Jonathan Cogburn, LMFT

Did you know that Marriage and Family Therapy approaches were always intended to address and change unconscious processes in individuals? Well, it’s true! MFT treatment from its outset was primarily designed to facilitate change in the constantly interacting unconscious processes across a patient’s entire family by addressing them from the level of a family’s relationship structure and communication patterns. The field began when a handful of psychiatrists, psychologists, and at least one anthropologist began to notice that schizophrenic patients *virtually always* regressed in treatment progress during/after family visits to inpatient facilities. They became frustrated with the lack of available interventions to prevent this kind of regression across the therapy field as a whole, and began exploration in new directions (e.g. the application of General Systems Theory to individual and family behavior.) Practitioners like Murray Bowen, Gregory Bateson (our anthropologist, and his Palo Alto Group collaborators especially Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Virginia Satir), followed quickly by others like Salvador Minuchin, kicked off this area of exploration into systemic therapy as an alternative treatment to intrapsychic & analytic methods they understood very well, having been well trained in them up to that time (1950-1952 as the very beginning.) The MFT field has persisted as a viable and effective alternative to individual & intrapsychic methods to this day, with both sub-fields influencing one another in (hopefully) very productive ways over time. Neither should be viewed as “less than” the other, but instead as complementary approaches that each possess limitations, but moreover bring strengths that can each potentially benefit a wide spectrum of patient needs. On a personal note, I decided to write this in detail here because I don’t believe that many modern colleagues outside of the MFT world would have any reason to know of this history. And because too many of my own colleagues have viewed this history, and strong mastery of General Systems Theory, as something to “get through quickly so I can get to the good stuff (treatment models)”, which has led to impoverishment of skill in some places. We need to remember and elevate this knowledge rather than allow it to fade away.

Good men are everywhere. I think Ryan is one. Lots of men also need help, mentorship, encouragement, and hope in order to become good men.

Good men are everywhere.

He really was, and I’ll miss his presence in great stories that won’t be the same without him. 🥺

GM fellow psyop audience! 🫶🏼🍿

Uhhhh…😅 “Art supplies” are tax deductible for therapy purposes, right? riGhT??!

Undeniably true. Couples therapy is the hardest milieu overall. The only way to do it is to slow the couple’s pace and lower their intensity, because you ain’t keeping up.

Everyone has personal agency. Not everyone has the same ability to manage it. None of us are good at spotting key problems with AI output: 🙂‍↕️11 well-known LLM platforms affirm users ideas and actions 49% more often than humans would. 🚔 Those same LLM platforms affirmed users in 47% of responses involving behavior described as harmful, dishonest or illegal. 🤺 Users who relied on LLM platforms to talk through relationship conflicts were 25% more certain their initial reaction was right, and 10% less likely to participate in repair behavior on average after consulting the LLM. ⚖️ 48% of users didn’t rate sycophantic AI platforms as more biased, even after seeing it agree with both sides of an argument in a single exchange. We have a responsibility to understand what these apps are capable of and what they actually offer us in terms of risk and benefit.

Is the buttcheeks pumpkin at the local coffee shop… Hilarious?, or; Inappropriate/Scandalous? What do we think Twitterland?

What do most Conservative therapists and counselors want to see? And how do many of us feel about our field? ⬇️