My First and Second Attempts as Co-therapist (Taylor Family)
12/11/09 Initial plan was for me to remain as observer and participate in the reflection with my supervisor at end of session. Supervisor, however, invited me to participate at the start of session, which I jumped at it. While Supervisor was leading it mostly, I was given the space to speak my thoughts and observations throughout.
Felt this is a good session as it allows me to slowly transit from an active observer to supporting therapist, applying some executive skills leading from the perceptual and conceptual skills, eg. observing there were less emotional upheaval in the family as compared to the previous session I observed. Hypothesized that it was the absence of Tom that result in no sibling rivalry and jealousy for mother's and therapists' attention, and no aggravation of mother's anxiety and helplessness over the competition of the siblings for her attention, and her guilt over her being more affectionate towards Tom than Lara. My response, when invited by supervisor to comment at the beginning, was to verbalise my observation, yet affirmed Lara and mother of their calmness in the session, which allowed my supervisor to leverage on it to explore with Lara her negative emotions and self-talk.
Prior to session, I shared with supervisor my learning from reading about reflecting team, something that I noticed to be missing in both the home visits and Family Therapy Team 's reflection I was involved for the past weeks - the importance to reflect not just about clients but therapists and processes as well, or else reflecting team will be re-enforcing the facilitators to be at higher level of power than the participants and presuming facilitators to be not part of the system. We agreed to include this in our reflection if it flows. In the end, we did apply it, sounding each other out our awareness of talking more with mother and noticing Lara's reaction, while positively reframing it to be that we are attending to her indirectly by giving her space to listen to her mother.
26/11/09 Felt the post discussion with my supervisor after the home visit very helpful. It was incorporated as part of my individual supervision. Our reflection drew out possible alternative tracks the session could have led us to and possible reasons for us feeling stuck at which portions of the session.
I found myself not fully plunging in as a co-therapist in this session; there were quite a few entry points that I had thoughts in my mind but did not execute them. After voicing them out to my supervisor, she was pretty receptive to the ideas. On reflection, I was probably positioning myself still as a trainee waiting for cues to lead the session. The discussion with my supervisor has helped to understand her receptiveness and the confidence I need to have next time to attempt in c0-leading the “dance”.
Reflections on Post-Milan
27/11/09 Social-constructionism and post-modernism, the building blocks of the newer Family Therapy approaches like Post Milan and Narrative models... how they fascinates me... The Academic Seminar on Post Milan today was very helpful and cleared some confusion I had, eg. the use of reflecting team came from Post-Milan, rather than early Milan. Read the papers written by the Milan and Post-Milan teams (the former by Palazzoli et al and latter by Cecchin/ Tomm) given by my clinical supervisor at Oogachaga about two years ago. I did not know anything about these teams then and could only understand the concepts superficially. Now everything makes so much more sense! While to some extent found Post-Milan concepts on the interventive interviewing, curiousity and irrelevance more of a reframe of Milan's circular questioning, neutrality and hypothesizing, I think the major paradigm shift is the move from the use of one-way mirror and expert position, to reflecting team and collaboration.
Browsing through some of my old readings from my social work undergraduate studies, I was amazed to spot "Milan" and "Systemic Therapy" being mentioned - I actually had zero memory about them! Somehow only Minichin's Structural and Haley's Strategic models registered in my mind then. While it could be different emphases then, it could also be that now that now I have a historical context of the development of family therapy that has helped bring clarity.
