Family Therapy Stories: Stretching Customary Family Therapy Practices

Abstract

We have created a collection of stories from our authors to provide another glimpse into ways that social injustices manifest themselves in daily interactions and events. The stories each have a different focus on transformation and/or social justice. We offer you stories of trying to explain social justice work in clinical practice, a supervisee’s emotional reaction, a student therapist’s own personal transformation through her professional preparation, the heartbreak of seeing and experiencing injustice inflicted by the helping profession, the complications and unfairnesses that occur when multiple helping systems do not coordinate, what possibilities emerge when there is a softening of the distinction between professionals and clients, and moving from seeing family problems appearing as internal to have external originations. Each story is then followed by a series of questions evoked by the story to help provide a pathway to continue to ponder issues of social justice/injustice in the therapeutic context.