Grounded in systemic family therapy and drawing on a variety of other models to enhance skills development, this book is a comprehensive, practical guide to working with families.
This second edition is thoroughly updated and includes new chapters which cover working with First Nations Families, diversity and family therapy, understanding emotions, and dialogical reflective processes. The book begins with a focus on the therapeutic relationship and use of self as a foundation, and from there provides the reader with practical, skill-oriented guidelines for working with families. From the first session to addressing the complexities of separated parents, parent-child relational breaches, family of origin issues, wider systems, managing emotions, diversity, and much more, the book takes the reader through core practices that will become essential skills for family work.
Written by an expert team of authors committed to innovative and contextual practice, this book is for experienced clinicians who want to learn to work with families and for beginning therapists to learn from a structured approach to developing complex skills.
Chapters 2,3 and 14 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
1. The Therapeutic Relationship and Use of Self 2. Structured Guidelines for the First Session of Post-Milan Systemic Family Therapy 3. Deviation Amplifying: The Second Session 4. Establishing Parent Hierarchy: An Integration of Milan Systemic and Structural Family Therapy 5. Establishing Safety While Building Therapeutic Relationship: Responding to Abuse in Family Therapy 6. Beyond the Immediate Family: Exploring the Wider Spheres of Influence 7. Including Children in Family Therapy 8. Improving Relationship Security for Distressed Adolescents 9. Family Therapy with Adolescents: Key Ideas and Their Application 10. The Why and How of Separate Parent Sessions in Family Therapy 11. Family of Origin Session: Why, When, and How 12. Understand and working with Emotion in session 13. Diversity and Family Therapy 14. Working with Australian First Nation Families 15. Dialogical Reflecting Processes and Practices in Family Therapy 16. The Final Session
Andrew Wallis is a clinical social worker and systemic family therapist. He has worked with adolescents and their families for more than 30 years. Andrew’s clinical and research work at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network has primarily focused on family therapy approaches for eating disorders, clinical supervision, and teaching. Kerrie James, MSW, MLitt, has taught and supervised family therapists for over 30 years in postgraduate programs at Relationships Australia and the University of New South Wales Sydney. Her research and publications have focused on the intersections between family therapy, gender, family violence, and trauma. Paul Rhodes is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney with a wide range of clinical and research interests including family therapy, ecological emotions and the climate crisis, post-structural and New Materialist research methods, and the decolonisation of psychology.
