Choosing to study Clinical Family Therapy is choosing to learn a way of seeing—and a way of being with people.
Family and systemic practice offers a powerful frame for understanding distress. It enables us to step back from the individual, without losing sight of them, and to see the cultural context, the histories, and the relational ties that may constrain or enable their growth. It asks us to consider not only what is happening within a person, but what is happening between people, across generations, and within the systems that surround them.
This way of thinking creates promise for your future practice at multiple levels. It gives you skills to work with complexity, to recognise strengths and possibilities, and to help families - biological, chosen and created – to better manage serious challenges by optimising the foundations of their caring relationships.
You may be wondering about the value of undertaking a double degree, especially in these economic times. I can offer something of my own journey in response.
I began post-Honours with a research job at the Children’s Protection Society, before moving into the study of clinical psychology, where family therapy was one of three pathways available for specialisation. I insisted on a double major in psychoanalytic psychology and family systems—and fortunately, they let me.
I followed this with a Master’s in Developmental Psychology, which gave me the qualifying time to become both an endorsed Clinical Psychologist and a Clinical Family Therapist. And, for punishment, I then completed a PhD, studying the shape and recovery of attachment for children and carers in foster care.
Why all of that?
Because I needed to sit at the feet of many great thinkers and many diverse teachers. I needed to learn to see the person in context – be that a child, a parent or an elder: their intrapsychic world and their developmental world, understood in the context of their relational world. I needed to understand how to research that context and evaluate outcomes that mattered.
This combined perspective equipped me to work with the families I encountered, and to contribute to the policies and practices at a national and international scale. I cannot say strongly enough that these are all the essential tools of my trade.
The double degree is not simply about collecting qualifications. It is about developing yourself as a systemic thinker – someone who brings a fuller, more evidenced and more circular perspective to healing and growth – of the person, their relationships, embedded in their history, their culture and the systems in which they live.
The qualifying courses are now situated within the Department of Psychology, Counselling and Therapy at La Trobe University. The Bouverie Centre is part of La Trobe University too – as a Research Centre. Bouverie remains a pivotal part of the Master’s experience as a place where ideas are actively lived, tested and developed.
In your third year, it’s likely you will be placed here, working with Bouverie families in the Clinical Family Therapy Service, which is funded by the Victorian Dept of Health, as a demonstration clinic. We see families who present with serious and complex mental health challenges.
Those families will challenge and invite you to bring together your developing knowledges, your clinical skills, and your capacity to remain curious and connected in the face of difficulty. The task is not to offer simple solutions to complex lives. It is to work alongside families so that they can better manage their challenges, strengthen their relationships, and discover new possibilities for living together.
You will also be immersed in the research-practice environment of the Centre. This is a distinctive opportunity: to learn not only established approaches, but to see how clinical practice generates questions, how research informs practice, and how practice can contribute to meaningful change.
For example, we have recently completed Medibank-funded research into the power of a single family therapy session conducted within the Walk-In-Together frame. We have re-centred the infant in family therapy, recognising the infant as an active participant in family relationships and therapeutic work.
Through our Workin’ With the Mob program, we have published on our cross-cultural learning. We are learning, among many things, about the transformative potential for mainstream non-Indigenous families of working with Indigenous therapists.
We have published important work on cut-off relationships—considering when healthy disconnection is needed and possible, and when traumatised relationships can be healed.
We are now pioneering the first virtual family therapy space through our Gather family e-hub. We are working with complex mental health systems to embed family-inclusive approaches to mental health care and suicide prevention.
These are not separate projects sitting at a distance from clinical practice. They are expressions of a living systemic tradition: a commitment to seeing the whole picture, to listening across difference, and to developing forms of care that are responsive to the realities of families and communities.
Here, you will sit at the feet of great and dedicated teachers. You will be exposed to new opportunities when you reach your time at the Bouverie Centre. You will be supported to bring together the psychological, developmental, relational, cultural and systemic dimensions of practice.
And at the heart of this work is you. In family therapy, you are the tool of the trade. Your presence, your awareness of yourself in time and history, your reflective capacity, your skill, sensitivity, humour and courage are all important instruments.
You will bring these qualities to the course already. Our teachers’ role is to help you recognise them, question them, strengthen them and use them with greater intention.
The work will challenge you. It will ask you to tolerate uncertainty, to stay open when the answers are not immediately clear, and to remain engaged when relationships are painful or complicated. But it will also offer you the privilege of witnessing change: a moment of reconnection, a new understanding, a family finding a different way to speak, or a person no longer carrying their difficulty alone.
Who knows? One of you may be standing in my shoes in the years to come, having relished the challenge to learn, see and offer a healing environment from a full, evidenced, circular, life-course perspective.
We hope that your time in the Master’s program—and especially your time at the Bouverie Centre—will help you become thoughtful, courageous and skilled systemic practitioners.
Family therapists who can see beyond the presenting problem. Systemic practitioners who understand that relationships are central to both suffering and healing. And people who can bring their whole, reflective and deeply human selves to the work.
