This Delphi study surveyed an interdisciplinary panel of diversity expert trainers (N=20) about what white mental health professionals need to understand about whiteness. The panel endorsed 162 items that included what white mental health professionals need to understand about historical and contemporary whiteness within the mental health fields and larger social systems, self of the therapist work for white therapists, as well as challenges to understanding whiteness in clinical training and practice. More specifically, the panel provided guidance on the cognitive and emotional transformations necessary for white mental health professionals to address whiteness, as well as the challenges to those transformations. The researchers provide clinical training implications for marriage and family therapists (MFTs) and other clinicians based on the results.
The Acknowledgment, Naming, and Giving (ANG) activity is a systemic self of the therapist training exercise based on several concepts and techniques in Contextual Family Therapy (CFT). It is designed to help family therapy trainees acknowledge (A) acts of destructive entitlement, name (N) the relationships directly affected by destructive behavior, and give (G) to those relationships in trustworthy ways. The activity requests that family therapy trainees consider both their own relational pain and the ways that they have been relationally harmful. In addition, the activity provides options for repairing damage and rebuilding trust in personal relationships that have been harmed. Systemic exercises like the ANG activity are essential components of self of the therapist training, and this article describes the activity in detail, provides guidelines for its use in training, and includes a case example of one trainee's journey through the process.
The impact of technology on mental health practice is currently a concern in the counseling literature, and several articles have discussed using different types of technology in practice. In particular, many private practitioners use a cell phone for business. However, no article has discussed ethical concerns and best practices for the use of short message service (SMS), better known as text messaging (TM). Ethical issues that arise with TM relate to confidentiality, documentation, counselor competence, appropriateness of use, and misinterpretation. There are also such boundary issues to consider as multiple relationships, counselor availability, and billing. This article addresses ethical concerns for mental health counselors who use TM in private practice. It reviews the literature and discusses benefits, ethical concerns, and guidelines for office policies and personal best practices.
This article describes an experiential self of the therapist exercise for use in family therapy training. It provides guidelines for instructors to integrate the activity into their courses including step‐by‐step directions, examples of processing questions, and potential readings to accompany the activity. The Talking About Versus Talking With exercise was designed to help family therapy students have a felt sense of some of the differences between individual and relational therapy. It provides trainers with a way to teach therapists in training about clients’ experiences in relational therapy where they talk about relational difficulties directly with someone, as opposed to talking about those same difficulties in individual therapy. The exercise also offers an opportunity for students to do self of the therapist work with a strained relationship in their personal lives, and students report that it is both rewarding and emotionally intense.
Practitioner points
Differences between individual and relational therapy may not be easily understood by family therapy students
Self of the therapist work, including working with difficult personal relationships, is a vital component of family therapy training
The experiential nature of the exercise provides students with a felt sense of some differences between individual and relational therapy
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