lack thereof, in the myriad contexts of our lives. What lived and told stories do we, individually and collectively, have about our relationship to nature and how do these stories inform and influence how we show up in our relational and environmental worlds? And, perhaps most importantly, what does nature teach us about how to be in life-giving relationship with one another?

Although there is a body of literature on the importance of spirituality in healing from transgenerational trauma, there is correspondingly little written, from a systemic perspective, about the partition of India (1947). This article is based on a small-scale, autoethnographic, qualitative research study, in which I interviewed first-generation, second-generation and third-generation survivors of the partition of India. A number of themes emerged from the material, such as the meaning of home; the erasure of language; secrets in the family; mind–body connections; community and family violence; and the significance of faith and religious and spiritual beliefs. In this article, I will focus on the role of religious and spiritual beliefs in transgenerational trauma and will explore the subthemes that emerged, namely partitioning, visible and invisible differences and resiliencies. I found that all the participants in my research study made use of spiritual and community resources to heal from trauma. Further, intercultural and interfaith relationships served as a protective factor in promoting resilience and healing from transgenerational trauma. It seemed that the adversity of the trauma of partition affected the participants, at both individual and community levels, in ways that could be negative, positive or even transformative. I make a case for systemic psychotherapy to incorporate an assessment of their clients’ spiritual practices through a range of visual methods and tools such as the ecomap and cultural genogram and an original tool called the ‘pneumagram’, which explores differences in spiritual and religious beliefs and values. I will conclude by touching on the ubiquitous theme of the silencing of the narratives of the Partition and the resiliencies of indigenous people in engaging with community and spiritual resources.

Through a love letter to the glaciers that have shaped the author's inner landscape as a child, this article shares reflections on the ecological context of climate change, our relationship with the more-than-human world and the implications for ecosystemic therapy. At a time of multilayered ecological crisis, if we engage in dialogue with the more-than-human world, even whispers from the glaciers as perspectives from the wild can help us feel in tune with the loss of habitats and the state of the natural environment, leading us to recognise our sense of loss and eco-grief as a response to climate change and ongoing natural disasters. A shift of positioning away from dualistic thinking and anthropocentrism is necessary and urgent. This paper will argue that embracing ecological thinking will lead to redefining therapy as dual hospitality where nature becomes the host and co-therapist, whereas clients and therapists become co-explorers of inner and outer landscapes. Nature, as a diffractive mirror, will reflect the tight link between our sense of well-being, mental health and our sense of belonging to Mother Earth. This process of rewilding our personal and professional lives will contribute to restoring our shared identity as earth dwellers and activate our commitment to care for the planet. This, in turn, will lead to becoming actively engaged in imagin-action, that is, as systemic therapists/activists imagine and create new landscapes of mental health services rooted in social justice and ecological change.

Climate change and environmental justice impact mental health directly and indirectly through exposure to traumatic events and subsequent traumatic stress symptoms. This is especially relevant for marginalised groups, who are disproportionately impacted by climate change and are more vulnerable to traumatic stress. We propose integrating discussion of the impact of climate change via systemic trauma education in couple and family therapy (CFT) training. The authors are based in the United States and Canada and specifically address programmes in this continent. However, readers elsewhere may still find our paper relevant. Exploring the connections between climate change, environmental justice and trauma, we identify moments for ‘when’ to teach about climate change and mental health in CFT training. Next, building on research from clinical fields, we propose utilising a trauma-informed pedagogy for ‘how’ to have these discussions with care for trainee mental health. We propose embedding discussion about climate change within trauma education in CFT training so that future generations of systemic practitioners can grasp the relevance of climate in their clinical practice early in their development.

Within this period of climate breakdown and collapse, mental health professionals have continuously called for specific training to address rising presentations of climate distress. Dominant mental health services influenced by biomedical paradigms put forth supportive non-relational and linear responses to climate distress, solutions that are not epistemologically appropriate considering the breadth of recursive causes and effects of systemic climate injustice. Contemporary and integrative family therapy practices encompass a way of working with relational systems, rather than promoting strict prescriptive protocols for certain presentations. However, systemic thinking is not a panacea, and models of therapeutic care should be appropriately critiqued. A case study is utilised to explore Gehart's Therapy that Works approach of conceptualising and working with a family explicitly presenting with climate distress. Benefits and constraints of utilising systemic ideas with presentations of climate distress are explored, and outstanding ethical questions and concerns that warrant further exploration are raised.

In a preceding theoretical paper, six concepts from Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World are described. They include laughter; the language of the marketplace/billingsgate; the body and the bodily lower stratum; ambivalence; the grotesque; and carnival and the carnivalesque. This paper provides a summary of the six concepts mentioned and reflects on their relevance to practice by providing illustrative vignettes with accompanying reflective commentary. The author suggests that Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais offers insights into dialogical and other approaches, with a focus on how language, laughter and bodily processes influence human interactions and how therapeutic dialogues might be considered carnivalesque.