Predictors of Engagement in Family Mediation and Outcomes for Families that Fail to Engage

An important limitation to the effectiveness of family mediation in assisting separated parents is parents failing to engage in the mediation process. In 524 parents who presented to a telephone‐based mediation service, 113 (22%) initiating parents withdrew from mediation before the other parent was invited to participate, 241 (46%) initiating parents had respondent parents who declined to participate in mediation, and 170 cases (33%) completed mediation. We tested whether socio‐demographic variables, psychological distress, coparental acrimony, parenting problems, or children's behavioral difficulties predicted mediation engagement. High interparental acrimony predicted failure to engage in mediation, but none of the other variables predicted mediation engagement. We followed a sample of 131 families that did not mediate and found they showed elevated psychological distress, acrimony, parenting problems and child adjustment difficulties, which remained unchanged 6 months later. Further research is needed to explore strategies to enhance respondent parent engagement with mediation, and to address the negative outcomes for those separated families not proceeding with mediation.     

Lessons from the Transition to Relational Teletherapy During COVID-19

When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, clinicians were challenged to maintain continuity of care. Teletherapy became the primary means of service delivery for many who had never or only sparingly used it. The Family Institute at Northwestern University, in response to encouraging findings with respect to the effectiveness of teletherapy and recognizing advantages with respect to access to care, launched our teletherapy services in 2018. As a relationship-based organization, we were keen to exploit the opportunity that teletherapy provides to integrate additional members of the client system into the treatment. Over these two plus years, we have learned a great deal. Our learning was greatly accelerated by our transition to a 100% teletherapy practice in the wake of the pandemic. Teletherapy is a different context. Intentionally managing the context’s constraints and exploiting its strengths is key to providing high-quality couple and family therapy. This step is often overlooked or resisted when teletherapy is an occasional add-on to a face-to-face practice.     

The Italian Version of SCORE-15: Validation and Potential Use

SCORE-15 (Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation) is a 15-item questionnaire for completion by family members aged 12 years and older to assess outcomes in systemic therapy. This study aimed to investigate (a) the psychometric properties and the internal consistency reliability of the Italian version of SCORE-15, (b) clinical responsiveness, and (c) normative (Italian) criteria. Furthermore, (d) the study sought to evaluate the participants’ representation of both their family and their problems, analyzing open-ended questions included in the SCORE-15. Data were collected from two clinical centers for 208 families (n = 507). Results confirmed the three-factor structure (i.e., strengths, difficulties, and communication), a good internal consistency reliability, and indicated a cutoff threshold for the Italian version. Furthermore, results showed that SCORE-15 is a good instrument for clinical responsiveness and that it can be used to explore the way in which family members describe their families and problems. Overall, SCORE-15 is a brief, psychometrically robust family assessment instrument that may be used for both researchers and practitioners in several domains of clinical and social psychology.     

Community,Context, and Coping: How Social Connections Influence Coping and Well-Being for Military Members and Their Spouses

Military members and their spouses (n = 223 families) were selected from an Active Duty Army installation and assessed with regard to their connections with the military community, their levels of coping with military culture demands, and their reports of individual (depression and life satisfaction) and family well-being. Guided by the contextual model of family stress and the social organization theory of action and change, results from a structural equation model indicated that military community connections, for both military members and their civilian spouses, were related to coping with the military culture and its demands, which in turn was related to both individual and family well-being. Unique actor and partner effects also emerged where both active duty military members' and their civilian spouses' perceptions of military community connections influenced the civilian spouses' satisfaction with military life, but only the active duty military members' community connections influenced their military-specific coping. Additionally, the associations between military-specific coping and individual and family well-being only had actor effects. When examined within the context of important military culture elements, namely rank and extent of military transitions (deployment and relocation), these core findings linking communities to coping and well-being were unchanged. Implications for theory, future research, and practice are shared.     

Interventions to Empower Adults with Eating Disorders and Their Partners around the Transition to Parenthood

The transition to parenthood is perceived as a stressful life event, when parents experience an immense change of their psychological focus and a reorientation of roles and responsibilities in the family system. This process may be even more challenging in the presence of a parental eating disorder history. This paper reviews the impact of parental eating disorders on the parents, the couple relationship, and their child during the perinatal period. A parental eating disorder is associated with more negative expectations of parental efficacy as well as specific difficulties in couple communication over the child’s feeding, shape, and weight. Providers who better understand the effects of an eating disorder on parental functioning can more effectively intervene early on. We also present couple- or parent-based, empirically supported interventions for adults with eating disorders and their partners in the prenatal and postnatal periods: Uniting Couples in the treatment of Anorexia Nervosa (UCAN) and Uniting couples In the Treatment of Eating disorders (UNITE) both enhance recovery from the eating disorder through a couple-based intervention; the Maudsley Model of Treatment for Adults with Anorexia Nervosa (MANTRA) incorporates the support of partners, when appropriate; Parent-Based Prevention (PBP) focuses on improving parental functioning and reducing risk of negative parental and child outcomes. Finally, we discuss the clinical implications of addressing parental eating disorders and encourage more research on these families.     

Resilience Factors and Suicide Risk for a Sample of Transgender Clients

This study explored how individual- and community-based resilience factors operated together in order to reduce risk of suicide for a sample of transgender therapy clients. We collected cross-sectional survey data from 106 transgender therapy clients at a local community center, including demographic information, experiences of relational support, participants' emotional stability, and risk for suicide. Results from our mediation analysis indicated that high levels of perceived relational support are related to reduced risk for suicide and that this happens by way of a person's emotional stability. Clinical implications for family therapists are discussed based on the significant indirect effect found in this study.     

The familiar stranger

To classify the contents of the collective unconsciousness which he had just discovered, Jung made use of typology. Later, beginning in the 1940s, he adopted the concept of archetypal field (relational and energetic), emphasizing the dynamic of opposites. Drawing inspiration from the field concept, the author shows the active role taken in the transference relationship by the opposites 'strange' and 'familiar'– defined as antinomic values – and studies the therapeutic conditions for a transition from one pole to the other, in neurotic and borderline cases. The clinical examples are drawn from Théodore Flournoy's book, Des Indes à la planète Mars (From India to the Planet Mars) , and two films, Theorem by Pasolini and Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Renais and Marguerite Duras.