Teaching Clinical Psychology Trainees about Weight Bias

Abstract

As an assistant professor who teaches clinical psychology trainees about social aspects of behavior, I devote one week to the topic of weight bias. In this class, I rely on the research literature to challenge common myths about “obesity,” demonstrate the pervasiveness and harm of weight bias, and offer recommendations to trainees to apply to their own professional and personal lives. I encourage trainees to shift focus from weight and weight loss to health and well-being and to engage in self-reflection on the role of weight bias in their interactions with others. Here, I describe my weight bias seminar and outline common questions and my responses to them (e.g., Do you actually believe that “obese” people can be healthy?). Weight bias is a neglected topic in most clinical psychology training programs. Weight bias must be addressed in clinical psychology programs to produce culturally competent graduates who are aware of diversity issues.     

Editorial

No abstract available for this article.     

Using Relational Cultural Theory as a Pedagogical Approach for Counselor Education

ABSTRACT

In the article the authors will discuss core concepts of RCT in greater detail while relating these concepts to the counselor education classroom setting. There are many aspects of the counseling process that are open-ended due to the necessity of counselors needing to be responsive to the client’s needs in the moment. It is the assertion of the authors that using RCT in the classroom as a pedagogical framework may be beneficial to the growth of CITs. Through creating and maintaining an environment that supports growth fostering relationships, mutual empathy, authenticity, recognition and healing of disconnection, identification of central relational paradoxes, and processing relational images can all lead to developing relational competence in the CITs who will become the next generation of counselors. Additionally, the authors provide examples of the core concepts in action that are grounded in their experiences, blending RCT into their instructional delivery in their course.     

Strengthening Couples from a Single-Parent Household Using Relational Cultural Therapy

ABSTRACT

Individuals initially learn about intimate relationships from observing others, such as their parents or caregivers’ relationship, which may positively or negatively affect their own romantic relationship. This article focuses on the application of Relational-Cultural Therapy (RCT) concepts to establish resilience among couples with at least one partner from a single-parent household. Some individuals from single-parent households may not have witnessed romantic relationships to confidently engage in adult romantic relationships. Additionally, clinicians may not consider family background as a source of contention for a couple’s presenting concerns. Thus, this article provides creative interventions and implications to assist counselors in working with couples.     

What Changes in Therapy? Who Changes?

SUMMARY

A central component of therapeutic change involves facilitating the capacity to move and be moved by the other. Another way of saying this might be that change entails experiencing a greater freedom of relational movement. The question of who and what actually changes in the process of therapy is the focus of the three vignettes that follow. They highlight, among other things, the recognition and acknowledgment of mutuality as an essential force within the relational matrix and the ever-changing landscape that this creates. Each of these examples of a change process bears, as well, a particular stamp of its own, and thus speaks to the unique personality of every therapeutic dyad.     

Commitment to Connection in a Culture of Fear

SUMMARY

This article was originally presented at the May 2004 Learning from Women Conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School and the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute. It examines the ways in which cultural and personal denial of fear and vulnerability contribute to a sense of isolation. Fear is manipulated in hierarchical settings to ensure the preservation of existing power arrangements. In a culture built on exploitation of fear, people do not experience the safety necessary to let their inevitable vulnerabilities show. Unmitigated chronic fear is an unsafe context that leads to a traumatic sense of disempowerment and personal immobilization, whether it is in war, childhood sexual abuse, living with a battering partner, or, perhaps in a more subtle way, in being immersed in massages of un-safety, danger, and having no influence in the larger public domain. Through mutual empathy we can heal these places of fear and disconnection. Mutual empathy arises in a context of profound respect, authentic responsiveness, humility, non-defensiveness, an attitude of curiosity, mindfulness (staying with the “not knowing”), and an appreciation of the power of learning. Movement out of isolation helps us pass through fear to hope and ultimately leads to growth and more connection.     

From relation to the field: Modes of unconscious fantasy elaborations1

Abstract

Relational and field theories have much in common, despite divergent foundations. In this paper, several areas of divergence are selected, including the structure of the field as a relational matrix or as an unconscious joint fantasy of the couple; the fate and form of insight; and the nature of the unconscious as relational or ubiquitous. Differences in cognitive and attentional sets are identified and linked to different modes of insight. Using a clinical vignette, these divergences will be illustrated with an attempt to compare and contrast the two approaches through a discussion of how each lens highlights, expands, or forecloses different features of the analytic process. A mode of conceiving the unconscious as unstructured and multiple in potential is offered to reconcile divergent assumptions in therapeutic action. A consideration of Sandor Ferenczi’s clinical emphasis on relaxed technique, elasticity, and especially mutuality suggests that he would have been a field theorist were he among us today.