Month: June 2017

For the past several years the institute has been focusing on producing teaching videos, including short and longer videos for classroom teaching as well as short videos to use with clients in therapy. We have always used videos in our teaching, but the limitations of use of videos of client sessions as well as the limitations of using movies, which we have always considered a tremendous resource for teaching, led us to beginning to develop teaching materials that would allow other therapists, students and the public to learn without great expense from our clinical insights built up over many years teaching family therapy. The following is a list of videos we have been working on, some of which are complete, while others are still in the imagination stage. Harnessing the Power of Genograms which illustrates a first session with a client who enters therapy with no particular interest in exploring his family history and learns about the relevance of his genogram as he explores his personal and family history (available through www.psychotherapy.net) Assessment and Engagement in Family Therapy – This video of an immigrant family from Puerto Rico and Ecuador demonstrates the first stages of therapy over 4 sessions. Monica McGoldrick is the therapist (available through www.psychotherapy.net) Triangles and De-Triangling, by Monica McGoldrick. A 39 minute video on understanding triangling and detriangling in clinical practice – a video for clients or students. Emancipating History: A Family’s Racial Legacy: A Genogram Journey of Elaine Pinderhughes. 35 minute video of an interview Elaine Pinderhughes had with Monica McGoldrick about her insights drawn from research she did on her family’s history. Facing Unmourned Loss & Trauma: Building Resilience: a 27 minute teaching video addressing clinical understanding and intervention for those who have experienced unmourned loss and trauma, based on insights drawn from the work and genogram story of Dr. Norman Paul. Working with Immigrant Families- 16 minute orientation video about who immigrants are in the U.S. and clinical issues in assessment and intervention- This is a companion video for Assessment and Engagement in Family therapy which explores the issues of an immigrant family over the course of 4 sessions. Stonehenge: Historic Meetings of Women Family Therapists 1984 and 1986. A 10 minute video including commentary by Monica McGoldrick in collaboration with Froma Walsh from historic conferences they organized more than 30 years ago. The video discusses also the impact of the meeting for the participants and others. Inlaws, Stepfamilies and other Hazards of Family Life. A video still in process for clients and students to illustrate some of the specific patterns relevant for understanding family relationships with inlaws and step-families. Creating Genograms– This video is still in process. It will be primarily for students. It uses the story of the Kennedy family to illustrate the creation of genograms: why they are excellent ways to map family stories, patterns they can help you to see in family history, and some specifics of family issues such as sibling constellation, untimely loss and trauma, the pile-up of stressful events, the long range impact of addictions, triangles, and family secrets. Couples Video: to help couples understand work on their relationship issues. This video will be for couples as well as for students and therapists. It should be no longer than 20 minutes. Interview with Carlos Sluzki, MD, one of the originals in the Family Therapy Movement. In this interview Sluzki discusses with Monica McGoldrick and Michael Rohrbaugh his history, from his early interest in Systems when studying medician and social theories in Argentina, to his early introduction to the pioneers at MRI, where he worked from the 1960s. Video in preparation Engaging A Family with a Family Play Genogram: This 22 minute teaching video describes how to use a Family Play Genogram a offers a dramatic case illustration, depicting the value of the technique.   Other themes we are working to develop include: Using a Family Life Cycle Framework for Assessment Working with Remarried Families Key Issues in Developing Cultural Competence Helping People Deal with Conflicts and Cutoffs The Dimension of Power in Family Therapy Our Multiple Identities: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Social Class, Geography, Values, Family Connectedness, Life Cycle Stage, etc. Using U-Theory in Couples Therapy

The Multicultural Family Institute (MFI or the Institute) developed from a family systems training program that began in 1972 at the Community Mental Health Center of Rutgers Medical School (CMHC) in Piscataway New Jersey, spearheaded by Monica McGoldrick. In 1991, due to changes in the landscape of mental health, the program moved to Metuchen and was incorporated as a private non-profit educational institution, called the Family Institute of New Jersey. In 2000, The Institute changed its name to The Multicultural Family Institute to better reflect its mission and moved to its present location in Highland Park, New Jersey. The founders, all of whom had worked together at Rutgers Mental Health Center, were Monica McGoldrick, Nydia Garcia Preto, Meyer Rothberg, Paulette Moore Hines, and CharlesEtta Sutton. (click to read more) Remembering Paulette Moore Hines There is no one you would rather have in your corner when you are at the most complex, difficult, trying moments of your life than Paulette Moore Hines. She had the most dazzling ability to