Working with Adult Children and Families Using Core Focused Family Therapy

In this episode, Judye discusses growing up in a family where her father was a psychoanalyst and became interested in the field. In graduate school, she became interested in family therapy, and worked at a youth guidance center in Massachusetts, but didn’t find working with children and play to be a way she really wanted to work. Her supervisor had trained at the Ackerman Institute in New York City and had her start working with families, which really fit well for her and her work. She explained she moved to California and worked at Xanthos, now Alameda Family Services, and studied with Alan Leviton, one of the founders of the Association of Family Therapists of Northern California. Additionally, she started teaching at California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she taught family therapy by having the students bring in their families to have a family therapy session, or role play if the family was unable to come in. She discussed her work and how she ended up writing a book about her approach called Core Focused Family Therapy. She discussed one of her strategies in the beginning of a family session was to do some dyadic work with two members of the system who were not the central focus, which seemed to help open up conversation and soften stuck systems, and then moving on to the focus on the areas the system might be struggling. Judye explained that one of the reviewers of her book wrote that her approach is love and truth, using a warm, but direct approach. She explained another strategy is to move the focus off of the identified patient, and look at how the whole system is involved with the difficulties that are happening, so they can make a systemic change, which she calls increasing the surface area of the problem. She discussed connecting with he vulnerabilities behind the defenses, and in helping the dyad that seems most open, the rest of the system then usually also become more open to vulnerabilities. She talked about using this model to make significant changes in the family system in a short period of time. She discussed how she focuses on working with families with adult children, and the variety of clients who reach out to her, with family cut offs being a common issue clients are seeking help in repairing their family. Judye Hess, PhD, has worked with families since 1974 when she began her family therapy career at Worcester Child Guidance Center in Worcester, Mass. In 1977, Judye moved to the west coast and found a home at Xanthos, a family counseling center in Alameda, CA, where she worked for the next three years. In 1984, she began teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she was on the core faculty and taught family dynamics, couples counseling and group process until 2015. She is the author of Core Focused Family Therapy: Moving From Chaos to Clarity and she is now Professor Emerita from CIIS, and since then has maintained a private practice, seeing couples and families of adult children exclusively.