Hearing Metaphor: An Approach to Working with Family-Generated Metaphor

This article presents a step-by-step approach to working with family-generated metaphor in family therapy. Although the use of therapist-generated “therapeutic metaphors” has been widely advocated and practiced for many years now, less attention has been paid to the metaphors used by family members. We argue that the family's metaphors are a neglected linguistic resource in family therapy. Highlighting and validating these metaphors produces a therapeutic conversation in which the voices of family members are heard more clearly by the therapist, and the families' own imaginative energies are engaged in defining and pursuing the goals of therapy. Several case examples illustrate the use of this approach with children of various ages.     

Paradox and polarity: the Tao of family therapy

Taoism is a Chinese spiritual tradition whose central metaphors concern polarity, paradox, and the natural process of change. Taoist ideas offer a particularly useful framework for understanding paradoxical interventions, the stance of the paradoxical therapist, and the new epistemology emerging in the field. The relevance of three Taoist metaphors for family therapists is discussed: polarity, cyclical change, and Wu Wei (noninterference).     

Adaptation of Transdiagnostic CBT for Turkish Adolescents: Examples From Culturally Adapted Multiplex CBT

The present article illustrates how cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) was adapted for an adolescent Turkish population with mood and anxiety disorders. The resulting 10-session treatment—based on multiplex CBT—was efficacious in a treatment trial, showing large effect sizes (Acarturk et al., 2018). This paper discusses the cultural grounding of CBT, which increases effectiveness by such means as increasing acceptability and positive expectancy. We describe a culturally sensitive assessment measure of somatic complaints and cultural syndromes, the Turkish Symptom and Syndrome Addendum. We discuss how, in a culturally sensitive way, we normalized symptoms, conducted interoceptive exposure, and created positive reassociations to sensations. We describe how we used Turkish metaphors and religious ideas to teach CBT principles. We show how we adapted mindfulness and “loving kindness” for a Turkish population, and how we utilized transition “rituals” at the end of the treatment to give a sense of closure and a positive feeling of transformation. Two case examples are provided to further illustrate how we adapted multiplex CBT to a Turkish adolescent population.     

Mirrors, Clocks, Maps, and Music: A South African Response to Family Therapy Supervision/Training

Once upon a time a training unit embarked upon a Journey. The Journey was to encompass a year's training and supervision in family therapy. Bags were packed to the brim with theory and training methods. One day the Unit left the bags behind to see what would happen if they travelled light and let the students bring their own luggage to the examination. Students were expected to describe their relationships with the interviewed families, and their training through a story. The great exam day came. Inspired students used innovative ideas and metaphors to describe the Journey. This article tells the story about these stories and the Unit's learning from them.     

Honoring and Privileging Personal Experience and Knowledge: Ideas for a Narrative Therapy Approach to the Training and Supervision of New Therapists

This article discusses an approach for the training and supervision of new therapists built around social constructionist and poststructuralist ideas from a narrative therapy perspective. We briefly discuss some of the pitfalls of current training/supervision in marriage and family therapy (MFT) that are deficit based and/or that disproportionately grant privilege to expert knowledge. We articulate this emerging training approach which utilizes the rite of passage metaphor, centers relationalism, and incorporates the honoring and privileging of new therapists' lived experience, knowledges, skills, talents, ideas, morals, personal ethics, values, beliefs. Concrete practices of experience privileging, re-membering, and creating communities of concern are detailed, and illustrative examples from our supervision work are given.     

Warriors,authors and baseball coaches: the meaning of metaphor in theories of family therapy

This article examines the metaphors family therapists use in their theories to reveal aspects of the theories which are not explicitly stated, using Whitaker's symbolic experiential therapy, Minuchin's structural therapy and White's narrative therapy as examples. Such examination, drawing on social constructivist understandings of metaphor and meaning making, reveals that Minuchin's metaphors of family as organism and therapist as artist and warrior emphasize the family as relatively holistic and the therapist as relatively interventionist. In contrast, Whitaker's metaphor of family as ecological system or team and therapist as coach emphasizes the interdependence and context sensitivity of the family and relative powerlessness of the therapist to impose change. Finally, White, reflecting his explicitly post‐structural commitment, uses the metaphor of therapy as a journey undertaken with a map and as therapy as an act of re‐narrating a story.     

The reflecting team: dialogue and meta-dialogue in clinical work

A "stuck" system, that is, a family with a problem, needs new ideas in order to broaden its perspectives and its contextual premises. In this approach, a team behind a one-way screen watches and listens to an interviewer's conversation with the family members. The interviewer, with the permission of the family, then asks the team members about their perceptions of what went on in the interview. The family and the interviewer watch and listen to the team discussion. The interviewer then asks the family to comment on what they have heard. This may happen once or several times during an interview. In this article, we will first describe the way we interview the family because the interview is the source from which the reflections flow. We will then describe and exemplify the reflecting team's manner of working and give some guidelines because the process of observation has a tendency to magnify every utterance. Two case examples will be used as illustrations.     

