The therapist's capacity to imagine is one specific part of the endeavour of empathy, which lies at the heart of the processes of the therapeutic relationship. This article offers beginning ideas about the significance of therapist's imagination of self in relation to her/his clients in the task of trying to understand their experience. In seeking to ‘understand’ the experience of others, the therapist is able to move between an imagination of sameness/identification with the client/s, and an imagination of difference/‘foreignness’. The family therapy orientation of curiosity and ‘not-knowing’ relies on the imagination of self as different to our clients; more traditional understandings of empathic connection rely more heavily on the imagination of sameness/identification with clients. This article argues that flexibility in the therapist's use of self in moving between these positions allows an expanded capacity for therapeutic connectedness. These ideas have special valence in the practice territories of impasse and intercultural therapy.

Although family therapy was born to deal with problems posed by severe mental disorders, systemic therapists today tend to drift away from the field of psychiatry. The author refers to his own experience in psychiatry to argue in favour of the presence of the systemic model within the field: systemic understanding might be precious to counterbalance the tendency toward too easy a reliance on bio-psychiatry and pharmacology. In turn, keeping close to psychiatry and to its problems can be useful to systemic therapists, by involving them in social and epistemological queries that are otherwise extraneous to professionals mainly devoted to private practice.

The initial section of this article describes the frequency with which people are exposed to various forms of traumatic stressors and the limitations of linear thinking in both assessing and treating the consequences of traumatic exposure as reported by the Institute of Medicine. The middle section of the article identifies the research and theory that supports the utility of systemic thinking and action in working with traumatised systems, especially families. The final section includes an outline of a protocol for family therapists and other systems-informed practices to help traumatised families and other systems. A critical part of the protocol is that it meets the standards of trauma-informed practice reflected by the Green Cross Academy of Traumatology and the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) guidelines, and the six criteria for evaluating treatment approaches. These criteria include do no harm, exposure titration control, reciprocal inhibition tuning, quantity and quantity of training, fit and fidelity, and evidence of effectiveness.

The purpose of this article was to explore the potential application of the science of complexity to aspects of team, family and group systems. A child and adolescent mental health Day Program as a tightly knit multidisciplinary team closely interacting with family systems, provides an opportunity to illustrate concepts of this general scientific framework and offer potentially unique insights. In particular, the relevance of diversity and interconnectivity between parts of a system are highlighted. Ideas explored include team functioning, how change occurs in families and new ways of looking at groups. Furthermore, complexity provides support for intensive multisystemic interventions such as the Day Program to assist families with severe and chronic child mental health issues.

This article offers an introduction to key systemic ideas as seen through the eyes of first-year trainees in a postgraduate systemic therapy course. Our aim is to present these ideas in user-friendly, accessible language, with examples to illustrate their use. The article is organised around three main themes: how a family system gets organised; how systemic work helps to effect change in families; and how a systemic therapist creates a context for change. Ideas covered include circular patterns, processes and questions, feedback loops, the importance of context, the interdependence of meaning and action, taking a meta-perspective, systemic hypothesising, neutrality, curiosity, second-order change, use of language and the position of the therapist. The article may be of particular interest to those who are new to systemic ideas, as well as for those involved in providing training in systemic practice.

The following interview was conducted during the 29th Australian Family Therapy Conference, September 29 to October 3, 2008, at The University of Queensland, Australia. Paolo Bertrando, psychiatrist and systemic psychotherapist, was trained in Milan by Gianfranco Ceechin and Lugi Boscolo, with whom he collaborated in the 1990s. His present interests concern the dynamics of systemic therapy, the use of systemic therapy with individuals and the relevance of emotions for systemic practice. Michael Locke works as a consultant in practice development and service delivery systems at Centacare Catholic Family and Community Services, Brisbane. He has worked in both public and community based agencies utilising both systemic and brief therapy orientations with individuals, couples and families.