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Responses to Carmel Flaskas

Responses to Carmel Flaskas Julie Burgess-Manning (burgessjulie@hotmail.com): The previous discussion worked because a variety of people posted to it. Please don’t hesitate to add your ideas. Glenn Larner (glarner@intercoast.com.au): I can only heartily agree with Carmel. For me, being a family therapist gives permission to think in many frameworks at once and this curiosity is what family therapy is about. When we are with persons in a situation of family therapy our openness to ideas as therapists — the diversity factor as a therapist variable if you like — is what is important in the process of change. Through our reflectivity, others are encouraged to think more widely and become responsible for defining individual and contextual experience in relationship to each other. Here I appreciate the practice examples provided by Carmel, which remind us not to be too carried away with any idea, that ultimately theory is a frame or container for both therapists and clients to hold and approach the horrible (the pain of lived experience) that which has hitherto not been expressed or said. John Gregson (jgregson@wnmeds.ac.nz): I have just read Andrew Wood’s comments about Family Therapy being in danger of falling off the radar in Mental Health Services (ANZJFT, 23, 4: 227). I agree, and am concerned. I think there are links with Carmel’s points in this article. The ‘hot’ area in Mental Health at present is Evidence Based Practice. Much is good about that, but Family Therapy does not appear on most psychiatrists’ or managers’ radar as evidence based. And I write as a sympathetic psychiatrist rather than a family therapist. There are many and complex reasons for this. It is important to state that there is an evidence base for family therapy. However in terms of the gold standard of randomised blinded trials the evidence base is relatively thin. If Family Therapy is to hold its place, let alone expand, more outcome research is needed. Carmel’s article raises two relevant issues. • If Family Therapists are always moving on to the next paradigm, there is little time to evaluate the last paradigm • Even if an Evidence Base is developed, there is a danger that it is devalued as it represents the old therapy that is no longer practised. I realise that the reasons that Outcome Research is less prevalent in Family Therapy than some other treatments are complex, and are in part related to who holds power and money. But I would be interested in responses to these thoughts, and to Carmel’s article generally. Ju l i e B u r g e s s - M a n n i n g (jburgess-manning@wnmeds. ac.nz): John Gregson has raised one of the points that we struggle with here in NZ. Will the trend to evidence-based practice squeeze us out of the health services, unless we start more research? Tom Blume (blume@oakland.edu): I was delighted in Carmel’s clarity of observation and expression about the contentious and absolutistic way in which family therapists have flocked to every new set of ideas as ‘the truth’ and rejected all else as ‘error’. I am writing an intro textbook, trying to help newcomers to the field in their efforts to make sense of this 50-year history of ‘My theory’s more useful than your theory’, and I am calling for less attention to the distinctions that served so well in the early decades. I think that I am in agreement with Carmel when I have been saying that a postmodern ethos should lead us to an inclusive stance in which we take seriously our own, and our clients’, efforts to create meaning ... Can we take all meaning-making efforts seriously? To the extent that professionals wield power in our encounters with each other and with outsiders, we can’t exactly be value-free in accepting and validating every theory. When a theory privileges some realities and doesn’t privilege others … the theory can be used in ways that are exploitative. But if the theory is a narrative tool, useful for the ways in which it brings forward one or another kind of discourse, what we would want is not to seek the ultimate problem-free tool but rather to know how to choose the tool that helps us achieve something that matters to us at the moment. Keeney has used the term ‘meaningful noise’ to describe the way in which a professional puts language around the issues presented by the clients. What his term has said to me is that we can’t just arbitrarily decide how to make meaning out of people’s experiences, we have to negotiate those meanings with them. What our professional conversations have focused on, instead, is the process of selling meanings to people. P lease join the next discussion, responding to t h e i n t e r v i e w o f M o s h e Ta l m o n b y L i l C o x a n d Alistair Campbell, ‘Let’s Live, and See’. Dates: April 6th–27th. R ead it in this issue and on our w e b s i t e www.anzjft.com ANZJFT Volume 24 Number 1 2003 p. 55 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy Wiley

