“Is it us or is it me?”: Family experiences of connectedness following a reflecting team intervention

Abstract

The present study examined family-wide versus individual perceptions of, and changes in, family connectedness in response to a one-time reflecting team (RT) intervention. Seventy-six families (N = 208 individuals), recruited during family therapy, completed family connectedness measures before and after the RT intervention. A subset of adults (n = 26) completed 1-week follow-up measures. Three-level (family, individual, time) multilevel models were used to partition sources of variance in connectedness while permitting different fixed and random effects for adults and minors. Results indicate that family connectedness is a characteristic of whole-families (34% of the variance), individuals (43%), and change over time (23%), including measurement error. Additionally, participants reported higher family connectedness after the RT. This study demonstrates the importance of considering family connectedness as a multilevel relationship construct that potentially changes in response to RT.

“Always opening and never closing”: How dialogical therapists understand and create reflective conversations in network meetings

“…This is understood as important in order to respond to others in the meeting in such a way that they might feel heard. This adoption of therapist reflexivity during therapy conversations is not unique to reflecting teams (Brown et al, 2016;Bourke and Grenyer, 2017;Cologon et al, 2017), however, in using the reflecting team process, dialogical therapists share these inner experiences with clients in a way they hope might be helpful to them. Dialogical therapists participating in this study understood their own responses to therapy talk to be essential to guiding the conversation, and to the process of reflecting team practice.…”

“…Reflecting team practices have been described with deaf clients ( Munro et al, 2008 ); those with intellectual disabilities ( Anslow, 2014 ); people with gambling problems ( Garrido-Ferńandez et al, 2011 ); people with opiate addiction ( Garrido-Fernández et al, 2017 ); those with eating disorders ( Russell and Arthur, 2000 ); people in war-torn ( Charlés, 2010 ) and residential settings ( Faddis and Cobb, 2016 ) and with young children ( Fredman et al, 2007 ). Reflecting team sessions have been found to increase family connectedness ( Browne et al, 2020 ) and hope among family members ( Egeli et al, 2014 ; Armstrong et al, 2018 ; Allan et al, 2019 ). Dialogical approaches such as Open Dialogue have taken up a modification of reflecting team practices as a core component of the therapy process ( Sutela, 2012 ).…”