 Monday, September 8, 2008
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JUNE 2008 FEATURED ARTICLE For a remembrance of Michael White, please scroll down to the "Of Special Interest" section below.
Treating Family Relational Trauma: A Recursive Process Using a Decision Dialogue
Article By: Marcia Sheinberg and Fiona True
| Marcia Sheinberg, LCSW, Co-Director of the Center for Children and Relational Trauma, also is the Director of Training and Clinical Services at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She is the founder and Director of the Institute’s Interfamilial Sex Abuse Project and is co-author with Peter Fraenkel of The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family-Based Approach to Treatment, (Guilford, 2000). Ms. Sheinberg was also a co-founder of Ackerman’s Gender and Violence Project. A former advisory editor for Family Process, Ms. Sheinberg has published widely in professional journals on the treatment of chronic illness in the family, the role of gender in relationships, the treatment of obsessional disorders, domestic violence, larger systems, incest, and clinical innovations in couples and family therapy. She is an internationally recognized therapist and lecturer, and has presented in Asia, Europe, Latin America, the U.S. and Canada. In 2004, she was the recipient of the AFTA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy together with her colleagues Peter Fraenkel and Fiona True.
Fiona True, LCSW is a member of the teaching faculty of the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She is the Director for International and Community training. In this role she directs programs in Hong Kong, Chile, Argentina, and Japan. For the last 17 years she has been a member of the “Making Families safe for Children Project”, a project that has developed a treatment program for families where intra-familial sexual abuse is the presenting problem. The project additionally developed a family based treatment model for adolescent boys who have offended. Since 2004 she has co-directed the Center for Children and Relational Trauma. This project is translating what was learnt in the earlier work with incest to working with children and families who have experienced other forms of relational trauma such as witnessing domestic violence, the loss of a parent or bitter and contentious custody disputes. She consults to numerous social service agencies concerning issues of sexual abuse in residential and foster care. In this role she has written and is implementing a protocol of programs and services to respond to the clinical needs of girls and boys with histories of either being abused or having abused others. Since September 11th 2001 she has been the leader of therapeutic groups at the Ackerman Institute, for families who had relatives killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. Fiona True has presented the work of the Center nationally and internationally and in 2004 was the recipient of the AFTA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy along with her colleagues Marcia Sheinberg and Peter Fraenkel She maintains private practices in Connecticut and Manhattan.
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Welcome from the President of the Family Process Instiute, Dr. Nadine Kaslow,
at "About Family Process" (menu at left.)
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Celia Falicov has been selected to receive the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family Sussman Award. Groves President Leslie Koepke wrote: "This year's conference is on 'The Impact of Globalization Upon Family Well Being' and [Falicov's ] 2007 article published in Family Process on"Working with Transnational Immigrants....." was selected as a perfect example of reflecting the conference's theme with current family scholarship." Dr. Falicov will present at the 2009 Groves Conference at which time the award will be given.
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Remembering Michael White
-by Vicki Dickerson
I am only one of many, many people whose lives were touched by Michael White, so my memories are not necessarily unique, although they are dear to me. I met Michael twenty years ago in one of his first teaching "gigs" in North America. At the time he was still incorporating a good deal of Batesonian thinking in his presentations, but there were also the first hints of "narrative," drawing on the work of Jerome Bruner (his theory wasn't called "narrative" until 1990).
Michael's thinking profoundly influenced me on that day in September 1988; it changed my life personally, allowing me to experience myself in a way that was both kinder and more loving. What that encounter also provided, however, was an invitation into a way of thinking about people, about problems, and about therapy that has forever changed my way of working. I cannot imagine thinking any other way.
In those early years I prided myself on believing I was reading what Michael was reading: Geertz, Foucault, Derrida, Edward Bruner, Jerome Bruner, Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, as I was continually introduced to new ideas from anthropology, literary theory, social psychology. I soon couldn't keep up, as Michael's learning process was unstoppable. Over time, I was honored to be able to host Michael in many appearances in the U.S., even though his work spread out to the far reaches, not only in North America, but also to international sites. I was also able to help spread Michael's ideas through my own writing (mostly in collaboration with Jeff Zimmerman) and my teaching.
In 1999 I wrote a small article for the AFTA Newsletter honoring Michael as he was receiving the AFTA award that year for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice. When I asked Michael to look it over before I submitted it, he wanted to ensure that I emphasized that it was not the person but the ideas that were important. Undeniably, Michael, as a person, made a profound impact on many, many people; even those who may not have been entranced by narrative ideas found his presence empowering.
In the spirit of the ideas, however, knowing that they will carry Michael's spirit for years to come, I would like to emphasize three specific ways of thinking that hold what I believe are key to a narrative approach. I will also give examples of how these ideas have influenced my own work.
The first is what seems to me to be core to the ideas and the practice: narrative therapy is an inherently "political" approach. Building on Foucault's notion that all relationships are relationships of power, Michael underlines the everyday politics of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and so on. It is not surprising that other critical thinkers in the field of family therapy also carry that banner: for example, Rachel Hare-Mustin in Discourses in the Mirrored Room (1994), Kaethe Weingarten in Discourses of Intimacy (1991), Ken Hardy's w
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