Multicultural Family Art Therapy

Christine Kerr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415827317
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134062300
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does the family art therapist understand the complexities of another's cultural diversity? What are international family therapist's perspectives on treatment? These questions and more are explored in Multicultural Family Art Therapy, a text that demonstrates how to practice psychotherapy within an ethnocultural and empathetic context. Each international author presents their clinical perspective and cultural family therapy narrative, thereby giving readers the structural framework they need to work successfully with clients with diverse ethnic backgrounds different from their own.
A wide range of international contributors provide their perspectives on visual symbols and content from America, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Trinidad, Central America, and Brazil. They also address a diversity of theoretical orientations, including attachment, solution-focused, narrative, parent-child, and brief art therapy, and write about issues such as indigenous populations, immigration, acculturation, identity formation, and cultural isolation. At the core of this new text is the realization that family art therapy should address not only the diversity of theory, but also the diversity of international practice.

The United Kingdom

3
Respect?

A personal account of practicing family art therapy from a solution-focused perspective in Britain

Nadija Corcos

When I began my training in art therapy in 1985, there was no formal training in family art therapy in Britain. (I believe this is still true.) I had a personal interest in this area which predated my training by ten years. I had read much of the American literature on family therapy and family art therapy. I joined a National Health Service Adult Community Mental Health Team in 1989, and to my delight and terror, was told that the art therapist was a de facto member of the then systemic family therapy team. The team leader was a psychiatrist who dismissed my inquiry about formal training: “You can learn on the job – you’re better trained in therapy than the rest of us!” After I’d been working on the team for about a year, I hesitantly approached them about using art in a family therapy session with a particularly inarticulate family. To my surprise, the idea was taken up, and proved moderately more successful than our previous efforts with the family. This style of intervention, ‘family therapy using art’ in contrast to ‘family art therapy conducted in an art space’, became part of the family team’s repertoire.

The family art therapy dimension of my work moved into a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Team which has embraced both ‘solution-focused family sessions using art’ and ‘solution-focused family art therapy’. Structural interventions, informed more by family goal definition than by a theory about the ideal family structures, also find their way into our repertoire. Accepting unique family solutions can be particularly important when parents or children have constraints such as poverty or chronic health problems which alter the options available to them.

The family in Britain today

I grew up in America, but have lived and worked entirely in England for the past thirty years, with my British husband and children. Linking into the theme of ‘respect’, which I feel runs through this chapter, many people I asked mentioned the importance of appearances to families of all social strata. Local reputation, education, and home ownership are seen as measures of a person’s value. The importance of how things look, and what is seen, can be observed in the common British preoccupation with home improvement, symbolic public acts (such as wearing red poppies to show support for the military) and constraints on behaviour in public, based on how an action might be seen. Appearances also seem important to families that present children to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) – an act which in itself represents a loss of status and authority as a ‘good parent’.

Families seem particularly central to British culture, from the iconic example of the British Royal Family, to the popularity of TV prime-time ‘soaps’ based entirely on a group of families in one community.

In Britain today … four out of five people say that ‘my family are more important to me than my friends’, and families currently ride high on the policy agendas of both the Labour and the Conservative Parties. (Jenkins et al, 2009)

In the Families Matter report (2011), parents identified pressure from the media and from government in relation to their roles as parents.

In the CAMHS population I meet, intact families are rare. Domestic violence often features in a narrative of family separation. Family structures and dynamics have frequently been altered by the introduction of new step-family members, or by a single parent’s reliance on his or her children. The National Health Service (NHS) policy of treating adults with chronic major mental health needs in the community can lead to a confusion of roles and authority between parents and children who sometimes function as ‘young carers’.¹

One thing that unites everyone in Britain is the need for parents to take more responsibility for their children … the growth of single-parent families and other new kinds of families present many new challenges for government policy. (Jenkins et al, 2009)

How do British parents and children imagine the hopes for change that bring them to CAMHS and family art therapy? Both children and parents often wish for more enjoyable ‘family time’. Parental complaints include lack of cooperation, feeling unable to control children’s behaviour (including physical violence and self-harm), and lack of communication. In situations where parents and children feel unheard and powerless, both parents and children seem to be struggling to establish how to get their needs met effectively. Those needs often include closeness and belonging, even for teenagers.

Life cycle issues in Britain today

Recent changes in the benefits system, the introduction of university fees, the escalation in rents and property prices, and youth unemployment have combined to change the separation/leaving home stage in the British family life cycle. Many families have two, three, or even four generations living in one home, as realistic options for leaving home and home ownership diminish. Parents who continue supporting their children (and grandchildren) may find themselves working and parenting without a break well beyond their original expectations. Four out of ten grandparents are performing ‘primary parenting roles’, and something like 200,000 grandparents in Britain are raising their grandchildren in place of parents (Families Matter, 2011).

Multiple generations within one household can be a source of strength and support, but can also cause confusion. Who is in charge? Who is most important when the needs of different generations seem to conflict?

The images and influences of the Second World War remain significant in Britain. Cultural and personal qualities seen as responsible for Britain’s survival and ultimate victory have come to represent ‘Britishness’ particularly to older generations: stoicism, duty, bravery, ‘making do’, and ‘getting on with it’. One of my adult patients summarised the effect on her parents’ values as: “No tears, ‘chin-up’, don’t say too much”. She also describes the importance of appearing to be a ‘normal happy family’ who hid or denied anything that disturbed that impression, even from themselves.