From perceptual rags to metaphoric riches--bodily, social, and cultural constraints on sociocognitive metaphors: comment on Landau, Meier, and Keefer (2010)

What leads people to describe some of their interpersonal relationships as "close" and "warm" and others as "distant" and "cold"? Landau, Meier, and Keefer (2010) proposed that conceptual metaphors facilitate social cognition by allowing people to use knowledge from a relatively concrete (source) domain (e.g., physical distance) in understanding a different, usually more abstract (target) concept (e.g., love). We concur that such a notion of metaphors can greatly enrich the field of social cognition. At the same time, we believe it is important to devote greater theoretical attention to the nature of metaphorical representations in social cognition. We believe that Landau et al. place too much emphasis on sociocognitive metaphors as top-down knowledge structures and pay too little attention to the constraints that shape metaphors from the bottom up. In the present contribution, we highlight important bottom-up constraints, imposed through bodily constraints and social scaffolds. Sociocognitive metaphors do not exist just for mental representation but for action as well. We discuss the relevance of grounding sociocognitive metaphors for broader motivational purposes.     

Metaphor in intergroup relations

Belonging to groups and relating to other groups are central parts of our lives, but they confront us with abstract ideas (e.g., identity and power) and nebulous feelings. To make sense of it all, people rely on conceptual metaphors: cognitive tools that ground abstractions in dissimilar, more concrete ideas that are easier to grasp. We review some common metaphors that people use in intergroup contexts—metaphors that draw on knowledge of such familiar experiences as physical cleansing and warmth sensations. We review evidence that these metaphors are not mere figures of speech, but have a systematic and practically important influence on intergroup attitudes and behavior. Most of this work shows that reliance on metaphor contributes to prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, sometimes without the person's awareness. Yet we consider the hopeful possibility that citizens, politicians, and researchers can harness the power of metaphor to promote intergroup harmony and peace.     

What we say we do: results of the 1997 UK Association of Family Therapy Members Survey

This study represents the first UK national survey of family therapists and systemic practitioners. The aim was to provide demographic information of systemic practitioners/family therapists and also to describe their clinical practice. The sampling frame used was the UK Association of Family Therapy membership list and all members were sent a postal questionnaire. The response rate was 33% with 495 out of 1500 questionnaires returned. Among the major findings were: systemic practitioners/family therapists are most likely to work for an NHS trust, to use family therapy techniques/systemic ideas predominantly, and to treat a broad range of client issues. They are also most likely to work with families, and therapy is relatively short term (five to eight sessions) regardless of whether they treat families, couples or individuals. Most family therapists/systemic practitioners use some measure of outcome, although frequently this will be feedback from clients. Supervision is sought by the majority of AFT members. In spite of some methodological limitations, the study provides interesting insights into the training and practice of UK family therapists and systemic practitioners which appears to differ in some respects from our American colleagues. It also provides a baseline for future surveys, making it possible to describe the developments of family therapy and systemic practice in this country.     

Book Review

This article is based on Ulkuniemi's key-note lecture in the Congress of Photo Therapy and Therapeutic Photography. The lecture dealt mainly with the history of family photography and the uses of family photographs in art education. Here Ulkuniemi has put her ideas in dialogue with some of the themes presented in the Special Issue (11.1) of European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. Thus this article also serves as a commentary to some of the texts in this journal. The main approach of this article is to offer some hints about possibilities for using photographs in therapy by giving practical examples from the field of art education and art – Ulkuniemi's own visual-pedagogical installations. Another aim is to offer a general view of how a family photograph is constructed. Ulkuniemi will ‘break the frames’ by showing the various factors existing outside the frames that have influence on the outcome of the picture.     

Tales of a Therapist

ABSTRACT

Historically, theorists and clinicians from various schools of family therapy have discussed therapist self-disclosure in terms of either helping or inhibiting therapeutic progress. Although postmodern language-based theorists and therapists accept and encourage its use, few clinical examples of therapist self-disclosure exist in the family therapy literature. In this paper, a postmodern family therapist working within the language-based tradition describes the use of self-disclosures with a couple. The therapist then reviews the effects of those self-disclosures through the eyes of husband, wife, and therapist.     

Family work with victims and offenders in a secure unit

Two examples of family therapy in a secure unit for violent mentally ill offenders are described. The model used incorporated ideas from reparation schemes for victims and offenders in addition to an emphasis on the circumstances of the offence.     

Healing Without Waging War: Beyond Military Metaphors in Medicine and HIV Cure Research

Military metaphors are pervasive in biomedicine, including HIV research. Rooted in the mind set that regards pathogens as enemies to be defeated, terms such as “shock and kill” have become widely accepted idioms within HIV cure research. Such language and symbolism must be critically examined as they may be especially problematic when used to express scientific ideas within emerging health-related fields. In this article, philosophical analysis and an interdisciplinary literature review utilizing key texts from sociology, anthropology, history, and Chinese and African studies were conducted to investigate the current proliferation of military metaphors. We found the use of these metaphors to be ironic, unfortunate, and unnecessary. To overcome military metaphors we propose to (1) give them less aggressive meanings, and/or (2) replace them with more peaceful metaphors. Building on previous authors' work, we argue for the increased use of “journey” (and related) metaphors as meaningful, cross-culturally appropriate alternatives to military metaphors.