Being useful to families

Ideas underlying this approach:
• Families hold knowledge and resource which can enable movement
• Families need to feel (rather than be told about) the respect we hold

It seems to be a feature of the societies we live in and the context we work in that families experience a lot of blame and guilt. Experiencing these feelings tends to undermine, rather than enable, parenting. It is extraordinarily unusual, perhaps unknown, for parents not to hold some intentions to parent well, hopes for the best for their child(ren), etc.

Families are very important for their children. They not only spend a lot of time with them, but they comprise relationships - for instance: mother, brother, auntie - which may fail or be avoided but can never be replaced and are in place for life. There are also emotional and blood connections as well as societal and institutional support for these relationships. Families have a lot of knowledge and experience of their children. This can be from practical observation, shared family and cultural context of development and genetically mediated similarities in personality and ways of functioning. It is unusual to find children or young people who do not hold some hopes for things to be better between them and their family.

We can best serve children and young people by bringing forward and enabling access to the resources, knowledge, love and commitment, hopes, intentions, etc, in their families. To do this we need faith in the resilience and resourcefulness of the family. We need a commitment to the potential for discovery of the family’s knowledge, values, intentions. We need profound respect for the family, their practices, values and intentions. They need to feel this from the conversation. It is of limited value to tell them this, they need to feel it.

Potential pitfalls in working from modernist epistemology
• Risk of prioritizing therapist knowledge and losing access to family knowledge

Operating in a modernist epistemology with a hierarchy of knowledge, often results in an understanding that the therapist has more and better knowledge and uses this knowledge to assess, identify problems and intervene. Because of the complexity of non-linear causation in a system such as a family, the clinician begins a long way behind family members in developing knowledge of any family. The prioritizing of clinician knowledge, risks undermining the family’s sense of expertise in their personal and family knowledge, sending it underground and decreasing its availability. Modernist epistemology seeks causal explanations based on underlying structures. Experience in quantum physics has shown this to be a limited strategy, the further physicists looked 'underneath' for smaller and smaller particles, the more they were led to empty space. In working with families, looking underneath risks leading therapists to blaming and pathologising formulations. Even trauma based formulations often focus on damage rather than resources, agency, etc.

Alternatively, using social constructionism we can look at a range of knowledges, which are evaluated, not by absolute truth but by values, usefulness and effects. In this context, the most useful explanations are those which mesh with the family’s knowledge, support their sense of agency and enable movement.