Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy

By Carol Boland. Volume 27 Issue Number 1. [PDF format - 106KB]
This paper highlights the negative effects on professionals who regularly work with very abusive families and seeks to identify what protective factors in the work team and its management mitigate these effects. I compare the behavioural consequences of living in a dysfunctional family, with the consequences of working in a dysfunctional team. My hope is to identify practical, realistic things that can be done, especially by team managers, to protect staff from the all too familiar emotional costs of such work.

Scapegoating and Therapeutic Storytelling Intervention

By Hugh Clarkson and Ron Phillips. Volume 27 Issue Number 1. [PDF format - 109KB]
Scapegoating is an interpersonal process which is as old as humanity. It offers a means of protecting a social group from disintegration, but at the cost of blaming one individual for having a problem which he or she cannot then fix. Family therapy attempts to unravel the scapegoating process and address the underlying difficulty, but often fails because the family responds fearfully and reasserts the scapegoating. Therapeutic Storytelling Intervention (TSI), among other things, offers a means of adding individual therapy to family therapy without reinforcing scapegoating.

Invitations to Collusion: A Case for Greater Scrutiny of Men's Behaviour Change Programs

By Susie Costello. Volume 27 Issue Number 1. [PDF format - 118KB]
Men's Behaviour change groups have been operating in Victoria since the early 1980s. Unlike their criminal justice-based counterparts in the USA, Canada and the UK, groups in Victoria arose as stand alone voluntary programs within the community health and family support sectors. Their focus on therapeutic engagement, education and invitations to responsibility has at times failed to include consequences for men who continue to use violence and abuse whilst attending the group. This paper argues that unless facilitators build in consequences for men whose violence continues, they can inadvertently collude with the violent behaviour. Including women partners in ongoing evaluation is one means of reducing this collusion. This view is drawn from research into behaviour change groups in Melbourne over the last decade.

Houses are a Necessary Illusion: Uncovering Family Process Through Asking Families to Draw a Plan of their Homes

By Olga Rochkovski. Volume 27 Issue Number 1. [PDF format - 134KB]
The way families organise their living space is an indicator of family relationships. The physical shape and organisation of houses, flats and dwellings of all kinds are not 'unchanging natural phenomena', they are historical, cultural, economic and family constructions. Therapists, like families, 'do not see that they do not see' (von Foerster, 1994). They are partly 'blind'. This becomes apparent when a therapist asks a family to draw the plan of their house. The therapeutic task illuminates the organisation of family bonds, and provides insight into the causes of family suffering. A clinical example is given.

Page 2 of 35<123 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >11-20 Last »