keep her feet on the ground and her heart open to others’ needs, personal stress, and pain, while staying focused on the task at hand. (read more) Remembering Betty Carter Betty Carter was a primary mentor of our Institute, she was the speaker at our Opening, and she was one of 16 founding members of our Culture Conference Faculty from our beginning in 1992 until her retirement. Betty was a magnificent, inspiring, brilliant teacher and my dear friend for more than 35 years. As a personality she was larger than life- in her humor, her creativity, her mentoring of generations of family therapists, and of course her “Bettyisms”- turns of phrase that made us all recognize our foibles and realize what we had to do next. (read more) Remembering Carol Anderson Carol Anderson MSW, PhD. (1939-2014) was a great and loyal friend of our Institute from the beginning, presenting workshops and consulting with us as well as participating many times in our Culture Conference over the years. Shy, brilliant, and creative, she was one of the most consistent contributors to the Family Therapy field. She never hesitated to offer her warm and thoughtful ideas on every sort of issue as the years went by. (read more) Read our CCTC paper from Family Process (pdf) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1jsz4HlIO4&t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmgt_mG1cXM 26 years of our Cultural Conference Training Center Article on The MFI’s History The institute was asked to write a chapter for the Encyclopedia of Couple and Family therapy about our history. The following is from the chapter we wrote: The Institute’s Evolution In the earliest years of the Family Therapy Training Program at the CMHC we were inspired by many of the 1st generation family therapists, in particular Virginia Satir, most of all through her first book, Conjoint Family Therapy, which was our first “bible.” Jay Haley was also a major influence, especially his book Strategies of Psychotherapy. We had missed the era of Don Jackson, but the Palo Alto group was a great influence also. Change, the book of their second incarnation was a prime text for us all. From early on McGoldrick was affiliated with two other area Institutes associated with the work of Murray Bowen (The Center for Family Learning and then the Family Institute of Westchester). Bowen’s ideas became central to our training. In addition to a visit from Bowen himself, Phil Guerin, Tom Fogarty, Betty Carter, David Berenson, Ed Friedman and other Bowen oriented therapists visited and inspired the program. Over the years the Institute became a place where many other influential family systems thinkers came to present their work as well. Harry Aponte became part of our CMHC training faculty bi-weekly for 4 years, training our faculty as well as our students. Among the many others who visited and taught us repeatedly over the years were David Treadway, JoAnne Krestan, Paul Watzlawick, Norman Paul, Froma Walsh, Carol Anderson and Lynn Hoffman. Several international groups came for multiple visits: Michael White and David Epston, the Irish Fifth Province Team (Nollaig Byrne, Imelda McCarthy and Phil Kearney), and The Just Therapy Team from New Zealand, and we developed a collaboration with Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin, which involved making teaching videos and holding conferences in various places in the U.S., Ireland and Italy. We also cosponsored an International Addictions conference in Dublin 1983, as well as two national conferences (Stonehenge- 1984 and 1986) and one International Women in Family Therapy conferences (Copenhagen, 1991). In 1991 when the CMHC training ended and our new institute was founded, Betty Carter became our formal godmother, and our network expanded, involving a great many others with whom we collaborated in training and writing projects, including, to mention just a few: Ken Hardy, Nancy Boyd Franklin, Evelyn Lee, Elaine Pinderhughes, Rhea Almeida, Jay Lappin, Matthew Mock, Maria Root, Fernando Colon, Rockey Robbins, Salome Raheim, and many others. From 1994-2008 Eliana Gil became a crucial part of the Institute’s visiting faculty, and together we developed the use of family play genograms and many other techniques for assessing and dealing with children in families. The Institute’s Aim and Focus We represent a diversity of cultural perspectives and are committed to promoting a multi-contextual systems life cycle approach to resolving human problems within a framework of community empowerment. The Institute from its inception has been devoted to postgraduate family therapy training, research and consultation to community institutions from a multicultural systemic perspective. We are committed to promoting social justice and countering societal forces that undermine people because of race, gender, culture, class, sexual orientation, religion or disability. We seek to create a world in which all members of our community share in the possibility of finding a “home place” where they feel safe and can receive educational, health and mental health resources that will allow them to function at their best. We collaborate with a broad national and international network of colleagues similarly dedicated to evolving a multi-contextual cultural framework. Originally our focus was on a 3-year post-graduate … Read more

