Prompt Post # 5: Observing Community

    To find out what is being done in the community here at MSU relating to my field, I researched an organization by the name of " The consortium for Multicultural Psychology Research (CMPR)". The organizations primary goal is to use psychological concepts, principles, and therories, and appply them to multicultural issues to get a better understanding of those issues. This is related to my field because their will be multicultural families to deal with and I will need to understand things from each family membersl's perspective. This research organization could benefit a lot of therapist rin their daily jobs.
    The organization has a website that explains their primary goal of their group along with many other things. It shows us the types of publications they have come up with and the research that they've found out about multicultural issues. It shows us many different research fellows in which they work with in developing these publications. They have a section for graduates who are study the multicultural issues in which they are providing grants to those students. They also have a section where someone can donate to their research program to help them further their research for multicultural issues.
   

Free post # 5: Fixing the Family

A marriag and family therapist serve as a guide for familes , they help them make their family stronger or bring them together. Families will always face problems and get into arguments based on jealousy, teenage rebellion, substance abuse, financial disagreements, etc. When beginning to help a family mend their issues to help their family functioning, a marriage and family therapist will first need to figure out what the problem is. When things are a little to heated, the family therapist would probably choose to speak with each member of the family separately and get a better understanding of each family member's perspective. But usually, they would like to speak with the family as a whole, to see how they are interacting with one another. For example, are they interrupting one another, not listening, are they rolling their eyes, etc. The marriage and family therapist job then is to just listen and observe each family member's body language. After the family is done pleading their case, then the family therapist can insert their own opinion to get the family to communicate effectively, so that they are able to understand their peers or partner and come up with solutions that will then benefit everyone.

Free Post #4: Getting Experience

I am really interested in going experience in my career field. I find it really hard to get hands on experience with marriage and family therapy sessions because of the extreme level of confidentiality. So to gain some type of experience, I believe that I will need to work with an array of different people. For example, children and adults of different backgrounds because after all that is the bulk of my career, working with different families. Internships at schools, hospitals, counseling centers, and boys and girls club's could help boost my resume for working with different types of people. Attending these types of jobs or internships could help me learn how to deal with children and adults and also help me with problem solving skills. Now knowing the types of jobs and internships to look for I wonder where will I start to get information on the job openings or internships?

Prompt Post #4: Considering Delivery and Style

    I read two different forms of writing which was a newspaper article called "Putting the Summertime to Work" by Karen Ann Cullotta and a scholarly article called "Abuse and Violence within Families and Family Therapist Response" by Judith Myers Avis. The newspaper article explained how planning family time in the summertime months can help rebuild your family by teamwork. A family activity that involves helping others and sharing with others, and gives a sense of emotional attachment, can help with the relationships between family members. The audience was for families and also marriage and family therapist who would like to fix broken families. The purpose of this article is to help families develop strategies to gain a stronger family or bring a family together. The style of delivery was very easy to read and understand. It was broken up into passages for every main point in which I found really helpful. It also included a picture of a family working together on an activity that required teamwork.

    The scholarly article explained how Judith herself felt that there should be a required course in treating violence and abuse in families into the marriage and family therapy program. It explained how there is a lot of abuse against the child and mother of families by the father, stepfather, brother, uncle, or the mothers boyfriend, because of the power men hold over women. She explained that when students understood the concept of power dynamics, relationship between power and gender, the emotional, psychological, and behavior consequences of abuse, they learned to assess incidents of violence and abuse within families. And therefore family Therapist could be of more help to these type of abusive situations. The audience is scholarly students and professors. The purpose was to provide other scholarly individuals with some evidence that this class taken was very beneficial to the future family therapist. The style of delivery was very hard to understand because of some of the terms used. It consisted of a lot of information in which I had to search for the main points. It included a very long bibliography at the end as well.

    I feel that the scholarly article is more trust worthy because it showed a lot of statistics. Since it is a scholarly article , I believe that there had to be a lot of evidence collected in order to write this article because it could later contribute to someone else's work. I feel that the newspaper article was just basically telling people a good strategy to rebuild and build a strong family system.

Free Post #3: Day-To-Day Activities Of A Marriage and Family Therapist

      I wanted to gain a feel of what a counseling session actually looked like when talking to a family or a individual. This video gave me insight of how the sessions actually looked, which presented a very positive and caring environment. I liked the fact that the client in the video was so open about her emotions to her therapist. This video also captured my image of how a session might look. There was a couch in which the clients sat on in the therapist was sitting in a chair taking notes. It showed the different task a marriage and family therapist will have to do such as file paper work and schedule meetings with their clients. the means of communication was through the phone which was really interesting and exciting to me because I thought clients and therapist would contact each other through email. Another aspect of the video that I found interesting was that even though people were already a marriage and family therapist, they still had to go through training which made them better at their job. This reassured me that I do not have to go into this profession knowing everything because there will still be training available for some things.


So You Want to Be a Marriage and Family Therapist

Free post #2: A different Route

    Marriage and Family Therapy does not have to be rooted in the discipline of psychology. I could take a different route and join a Marriage and Family therapy program. I found two programs of interest that are associated with Syracuse University and Hope International University. These programs train students on how to work with different people or families when dealing with difficult situations. These situations include...

• Mental Health Concerns
• Couples
• Families
• Etc.

    They are designed to help students meet requirements held by the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. There are different requirements to meet for different programs. Thus gives me insight into the possible routes I can take to reach my goal of becoming a marriage and family therapist. Finding out about these different programs helps me get a head start in finding the perfect option for me after I receive my undergraduate degree.