After a summer filled with travels along the East Coast and through England, I find myself ready to settle down into those "callings" that make my life meaningful. And one of those is spreading the word about the systemic and contextual thinking of marriage and family counseling. My students probably get tired of my continual questioning about how a client's contexts may be impacting the client, the counselor, or the client-counselor relationship. But hopefully they "get it" by the end of the semester. I am sure most of you lay claim to a similar calling or worldview. And you have a group of VAMFC leaders who envision that as a calling for our organization as well.

I began my presidency not completely clear on what our organization was about, but willing to take on the job because of my relationships with and trust in the people who had preceded me in leadership. I asked them in my first meeting to define for me their vision for the organization, and they brought the "heart" behind our mission statement into clearer focus.

¨ We want to bring the message of systemic and contextual thinking and being to all counselors, demonstrating its benefits in  real life situations.
¨ We want to create a community of marriage and family practitioners, including gathering together those who train counselors.
¨ We want to offer benefits to the membership that they cannot find elsewhere, including inexpensive, quality education and training, legislative monitoring and advocacy, communication about current events impacting the profession, visibility with other mental health practitioners and within VCA, stipends for research and practice, student scholarships, and web page resources (books and literature on key topics, speaker and consultant's bureau, and perhaps a referral directory).

¨ We pondered who best could serve in leadership, and you have a ballot in this issue reflecting these thoughts.
¨ We have begun plans on a Spring 2002 day long conference "Families in Crisis" in Charlottesville, and welcome your ideas about topics and speakers. We plan to invite a nationally known speaker to our Spring 2003 conference, and so have already begun considering what areas our members need to know about and who would best be able to meet those needs.
¨ We reflected on how to make the newsletter a top notch resource for our members, and how to fine tune the web page so make it useful to members, prospective members, and others interested in our organization and in marriage and family counseling.
¨ We hope to create an online referral directory to connect prospective clients with our members.
 ¨ We will develop an email distribution list of our members, so as to disseminate information more quickly, regularly, and inexpensively.
¨ We plan to create more links between our web page and those of other organizations so as to serve our members and link their members with ours (please let us know if you have ideas about good links).
¨ We will regularly update a topical resource list with key books and articles, so that members can quickly access material they need to better serve clients (please let us know if you would like to write a book review for the newsletter or let us know of key resources relating to work with particular populations).
¨ We hope to sponsor an event at VCA designed to link marriage and family counselors and school counselors, building collaborations that can generate systems changes in schools when they are needed.
¨ We will have a booth at VCA so that counselors in other specialties know what is special about marriage and family counselors.
¨ We will highlight in our November newsletter those of you doing presentations at VCA.
¨ We hope to develop a Campus Liaison Committee, in collaboration with VACES, in order to maintain closer links with faculty and students who need information about marriage and family therapy.
¨ We may develop a VAMFC listserve to encourage online discussions among our members about "hot" topics.

And I offer you the same invitation: Let your energy fly toward me in dreaming up new ideas, new visions, new ways to make our plans and goals happen this year. You have my email address! I await your input.

                                                                                                               Karen

Remember to check out the VAMFC web page at: (www.wm.edu/VAMFC)

 As I write this newsletter, I’m glued to the television and radio listening to the horror stories unfolding in the wake of the deliberate attack on the World Trade Centers, Pentagon, and the highjacked airliners. It is not just the Americans who are horrified but the entire world is stunned by this reprehensible action. The videos are played again and again; the tragedy  relived from a variety of angles.
 Yet, I cannot help but be impressed by:the dedication of the news crews risking their lives to bring us the latest information;
• the citizens of New York helping one another out and away from the danger;
• the mobilization of our government to keep out leaders safe and functioning;
• the organization and implementation of rescue workers in NY
• the members of the medical profession who immediately set up units to care for the injured
• the lack of looting and rioting
• the continued working of our phone systems
• the incredible volunteers showing up to donate blood
• the rescue workers arriving from across the country
• the immediate response of sympathy, empathy, and support from other world powers
• the flowers brought to the American Embassy in Germany, by concerned citizens
• the immediate prayers sessions organized by many different denominations
 The has been much focus on the horror, the need to retaliate, and the long range counseling needs of our population. Let us not forget the positives.
 There is nothing I can say that will make us feel safer, less horrified or more comfortable in our homes. The only comfort I can offer is the amazing resilience of the American people; the fact that our system works and that we are supported by the other super powers in this world. VAMFC members range across this state and there is no way that we cannot be affected by this tragedy, but my hope for each of you is that you do not lose loved ones or dear friends. “What does not kill us makes us stronger.” It is gratifying to see Americans and people around the world pull together.

