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About the Editors
Monica McGoldrick, LCSW, PhD (h.c.), is Director of the Multicultural Family Institute in Highland Park, New Jersey, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Her videos on clinical work with diverse families are among the most widely respected in the field. Her numerous books include Ethnicity and Family Therapy, Third Edition. Ms. McGoldrick is a recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award from the American Family Therapy Academy. An internationally known author, she has lectured around the world on such topics as culture, class, gender, the family life cycle, and loss.
Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, is Professor of Family Therapy at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Director of the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships in New York City. He is also President and Founder of the Eikenberg Academy for Social Justice. Dr. Hardy is a recipient of honors including the Distinguished Contribution to Marriage and Family Counseling Award from the International Association for Marriage and Family Counselors and the Distinguished Contribution to Social Justice Award from the American Family Therapy Academy. He maintains a private practice in New York City specializing in family therapy.
Contributors
N. Norma Akamatsu, MSW, private practice, Northampton, Massachusetts
Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora, PhD, School of Education, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
Deidre Ashton, MSSW, private practice; The Therapy Center of Philadelphia; The Race Institute for K–12 Educators; and Widener University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Christiana I. Awosan, MFT, PhD, Department of Professional Psychology and Family Therapy, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey
Saliha Bava, LMFT, PhD, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York; Taos Institute, Chagrin Falls, Ohio; Houston Galveston Institute, Houston, Texas
Joanne Bowen, PhD, Anthropology Department, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
Nollaig Byrne, MD, Department of Child and Family Psychiatry, Mater Misericordia Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
Fernando Colón-López, PhD, Ann Arbor Center for the Family, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Donna Dallal-Ferne, LMFT, private practice, Syracuse, New York
Sarita Kaya Davis, PhD, MSW, Department of African American Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia
Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio, LMFT, SPHR, GreenGate Leadership, LLC, Palmer, Massachusetts
Contributors
Ken Epstein, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, and Department of Public Health, San Francisco, California
Celia Jaes Falicov, PhD, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
Linda Stone Fish, PhD, Department of Marriage and Family Therapy, Falk College, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
John D. Folwarski, MSW, Raritan Bay Mental Health Center, Perth Amboy, New Jersey
Nydia Garcia Preto, LCSW, Multicultural Family Institute, Highland Park, New Jersey
Robert-Jay Green, PhD, Rockway Institute, California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, California
MaryAnna Domokos-Cheng Ham, EdD, LCP, LMFT, College of Education and Human Development, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, Eikenberg Institute for Relationships, New York, New York; Department of Family Therapy, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Ana M. Hernandez, PhD, LMFT, Rising Ground, Inc., Yonkers, New York; Seton Hall University, East Orange, New Jersey
Paulette Moore Hines, PhD, private practice, training, and consultation; Center for Healthy Schools, Families, and Communities, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Department of Psychiatry, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey
Evan Imber-Black, PhD, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York; Center for Families and Health, Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York, New York
Christian Jordal, PhD, LMFT, CST, Department of Counseling and Family Therapy, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hugo Kamya, PhD, School of Social Work, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
Jodie Kliman, PhD, Clinical Psychology Department, William James College, Newton, Massachusetts; Boston Institute for Culturally Affirming Practices, Boston, Massachusetts
Imelda Colgan McCarthy, MSW, PhD, private practice, Dublin, Ireland
Monica McGoldrick, LCSW, PhD (h.c.), Multicultural Family Institute, Highland Park, New Jersey; Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey
Peggy McIntosh, PhD, Wellesley College Centers for Research on Women, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Marsha Pravder Mirkin, PhD, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education, Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts
Matthew R. Mock, PhD, Counseling Psychology Program, John F. Kennedy University, San Jose, California; private practice, Berkeley, California
Elijah C. Nealy, PhD, MDiv, LCSW, Department of Social Work and Equitable Community Practice, University of St. Joseph, West Hartford, Connecticut
Elaine Pinderhughes, MSW, Boston College School of Social Work, Boston, Massachusetts
Salome Raheim, PhD, ACSW, School of Social Welfare, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York
Rockey Robbins, PhD, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Sharla Robbins, PhD, private practice, Norman, Oklahoma
Robert Shelby, LMFT, Men’s Center for Counseling and Psychotherapy, Berkeley, California
Tazuko Shibusawa, PhD, LCSW, Silver School of Social Work, New York University, New York, New York
Walter Howard Smith, Jr., PhD, Department of Human Services, Allegheny County, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
David Trimble, PhD, Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts
Froma Walsh, MSW, PhD, Chicago Center for Family Health; and School of Social Service Administration and Department of Psychiatry, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Marlene F. Watson, PhD, Department of Counseling and Family Therapy, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hinda Winawer, MSW, LCSW, private practice; Princeton Family Institute, Princeton, New Jersey; The Center for Family, Community, and Social Justice, Princeton, New Jersey; Faculty Emerita, Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York, New York
Preface
The goal of this book is to transform the focus of our work beyond the interior of the family, offering an opportunity and invitation for our readers to see how our clients’ lives are constrained by larger societal structures and to develop new ways of working based on a more contextual understanding of ourselves, our society, our history, and our clients’ lives.
