For some time the family therapy field has been moving away from a problem-based approach to work with clients. Ideas such as creating a new family story, focusing on strengths and solutions, and making contracts with family members have all shifted interest toward a new approach to therapy. Ray and Keeney have been in the forefront of this thinking for several years and they have been experimenting with their ideas by working together with clients in order to create their own coherent, effective model for therapy. Resource Focused Therapy is the result

The application of systemic ideas and principles in working with people with intellectual disabilities, their families, and their service systems has grown over the last decade. This book, for the first time, brings together the writings of a group of practitioners who have been using this approach in their clinical practice. They hope to inspire others to try different ways of working with people with intellectual disabilities and their wider systems, so that they can have the choice of a wide range of therapeutic approaches. It is also hoped that systemic practitioners who are unfamiliar...

The impetus for this book came from an appreciation that reflexivity, for both consultant and client, is the core ingredient for facilitating the -changing organization.- Central to this belief, Reflexive Inquiry (RI) draws on the spirit of five overlapping theoretical traditions--systemic, social constructionist, critical, appreciative, and complexity. These principles each offer a contribution to the management of reflexive consciousness and are used to shape consultancy practice. Tools expressing these approaches and embodying and facilitating reflexivity are honed and sharpened with...

Dialogic practices have been described and analyzed to a certain extent in the fields of therapy and other psychosocial work--and so have approaches based on network encounters and multi-professional work. But these two, networks and dialogues, have seldom been placed in the same framework. Yet dialogic encounters between private and professional networks have great potentials in dissolving problems.

The book describes and analyzes two dialogic network practices, Open Dialogues and Anticipation Dialogues. Both are the result of development and research during almost two decades....

The authors of this volume take as their starting point "striking moments" in their practice with older people, their families and other practitioners. They integrate these with current systemic thinking to offer new perspectives on working with older people in a range of physical health, mental health and social care contexts. This book is practice led and contains a wealth of examples that will be familiar both to practitioners working with older people and to older people themselves and their families. The authors, all experienced clinicians, place an emphasis on how systemic and narrative...

Everyone is familiar with situations, events or stages in our lives, where we do not quite feel that we have succeeded as parents or partners. Parenthood is a unique opportunity not just to create a family, but also to create growth and development in our own lives, as well as in the lives of our children and with others with whom we are intimate.

The Vibrant Family is a manual based on the new paradigms that have inspired the authors in their professional and personal lives. They have an optimistic approach and would like to invite you and your partner to develop some of...

Emotions are connected to meaning-making in human interactions. In recent years, systemic theory and practice adopted a dialogical orientation, more centered on the persons of the therapist and her clients. This has led to a growing attention toward emotions, which, in this book, is developed in terms of emotional systems.

An emotional system in therapy may be viewed as the sum of the emotions existing and interacting in people's lives. Relevant changes in life happen when emotional stances and sequences change within the system, leading, for example, to a greater sense of agency...

Contemporary practices in Mental Health (and Social Care) are increasingly characterized by approaches that overly simplify social, political, and psychological concerns. The persistence and ubiquity of models designated to tackle diagnoses through focused technologies serve to minimize the human encounter in all its relational and systemic complexity. Practice becomes a technological activity instead of one concerned with the unique creative potential in meeting with others in therapy.

With the growth of privatized mental health services, many practitioners are facing a plethora...

This is a book about children who have to grow up apart from their biological parents, the impact of this on their lives and on those who look after them, and how we can respond to the challenges this poses in order that they can grow and develop in healthy directions. It provides a systemic framework to describe working with children and adults who are or have been in care or adopted, as well as working with their adoptive parents and carers, highlighting their own narratives and those of professionals working with them.

The authors have tried to make space for multiple voices to...