Working Together in Troubled Times: Community-Based Therapies

This book realizes the current crisis in counseling fields resulting from the very culture of therapy and from funding directives in the past two decades. The ideas and practical examples of work it provides builds upon postmodern goals of creating new alternatives to rigid thinking by unearthing or using the valuable experience of those who have not been in the 'mainstream,' in power positions in which they could write about or lecture from their own life experiences and traditions. Here, the author has assembled groups of people, from her twenty-nine years of clinical experience, who have not been in academic or teaching positions. The author has convened nine groups, in various small town to large urban settings, and videotaped the discussions, reproducing closely in six of the book's chapters the language and flow of the original conversations, as well as the content. The book offers alternatives to the current deadlock in therapy fields by offering the thinking of new players and presenting ideas as group phenomena. It then places these concrete examples of clinical work in the context of the cultural and community traditions which nurtured them, rather than creating yet another 'school' or 'model' of therapy which does not do justice to our North American diversity. The stories which are told here are valuable and accessible to both the beginning and the advanced practitioner, especially to those who intend to work or are working in the public sector.