Integrating Gender and Culture in Family Therapy Training

Book excerpt: Don't let hidden cultural expectations sabotage your therapeutic relationships! Integrating Gender and Culture in Family Therapy Training offers positive strategies for teaching your students to understand the ways in which cultural expectations affect individuals, society, the therapeutic relationship, and even the relationship between supervisor and trainee. Integrating Gender and Culture in Family Therapy Training explores the ways you and your students can become more effective by bringing your unspoken assumptions into the light. It presents empirical research and personal experiences dealing with multicultural and gender issues in therapy and therapist training programs. In addition, it offers dialogues with some of the founders of feminist family therapy, cultural studies, and a hilarious spoof of pop-psychology approaches to gender issues. Integrating Gender and Culture in Family Therapy Training offers practical strategies for: working with families in poverty cross-cultural interactions in the supervisor/trainee relationship integrating gender and culture into coursework, supervision, research, service, and clinical environments teaching and modeling multicultural awareness dealing with the inevitable conflicts, misperceptions, and misunderstandings that arise because of clashing cultural expectations This book takes a searching view of the dynamics and implications of power, gender, class, and culture, including such tough issues as: the moral issues of feminist therapy using the excuse of cultural tradition to mask abuses therapists’hidden gender assumptions ways feminist family therapy speaks--or fails to speak--to women of color, minority women, and women in poverty Including case studies, figures, tables, and humor, Integrating Gender and Culture in Family Therapy Training will enhance your effectiveness as a supervisor or therapist and inspire you to rethink your own cultural assumptions.