January/February 2024 Volume 23, No. 1

Mothers’ Lived Experiences with an Incarcerated Son: A Research Brief

Impacts of incarceration on the family system With an estimated 2.2 million people incarcerated, the United States (U.S.) continues to have the highest incarceration rate in the world (Beckett et al., 2018). Stress, trauma, and stigma are common negative effects of incarceration on the well-being of the individual and their loved ones (Turney & Goodsell, [...]

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January/February 2024 Volume 23, No. 1

Guiding Couples to Repair When Trust Has Been Broken: Setting Expectations with Digital Use

Many couples struggle to form agreements for cellphone and computer use after an affair. Providing guidance to establish expectations around digital use is a valuable service provided by therapists in the field of marriage and family therapy. Setting shared expectations with digital use can be hard to accomplish in any relationship, and post affair, the [...]

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November / December 2023 Volume 22, No.6

All Hands on Deck: Let Us Serve With Those Who Serve

“Thank you for your service” is a statement that those currently serving, or who have served, in the U.S. military receive from family, friends, and strangers. Additionally, Thank You For Your Service is the title of a movie that was released in 2017, which depicts U.S. soldiers returning home from Iraq and their struggles to [...]

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November / December 2023 Volume 22, No.6

Maybe I Was Overreacting: A MedFT’s Role with Autism Spectrum Disorder

One in 44 children was diagnosed with autism in 2020 (Maenner et al., 2021), or approximately 1.7% of children in the United States (Bridgemohan et al., 2019). Despite increasing autism awareness, parents still express dissatisfaction with care from their primary care physician (PCP; Carbone et al., 2010). One-third of parents expressed concerns with the diagnostic [...]

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November / December 2023 Volume 22, No.6

What Is “Science-based” Therapy and How Do I Practice It?

After a decade of working with clients, there are important questions I’m asking myself. Why do I use the theories I use? What makes therapy effective? Why do some clients fail to meet treatment goals? And how do I practice science-based therapy? These questions are related, but the very last question is the one I’ll [...]

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September / October 2023 Volume 22, No. 5

Neurocriminology: A Call on Marriage and Family Therapists and Allied Disciplines to Become Informed

Neurocriminology is an interdisciplinary subfield of criminology that incorporates methodological approaches from neuroscience, physiology, genetics, biology, and psychology. The goal of neurocriminology is to better understand, predict, prevent, and treat criminal and violent behaviors. Although there is no single determinant of such actions, neurocriminology strives to identify different risk factors that increase the likelihood of [...]

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September / October 2023 Volume 22, No. 5

Culturally Informed Marriage and Family Therapy with the Chinese Population

In light of the growing recognition of the importance for marriage and family therapists (MFTs) to be sensitive to their clients’ cultural backgrounds and memberships, this article is intended to provide several culturally-informed clinical suggestions for therapists applying Western-based MFT theories, models, and concepts to the Chinese population. When the authors use the term “Chinese [...]

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July / August 2023 Volume 22, No. 4

Family Therapy Has Always Evolved – Now Includes Sibling Therapy

I had the good fortune of having discovered the field of family therapy before there were separate schools. I was living in Boston in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Some of the noted early pioneers would travel around the country offering one-day trainings. They each had their own special orientation. Some just did a [...]

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July / August 2023 Volume 22, No. 4

Consensual Non-Monogamy and Attachment Styles

Marriage and family therapists (MFTs) have a unique skillset to manage complex relationships between client constellations, a skill which is essential for working with people in consensual non-monogamous relationships (CNMRs). With around 5% of the population in the U.S. being involved in a CNMR (Ka et al., 2022) and sexual minorities being more likely to [...]

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July / August 2023 Volume 22, No. 4

The Power of Coming “Out”: Creating Safe Spaces for Young People to be Themselves

Recently, I had the pleasure and privilege of a teenager coming out to me as gay. The process of this discovery was a long one. He disclosed to me that he had seen a movie, Call Me By Your Name, that he found arousing. We had a long conversation about sexuality and how it falls [...]

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