 One of the fundamental components in the transition from graduate student in the development of a professional identity as a counselor is involvement in professional counseling organizations.  A vital element in this process is attending and presenting at professional conferences. Conducting a professional presentation can be anxiety producing for first time presenters, however, the only remedy to this anxiety appears to be to conduct presentations. The Virginia Counseling Graduate Student Association (VCGSA) and the Virginia Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (VACES) have joined together to assist counseling graduate students to make this transition more comfortable. VCGSA and VACES co-sponsor the Counseling Graduate Student Conference each spring. The conference is designed to give graduate students the opportunity to conduct professional presentations in a supportive environment. Graduate students are the only presenters at this conference. This conference is an excellent opportunity to practice a presentation that a student or groups of students are planning to present at another professional conference later in the year.

The Spring 2002 Counseling Graduate Student Conference is tentatively schedule for early April 2002 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Another upcoming conference is the Virginia Counselor Association (VCA) convention, which is scheduled for November 7 – 10, 2001 at the Richmond Marriott in Richmond, Virginia. It is important to remember that an integral part of being and becoming a professional counselor is involvement and participant in counseling professional organizations and conferences.

 Students are encouraged to email questions, concerns, and possible subjects of interest to me so that these topics may be addressed in future newsletters.  My email address is: spider@widomaker.com.

 On March 2nd, VAMFC sponsored a workshop at The College of William & Mary entitled "There Is A Lot of History In My Family's Past: Resolving Traumatic Memories and Re-Authoring One's Life" featuring Dr. Wally Scott. Dr. Scott (Wally) was invited to do a second workshop for VAMFC after he conducted a very successful fall workshop in Roanoke under the same title. In both workshops, he applied the concepts of narrative family therapy specifically to helping families process and integrate past traumas into present living. What makes Wally so enjoyable is that he practices what he preaches—that is, he uses his own wonderful “life narratives” to demonstrate the power of such narratives on family life generally. His warm and personalized presentation style made the workshop as enjoyable as it was beneficial.

VAMFC would like to thank all those who attended this workshop, and we hope and trust that it met your expectations. A special thanks is extended to the large contingency of faculty and students from Regent University whose interest helped to make the workshop possible and whose active participation enriched the experience for all those attended. A final note of gratitude is extended once again to Wally Scott for another inspirational presentation.

VAMFC is committed to sponsoring at least one specialized training program in family counseling each year. If you have topics that you would like to be considered for future VAMFC workshops, please let us know by contacting our President, Steve Walker at ssw@peoplepc.com or directly through our web site at www.vamfc.org. We are committed to providing our members in-service training that is of high quality and relevant to contemporary practice. Let us know what you need!

                                                                                                  Rip McAdams

President Elect: Rip McAdams
     Rip is an Assistant Professor at The College of William & Mary. He is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in Virginia, and serves as a Faculty Supervisor and family therapist with the New Horizons Family Counseling Center, a collaborative venture between William & Mary and a number of local school systems to provide counseling services to the families of children identified by the schools as having emotional and/or behavioral difficulties. Prior to coming to William & Mary, Rip was employed for nearly 15 years by Lutheran Family Services of the Carolinas and Virginia where he developed and directed the delivery of residential, day treatment, and treatment foster care services for emotionally disturbed and physically aggressive children. His many years of individual work with children and adolescents have impressed upon him of the necessity involving families in the treatment process if there is to be any hope of lasting success. He has been a member of the VAMFC Board for four years and was President during 1999-2000.

