I just finished Maurizio Andorfis one week family therapy training in Perth, West Austraila. Being with the group of professionals from different cultural background gives me a chance to realize how much we are bundled by the set of cultural rules in our daily life. They are invisible as far as we stay inside of the cultural framework. Psychopathology and problems exceeds our premises of what is normal. To resolve the problem, we as family therapists have to empower family so that they can go beyond their framework. For example, I explained to the group we in our culture, NEVER ask divorced couple to come to the session together to talk about their problem child. The group said No, no, we do that here. You should ask them. I said, it would be very DIFFICULT for them because they hate each other and do not like to face each other… So this is the important point. I realized afterwards that these NEVER and DIFFICULT are my cultural premises. If the family and I as a therapist share the same premise that divorced couple could do not talk each other, there is no possibility to go beyond that common sense, break the cultural taboo and go into a new possibility. Dialogue in the training group made me think, yes, it may be possible that the divorced couple may manage to talk each other if they take their childs problem seriously enough, and the therapy may offer good opportunity for them. It is important for a therapist to hold both same and different perspectives with the client families. It has to be same so that the therapist can really understand and empathize the family, but yet has to be different so that he/she can introduce a bit of challenge for the family to go beyond of what they think they should do, so that they can overcome the family problem.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 10:58:02 +0000
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