We have long struggled to envision systemic theory and practice in ways that transform our field to see our clients and ourselves more clearly and thus more complexly and to provide services that are more trauma-informed and healing. We have espoused approaches that take account of our connection to each other and to all that has gone before and all that will come in the future. Striving to build a sense of belonging for all who seek our help seems the only way to pursue our work. Our original companion volume, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, began with the lens of ethnicity in its exploration of culture; ReVisioning Family Therapy, Third Edition: Addressing Diversity in Clinical Practice explores the intersections of multiple cultural perspectives (ethnicity, social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion), attempting to view families and family therapy from more inclusive cultural perspectives.
The aim of this book has been to provide in one relatively short, accessible volume a broad range of brief contributions by many of those who have been working to “re-vision” the family therapy field through a cultural lens. The chapters in this volume are reflective of the authors’ efforts to make a truly paradigmatic shift toward systemic thinking and practice, which we believe is sorely needed in our field and in our world. We have worked assiduously to include chapters that expand our definition of knowledge from an exclusive reliance on evidence-based, scientifically tested practice to one that validates also the “evidence” of subjective knowledge, creating space for the inclusion of personal stories of suffering, subjugation, and strife born out of experiences
with oppression, which honor a different kind of knowledge. There is great wisdom in learning from the experiences of those relegated to the margins of our society. This book includes many personal stories, a few of them known over the years to some of us, but here available for a wider audience, which help us pay attention to those who have been hidden from history. Creating a space for personal stories and experiences enriches our work as therapists and is central to our view of re-visioning family therapy. We have also included chapters that expand the systemic perspective to larger systems in terms of both conceptualization and intervention. We hope that these perspectives will inspire future therapists to think as broadly as possible about the contextual aspects of our work and our lives.
This new edition is appearing at a time when our world seems fraught with polarities, discontinuities, and regression in the development of social justice. Our search continues to strive toward finding ways to contain opposites, contradictions, and ambiguities—not oversimplifying the issues and at the same time not obfuscating the prejudices and oppression that are increasingly defining and destroying our world and us.
Each author was given frustratingly little space and asked to present a few key ideas of clinical and theoretical relevance in a reader-friendly format to contextualize the oppressions that are their work’s focus and to suggest re-visions for our clinical work. We applaud the authors for their courage to contend with these difficult issues and rejoice that they are our collaborators, going through life with us, knowing we are not yet clear about how these power dimensions operate on us, but striving with each other’s help to see the road more clearly.
Re-Visioning Family Therapy is intended to be exciting and suggestive rather than comprehensive in its articulation of where we need to go in our work. Most of the material is intentionally personal. We want to make clear how hidden aspects of our history have influenced our need to change the future. Our ideas have evolved from our frustrations with the traditional boundaries of clinical practice and our wish to expand our vision to see more clearly where we must go to create a better world for everyone. This book has been an opportunity to push our own and each other’s boundaries in hopes of helping to transform clinical practice toward more contextual and systemic work with clients. We trust readers will give us the benefit of the doubt, realizing that many of these ideas are still in progress, awaiting the leavening of future conversations to better see the issues. We know we have inadvertently left out or marginalized some in this book and will continue to push ourselves to learn from our “sins of omission” in the future. We hope, as we have expressed before, that this edition will soon be out of date again, as the ideas expressed here become commonplace and accepted practice. When this re-visioning occurs, we hope we will be in the fortunate position of trying once again to reformulate the ideas to accommodate our evolving understanding and insights about change and healing and that others will follow us to expand this endeavor. We hope this book will provide a small window into new possibilities.
PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Like the other institutions of our society, family therapy has been structured in ways to support the dominant value system. And, again like the other institutions of our society, our field has evolved many conceptualizations and practices that keep invisible certain hidden organizing principles of our lives, including social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. This book aims to unpack some of these issues in hopes that they become easier to hold in our minds and in our hearts so that we can better go about our work.
The chapters on theoretical perspectives, and, indeed, the book as a whole, evolved out of the work many are doing to uncover those dimensions of “home” and “family” that have been kept hidden and to transform our definitions of home and family so that all families may feel safe and included. These chapters offer a framework for the possibilities of re-visioning family therapy toward a more contextual perspective.