STONEHENGE WOMEN’s COLLOQUIUMS Click here for the video of pictures and discussion of the meetings. 3 Meetings of Women Family Therapists: 1984, 1986, 1991 by Monica McGoldrick & Froma Walsh It was not so long ago that leading women from many tribes and from many parts of the territory left behind their husbands, children, and everyday tasks, rendezvousing in a distant and mysterious place. The men, left behind for the first time, were puzzled and wary. They drew together in little groups, watching and whispering as the women left the villages, gradually disappearing from sight As the women gathered at this beautiful, misty place, ringed by ancient monoliths, they greeted each other and, tentative at first, began to share their stories. The women’s voices grew louder and more animated as they began to recall the long suppressed myths of the great goddesses, to hearken back to the proud, original forms of these stories before they had been diminished and grown ugly in the voices of the medicine men of the territory. They shared their own stories, their own lives, cementing a new and powerful bond. On the last day, sad to leave but renewed, they clasped hands and took a vow of secrecy, for they had experienced the dangers to women and to women’s stories in their everyday worlds. Each woman, strengthened and somehow changed, headed back to her village, to her tasks, to her kin. –Joan Laird- A Tale she included in a write up about Stonehenge for the AFTA Newsletter   The Set-Up for the First Meeting In 1984 the two of us with our third “musketeer” Carol Anderston arranged a meeting of 50 women at the cutting edge of family therapy training, theory, and research, which took place at Stonehenge in Connecticut in 1984. The aim of the colloquium was to share and build on our mutual efforts to understand the issues of women in families and in family therapy. It was the first time as far as we know that there was a group convened for the sole purpose of discussing the place of women in family therapy. The initial reactions to the idea of the Stonehenge conference were many and surprisingly negative. Monica had originally proposed co-sponsoring the conference with The Women’s Conference in Family Therapy, a group of 4 of the senior women in the field: Betty Carter, Peggy Papp, Mary Ann Walters and Olga Silverstein. They did not think such a meeting would be worth participating in, although in the end they were great enthusiasts for the meeting. Marianne even told me initially there were no women out there she would be interested in meeting. Luckily she changed her mind and participated actively in all 3 of the meetings, but it gives you an idea how strongly we women had been socialized to view men as the center of the universe. We invited the mothers of the field including Virginia Satir and Mara Selvini, who later said they did not believe there was any need to have a meeting just with women. One senior woman rejected the invitation out of hand, saying she never concerned herself with gender since it was a trivial level of difference, which held no interest for her. Another woman said that to participate in the meeting would be “counter to all my efforts toward systems theory.” A third said she had no “legitimate excuse” to go off for three days “with just women,” particularly since she had been away from her husband too much already. Others worried what it would be like to meet “with only women” for three days, and a few were concerned that their male colleagues would be upset with them for attending. In other words, few women were unambivalent about the idea of a conference of and about women. Several joked that 20 years ago the idea of a meeting without men would never have occurred to them, and if it had, would have been immediately dismissed as too boring to consider. Indeed, at the meeting itself Kitty LaPerriere, one of the very few early women leaders in the field, commented that she was surprised herself to realize that there was no place on earth she’d rather be that Saturday night than with this very amazing group of all women! Men who heard about the meeting also reacted strongly. Several expressed fears that we women were trying to mobilize a takeover of the field to oust the male leaders. A few tried to get themselves invited or at least to be allowed to send a representative. The meeting was compared to a coven of witches. The meeting stimulated emotional reactions and fantasies far beyond our expectations. Women who were interested in attending were called radicals, men haters, and–the worst of all possible insults–“nonsystemic thinkers.” Even we as the initiators wondered at times about the possible negative effects of such a meeting. Would it unite us or divide us? Would it alienate those who could not attend? As the emotional climate intensified, so did our commitment to the meeting and our curiosity about the causes of such extreme responses from otherwise rational people. It became clear that some very powerful issues were being raised; some very important unspoken rules were being challenged. Stimulating turmoil had not been our intent. In developing the plan for Stonehenge, we had seen the need for a network of support and sharing, a need for more visible women mentors and role models, and for hearing the many wonderful voices of women in the field, who were so often overshadowed by the men in their lives. Indeed, the inspiration for the meeting came to Monica as she travelled around Ireland in 1983 with Lynn Hoffman and realized through their conversation what a hidden but significant force Lynn had been for so many in the field since the early 1960s and yet hardly anyone knew her name. She had ghost written Virginia Satir’s first book, she had given the structural therapists … Read more