The Systemic Way Sezer and Julie

This episode is a reflective conversation bout the recent AFT symposium "Building Bridges" which took place in Birmingham in July 2023. We are joined by Jennifer Achan, Anokh Goodman, Sybil Qasir and Judy Sutton who share their experiences of the day from their personal and professional positions. 

If you were unable to make it in person then we hope this gives you a flavour of the day and if you were there a reminder of the event. 

In this episode Parveen Kaur & Amy Urry join us to discuss an initiative by AFT to openly and collaboratively work with members on issues of diversity. They share the intentions of creating the DWPs, provide insights on what they are about and details on how to join.


Parveen Kaur works as a Family & Systemic Psychotherapist in Community CAMHS for Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.  She practices as a clinical Supervisor on the MSc training programme at Birmingham and in March 2021 started her role as Head of the Birmingham Systemic Training Programme.  In addition, she teaches clinical applications of FT-AN to SFP trainees on the Eating disorder training pathway for CYP IAPT training in Manchester.

Amy Urry worked as a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist in a Specialist Personality Disorder Service, Devon Partnership Trust. She is UKCP registered, and an approved supervisor and trainer, with many years of experience working with individuals, couples, families, teams and organisations. She taught Family Therapy at Foundation and Intermediate levels from 1981, and was co-director of the Post-graduate Diploma/MSc in Systemic Practice from 1991- 2009 at Exeter University. Amy has been a member of the Board of Directors and Trustees since 2017

In this episode we talk with Dr Travis Heath and discuss the book “Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography by Travis Heath, Tom Carlson and David Epston.

The heart of the book is a re embracing of the spirits of narrative practice through the teaching and learning of this approach. Travis invites us to explore the essence of the model through autoethnography, practice & teaching stories It’s a deep dive into the core of its inventive origins from dedicated practitioners.


Travis is a licensed psychologist and is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Counseling & School Psychology. Past work he’s been involved with looked at shifting from a multicultural approach to counseling to one of cultural democracy that invites people to heal in mediums that are culturally near. 
His most recent work involves incorporating the work of Black abolitionist scholars into psychotherapy, community healing, and uprising. His writing has focused on the use of rap music in narrative therapy, working with persons entangled in the criminal injustice system in ways that maintain their dignity, narrative practice stories as pedagogy, a co-created questioning practice called reunion questions, and community healing strategies. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson, of the first book on Contemporary Narrative Therapy released in June 2022 entitled, “Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography.” The book is part of the “Writing Lives” series with Routledge publishing. Travis has been fortunate to facilitate workshops and speak in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Peter Rober returns onto the podcast to talk in detail about his JFT award winning paper ‘One step up, but not there yet’: using client feedback to optimise the therapeutic alliance in family therapy, where he and his co-authours talk about the integral role of collaboration and therapeutic alliance in achieving positive outcomes in therapy.

In this episode Peter talks to us about the feedback instruments,  the origins of using feedback in his practice, the development of the tools. He  gives examples, tips and insights  in using these in practice. We hear how Peter integrates feedback into practice in a meaningful and collaborative way for families to bring about change. Peter also discusses how fluid the tools are and can be adapted to different cultures, context and settings.

Paper reference:

Rober, P., Van Tricht, K., & Sundet, R. (2021). ‘One step up, but not there yet’: using client feedback to optimise the therapeutic alliance in family therapy. Journal of Family Therapy, 43(1), 46-63.


Resources:

https://www.intherapytogether.com/

In this episode we meet with Graham Music, Consultant Child Psychotherapist and former Associate Clinical Director at the Tavistock Clinic in London. We discuss his career, his books as we dive into his ideas on the interplay between systemic thinking, attachment theory, developmental psychology and the new frontiers of neuroscience.

We discussed this paper as a focus for the conversation:

Music, G. (2019). Babies and bathwaters: attachment, neuroscience, evolution and the left. Soundings, 73(73), 111-128.


Graham Music works as a therapist both with adults and children, as well as families, especially after trauma, both in the NHS and privately. He is an international speaker, teacher and supervisor of other therapists, working as a consultant psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, an internationally renowned mental health centre, where he was formerly an associate clinical director. His passions include child development research, neuroscience and attachment theory, and how cutting-edge developmental findings can help us in our lives and in how we work with others.

Welcome to The Systemic Lens - our podcast where we geek out on systemic ideas and apply them to films, music, literature and pop culture. 

In this episode we take on the magnificent film,  Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Enjoy!