Impacts of the Pandemic and Systemic Racism on Foster Youth

Foster youth are well versed in exposure to and overcoming a variety of traumas and have often developed and relied on both individual and cultural assets. What has been emphasized less is how these traumatic experiences are interrelated with oppression from their community and structural racism in our systems. Background and preliminary data Every day, [...]

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Suffering in Silence: Postpartum Anxiety in the Wake of COVID-19

I knew something was terribly wrong, but my distress didn’t have a name. My expectations of early motherhood included eye gazing, stroking soft folds of baby skin, and the blithe exchange of coos and song. There was that, and there was also a disorienting, relentless storm of angst, hypervigilance, and fear. I did not seek [...]

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Hope from a Systemic Perspective

We have been looking forward to the New Year with renewed hope and expectations that our society can move past the pandemic and work together toward healing. The past year presented enormous challenges that generations have not seen before. Together, we faced a pandemic, stood up to systemic racial injustices, and went through a contentious [...]

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Time is (Way) Out of Joint: On Systems, Politics, and Truth

It is difficult for an adversary to see further than the dichotomy between winning and losing in the adversarial combat. Like a chess player, he is always tempted to make a tricky move, to get a quick victory. The discipline, always to look for the best move on the board, is hard to attain and [...]

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Therapeutic Activism

The year 2020 was an anomaly. We shared collective grief, fear, loss, and uncertainty as we faced two deadly pandemics, COVID-19 and systemic racism. COVID-19 spotlit record unemployment, lack of consistent healthcare, food insecurity, chasms in education, and technologies. The pandemic exacerbated the disparities of systemic racism on Black, Latino/a, and Native American lives. Even [...]

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Harvesting Hope for 2021

2020 was a year like no other in our history. Global pandemic, political upheaval, and racial injustice have marred the view of the world in even the most hopeful and resilient of people. Since March 2020, many of us have been largely confined to our homes, carefully venturing out masked and keeping our distance from [...]

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Combining Contemplative Psychotherapy and Family Therapy

As a contemplative therapist in training, like many other psychotherapists, my home base is a humanistic and strengths-based approach, which is a synthesis of many western and eastern approaches. From western psychology and psychotherapy, it draws from humanistic psychology, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Jungian analytical theory, Rogerian person-centered therapy, and positive psychology. From the eastern traditions, [...]

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Multilateralism

therapy talk Recently on the AAMFT Blog, AAMFT Clinical Fellow Laurie L Charlés, PhD, LMFT, wrote: Multilateral, a term more utilized in international politics rather than family therapy, is about collaboration, and about working together across borders and sovereign states on global issues. Systemic thinkers are natural multilateralists—skilled at lateral engagement—able to work across multiple [...]

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The Greater Systems Around Us

Welcome to 2021, AAMFT Members. As I enter this inaugural season of my presidency in the midst of metasystemic changes, I find myself mentally framing AAMFT’s place in the greater systems around us. As the smallest of all mental health professions, Marriage and Family Therapy has our own unique story: Our origins started with “others”—psychiatrists, [...]

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