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Families are inextricably embedded within their larger sociopolitical contexts, an observation acknowledged by many theorists. The field of family therapy is working on its translation into comprehensive and effective approaches for helping families change. This article illustrates the use of the Cultural Context Model to help families change, guided by the linked foundational concepts of accountability, critical consciousness, and empowerment. The authors support their discussion of theory with examples illustrating the ways in which social patterns connected to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation shape the dilemmas that family members encounter, as well as their access to solutions.
Fam Proc 44:105-119, 2005
From its inception, the family therapy movement emerged as a radically different way to address the tasks of healing in the mental health field (Ackerman, 1937; Bowen, 1978; Haley, 1963; Jackson, 1957; Satir, 1964; Selvini-Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Praia, 1978; Watzlawick, 1976; Whitaker & Bumberry, 1988). Emerging models from various systemic perspectives offered their unique conceptual and technical contributions to this task (Alexander & Parsons, 1982; Andersen, 1987; Anderson & Goolishian, 1988; Carter & McGoldrick, 1988; de Shazer, 1985; Madanes, 1981; Minuchin & Fishman, 1981; Napier, 1987; White & Epston, 1990). Although some of these models address the impact of social realities connected to gender, race, class, and sexual orientation, few address the systematic ways in which the intersectionality1 of these factors shapes family and community (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1996).
Family therapy approaches developed a more complex articulation of issues of power, history, and context in the therapeutic process. In different but not unrelated ways, both postmodern and postcolonial approaches have taken the task of studying family processes through the decentering of ethnocentric (Western, heterosexual, White) conceptions of family life. For example, the social constructionist feminist perspective that has evolved since the 1990s (Avis, 1991; Avis & Turner, 1996; Hare-Mustin, 1994; Laird, 1989; Weingarten, 1991, 1998) revolves around examining the construction of gender discourses and their implications in day-to-day social practices. This perspective involves deconstructing, reconstructing, and transforming dominant and oppressive discourses and practices.
Tamasese and Waldegrave (1993) articulated a therapeutic paradigm aligned with a vision of social justice. Waldegrave (1998) posited that people give "preferred meanings" (p. 405) to events occurring in the physical world, and that those meanings depend on...