Secretary: Judy Stone
 After two decades in the fields of education and counseling, Dr. Judy Stone views herself as a seasoned psychotherapist, consultant and educational entrepreneur.
 In the early stages of her career she lived and worked overseas in England and Thailand where she taught in the International School system.   Upon returning to the states, she worked as a high school guidance counselor developing and implementing a Career Shadowing Program for minority students in Fairfax County Public Schools.  The project, still in use by the school system today, links minority high school students to business mentors to enhance student career and college-major decision-making abilities.
 Dr. Stone left the school system in 1988 to begin her family-counseling career under the supervision of Jay Haley and Cloe Madanes, using the strategic therapy model working with court ordered families.  She established Counseling, Training & Mediation Services in Northern Virginia.  As a Licensed Professional Counselor and Marriage & Family Therapist she built an individual and group practice supervising individuals in the licensure process.
 From 1992 to 1998 Dr. Stone worked in executive position for Managed Behavioral Health Organizations where she monitored national, state and community-level projects to implement and use behavioral health care quality assessment activities, with emphasis on the Medicaid environment.
 In addition, Dr. Stone was an adjunct professor for the past 8 years at George Mason University in the Graduate School of Education.  Currently she is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Education at the College of William & Mary.
 In her private life Dr. Stone is the mother of 3 adult children and grandmother of 2 grandsons and a granddaughter.   She is also an accomplished musician, artist and webmaster.  In her spare time she and her partner travel, bike and spend as much time as possible with the grandkids!

Board Member at Large: Wally Scott
 Wally Scott received his doctorate from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in the Marriage and Family Therapy program. He has worked with children and families for over 20 years in a number of different settings: social services, residential care, community mental health, court service and family service. Most recently, he was the Director of Counseling at Family Service of Roanoke Valley for the past 10 years. He is currently the Director for the Center for Counseling and Student Development at Radford University in Virginia. He is a licensed
Professional Counselor and a Marriage and Family Therapist in Virginia. He has presented his ideas to various groups at local, state, national and international conferences. He has presented at Marriage and Family Therapy conferences in Virginia and Texas, and international conferences in Poland and Finland. He has presented at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) national conferences in 1995, 1996 and 1998, and the Association for Play Therapy (APT) national conferences in 1992 and 1993.
 He has been involved in clinical supervision, training and consultation for over 10 years. Wally has been an adjunct professor at Radford University since 1993 and teaches in the School of  Social Work, and the Counselor Education and Counseling Psychology departments.

Student Member: Karen Dixon
     Karen Miller Dixon is 26 years old and was born in Manchester, TN. She received her B.A. from Berry College in Rome, Georgia in 1997, with a major in French and a minor in Education. She is first year graduate student majoring in Counselor Education with an emphasis in school counseling. She has lived in Tennessee, Georgia, Colorado, and Virginia since she finished her undergraduate degree. She loves to dance. Waltz, tango, cha-cha, rumba, etc. Her husband and she also enjoy contra dancing. She speaks French fluently. She has been married for two years. "I believe that all specialties of counseling are related to one another. My interest in volunteering for the position of student representative of VAMFC comes from the desire to learn more about marriage and family counseling and about how systems thinking might be used more effectively in schools, and to benefit from the
knowledge and insight of experienced counselors."

 Only a few years ago at our university-affiliated family counseling clinic, we can remember feeling some measure of success at matching the assessed “severity” of referred client family’s problems to the variable ability levels of our student family counselors. Beginning counselors could be matched with families who were assessed as having “less difficult” issues such as recent adjustment problems and younger children’s conduct problems; more experienced second-year masters students could be matched with families experiencing increasingly complex problems such as parental conflict, inconsistent parenting, and older children’s conduct problems; while the most experienced doctoral interns could be matched with families having the most complex problems such as abandonment, rejection, abuse, and confusing multiple diagnoses. This process afforded the client families a greater likelihood of having a counselor with the level of experience needed to understand and assist them, and it afforded the counselor a greater likelihood of an educative experience by lessening his/her chances of being overwhelmed by family issues that surpassed his/her levels of understanding and ability.

