feedback on this consultation. It is important for our voice, as family and systemic psychotherapists, to be added to this debate, so please do comment:
https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/about- ukcp/consultations/scoped-project-update-july-2020/ If you prefer to send your comments to me (Reenee), please
email me on
ceo@aft.org.uk, and I will collate them and send them on, as unifi ed feedback from AFT.
Free continuing professional development training course: Working with Infi delity
Andreas Vossler and Naomi Moller at the Open University have
produced a free training course on Working with Infi delity. This is a 12-hour online course and will provide a certifi cate of completion for anyone who both completes it and passes the quiz. The course content has been checked for practice relevance
and accuracy by Relate, and Naomi and Andreas have been doing research and teaching on therapeutic work with infi delity for about ten years. Please see the advert for further details and how to access the course.
AFT survey of members – responses to COVID-19 COVID-19 has meant the psy-professions, and health
practitioners more generally, have had to move practice rapidly online, disrupting some of our familiar ways of working, and creating new opportunities. For much of its history, the development of family therapy
as a discipline parallels the adoption of new technology and new ways of using technology, both to understand family life and its challenges, and to help families make changes in how they live together. The promise of new technology is a central theme in our founding myth: “in the 1950s an interdisciplinary team of researchers associated with anthropologist Gregory Bateson embarked on a collective effort to dethrone psychoanalysis with film and magnetic tape” (Geoghegan, 2017). The speed of recent changes has been unprecedented. As
family therapists, we don’t yet know what this will mean for our most prized rituals, like the inter-session team discussion and the reflecting team, rituals which can be adapted to new technologies like Zoom and teams, but may be, at the same time, subtly transformed by these new ways of working. We are in the process of discovering whether entirely new practices are necessitated or made possible and desirable by moving online. In the first phase of AFT’s response to COVID-19, we moved
quickly, through our committees, to respond to these changes at the levels of training and practice. We now want to widen the conversation with and between members, to share new understandings and innovations, to continue to develop best practice, update our thinking about risk assessment in the online world, and so on. As a first step in this direction, we want to survey members, to map the territory of practice as it has changed and adapted since March 2020, and to find out from you what you think AFT’s priorities should be in this area of our work. We are inviting all members to complete a short survey
to start to capture your experiences of working online, to invite members to help set priorities for the organisation, and to ask for your help with some more detailed survey work to follow. Please access the survey via this link: https://
associationfamilytherapy.wufoo.com/forms/p1xifli30l8m0ag/
60
The survey will take approximately fi ve minutes to complete.
Thank you in anticipation for your help and support. The coordination of this work will be supported by Richard
Mc Kenny, a family therapist based in London. Richard worked in specialist and generic CAMH, and local authority services for the last 20 years. He currently works in a therapeutic partnership focused on responding to domestic violence, alongside some teaching and supervision. If you would like to be more involved in this work, please email Richard directly on
rmckenny@me.com
Geoghagen, B.D. (2017) The family as machine: Film, infrastructure, and cybernetic kinship in suburban America, Grey Room, 66: 70-101.
How do digital devices impact on relationships? Take part in a survey
Two researchers in the Open University’s School of Psychology
and Counselling, Andreas Vossler and Naomi Moller, are investigating the impact of digital devices on relationships. If you are interested in taking part in their research, please use the link below to fi nd out more and access the survey.
https://openss.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a9wMUIlivtaE2yh
If you decide to participate, you can enter a draw to win £100 of shopping vouchers. Naomi Moller and Andreas Vossler are both senior lecturers
in the School of Psychology at the Open University. They are collecting data for a project focused on understandings the impact of smart phones, tablets and personal computers on people in committed romantic and sexual relationships. You are invited to complete a survey about your relationship,
how you use smart phones, tablets and personal computers, and what impact you think these technologies have on your relationship. You will also be asked to answer some demographic questions to help us fi nd out about the range of people taking part in the research. Before you start completing the story, you need to complete a consent form, to confi rm that you agree to participate. Anyone over the age of 18 who is in a committed romantic/
sexual relationship and interested in taking part. The information collected in this research project will be
processed by the researchers. They will hold your data securely in password-protected fi les on a secure server for a period of ten years after data analysis, in line with Open University policies. The data will be anonymised (that is, any information that can identify you will be removed) and used in the research. This means that extracts from the data may be quoted in any publications and conference presentations arising from the research. The demographic data for all of the participants will be compiled into a table and reported in any publications or presentations arising from the research. If you decide you want to withdraw from the research after
completing the study – please email Naomi (
Naomi.Moller@
open.ac.uk) quoting the unique participant code you’ll be asked to create before completing the survey. Please note that there are certain points beyond which it will be impossible to withdraw from the research – for instance, when they have published papers reporting their analysis of the data. Therefore, they strongly encourage you to contact them within a month of participation if you wish to withdraw your data. They emphasise that participation in this research is voluntary and all information
Context 170, August 2020
AFT news
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