In Chapter 1, we have tried to locate this re-visioning in the history of the family therapy field in general. Following the path established by Peggy McIntosh in the field of education, we try to contextualize the history and possible future of our field. McIntosh’s framework has provided a practical tool for assessing where our field is, as well as where we need to get to in this re-visioning process. We have expanded our overview on issues of social class, spirituality and religion, poverty, gender, and power, with new chapters by Walsh, Hardy, and Ashton and Jordal to expand therapists’ awareness of the centrality of these issues.
Froma Walsh and I (KVH), in our respective chapters (Chapters 3 and 4), provide provocative discussions of these most poignant, volatile, and sensitive issues that are integral to the process of re-visioning related to social class. In Chapter 3, Walsh thoughtfully lays out the dimensions of class, one of the essential and, until now, one of the most invisible elements of re-visioning family therapy from a cultural perspective. It goes unacknowledged that many groups in society are not represented in our institutions and do not have the same entitlements to participate even in our world of family therapy. It goes unsaid that where you come from does matter; that you cannot shed your past, become whatever you want, or move up in class just through hard work and desire. Walsh addresses directly the therapeutic implications of class relations and invites us as therapists to consider the ways in which our work is shaped by the nuances of class. In Chapter 4, I (KVH) discuss poverty as sociocultural trauma, illustrating how the limitation of resources organizes the lives of those in need, and the psychological fallout of the assaults of poverty on dignity, the learned voicelessness, shame, stigma, secrecy, and silence that follow. This chapter offers suggestions on ways of transforming this fallout and empowering clients through our acknowledgment, countering the devaluation that typically accompanies poverty and encouraging clients to lean in toward transformative possibilities of their survivorship and their voices.
Deidre Ashton and Christian Jordal (Chapter 2) take on some of the aspects of gender and gender nonconformance as they play out in our own
lives and in the lives of our clients and the intersectionality of race and sexual orientation, offering helpful insights into the hidden dimensions of power as they affect our views of gender. They both remind and caution us that we have outgrown the traditional binary constructions of gender that leave so many clients, therapists, family members, and other loved ones sentenced to a life sentence of invisibility.
Religion and spirituality also play a powerfully influential role in virtually all areas of family life. Yet having a critical discussion about religion is not only difficult to do, but it is often considered inappropriate, sacrilegious, and taboo. Although seldom acknowledged overtly, religion is a major organizing principle in our society. Chapter 5 by Walsh is a firm but gentle reminder of the role that religion and spirituality play in our everyday lives. Race, like religion, is also an important factor that must be placed at the forefront of the agenda for re-visioning family therapy. We believe religion is a salient variable because it influences many of the more controversial issues that we, as a society, seem to grapple with passionately on a daily basis. Family-related issues such as same-gender marriages, abortion, masturbation, premarital sex, mother employment, and child-rearing practices ignite strong feelings, even seemingly irreconcilable acrimony, because they are all connected to religion. Former President Barack Obama was forced to claim and reclaim his Christian identity amid numerous allegations that he was really both foreign and a Muslim. In a society that exalts “freedom of religion,” whether he was Muslim, Christian, or Sikh should not have mattered, but it did, because religion matters. By denying its significance, we give its hidden power even more significance.
PART II. SOCIOCULTURAL TRAUMA AND HOMELESSNESS
The authors in this section have given voice to experiences that have also generally been marginalized in the main cultural stories of our society. In a sense, this section is devoted to all of our respective journeys to find home—that is, a place of belonging and acceptance of our multiple identities. In so doing, we share our triumphs and our tribulations. The process of finding home involves each of us, as a fundamental part of the existential search, identifying and claiming disavowed parts of ourselves that we have to make peace with as part of the journey.
In a world that is often divided into the haves and have nots, the valued and devalued, finding a sense of home can be a relentless and often futile endeavor. The chapters in this section highlight how home, homelessness, and trauma are intricately interwoven. As we pulled together our ideas for this book, issues of immigration dominated the national news and raised an array of thorny clinical issues regarding family therapy with populations who are increasingly non–U.S. born, non–English speaking, non-white,1 and from countries often considered “Third World” or whose citizenry is believed to have little to offer this country. We have also been ever more conscious of the
sense of anomie of those pushed to the margins of our society because of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, poverty, disability, and other disadvantages. I (MM) have told aspects of my own story (Chapter 6), trying to separate out some of the threads of privilege from those of oppression in my journey trying to dissect the complexities of racial and class privilege in relation to a history of gender and ethnic oppression. This section includes a rich and thoughtful chapter (Chapter 7) by Celia Jaes Falicov on issues of culture and cultural identity in relation to migration and the complexities of transnational families, including issues of loss, adaptation, and network reconstruction. The ideas discussed by Falicov will be enormously helpful to all who work with immigrant families, both documented and nondocumented.
