Article by Professor Jennifer McIntosh
Centre Director, The Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University
I recently represented Bouverie at the British Association of Family Therapy Conference in September, In Brighton, UK. It was a great privilege to listen to some of my own teachers, meet up with colleagues, and hear newer voices in the systemic psychotherapy field. One of my highlights was hearing Umberta Telfner (Milan School) in her Plenary address, “Without roots we do not fly”. The panel responding to Umberta included our own Adjunct Associate Professor Glenn Larner. It was fascinating to consider the ‘new age we are working in – one of ‘liquid modernity’ - a societal, organisational and at a family level. It is an era where a lack of a epistemological coherence is a danger, where solid thinking and evidence becomes more important than ever. What, of course, continues to hold true in systemic practice, especially in a post-truth world and without simplifying complexity, is that “A” is better off if “B” is better off. Continuing to strive to enhance the well-being of the other, in their context, becomes the “solid” in a liquid situation.
Finally, our work in advancing the evidence for brief, rapid access family therapy was well supported by Umberta, who articulated the growing demand on mental health services and family therapy’s capacity to respond in this way: “We cannot provide psychotherapy to everyone who needs it. Alternate briefer diverse interventions are not less”.
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and listening to Professor Adrian Blow from University of Michigan – President of the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy. His plenary was on the question of research and family therapy particularly looking at who has taken up our research. His argument centred on the fact that we know and have amply demonstrated the efficacy of family and systemic practices in mental health setting- but our stakeholders don't. He proposes a way forward that - if it went well - would result in a seismic change in the mental health system, toward putting family therapy first. This is thinking Bouverie is keen to contribute to.
I can’t mention all the papers and people who impacted me at this forum, but must leave space for the moving and powerful plenary by Professor Dwight Turner: The Long Walk to Freedom: Intersectional Pathways toward Community and Wholeness. Together with Bouverie’s whole-of-organisation training underway already with Drummond Street, we celebrate work such as Dwight’s and the way this propels us further, toward an authentic grounding of our work through the intersectional lens, where we not only look inward through this lens, but contribute to deepening theory and practice in this space, going forward.
The workshop I presented was Intergenerational Healing: Exploring the Potential of Infant Led Family Therapy. This work is grounded in the MERTIL program, which has blossomed into a large suite of resources for practitioners and parents. I’ve been working on embedding our new MERTIL for My Family resource into Bouverie’s single session framework, developing a series of conversation prompts to help families of very young children to talk about “trust”. It’s not a topic many families discuss, but building environments of trust is of course pivotal for all children’s well-being. This is especially challenging for parents who bring inter-generational trauma from their own childhoods into the task of parenting their little one.
The gorgeous 6-minute MERTIL for My Family animation is useful across the lifecourse, and better still, we offer it freely to all, in the hope that it will be of value to families seeking to “write a new story of trust, together, for the next generation”.
In all, it was a great opportunity for networking and sharing Bouverie’s work. Watch this space for invited visits from our overseas friends.
