After birth the first thing we learn is becoming a participant in dialogue. We are born in relations and those relations become our structure. Intersubjectivity is the basis of human experience and dialogue the way we live it. In this paper the dilemma of looking at dialogue as either a way of life or a therapeutic method is described. The background is the open dialogue psychiatric system that was initiated in Finnish Western Lapland. The author was part of the team re-organizing psychiatry and afterwards became involved in many different types of projects in dialogical practices. Lately the focus has shifted from looking at speech to seeing the entire embodied human being in the present moment, especially in multifarious settings. Referring to studies on good outcomes in acute psychosis, the contribution of dialogical practice as a psychological resource will be clarified.

This article describes counselling practice as social action, reporting on a case of children witnessing community violence and its aftermath. Highlighted is the role of friends who made a stand of solidarity against such violence. Outsider witness practices helped recruit and grow a community of care for the client and his friends. This community of care was significantly enhanced by the involvement of a lawyer/musician/activist who composed a song with the three friends to take a stance against guns and violence in their society. Caring solidarity, generosity and doing hope together formed small but significant alliances against entrenched practices of violence.

Many families come to treatment with concerns about attention-seeking children. This paper examines the dominant socio-cultural and biological influences on individual parent and child narratives about attention-seeking behaviour and explores the misalignment between the two. A case study illustrates the reconstruction of the dominant problem-saturated story through the hungry-for-attention metaphor. Finally, the author proposes an integrative approach to combining narrative practices with behavioural interventions for families and professional caregivers.

In this article I explore the use of Pearce and Pearce's' (1998) notion of ‘curating stories’ and ‘transcendent story-telling’ for teaching about models in family therapy. Taking a position of curator, the discussion invites students into inclusive and pluralist thinking about the many models in family therapy's collection. Two story-making frameworks of Stratigraphy and Australian Aboriginal ‘Dreaming’ are curated in a sequential way allowing a thick description and lived story of pluralism to emerge. Creative use of metaphors invites a context for transforming knowledge and abilities towards pluralism. I outline how family therapy can be taught using these metaphors as a way of freeing students to see its history as both interpretation and lived experience.

When marriages and long-term relationships break down, parents may refer their children and adolescents to therapy for a variety of reasons. While the systemic therapist's preference may be to work with the family system/s, high conflict separation may prohibit such an approach. This article discusses family-focused child therapy that prioritises the needs of children while seeking to preserve a systemic approach. At a practice level this may involve: (a) individual child therapy, (b) engaging with smaller subsystems including siblings, (c) joint therapeutic work involving child/ren plus parent/s, and (d) any of these combinations; all while continuing to maintain a systemic understanding of the work. The article discusses the challenges of working with children from separated families, where there is restricted or no possibility of engaging with the broader family system.

Adolescent substance abuse is a common problem and family interventions are emerging as a strategy to prevent it and assist family coping. The effectiveness of a prevention-focussed family intervention was evaluated for its secondary impacts on improving parental mental health and family functioning. Twenty-four secondary schools in Melbourne Victoria were randomly assigned to either a control condition or an intervention titled Resilient Families. The two intervention levels analysed were: (1) a parenting booklet only and; (2) combining the booklet with face-to-face parent education sessions. Parent surveys at baseline were followed up one year and four years later. Repeated-measures analysis (n = 560) found parents attending parent education demonstrated reductions in mental health symptoms, however this had negative effects on family cohesion and no impact on family conflict. These findings were interpreted in terms of parent education assisting parent mental health by promoting assertive parenting styles that may increase adolescent-parent tension by encouraging firmer parental boundaries and strategies to reduce adolescent substance use.