Responses to Carmel Flaskas

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
2003 Australian Association of Family Therapy
ISSN
0814-723X
eISSN
1467-8438
DOI
10.1002/j.1467-8438.2003.tb00541.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Julie Burgess-Manning (burgessjulie@hotmail.com): The previous discussion worked because a variety of people posted to it. Please don’t hesitate to add your ideas. Glenn Larner (glarner@intercoast.com.au): I can only heartily agree with Carmel. For me, being a family therapist gives permission to think in many frameworks at once and this curiosity is what family therapy is about. When we are with persons in a situation of family therapy our openness to ideas as therapists — the diversity factor as a therapist variable if you like — is what is important in the process of change. Through our reflectivity, others are encouraged to think more widely and become responsible for defining individual and contextual experience in relationship to each other. Here I appreciate the practice examples provided by Carmel, which remind us not to be too carried away with any idea, that ultimately theory is a frame or container for both therapists and clients to hold and approach the horrible (the pain of lived experience) that which has hitherto not been expressed or said. John Gregson (jgregson@wnmeds.ac.nz): I have just read Andrew Wood’s comments about Family Therapy being in danger of falling off the radar in Mental Health Services (ANZJFT, 23, 4: 227). I agree, and am concerned. I think there are links with Carmel’s points in this article. The ‘hot’ area in Mental Health at present is Evidence Based Practice. Much is good about that, but Family Therapy does not appear on most psychiatrists’ or managers’ radar as evidence based. And I write as a sympathetic psychiatrist rather than a family therapist. There are many and complex reasons for this. It is important to state that there is an evidence base for family therapy. However in terms of the gold standard of randomised blinded trials the evidence base is relatively thin. If Family Therapy is to hold its place, let alone expand, more outcome research is needed. Carmel’s article raises two relevant issues. • If Family Therapists are always moving on to the next paradigm, there is little time to evaluate the last paradigm • Even if an Evidence Base is developed, there is a danger that it is devalued as it represents the old therapy that is no longer practised. I realise that the reasons that Outcome Research is less prevalent in Family Therapy than some other treatments are complex, and are in part related to who holds power and money. But I would be interested in responses to these thoughts, and to Carmel’s article generally. Ju l i e B u r g e s s - M a n n i n g (jburgess-manning@wnmeds. ac.nz): John Gregson has raised one of the points that we struggle with here in NZ. Will the trend to evidence-based practice squeeze us out of the health services, unless we start more research? Tom Blume (blume@oakland.edu): I was delighted in Carmel’s clarity of observation and expression about the contentious and absolutistic way in which family therapists have flocked to every new set of ideas as ‘the truth’ and rejected all else as ‘error’. I am writing an intro textbook, trying to help newcomers to the field in their efforts to make sense of this 50-year history of ‘My theory’s more useful than your theory’, and I am calling for less attention to the distinctions that served so well in the early decades. I think that I am in agreement with Carmel when I have been saying that a postmodern ethos should lead us to an inclusive stance in which we take seriously our own, and our clients’, efforts to create meaning ... Can we take all meaning-making efforts seriously? To the extent that professionals wield power in our encounters with each other and with outsiders, we can’t exactly be value-free in accepting and validating every theory. When a theory privileges some realities and doesn’t privilege others … the theory can be used in ways that are exploitative. But if the theory is a narrative tool, useful for the ways in which it brings forward one or another kind of discourse, what we would want is not to seek the ultimate problem-free tool but rather to know how to choose the tool that helps us achieve something that matters to us at the moment. Keeney has used the term ‘meaningful noise’ to describe the way in which a professional puts language around the issues presented by the clients. What his term has said to me is that we can’t just arbitrarily decide how to make meaning out of people’s experiences, we have to negotiate those meanings with them. What our professional conversations have focused on, instead, is the process of selling meanings to people. P lease join the next discussion, responding to t h e i n t e r v i e w o f M o s h e Ta l m o n b y L i l C o x a n d Alistair Campbell, ‘Let’s Live, and See’. Dates: April 6th–27th. R ead it in this issue and on our w e b s i t e www.anzjft.com ANZJFT Volume 24 Number 1 2003 p. 55

Journal

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy – Wiley

Published: Mar 1, 2003

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