Even though Obama made concerted efforts to avoid mentioning race, it was still an integral part of our nation’s discourse and reality, sometimes overtly but mostly by innuendo and the use of code words. Race is a prime definer of all interactions in our society, with sharp differences that often exist between the racially based perceptions of whites and African Americans. In Chapter 9, I (KVH) remind us that race and other manifestations of oppression are always, at every moment, influencing our perceptions and ultimately our relationships, both in and outside of the family.
In Chapter 8, Paulette Moore Hines discusses hope as a critical tool of assessment and intervention. She examines issues of transcendence, spirituality, hope, and resilience, which have long been eschewed in our theory and practice. For thousands of years such ideas have been the primary resources for people in emotional distress. It is high time we reintegrate this dimension into our conceptual formulations. The belief in something beyond our individuality and our personal self-interest is our only hope to have a future. We trust that in the future this area will begin to receive the attention it deserves, as more therapy incorporates transcendent ideas into our clinical assessment of families under stress and in our approaches to healing.
PART III. RACIAL IDENTITY
Typically, discussions of culture and racism focus on the marginalized group as the “other.” Whiteness, and the multitudinous ways in which it shapes interactions, both inside and outside of families, almost always remains invisible. Revisioning our field requires that we explore most carefully and explicitly those who see themselves as the norm and those who have established the norms. The chapters included in this section are attempts to deconstruct race both for those who have been historically subjugated and for the dominant group.
Rockey and Sharla Robbins’s discussion of Native American families and culture is an eye-opening perspective on trauma, healing, and the meaning of belonging and home. Their chapter (Chapter 10) reminds us how easy it is to “forget” and define people by their DSM numbers rather than by whom they belong to. Instead, we should all be dedicated to remembering, and “re-membering,”
shattered communities and bearing witness. Their illustrations offer invaluable suggestions on possibilities for working with Native American families.
Peggy McIntosh’s classic challenge to our “invisible knapsack of white privilege” is part of her crucial series of articles that have helped us to begin re-visioning race as well as gender in the field of education. In Chapter 15, McIntosh takes the lofty, virtually abstract concept of white privilege and makes its impact visible through the most mundane everyday experiences. Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio (Chapter 16) offers a critique of white male dominance and considers what must change so that white men can be collaborative partners with everyone else in families and communities in the 21st century. In Chapter 17, Jodie Kliman, Hinda Winawer, and David Trimble examine “the inevitable whiteness of being (white)” in family therapy training. These authors make the pervasive invisibility of whiteness visible.
Nydia Garcia Preto, in Chapter 11, explores her own and her family’s complex and multiple identities as they evolved over time and through the life cycle. She illustrates, with her broad and inclusive perspective, a profound openness to the complexity of building bridges to hold the sense of belonging to what came before and building connections to what lies ahead of us, which highlights a significant facet in the transformation of family therapy.
Marlene F. Watson (Chapter 14), Ana M. Hernandez (Chapter 13), and MaryAnna Domokos- Cheng Ham (Chapter 12), each in her unique way, discuss the powerful connections that exist between race and identity development. Watson provides a gripping and heartfelt account of what it means to grow up as an African American female in an oppressive society where societal messages regarding race, class, and gender often collide. Ham offers a critical and insightful examination of the life experiences of a multiracial person searching for a sense of belonging. In a society that is obsessed with binary notions of race, this chapter brings much-needed attention to the challenges of what it means to be a person of mixed-race heritage. Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora (Chapter 18) also asserts the importance of thinking about race beyond the Black–white binary and how the experiences of those who identify as Brown can be deemed not to belong.
The collective work and wisdom of the authors in this section remind us how the toxic messages that emanate from racism can leave indelible scars on the psyches and souls of people of color through the unconscious internalization of debilitating negative racial messages.
PART IV. CULTURAL LEGACIES AND STORIES: THERAPISTS’ EXPERIENCES
Personal narratives are a major part of our attempt to shift our paradigm to re-vision families and family therapy. From Murray Bowen’s first account of his own family at a 1967 research meeting, which stunned the field by breaking the rules of academic and professional discourse, we have gradually been stretching and transforming the boundaries of our dialogues to create more
inclusive ways of thinking about our work. The individualistic models of “scientific” discourse have proven inadequate to the realm of healing and therapy. These linear models are of limited relevance in a world where our lives are so profoundly interconnected. It is often through personal narratives that we learn most about those aspects of our experience that do not fit into our theoretical and clinical models. These stories may be key to liberating us toward new visions of our work.
