endeavour. In the third order, there is more awareness of the eff ects on people of the political and the social forces going on around us – of poverty, austerity, racism, sexual and gender politics, traffi cking, economic inequality. So it looks like therapy is developing into being more aware of these issues, bringing them into consideration in therapy, and making therapy more politically minded. Richard: So the third order is about trying to take cognisance of wider societal currents or events? Ged: Yes, but that is what family therapy has always done, because that is what ‘Systemic’ means. Instead of zooming in on the problem, we zoom out to look at the society, the context, the system. If the system says you are black in a racist society, or a woman in a patriarchal world, or gay in a heteronormative society, then we have to be more politically aware in our therapy. Rather than seeing our clients as coming to therapy from a vacuum we need to recognise that they are coming from a complex context to do with disenfranchisement, poverty, austerity, lack of opportunity, all of these things that we, perhaps as people in positions of privilege, might not always understand well but need to be aware of if we are to be useful as therapists. So that’s a direction in which I think family therapy is heading more. That’s one answer – multi-polarity, being open to and taking up more and more diff erent positions. Richard: Thank you, Ged Smith.


Ged Smith is a senior family therapist who has worked in public sector settings, as well as in private practice, for over 25 years, as a therapist and supervisor. He is the current deputy editor of the AFT publication Context, is the UK representative of the European Family Therapy Association, is a writer and regular speaker and contributor on the family therapy European conference circuit. Email: ged59@hotmail.com


Richard is a group analyst working in NHS outpatient psychotherapy service in Liverpool, and alongside running analytic psychotherapy groups there, he is the clinical lead for the Rotunda Democratic Therapeutic Community, a specialist service in the personality disorder hub, and a clinical supervisor. As colleagues over a number of years, Richard and Ged have collaborated on a number of clinical projects relating to families and groups. He is happy to be contacted at Richard.Curtis@merseycare.nhs.uk


Context 170, August 2020


The situation is hopeless but not serious: A tribute to


Steve Bennet Gary Robinson


I cannot help thinking: what would


Steve make of COVID-19? He would probably refer to it as the COVID-19 situation rather than crisis! I think that he would reframe it, as many others have, as a fantastic opportunity for us to take a good look at ourselves. He would have loved the idea that the planet had sent us all to our bedrooms alone to think about what we have done and to work out how we can say sorry, make amends and change. Steve loved a paradoxical intervention and a win-win situation. However hopeless things seemed, he could always deliver a message which would frame adversity as possibility. He would probably be celebrating this serious ‘bump’ and the massive unbalancing of a world that was stuck in defeating and destructive repeating patterns. He may be up there now looking forward to seeing how we might all jump. Steve will have been gutted to have


just missed all of this, having died at the end of 2019 following a long illness. He worked with social services and the NSPCC in Hull for virtually all his career as a social worker. He qualified as a family therapist in 1990 when Gill Gorrell-Barnes was the director of the Institute of Family Therapy in London. Prior to this Steve became a social worker in Humberside in the early 1980s after working with gypsies and travellers, co-ordinating services for their community. As one of the first qualified family therapists in East Yorkshire, he inspired and inf luenced a whole generation of systemic thinkers and practitioners, including me as my first ever systemic supervisor and as a colleague and a friend. Throughout his career, Steve called upon, practised and


shared the systemic ideas and techniques of therapists who inspired him, like Jay Haley, Salvador Minuchin, Insoo Kim Berg, Steve de Shazer, Paul Watzlawick and Cloe Madanes. He was a structural family therapist at heart, even when it went out of fashion for a while and he added more of his strategic approach. When I first met him in the late


1980s we both had hair, and I told him that I thought family therapists were elitist wankers who blamed their own reluctance or failures to help the families that I referred to them on the families’ own resistance to change, or not being ready to change yet. He listened, smiled, stroked his chin, framed my views as very important and invited me to help him think about how family therapy could do better, and said he would like to work with me – he reeled me in. Four years later, he gave me the book by Paul Watzlawick, which has the same title as this tribute, as a present to help me celebrate qualifying as a family therapist. Within it, he wrote “to a fellow survivor”. I would not have started or survived my training without his inspiration, support, wit, generosity and perspective. For Steve, no situation, problem, trauma, distress, impenetrable stuckness or hopelessness was insurmountable or terminally serious. He would say that you just had to find the right intervention to make a positive difference and enable people to have less of a problem than the one they came in with. Steve led the first ever family therapy


team I had the privilege of working with. This was part of a groundbreaking project within his Hull NSPCC team, working in relation to the explosion of child sexual abuse work that emerged


33


The situation is hopeless but not serious: A tribute to Steve Bennett


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68