Along the way of carving out niches and experience, family therapy became a space where I have much passion. While it may be considered an old-school approach, and considering that it's not always an ethical or safe option for everyone, this reflection is about family therapy as relational and deeply-rooted practice of healing.
As a lean into transparency and vulnerability, I’ve been a member in family therapy. Continuing to learn, reflect, and consult on what was abundant and also what was missed in my personal experiences. Families are often facing crises and tensions that manifest in destructive forms; themes that can polarize the psyche to absorb or annihilate. One must wonder how family stories get rooted in certainty in an attempt to find some sort of higher ground in groundless territory.
Elements of culture, patterned power dynamics, desires for change, and barriers to relating connect to core elements of trust, forgiveness, acceptance, endings, and changes. Ultimately, what family members come to know bridge understandings in how relational processes occur in life outside of the therapy room, presently and in the past. For example, (with identifying labels changed and concealed), a family I spent over a year working with created mutual understanding for how members relate to each another and within systemic context; connected to larger ecosystems of gender, power, and religious practices among the individual members. This can be acknowledged through language, what and how each member speaks, and metaphor.
Nuances in shared and differing realities gives opportunity to converse, reflect, disagree, and ultimately grow individually; within and beyond the collective unit. Connecting to how members interact in their own interpersonal relationships, and vice versa; re-enacting or transcending patterns of power within and outside of the family.
Aspects of reflective practice through community include reclaiming the indigenous and deep-rooted knowledges of each member:
What is being expressed through the pain collectively? How does that pain manifest as destruction? What type of future would that write, and is that consensual for the family members? Where did story get rooted in certainty?
What has been internalized that needs to be seen and released? In doing so, how would the family relate to one another in this co-created space?
While these questions serve more as abstract and intuitive reflection, deeply listening to the family’s stories brings about more grounded, process-oriented direction. Transcending and transforming power relations include both insight and a sense of movement towards chosen and agentive ways of being. The cultural landscapes of the family, individual knowledges, collective wisdoms, areas of appreciation, ways of communicating, and ultimately how the family seeks to be in relationship with one another, or not.
All of the above includes a sense of relational agency, that we are not necessarily just victims to fate or in control of outcomes in life. That with consciousness and co-creation, familial healing can create change for members in ways that individualized and privatized culture seeks to erase. In a day of self-help and insta-cures for relational woes, family council holds space and time. So, this reflection serves as considerations for family therapy practices and indigenous communal collectives.