Elaine Pinderhughes’s classic chapter (Chapter 19) describing her research on her own family explores the silenced history of white exploitation and internalized racism in her Black and white ancestors. Her story is a remarkable unpacking of the multigenerational traumatic impact of racism on a family. Fernando Colón-López’s narrative in Chapter 21 about his search for his past and his identity in his lost mother’s story is a remarkable example of the hidden oppressions of colonized groups and of the power of uncovering the submerged cultural dimensions of one’s history. It is also a striking example of the interface of racial and cultural oppression and mental illness.
John D. Folwarski’s personal recollection (Chapter 22) of a childhood in a Polish orphanage is a profound reflection of the effects of Polish subordination in European history, as well as a story of the impact of immigrant cultural disruption. Folwarski’s narrative is also an indirect testimonial to other salient themes that are replete in many of the stories told in this volume: stories of belonging and disconnection, stories of home and homelessness, and stories of suffering and survival.
The other authors in this section—Linda Stone Fish, Donna DallalFerne, Saliha Bava, Robert Shelby, and Elijah C. Nealy—all share stories of cultural legacies and of their recurring efforts to integrate the frayed threads of their histories into their contemporary lives. Shelby’s pathway to finding home (Chapter 20) required him to come to terms with the white privilege, pathological shame and guilt, and the perversion of morality often associated with whiteness. Acknowledging and claiming this ugly part of his past was in many ways a necessary precursor to the modern-day clarity that he brings to his antiracism work. His story, along with other authors’ accounts of what it meant to grow up in a racist family, should provide inspiration to other white and majority-group therapists regarding how the process of embracing disavowed parts of our cultural legacies can liberate and motivate us to be advocates for social justice.
Linda Stone Fish, a gifted teacher and therapist, provides an in-depth look at how issues associated with her Jewish identity and that of a Palestinian graduate student, Donna Dallal-Ferne, managed to creep into the sacred space of the classroom and graduate education. Their chapter (Chapter 24) provides a poignant discussion of the importance of being able to see the world through the eyes of those we consider “other.”
Elijah Nealy, in Chapter 25, examines the complexity of identity transitions and transformations across the life cycle with a provocatively insightful and transformative discussion.
All of the chapters in Part IV center the cultural experiences and legacies of therapists who challenge the dominant narrative that suggests that their stories are insignificant. Through the telling of their personal stories and honoring the ways in which they are embedded in cultural legacies, the authors help to shift the core values of our field away from “objectivity” and “professional distance” to values that acknowledge the role and significance of the self-of-the-therapist.
PART V. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE
The chapters in this section focus on specific clinical issues for particular cultural groups. They are meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, indicating the subtlety and complexity of our cases when considered through a cultural filter. Each of the chapters in this section offers a re-visioning perspective by moving the subject under consideration “from margin to center,” in bell hooks’s phrase. They use the group’s own frame of reference for assessment and intervention, challenging our field’s dominant notions of clinical practice. We believe the process of locating oneself and using one’s personal story as a frame of reference for our clinical work is essential to the re-visioning process.
In Chapter 26, Elijah C. Nealy examines the much-neglected area of lesbian and gay family life and the need for therapists to understand the particular challenges facing those who live within a novel or marginalized family configuration. Nealy invites the reader to see how critical it is for us as a field and for society to rethink our traditional notions of family with questions of who is included in such definitions and who remains invisible and marginalized. Robert-Jay Green, in Chapter 27 on gay and lesbian couples, also provides a great deal of practical information that will be helpful for working more effectively with lesbian and gay couples.
Chapter 28, by Hugo Kamya and Marsha Pravder Mirkin, addresses the profound disruptions of migration when families belong to more than one culture, as most families in the United States do. They suggest some of the larger implications of the complexity of biculturality, difference, and acculturation. They can help all of us rethink the very nature of our identity. Instead of measuring immigrants as “others,” we can use Kamya and Mirkin’s discussion to re-vision our very notions of assessment and intervention.
We must also develop transformative intervention models based on a revisioning of families from a contextual perspective. Imelda Colgan McCarthy and Nollaig Byrne have been developing their Fifth Province model for many years. In Chapter 30, they illustrate their model and the creativity of their thinking and work with a complex and tragic case example.
Tazuko Shibusawa’s chapter (Chapter 32), along with several others in this section, encourage us to think more broadly about race as an integral part of the re-visioning process. Her examination of biracial couples moves
the discussion of race beyond the normal binary notions of Black and white and provides an in-depth discussion of the salient factors to consider and to challenge when providing couple treatment across racial boundaries. Her discussion of biracial couples of Asian descent sheds light on a group that is often invisible in conversations regarding race. She also raises important issues about couple therapy in general, bringing light to the invisible, which has to be a hallmark of the re-visioning of family therapy.
