Community-Minded Family Therapy

Therapy often focuses on the family in the room as the locus of change. While this can mobilize change efforts on the local level, this may inadvertently encourage people to solve their troubles by adjusting themselves to their life conditions, thereby propping up situations and contexts in their world that are hurtful and should not be supported. Noticing those societal discourses/influences that families enact, in both helpful and non-helpful ways, is our way of bringing the idea of community into therapy. Additionally, discussing the societal discourses as part of how to best live our lives can lead to initiatives on the part of our client families and ourselves to challenge those ideas not only in the therapy conversation, but also in our overall lives (at work, school, etc.). We offer suggestions about ways in which we can look at the extra-familial social levels and societal discourses in our therapeutic practices.