Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy最新文献

As citizens and practitioners, climate change has important implications. This contribution attempts to ‘work the loop’ between the personal and the professional in a systemic account of the relationship between family therapy and climate change. The account begins with a practical question: How should practitioners formulate presentations where immediate environmental disaster, or the prospect of progressive degradation, is a key feature? Acknowledging the profound meaning of climate change, three fields are developed. First, data are presented on the two contrasting understandings of health and well-being that appear immediately relevant. Second, the mainstream understanding of the self is contrasted with a systemic view of the self. Third, the research undertaken by social epidemiology on the importance of personal relationships is summarised. It is argued that this research affirms the mission family therapy has traditionally served: to assist those we work for build ethical and reliable connections. In concluding, an affirming recommendation is put forward: in the context of climate change, the discipline's unique contribution to relationship-building makes this service especially important.

The literature shows that emerging adults exposed to parental conflict and divorce can experience difficulties adapting to adult life compared with their peers. This study presents a typical case of such emerging adults struggling with aggression tendencies. This case study was designed according to hermeneutic single-case efficacy design, implementing systemic psychotherapy over 13 sessions. We employed the Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire and the Differentiation of Self Inventory, changes in experiencing and behaviour scales, and conducted semi-structured interviews in data collection. Three case judges reviewed rich case records to evaluate whether the treatment was deemed effective. Based on the data, the course of intervention was partitioned into five stages: formation of the therapeutic alliance, introduction of the systemic perspective, expansion of the repertoire of emotion regulation strategies, emphasis on differentiation from family, and termination. Eventually, the client showed noticeable efforts to recover his relationships, there were desired changes in measurement scores, and positive statements from change interviews regarding the therapy impact. Based on the case judges' evaluations, it was concluded that the intervention was effective in helping the client to overcome his problems and take responsibility for his life.

In this paper I will tell three parallel stories. The story of punk music, the story of family therapy and small parts of my own story. Both punk and family therapy were social movements built on resistance to commodification, both radical in their perspectives. The Stranglers and Palazzoli 999 and Minuchin. Minor Threat (Green Day and functional family therapy haha). They came in waves/both were international/both were authentically intellectual. Both died in the 1990s as we entered an age of anxiety, memory and ghosts. We are haunted by lost models that could have been; a lost Deleuzian model. I will argue for a new wave of family therapy built on a punk mentality. We need to go back to being minortorians, embracing irrelevance, storm the margins, especially now. We have become no better than The Offspring. But new heroes are available: post-human, emergent, subversive, anti-essentialist.

Policy calls for family-inclusive, single-session approaches to mental health challenges are growing. In response, an online, single-session family therapy approach, Walk-In Together (WIT), was successfully piloted in a small team format in a specialist setting. For wider implementation, including in mental health services, use of a team for WIT sessions was a clear resource barrier. This small qualitative study examined the viability of a co-therapy approach to WIT sessions. For a 4-month period, families were allocated to one of two WIT program formats. Ten completed the two-therapist format, and six the team format. Sixteen family members participated in semi-structured individual interviews, exploring their experiences of the WIT service. Four therapists participated in a focus group about working in the differently sized co-therapy models. Descriptive qualitative analyses consider similarity and difference in the experiences of these two ways of working. For family members, strong similarity of session experience, essential change elements and nature of impact was evident between the two formats. In contrast, therapists showed some preference for the team format, particularly with complex presentations and training contexts, yet fully endorsed a two-therapist format in resource limited contexts. From family and therapist perspectives, essential change was equally achieved in the team and co-therapy formats. The benefit of a WIT session for family members appears to lie more with timely response, transparent engagement and well-contained process and less with the number of therapists providing these functions. We describe ways in which the current study may inform research and support implementation.

The roots of rebellion and social justice that have lived in the margins of systemic practice are needed now more than ever to steady our profession for a changing climate. For decades, justice-oriented family therapy scholars and practitioners have supported communities, by taking a stand against oppressive systems, furthering systemic change. This history lays the ground for family therapy to enter the political sphere and take up the counter-cultural act of extending our therapeutic arms beyond the anthropocentric. In this article, we widen systemic circles by drawing attention to antiracist and feminist family therapy scholarship. We discuss the pernicious belief in human exceptionalism and present insights from related disciplines. Listening to Indigenous worldviews and learning from frameworks that consciously include the living world, such as multispecies studies, we widen the circle still. Together, these explorations seed possibilities for systemic family therapy to embrace our more-than-human family: all of us living within our shared home, Earth.