Social and political influences

The welfare state is a big part of British family life, with 20.3 million families receiving some kind of benefit (64% of all families). (Benefits in Britain, 2013)

It is impossible for me to consider British family life today without describing the context of the government’s involvement in influencing and legislating issues around family. Anyone supported by state benefits (welfare), social housing, Working or Child Tax, Child Benefit, Housing Benefit, Job Seekers, or Employment Sickness Allowance is subject to rules which legislate what a family should be and do. There is heavy media and government backing for the view that children from single-parent families and lower-income families lose out, implying that this is the parent’s fault.

Almost every day there is a news item describing a proposed policy or piece of legislation or a media story designed to influence (improve) British society through its influence on families.

Children’s Centres offer a variety of parent training programmes. There are parent support advisers in schools, and parents can be fined or jailed if their children refuse to attend school. Midwives tell parents about diet, what to have ready for the birth, how to stop smoking, breast-feed, wean, and on and on.

This information is well researched and potentially beneficial. Indeed, a civilised society that cares for the vulnerable and provides universal health care and free education seems desirable to me. However, when I consider the dynamics of family structure, I notice how much families are being told what to do. In effect, they are being ‘parented’ by a powerful, opinionated authority backed by sanctions for disobedience: loss of housing or benefits, loss of health care for smokers or those who are obese, loss of children themselves if parenting standards aren’t met.

But what happens to families’ own problem-solving creativity when too much is prescribed? And what happens to the parents’ ability to make choices, protect, and guide their children when the context influencing and sometimes controlling them is not the wider family or their village, but government dictates? One three-year-old I know came home from his nursery after hearing about ‘eating healthy food’ and spent the next two weeks asking his mum: “Is it healthy?” about everything she served him!

When I reflect on the family sessions I have been involved in, the theme that stands out for me is one of empowering parents to overcome the ‘shoulds’ they have absorbed from their cultural and sociopolitical context. Facilitating and strengthening families to use their creative instincts and to trust their own knowledge has led to changes in their patterns of behaviour and authority that allow confident parenting which can meet individual needs. In addition to today’s sociopolitical structures and messages, some parents face specific disadvantages and prejudices that have come with their own situations. Mental illness, domestic violence, poor literacy, and poverty can also disempower parents in their children’s eyes.

Communication patterns

On the Project Britain website written by school children from Kent I found the following:

The British are said to be reserved in manners, dress and speech. We are famous for our politeness, self-discipline and especially for our sense of humour. Basic politeness (please, thank you, excuse me) is expected. Do not greet people with a kiss. (Barrow, 2013).

However, young people I encounter in groups away from their families sometimes seem to revel in deliberate bad manners and swearing. Taunting peers seems to have become a sort of tribal language. The summer riots in 2011 shocked Britains because they involved many apparently privileged young people who seemed to have a diminished sense of future.

In general, valuing privacy in relation to problems is a common characteristic of many families we meet. As an American, I have learned to tone down my language, especially in family therapy sessions, to frame questions less directly, check carefully whether my levels of praise and compliments appear acceptable to the family, and to nudge family members into accepting or offering instances of success and satisfaction with their achievements.

Children and their parents often use a limited range of expressive language in relation to their emotions. Family art therapy can provide a medium that bypasses the social limits on communication. Celebration of accomplishments and praise are less often rejected when they are offered to an object or image. When I provide substantial varied media to families, I am offering an opportunity to enrich the communication.

British culture: Social, geographic, and ethnic divisions

With well over 2,000 years of history, Britain has had its share of migrations. Within Europe, British ‘Islanders’ are seen as insular and reactionary. In defining the effect of migration on identity, I have found it useful to think about how British people stay rooted in their counties and towns or in the communities they create once they have arrived. In the county where I live, a 9,000-year-old skeleton was discovered. Archaeologists were able to find an exact match of his mitochondrial DNA in two people living in the same village today (Sykes, 2006)!

Contemporary literature on British culture emphasises the diversity represented by four national identities and immigrants from most of its historical colonial connections, as well as more recent migrations from Eastern Europe (Tomaney, 2010). However, Britain is far from being a melting pot, and recent migrations have accentuated rather than lessened the British phenomena of identity established and held within small discreet culturally and linguistically defined communities.

There are now three broad family types, identified with the university-educated professional classes, the native working classes and immigrants. (Changing Families, 2013)

At the opposite end of the class/income spectrum to the families I see in my semi-rural, ‘lower to lower middle class’ NHS CAMHS service are the generations of children sent away to boarding schools, sometimes as young as seven or eight. Their families value education and social connections above family life. I recently heard Joy Schaverien discuss her work with this population as adults now trying to function as parents themselves. She made the point that many of Britain’s family policymakers are people who experienced childhood away from family and its emotional connections (Schaverien, 2011).

The role of women as the primary or equal breadwinner in the family has shifted as manufacturing work has disappeared, and service industries have grown.

While the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the editor
• About the contributors
• Preface
• Introduction to the chapters
• The United States
• Canada
• The United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Australia
• Israel
• Russia
• Singapore
• Taiwan
• Japan
• Korea
• Trinidad
• El Salvador
• Brazil
• Index