Salome Raheim, Christiana Awosan, and I (KVH) focus our attention on the experiences of African Americans. Raheim (Chapter 31) delves into the rich African American history with music to provide a poignant look at the power of song as an instrument for promoting healing, hope, and justice. Awosan and I (Chapter 29) examine the invisible wounds of racial trauma that often underpins the day-to-day interactions of Black heterosexual couples, offering an array of hands-on, step-by-step strategies that couple therapists can employ with Black couples to enhance their clinical effectiveness.
PART VI. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING
The chapters in this section are devoted to providing cutting-edge ideas for what graduate programs and training institutes must do to prepare the next generation of family therapists, with an eye toward cultural competency. The re-visioning of family therapy requires programs, faculty, and supervisors to reject long-practiced training that has been ostensibly color blind, gender free, classless, and oblivious to sexual orientation.
Evan Imber-Black, a masterful clinical educator and supervisor, examines the challenges, changes, certainties, and uncertainties that confront training family therapists in the 21st century in Chapter 36.
The chapters by N. Norma Akamatsu (Chapter 35) and Matthew R. Mock (Chapter 34) both provide state-of-the-art strategies to invite trainees to think critically about issues of social justice, power, and multiculturalism.
Our chapter in this section (Chapter 33) provides an overview of the program and institutional domains that must be considered if we are going to incorporate understanding of contextual issues and overcome the current biases of our field. If our vision for the field is ever to be actualized, the training of the next generation of family therapists will be crucial.
In many respects, this book represents our concerted effort to practice what we preach. Critical to the re-visioning process we envision is paying acute attention to who is included and who isn’t. We appeal to our better selves to be mindful and respectful of who is at the metaphorical table and what is needed to keep us all actively engaged once we are there. Both our hope and our renewed vision for the field rest on our optimism that each of us will actively resist the “business as usual” mentality that has too often been guiding the thinking and practice of our field. This book is very much about such resistance. It is dedicated to recognition of our unique, culturally based stories of suffering and survival, as well as our common humanity and the
systemic connection of all human beings to each other and to our planet. We hope you will share our belief that re-visioning of family therapy is ultimately about the true inclusion of everyone in the definitions of “family,” “home,” and the healing possibilities of therapy. We hope that you will read, reflect, and heed our call to join us in the struggle to re-vision family therapy.
PART VII. IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE
The chapters in this section expand notions of what constitutes good research. The authors encourage new ways of thinking about research that challenge the dominant order. Sarita Kaya Davis, in Chapter 37, tackles the taboo topic of cultural bias in research and describes a number of pitfalls to avoid when using research to inform clinical practice. Ken Epstein’s chapter (Chapter 38) integrates principles of relational healing and a trauma-informed paradigm to conduct a critical examination of organizational change in the era of evidencebased practices.
PART VIII. LARGER SYSTEMS WORK: HOW TO BUILD BRIDGES ACROSS THE DIVIDE
The chapters in this section highlight our belief regarding the inextricable connection between our psychology (individually oriented human system) and ecology, how the number of larger systems within which we are embedded profoundly shape our lives. Joanne Bowen (Chapter 39) encourages us to consider our human connection with the environment. We believe the re-visioning of family therapy requires all of us to be concerned about the environment and our relationship to each other within the context of our connection to the earth and to nature around us. In Chapter 40, Walter Howard Smith, Jr., an experienced and gifted therapist and systems thinker, applies microlevel and macrolevel family systems theory to a large, bureaucratic child welfare system as an act of activism and transformation. Each of the authors in this section reinforce our fundamental belief that the healing and transformation of the human spirit cannot be achieved unless the lenses we use to understand complex human problems are universally broad and systemic. Our vision, scope, and reach must move well beyond the limits of our offices or of any individual to include history, the societal and local context of our current world, and our hopes for the future of our children and our universe.
NOTE
1. We have capitalized “Black” and lowercased “white,” in spite of the convention to do the reverse, because it seems to us that “Black” is a word which at least to some extent was chosen by African Americans to refer to themselves, while “white” does not deserve the “specialness” of capitalization as an honor to the distinction.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go to my coeditor and coauthor, Ken Hardy, for his wisdom, dedication, creativity, and humor in working on this book. We have been having deeply meaningful conversations for more than 35 years. Our collaboration on this book for the past two editions has given us the chance to push our thinking forward in ways I hope we can keep expanding. His ideas and moral compass have been a profound inspiration to me. I thank him for wonderful times we have had (not as many as I had hoped!) working through the ideas and details and laughing together over the problems along the way and at times arguing fiercely, as we are both strong-minded and do not give up our positions lightly. I am in awe of his brilliance, creativity, and deep commitment to the endeavor of re-visioning family therapy.
