The Dual Process of Intuitive Responsivity and Reflective Self-supervision: About the Therapist in Family Therapy Practice

Everyday ordinariness, neglected but important for mental health nurses' therapeutic relationships: An initial exploration for applying Daniel Kahneman's two systems of thinking

Mental health nurses undertake difficult and complex roles. Therapeutic relationships and engagement between mental health nurses and people experiencing severe mental ill-health provide the core purpose and rationale for such mental health care. These relationships are influenced by factors outside of frontline mental health nurses control. They are difficult to define or describe with clarity, have limited 'quantitative' evidence of effectiveness and are frequently not experienced as therapeutic. This paper presents some initial ideas regarding 'everyday ordinariness' using psychologist Daniel Kahneman's two systems of thinking as a focus for understanding and potentially improving mental health nurse practice, and therapeutic relationships and engagement.

Learning to Embody a Social Justice Perspective in Couple and Family Therapy: A Grounded Theory Analysis of MFTs in Training

This action research study explores how four MFT students shifted from a cognitive understanding of equity and power to an intrinsic and automatic internalized process as we participated in research in which we observed, coded, and engaged in structured reflexive conversations about relational power using a data bank of Socio Emotional Relationship Therapy sessions. We reviewed and analyzed ten of our recorded two-hour reflexive conversations to develop grounded theory that explains our experience of learning to embody a relational power lens, which consists of five interconnected phases: (a) developing a theoretical understanding of relational power, (b) critically observing live therapy, (c) noticing and attending to the felt sense of witnessing power, (d) engaging in transformative conversation, and (e) applying to personal practice. Our findings provide guidance for clinical training programs who wish to facilitate the experience for clinicians-in-training to understand and address societal power processes in clinical practice.