Scaling Up Family Therapy in Fragile, Conflict-Affected States.

This article discusses the design and delivery of two international family therapy-focused mental health and psychosocial support training projects, one in a fragile state and one in a post-conflict state. The training projects took place in Southeast Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Each was funded, supported, and implemented by local, regional, and international stakeholders, and delivered as part of a broader humanitarian agenda to develop human resource capacity to work with families affected by atrocities. The two examples illustrate how task-shifting/task-sharing and transitional justice approaches were used to inform the scaling-up of professionals involved in each project. They also exemplify how state-citizen phenomena in each location affected the project design and delivery.

Getting comfortable as "fish out of water": using qualitative research methods training to enhance the technical capacity of family therapy trainees.

This article describes a qualitative research methods training project undertaken in a COAMFTE-accredited family therapy master's-level program. Graduate students were trained to collect research data for a qualitative study on the resilience of families displaced to the United States because of war and politically motivated violence in their country of origin. By involving trainees in a research project with refugees, the project was intended to address a gap in clinicians' training, specific to the refugee population (Miller, Muzurovic, Worthington, Tipping, and Goldman, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 2002; 72: 341). However, the training process was also a way to increase the students' skills at interviewing in complex situations, develop their cultural sensitivity beyond awareness, enhance their capacity for routine self-reflection, and introduce them to basic practices of qualitative research methodology. In this article, we focus on the students' experience of the training and discuss the potential implications of their feedback for family therapy training.

Producing evidence of a miracle: exemplars of therapy conversation with a survivor of torture.

This article illustrates the termination sessions of a therapy case with a survivor of torture, displaced to the United States after facing targeted persecution in his home country. Using methods of qualitative research in the naturalistic paradigm, I examine the case of the client's torture rehabilitation experience through his descriptions and evaluation of the therapy process. Excerpts from the dialogue of the final 2 sessions, during which we discussed the client's past and future through the miracle question, are highlighted in this article. A case is made for further multimodal qualitative analyses of therapy conversation with this population.

Disarming people with words: strategies of interactional communication that crisis (hostage) negotiators share with systemic clinicians.

This qualitative study examined the interactional communication strategies used by law enforcement officers during a hostage-taking incident at a high school. The research involved analysis of the negotiation conversation between police crisis (hostage) negotiators and a hostage taker who entered his former high school to take revenge on a teacher. A condensed version of the talk was micro-analyzed with the actual negotiators from the incident, using ethnographic and Interpersonal Process Recall interviewing methods. Results illustrated that the negotiators used interactional communication strategies valued by systemic family therapists to reach a peaceful conclusion to the incident.

Crisis management during "live" supervision: clinical and instructional matters.

In this article, we illustrate two examples of "live" supervision with marriage and family therapy trainees whose clients presented in the therapy room in immediate crisis. The case examples, one a client with suicidal thoughts and the other a parent who had struck her child, demonstrate how the university-based therapy team managed the recursive clinical and supervision processes that unfolded during the sessions. We present the case examples from the perspective of both supervisees and supervisor, discussing how our different experiences of the supervision unfolded in real time. Case discussion and reflections later in the article illustrate the need for an open, transparent, dialogical process throughout supervision. A case is made for supervisory participants to create alternative formats in which multiple supervisory voices can be heard.

Overcoming bias toward same-sex couples: a case study from inside an MFT ethics classroom.

This article illustrates a teaching case in which a marriage and family therapy (MFT) trainee learned to develop cultural sensitivity toward same-sex couples despite religious beliefs that put her at risk of discriminating against that population. The case took place during a marriage and family therapy ethics course in the spring of 2003. From two first-person perspectives, the authors illustrate the processes that facilitated the student's change, addressing the class activities, discussions, and pivotal moments of teaching and learning that promoted the student's cultural competency and helped her to resolve this personal and ethical dilemma. A set of classroom techniques (creating a safe environment, using a stance of curiosity, finding alternative learning formats, extrapolating ideas from multiple sources, and capitalizing on students' experiences outside of class) used in the case are detailed throughout the article.