Family Therapy & Systemic Practice

 On Friday 12^th March, Aldo Gurgone, clinical psychologist and family therapist from Perth will be presenting a one day workshop at Bower Place with the title ‘Trust, Betrayal and Rejection; Re-establishing Trust in the Couple Relationship’. In this he has promised to address different forms of betrayal in couple relationship including cybersex.

Cybersex…as if standard sexual betrayal was not enough for the average marital and family therapist!

This is a new and increasingly common presentation both with individuals and couples so in preparation for Aldo and out of curiosity I went searching and found a paper by Katherine  Hertlein and Fred  Piercy. “Therapists’ Assessment and Treatment of Internet Infidelity Cases” published in Journal of Marital and Family Therapy October 2008, (Vol. 34, No. 4, p481–497) which reports on a study of 508 practicing marriage and family therapists. The authors asked their subjects to respond to ‘several typical internet infidelity scenarios’ with the initiator’s gender being varied. The clinicians were asked about their assessment and treatment processes, evaluation of the severity of the situation, their expectations of outcome, number of anticipated sessions and whether they would focus relationally or individually. Not surprisingly, the results tell us more about therapists than the clients. Those who defined themselves as religious indicated that they would address the issue more individually than relationally. The authors also report that both age and gender of the therapist affects treatment choices with younger therapists more inclined to address environmental issues and women focussing on the couple relationship in their intervention. The therapists own experience of infidelity also influenced their assessment but not treatment.

What is clear from this study is that there is no clearly agreed upon assessment or treatment process for cases of internet infidelity. The authors suggest ‘A therapist should reflect on his or her own invisible beliefs, biases, and therapeutic guideposts. Perhaps the results of this study will support open discussion regarding our therapeutic differences where they arise, and which ones we should rethink. (p493)
 

I’m hoping Aldo’s workshop will give us the opportunity to do just that.

 Clinical psychologist and family therapist he was born in Italy and migrated to Australia as a six year old boy with his family in 1956. His father had preceded the family four years earlier. He recalls his experience of returning to his home country in 1973 saying ‘My memories of Italy were very “child” formed and I was quite shocked at Italian culture in Italy when I returned for a year in 1973.  The way of life and way of thinking of people in Italy was totally different to what I understood about Italians here in Australia and it took me the better part of 6 months to get over the culture shock I experienced.’  He is fluent in both Italian and English and has worked and trained with Maurizio Andolfi.  He is well known for his multi-cultural work and acted as presenter and consultant to the production of a Training Package, ‘COUNSELLING ACROSS CULTURES’, produced by the Fremantle Migrant Resources Centre.
Since 1972 he has practiced professionally in Italy, the United Kingdom and Australia. Currently he is Director of the William Street Family Therapy Centre where he works as clinical psychologist, family therapist, consultant and teacher. As chairperson, he has been active in the restoration of the Western Australian Family Therapy Association and the establishment of a national Family Therapy Association.
He has delivered keynote addresses to conferences in Australia, Malaysia and Singapore on the Couple Relationship & Communication and Parenting Teenagers when there is Drug Use. He presented at the 30^th Australian Family Therapy Conference Therapy on the topic “Words are Not Enough”.
He is well regarded for his work with couples and has written articles and produced psycho-educational material for newsletters, newspapers and as videos, DVDs workbooks and manuals which are used by counselling and welfare agencies around Australia and overseas.
When you speak with him he is thoughtful and considered in manner. He takes his time in conversation and speaks quietly and authoritatively. He is warm and generous in his interactions……Who is he?

News of the discovery of a young woman abducted off the streets as an eleven year old by a stranger, repeatedly abused and kept prisoner for 18 years has made daily print and television news for the past fortnight. Yet another headline about violence closer to home has passed almost unnoticed. On 1^st September 2009 the Adelaide Advertiser displayed the headline ‘Mum Murder, Domestic Killings Hit Alarming Levels’. The paper reported on the violent deaths of eight South Australian mothers over the past eight months and the call for ‘an official state review into domestic violence related killings’. The Domestic Violence Crisis Service Executive Officer, Gilian Cordel is reported as saying that ‘I don’t think the general public realizes how many women are murdered by their partners’. The response to the article has been minimal producing two letter to the editor and minimal additional coverage. Meanwhile, every day we are regaled with further detail of the investigation of the abductor of Jaycee Dugard.
Why is this so and what does it mean for those of us whose daily work involve those subjected to and perpetrating violence? Perhaps the story of Jaycee is, given its horror, paradoxically ‘easier’. It speaks to every parents’ fear of the unknown madman who randomly selects a child who is then spirited away. The story reads like an episode from a television crime show which ends with the captor’s release. There is no excuse, there is a villain and an innocent victim and the villain will be tried and punished. It can never happen to people we know, people like ‘Us’.
The domestic violence headline is different. This speaks of the murder of women in our community, women who we see in the supermarket with a black eye, whose children play with our children and whose husbands come to dinner. The violence, if it is seen is explained away as a single, random episode or the fault of the recipient. If the woman speaks out to friends she will often experience a pulling away as others feel uncomfortable knowing the secret, are unable to relate to the abuser and would rather not know. More disturbingly the damage is being done by one who should be most able to be trusted who has promised to love and to cherish through sickness and health and who shares a bed. We look into their lives and in many respects they look just like ours. No wonder the article does not precipitate an out flowing of interest. It is received just as the problem is in real life. With silence.
 