I am also in awe of the contributors to this volume who have found the courage to write about their most painful life experiences and the wisdom of their deepest ideas with trust that the readers will bring empathy to their reading. For the pain and courage of so many whose experiences are acknowledged in this book, I am profoundly grateful.
I thank also my mentor and companion Scott Joplin, whose music saw me through the work on this book and through so many other endeavors in my life. His magnificent music and the effort of his life to voice his intuitions, love, and hope in his compositions have been an ongoing inspiration to me for many years.
At The Guilford Press, Seymour Weingarten supported this book from its first inception, Jim Nageotte offered good counsel and support throughout the development of the last two editions, and Jeannie Tang has been a most gracious, prompt, conscientious, and thoughtful production editor.
I thank my life-mates: Nydia Garcia Preto, Paulette Moore Hines, Jayne Mahboubi, Nollaig and Henry Byrne, Imelda McCarthy, Roberto Font, John Folwarski, Fernando Colón-López, Robert-Jay Green, Froma Walsh, Elaine Pinderhughes, Barbara Petkov, Charlee and Alex Sutton, Sueli Petry, Eliana Gil, Nancy Boyd-Franklin, and A. J. Franklin have all offered help and inspiration when needed. Their support is an ongoing richness to me every day. And to my dearest colleagues and friends who have gone before, but who live on always in my heart: Betty Carter, Carol Anderson, Evelyn Lee, and Michael White.
My sisters, Morna Livingston and Neale McGoldrick, have been throughout my life a major source of support and inspiration, both creative teachers and authors in their own right. I feel I am never alone when I connect with their belief in me and their efforts to promote the same kinds of cultural transformation in their own lives and work.
My husband, another creative teacher and writer, supports me every day in more ways than he realizes (and surely more ways than I fully realize myself!). I am very grateful. I thank him for the many wonderful days we worked in parallel on our books and for all that he has given me for so many years. And I thank my son, John, for doing his thing and for expanding our family with his wonderful and creative wife, Anna, their magnificent son, Owen, and our creative and dedicated in-laws, Renee and Bill De Palma, who have also pursued creativity and education in their own careers. I hope that John, Anna, and Owen will have many life endeavors as gratifying as I have had. My nephews, Guy and Hugh Livingston, have also inspired me with their efforts to build cultural bridges in their music and artistic creativity, and I thank them for their support and for what they are doing along similar lines in their worlds to promote cultural understanding and transformation. I am also grateful for my talented niece-in-law, Maria Sperling, whose work embraces a similar effort to build cultural bridges. And I thank my grandnephew, Renzo Robert Livingston, for having become such a wonderful part of my life for the past 8 years.
Thanks also to Dan Morin for his creativity and dedication to developing genograms, including in this edition. Ken and I were committed to having genograms included wherever possible in the text to illustrate our basic idea that mapping out the cultural context, best done with genograms, is essential for the work we believe in.
I thank my parents, Margaret Bush, and my Aunt Mamie Cahalane for giving me the courage to face truths about our family and about myself, which their strength helped me to acknowledge. They live in my heart and make me stronger every day. They have made this book possible. Finally, I want to thank my students and clients, who challenge and inspire me every day.
Monica Mc G oldrick
Acknowledgments
My involvement in this important body of work would not have been possible without the generosity, commitment, and dedication of my beloved friend, colleague, and soul sister Monica McGoldrick. Whether on the streets of Amsterdam, New York City, or Anaheim, I have appreciated immensely the intense, vein-protruding conversations that we have had over the years about matters of human indignities and social justice. As we both are well aware, we have not always agreed with each other’s positions, yet we have always genuinely respected each other. Thank you in the most heartfelt way for inviting me to work with you on the third edition of Re-Visioning Family Therapy. Our many conversations, collaborations, and brainstorming sessions regarding this issue have been inspirational and life transforming. Thank you for believing in me and for your foresight in using the collaborative spirit of our relationship to demonstrate that working across vast cultural divides is possible.
I would like to thank Jim Nageotte of The Guilford Press for his guidance, support, and sage advice throughout every phase of this project. I would also like to thank Dhara Mehta-Desai for the tireless and dedicated assistance she provided to this project throughout the entire process from start to finish. A special thanks is also extended to our many friends, colleagues, and brothers and sisters of the struggle who have contributed to the book. We thank you for your tireless efforts, patience with short turnaround times, and willingness to “go there with and for us” in the telling of your stories for the book. Obviously, without your contributions we have no book.
