The Graduate Certification of Family Therapy (May 2023- Feb 2024)

The Graduate Certification Program of Family Therapy – Over 100 hours of learning

For detailed schedule, view this PDF document

The certification program will be facilitated by the Andolfi Family Therapy Centre's academic team led by David Hong, who has over 40 years of experience in mental health services. The course will allow the student to develop fundamental knowledge and skills in family therapy.

The program encompasses four modules.

Modules 1 and 3 will be held face-to-face in Kuala Lumpur. Each module will have four days of classes.

Module 2, which covers different approaches to family therapy, will be done through zoom over five meetings.

The program comes with 20 hours of case supervision (module 4). Although each module will provide distinct learnings, the overall aim is to incrementally build students' knowledge, skills, and competence using family therapy ideas.

The program is skill-based, with an emphasis on developing participants' knowledge and skills when working with families. It will also focus on increasing students' insight into themselves as practitioners and as individuals. It aims to build competence, confidence, effectiveness, and comfort when working with families. It is anticipated students will develop a new way of "thinking" from a systemic perspective.

Students will have the opportunity to learn through interactive lectures, observation of videotapes of Master Family Therapist, structured skill-based activities, provision of relevant literature, case studies, experiential learning, and supervision.

The next intake of students will commence in March 2023, with the aim to start Module 1 on the 18th of May 2023. The number of students will be limited to 20 to maximize learning opportunities.

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What is Family Therapy?

Family Therapy – or, to give it its full title, Family and Systemic Psychotherapy – helps people in close relationships to help each other.

It enables family members, couples and others who care about each other to express and explore difficult thoughts and emotions safely, understand each other’s experiences and views, appreciate each other’s needs, build on strengths and make useful changes in their relationships and their lives. Individuals can find Family Therapy helpful as an opportunity to reflect on important relationships and find ways forward. Research shows Family Therapy is useful for children, young people and adults experiencing a wide range of difficulties and experiences.

The earliest approaches to psychotherapy in the 20th Century focused on individual therapy and the patient-therapist relationship as the best way to treat psychological problems. Patients were segregated from their families for therapy and treatment focused on their individual symptomatic behaviours. The advent of family therapy ushered in a whole new way of understanding and explaining human behaviour. Family therapists shifted the focus of treatment in a way that allowed for social context, communication and relationship to have primary importance in therapy. This way of working involves engaging with the whole family system as a functioning unit. While the individuals in the family are as important in family therapy as in individual therapy, family therapists also deal with the personal relations and interactions of the family members, both inside the family and in the therapeutic system, which comprises the family, the therapist or therapists, and their broader community.

Family Therapy aims to be:

• Inclusive and considerate of the needs of each member of the family and/or other key relationships (systems) in people’s lives.
• Recognise and build on peoples’ strengths and relational resources.
• Work in partnership ‘with’ families and others, not ‘on’ them.
• Sensitive to diverse family forms and relationships, beliefs and cultures.
• Enable people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or distressing issues, in ways that respect their experiences, invite engagement and support recovery.

**Sourced from Association for Family Therapy & Systemic Practice UK

Preamble:

The certification program in family therapy is suitable for clinical psychologists, social workers, counsellors, etc., who are currently practising counselling/therapy and are interested in cultivating skills in working with families. This program is suitable for final year master's in counselling or psychology students who plan to work with families as part of their internship. The program will provide the knowledge to develop a solid understanding of how to work systemically and collaboratively with families and the broader system.

M'sia is a collectivistic society where connectedness and support within the family system are generally the norms. It is common to have three generations living in the same household. Therefore, family therapy should be considered a primary treatment modality of choice when family relationships become problematic. Understanding the family context and engaging with the family is critical to effectively working with families and creating positive change.