Gradually, this desirable process of student ability-to-client complexity matching has become a much more difficult and, often, an impossible task. The divisions with regard to student ability have remained the same, as have the needs for client families with problems that are appropriate to their levels of ability. Unfortunately, we seem to be less and less able to classify our referred family’s problems as being “less difficult” or even as “moderately difficult”. Of course families still come to us experiencing all the problems that would fall into these categories, but they are now more likely to be in combination with, imbedded in, or symptomatic of larger issues of greater complexity and severity. It is accurate to say now that the majority of referred families present issues involving abandonment, rejection, substance abuse, and individual mental health problems, and usually in combination. As such, the majority now fall into the former “most complex” category leaving our novice student counselors with nothing but very difficult cases to “cut their teeth” on. As program supervisors, we are finding ourselves more and more often faced with the ethical dilemma of denying services to families and learning opportunities for students or accepting referrals whose problems we know from the outset may exceed the capabilities of the students who will be assigned to them.

This situation has caused us as a counseling program to do some serious self-reflection to ensure that we (a) have not unknowingly raised our expectations of client families or (b) lowered our tolerance for tackling tough clinical issues generally. Perhaps we are not developing our students’ abilities to levels that we have previously? Perhaps the changes we are seeing lie not in our client families but in ourselves? At this point, the best answer to this question seems to be “a little bit of both.” The situation has, in a healthy way, we think, caused our staff to examine and renew their commitment an extremely difficult job. It has also made us aware the following changes in philosophy and emphasis with regard to preparation, supervision, service delivery, and research that we must make in response to some real changes in the complexity of our referrals.
 

 1. Preparation curricula must be broadened to appropriately prepare family counselors to deal with the multiplistic issues and needs that client families bring to counseling. Up until last year, we offered one marriage and family course that introduced students to seven family therapy models and gave them opportunity for role play family counseling. That course and regular clinic-sponsored workshops were the primary didactic instruction in family counseling that they received. Last year in response to issues facing our student counselors and client families, we have broadened our curriculum to include classes in normal family processes, advanced M&F theories and techniques, relationship and sexuality counseling, play therapy, and families & addictions.  Faced with increasing numbers of clinical crises, we now additionally conduct annual daylong, in-service training workshops in client suicide and client violence for all student counselors in the family counseling clinic.

2. Supervision must focus on counselor development as much as on skill development. We have come to the conclusion that we cannot fully prepare students with the skills that they will need for practice. We don’t serve either our clients or students well if we mentor them to become just like us. Our efforts seem better spent if we provide students with the abilities to recognize the need for additional skills and to acquire those that best match their unique personal style and various client needs. To achieve this, our supervisors are trained in and practice a facilitative rather than a singular mentor (superior) relationship with their supervisees. Through a balance of challenge and support our supervision is intended to develop both our student’s professional skills and their ability to deal successfully with the complexity that awaits them in practice.

 3. Effective prioritization of multiple issues is necessary for effective service delivery. Typically, there is not a problem to be resolved—there are multiple, intertwined and interconnected problems that all may require attention. It seems that knowing where to start is becoming a major challenge for our students (not to mention for supervisors as well!) This year we have adopted the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF) as a framework for prioritizing the severity of the multiple issues in play in families and determining the order in which they should be addressed. Additionally the GARF provides a means of charting progress over time on the particular issues being addressed. This information is essential in determining when it is appropriate to move to another of often many issues needing attention.

 4. Research into new approaches is needed if we hope to be able to address new types of problems. We train our students purposefully and carefully in a number of established family counseling approaches. At the same time, we realize that none of the individual approaches seem to fully prepare students for handling the unique issues they are facing. Unique combinations of problems may require unique combinations of approaches and even new approaches that will evolve through research-based practice. This year our clinic staff was introduced to the principles of Action Research, a procedure for conducting clinical research around a framework of actual clinical practice. We hope that the Action Research process will enable us to recognize and document effective new approaches to contemporary family problems that would otherwise go unnoticed and remain only in the awareness of the individual counselor who implemented them. Opportunities for outcome measurement made possible through the GARF are another means by which we hope that our output (service delivery) will be driven by accurate input (knowledge of what works).

Editor note: I have run this in the past but I feel it bears repeating today.  Avis

 “All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. ...There is a greater darkness than the one we fight, it is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way.  The war we fight is not against powers and principalities.  It is against chaos  and despair.  For greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams.  Against this peril we can never surrender.  The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation.  No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us.  We know only that it is always born in pain.”

                                                                                    J. Michael Straczynski   Babylon 5

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VAMFC Board Members & Committee Chairs for 2001-2002 Term