And, finally but not insignificantly, I would like to thank my family for their unrelenting support and for being a tremendous source of inspiration, motivation, and resolve in my life. I am so painfully aware virtually every day of my life that every single accomplishment, accolade, and particle of privilege that I enjoy has been achieved by standing firmly on your tired, weary, but omnipresent shoulders. Please know that it is permanently etched in the walls of my psyche and soul that your individual and collective sacrifices and suffering have provided the pathway to my opportunities. I will never forget . . . and I am eternally grateful. One of the reasons why this book has been so important to me personally is because of the possibility that it promises for the emergence of a new world order—an invitation for us to think differently about each other, and because we think differently, to be able to act differently with each other. It is my hope and desire that the next generation of Hardys and McGoldricks, as well as the descendants of the many others who have contributed to this book, will inherit a different world where skin color, the shape of one’s eyes, whom one loves romantically, or where one’s ancestral roots are buried will not determine access to opportunity, dignity, and respect. This is the re-visioning that we envision with this book.
K enneth V. h ardy
I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
9. Toward a Psychology of the Oppressed:
Understanding the Invisible Wounds of Trauma
Kenneth V. Hardy
III. RACIAL IDENTITY
10. Native American Identity Transformation:
Integrating a Naming Ceremony with Family Therapy
Rockey Robbins and Sharla Robbins
11. Letting My Spirits Guide Me: Multicultural and Multiracial Legacies
Nydia Garcia Preto
12. Moving toward Multiracial Legitimacy: A Personal Reflection
MaryAnna Domokos‑Cheng Ham
13. On Being a Black Dominican
Ana M. Hernandez
14. Facing the Black Shadow: Power from the Inside Out
Marlene F. Watson
15. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming
to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies
Peggy McIntosh
16. Dismantling White Male Privilege within Family Therapy
Ken Dolan‑Del Vecchio
17. The Inevitable Whiteness of Being (White): Whiteness and Intersectionality
in Family Therapy Practice and Training
Jodie Kliman, Hinda Winawer, and David Trimble
18. Brown in America: Living with Racial and Religious Bias
Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora
IV. CULTURAL LEGACIES AND STORIES:
19. Black Genealogy Revisited: Restorying an African American Family
Elaine Pinderhughes
20. White Privilege, Pathological Shame and Guilt,
and the Perversion of Morality
Robert Shelby
21. The Discovery of My Multicultural Identity
Fernando Colón‑López
22. Going Home: One Orphan’s Journey from Chicago to Poland and Back
John D. Folwarski
23. Hyperlinked Identity: A Generative Resource in a Divisive World
Saliha Bava
24. The Semitism Schism, Revisited: Jewish–Palestinian Legacies
in a Family Therapy Training Context
Linda Stone Fish and Donna Dallal‑Ferne
25. No Single‑Issue Lives: Identity Transitions and Transformations
across the Life Cycle
Elijah C. Nealy
V. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE
26. Working with LGBT Families
Elijah C. Nealy
27. Same‑Sex Couples: Successful Coping with Minority Stress
Robert‑Jay Green
28. Working with Immigrant and Refugee Families
Hugo Kamya and Marsha Pravder Mirkin
29. Therapy with Heterosexual Black Couples through a Racial Lens
Kenneth V. Hardy and Christiana I. Awosan
30. A Fifth‑Province Approach to Intracultural Issues in an Irish Context:
Marginal Illuminations
Imelda Colgan McCarthy and Nollaig Byrne
31. The Power of Song to Promote Healing, Hope, and Justice:
Lessons from the African American Experience
Salome Raheim
VI. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING
Kenneth V. Hardy and Monica McGoldrick
Social Justice in Family Therapy Training: The Power of Personal
and Family Narratives
Matthew R. Mock
35. Teaching about Racism and the Implications for Practice
N. Norma Akamatsu
Evan Imber‑Black
VII. IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE
37. Ways of Knowing: Cultural Bias Pitfalls to Avoid 539 When Using Research to Inform Practice
Sarita
Kaya Davis
38. Relational Healing and Organizational Change in the Time of Evidence 553
Ken Epstein
VIII. LARGER
SYSTEMS
WORK: HOW TO BUILD BRIDGES ACROSS THE DIVIDE
39. Expanding Bowen’s Concept of Societal Emotional Processes 569 through Historic Ethnography: An Anthropological Exploration of the Human Connection with the Environment
Joanne Bowen
40. An Application of Bowen Family Systems Theory in Child Welfare 588
Walter Howard Smith, Jr.