Are you curious about the Phoenix teaching team? Then welcome to the second of the Teaching Team Introduction series of blogs to introduce Leonie and the Phoenix Family Therapy Teaching Team Associates and Guest Teaching Associates.
Relationships are at the heart of family therapy and systemic practice and start with introductions. It’s important that at Phoenix we practice what we teach and embrace the relational principles that we espouse. So let’s continue with getting to know the team in this blog series.
From Glenn:
"What sparked your interest in systemic practice?"
My first exposure to family therapy was in 1975 when I worked as a psychologist in a child guidance clinic in Forest Lodge, Sydney where we received supervision in Object Relations Family Therapy and over the next 5 years I worked in a psychodynamic approach with families. At the time I was also undergoing a personal psychoanalysis and practicing psychodynamic play therapy under the supervision of a Tavistock-trained child psychoanalyst as well as exploring family therapy by reading Virginia Satir, Salvadore Minuchin, Jay Haley etc. In 1978 I attended an intensive weeklong live-in experiential workshop with Margaret Topham, a key figure in the development of family therapy in Australia and experienced nonverbal bodywork and family sculpting. At the end I recall Margaret put her hand up to signify I had grown a little and thus began my journey in family therapy.
I started attending family therapy conferences in the 1980’s and began to take on board a Milan systemic approach among others. In 1991 working at Nowra on the south coast of NSW I wrote my first paper called Tolstoy and the Heroes of Family Therapy, which sparked a career in family therapy publishing and writing. Like many at the time, I fell in love with systemic thinking and read Gregory Bateson and others and have ended up publishing over 30 articles, several book chapters and a book with David Pare, Collaborative Practice in Psychology and Therapy (2004; New York: Haworth) as well as completing a Ph.D. The Ethical Relation in Therapy. From 2010 to the current time, I have been editor-in-chief of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy.
What is curious is that my interest in family therapy has not waned as the discipline has changed over the years and adapted to the needs of the present time. Certainly, working as a clinical psychologist in child and mental health services as well as in private practice across the age range over five decades, systemic thinking has been an integral part of my practice and identity as a therapist, and it’s been a fascinating journey. I think all therapists naturally integrate diverse ways of working in their own way and for me this is still evolving (Larner, 2022). Once you experience systemic work with individuals and families, the spark remains with you and becomes part of who you are as a person and therapist.
"What frameworks are you drawn too and why?"
I have had the rare luxury of taking on board a succession of family therapy models, approaches and frameworks as they have emerged since the 1970’s and I have been drawn to all of them. From Milan to Post Milan to solution focused brief therapy, narrative therapy as well as social constructionist and postmodern approaches in the 1990’s and more recently dialogical theory and practice, I think they are all interesting and fascinating and have something to offer. I have written about the rich diversity of family therapy and how it is important to be flexible, creative and open by deconstructing theory where the ethical relation to the other becomes the priority (Larner, 2011). It is great to see the discipline has moved beyond competing frameworks to a rich diversity of theory and practice, which can extend to integrating non-systemic frameworks like trauma-informed approaches and so on. All of this can inform your practice.
For me to be systemic is to be integrative, indeed as I have put it elsewhere: ‘The word “integrate” comes from the Latin integrare, to “make whole”, that is, to combine parts into a whole, which is also the meaning of “systemic”. In a spirit of hospitality, family therapy brings one part of the whole into conversation or dialogue with the other. As family therapists, we feel the desire to engage, to be curious, reflective and interested in how the other speaks and makes meaning, to learn their language while speaking our own. Family therapy is the wider understanding, the relational movement towards the other, whether at the level of the personal, the theoretical or the political. It opens up, not shuts down, borders’ (Larner, 2003, p. 12).
Where the priority is what is going to be most helpful for our clients this informs an ethics of practice where all theory and frameworks can have value.
"How has systemic thinking changed your practice?"
Systemic thinking informs every therapeutic breath that I take because it is always with you whether you’re working with individuals or families or utilising non-systemic approaches like cognitive-behavioural or schema therapy and so on. You can bring a systemic lens to a range of individual or non-systemic therapies that have demonstrated utility in helping clients and families. This is where it is helpful to see systemic thinking from an integrative perspective as taught in this course.
"Why have you chosen to go into a teaching and mentoring role in this field?"
I have been teaching family therapy over several decades beginning at the NSW Institute of Psychiatry where I wrote and taught courses for a post-graduate certificate/masters of family therapy. I have continued this teaching for NSW Health Education and Training to the present day. In my role as a senior clinical psychologist in Child Youth Mental Health Services, I organised and ran family therapy clinics over several decades as well as supervising clinical psychologists and interns in systemic theory and practice. I find that teaching provides an opportunity to evolve how I think and do the work, and it is always interesting to have conversations with students at all levels of family therapy training.
"If you could give one piece of advice to our starting students, what would it be?"
Well, it would be to stay flexible, open and curious and ‘irreverent’ that is not too attached to any one theory or framework and also build on the knowledge and skills of your original profession. However, it is a good idea to also focus on learning one model or approach at the beginning of your family therapy career as a mainstay and begin to build your own integrative framework. Also, who you are as a person -the person or self of the therapist-very much informs the work you do in the therapeutic space. I would say go slow slowly, take your time, it’s a process of evolving over many years and the reading and training that is offered by a course like this will add immensely to your journey.
"What is something you love to do when you aren’t working?"
I love literature, film and music especially improvised jazz and have been fortunate to have a parallel semi-professional career playing the electric and double bass. I think to have an outside to family therapy as in the arts and hobbies etc is crucial.
Glenn Larner
Clinical Family Therapist & Clinical Psychologist
Teaching Team Member Phoenix Family Therapy Academy
Please note that this article is educational in nature and does not constitute professional or therapeutic advice or suggestion.
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