Workshop presented by Malcolm Robinson  & Marten Johns
‘Family Violence across the Lifespan: A Trans-generational Perspective’ (click to get more information and register)
 
For all other workshops and events go to http://seminars.bowerplace.com.au

In 2004 the Attorney-General’s Department, Family Law Pathways Advisory Group, published A new approach to the family law system: Implementation of reforms - discussion paper. This proposed reforms based on the 2003 House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs inquiry into child custody arrangements when families separated. Reforms were proposed to address the needs of families before, during and after separation. In particular it proposed the establishment of Family Relationship Centres in the hope of providing conflict resolution for families which avoided the adversarial path.
The Family Relationship Centres were designed for a broader population than those facing family dissolution. The hope was to assist parents to prevent relationship breakdown, support separating parents and grandparents with parenting arrangements and child support issues, and provides advice and mediation services. They were designed to be “a source of information and confidential advice for families at all stages in their lives. Whether you are starting a relationship, wanting to make your relationship stronger, or having relationship difficulties, the Centres can help.”

Sixty –five centres have been established throughout Australia, the first opening in 2006 and others following in 2007 and 2008. While funded by the government the Centres are operated by family relationships services providers, including Relationships Australia and Catholic Social Services. 

With the new centres also comes specialist training in the form of The Vocational Graduate Diploma in Relationship Counseling, a practical competency based graduate course within the Vocational, Education and Training (VET) sector. The course aims to teach practical, demonstrable skills in working with children, young people and their families’ at the most stressful and distressing times in life. It is suitable for social workers, counselors, teachers, medical practitioners, psychologists, health and community workers and especially those interested in positions within the Family Relationship Centres.

As workers in the field of child and family relationships we are now well versed in the fact and dynamics of child abuse and violence. However as both the professional world and the wider community have come to embrace the need to protect children and parent in positive ways, family violence has appeared in a new guise. This is the violence which occurs in families’ of children with acute behavioral problems and parents who are helpless in its grip. Such parents view themselves as less powerful than their children and respond to their child’s demands with escalating punishment and violence, impotent acquiescence or an oscillation between the two. Such escalations feed the parents’ sense of powerlessness, hopelessness and the belief that ‘nothing works’ and allows the child to make increasingly risky and self-destructive choices.

Enter Haim Omer who has taken the ideas of non-violent resistance as practiced by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King and applied them to families with children with aggressive or other acute behavioral problems. Originally developed in Israel, this parent focused approach is now being applied in centers in Germany, England, Switzerland and Holland. Yet however intuitively appealing an intervention may be it is only as good as its objective effectiveness. The paper by Weinblatt, U. and Omer, H. “Nonviolent Resistance: A Treatment for Parents of Children with Acute Behavioral Problems” addresses this question. This is an evaluative study of a five week parent training program in the approach which randomly assigned 73 parents into a treatment and wait list control group and took measures at pre-treatment, post-treatment and one month follow up. Parents who participated in the treatment ‘showed a decrease in parental helplessness and escalatory behaviors and an increase in perceived social support’ compared to the waitlist control group. Intervention also resulted in the parents reporting a decrease in the children’s negative behaviors. One month follow-up demonstrated maintenance of change in relation to parental helplessness, parental permissiveness and child behavior. While the authors are careful to recognize the limitations of a study which was of limited duration and based on parental self report, the results are encouraging enough to warrant further exploration and application of this creative and respectful approach to extremely difficult children for whom traditional behavioral modification approaches have proved ineffective.

Weinblatt, U and Omer, H (2008) “Nonviolent Resistance: A Treatment for Parents of Children with Acute Behavioral Problems” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 34,1, 75-92 The answer : Each produced remarkable outcomes in seemingly intractable circumstances using methods of non-violent resistance