Family Therapy With Muslims

Family Therapy with Muslims is the first guide for mental health professionals who work with Muslims in the family therapy setting. The book opens with a section defining the similarities across Muslim cultures, the effects of postcolonialism on Muslims, and typical Muslim family dynamics. The author then devotes a chapter to different models of family therapy and how they can specifically be applied to working with Muslim families. Case studies throughout the book involve families of many different backgrounds living in the West—including both immigrant and second generation families—that will give professionals concrete tools to work with clients of their own.

A young female client presents with anorexia nervosa and believes that her problem has its roots in magic; parents are helpless in the face of their son's substance abuse issues; an interracial couple cannot agree on how to discipline their children. How would you effectively help these clients while balancing appropriate interventions that are sensitive to religious, cultural, social, and gender differences? This handbook answers these difficult questions and helps behavioral health practitioners provide religio-culturally-competent care to Muslim clients living in territories such as North America, Australia, and Europe. The issues and interventions discussed in this book, by authoritative contributors, are diverse and multifaceted. Topics that have been ignored in previous literature are introduced, such as sex therapy, substance abuse counseling, university counseling, and community-based prevention. Chapters integrate tables, lists, and suggested phrasing for practitioners, along with case studies that are used by the authors to help illustrate concepts and potential interventions. Counseling Muslims is also unique in its broad scope, which reflects interventions ranging from the individual to community levels, and includes chapters that discuss persons born in the West, converts to Islam, and those from smaller ethnic minorities. It is the only guide practitioners need for information on effective service delivery for Muslims, who already bypass significant cultural stigma and shame to access mental health services.

This widely used clinical reference and text provides a wealth of knowledge on culturally sensitive practice with families and individuals from over 40 different ethnic groups. Each chapter demonstrates how ethnocultural factors may influence the assumptions of both clients and therapists, the issues people bring to the clinical context, and their resources for coping and problem solving.

The long shadow of September 11 has awakened a widespread desire to understand more about Arab and Islamic cultures. In this book, a respected expert in the field provides a history of the region’s people and an exploration of their mental health issues, including the impact of western civilization in the Middle East and the negative reaction to western dominance among many Arabs and Muslims—plus two contributed chapters addressing Arab families in the United States and family therapy with Arab and Muslim women. “Deals directly with the consequences of simplistic stereotyping of Arabic and Muslim people following the 9/11 events and the threat of terrorism.” —From the Foreword by Paul B. Pedersen, Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University “Religion plays a major role in the mental life of Arabs and Muslims, and to address this aspect in counseling and psychotherapy is a welcome intervention. I congratulate Dr. Dwairy for his impact on the progress of psychotherapy in our region.” —Ahmed Okasha, Director of WHO Collaborating Center, Institute of Psychiatry, Ain Shams University “An excellent resource for mental health professionals working with Middle Eastern clients around the world. This text is well researched, and the author has extensive experience with this clientele and with the research literature in the counseling and psychotherapy field.” —Farah A. Ibrahim, psychologist and professor, Oregon State University “Outstanding . . . Dwairy presents a compelling historical and sociopolitical context . . . a must-have reference for any clinician working with Arab/Muslim clients.” —Sylvia Nassar-McMillan, North Carolina State University

The Routledge International Handbook of Couple and Family Therapy is a comprehensive text that promotes innovative frameworks and interventions in couple and family therapy from a cross cultural perspective. A diverse range of international contributors explore the role that demography, regionality, cultural and political crises, and policy, have on the issues faced by couples and families. Collectively, the chapters articulate unique ideas in conceptualizing the needs of families with international backgrounds, adapting the current models and frameworks to work with this population most effectively. The text is split into four sections covering: personal voices and philosophical perspectives, theory and models, specific applications with international populations, and emerging perspectives. This handbook is essential for individual practitioners, researchers, psychotherapists, and related mental health professionals, as well as academics with an interest in working with couples and families.

Integrating the Islamic faith with modern psychotherapy is at the forefront of the spiritually integrated psychotherapy movement. To bring this work to wider attention and to promote its continuation, Dr. Carrie York Al-Karam has brought together the present volume of nine essays, each of which is written by a Muslim clinician who practices Islamically integrated psychotherapy (IIP)—a modern approach that unites the teachings, principles, and interventions of the faith with Western therapeutic approaches. As delineated in the Introduction, IIP has emerged from a variety of domains including the psychology of religion and spirituality, multicultural psychology and counseling, transpersonal psychology, Muslim Mental Health, and Islamic Psychology. The individual chapters then describe a variety of ways IIP is practiced by Muslim clinicians in their service provision with Muslim clients. The contributors discuss a wide range of topics, such as how Islam can be viewed as a system for psychological wellbeing, or a “science of the soul”; what marital counseling can look like from an Islamically-integrated perspective; Prophet Mohammed as a psycho-spiritual exemplar in a new approach called The HEART Method; the use of Quranic stories in family therapy; as well as using Islamic teachings when working with Muslim children and adolescents. A description of the various approaches is supplemented with discussions of their theoretical underpinnings as well as research-based recommendations for advancing clinical application. What emerges is a vital resource for Muslim and non-Muslim clinicians alike as well as the lay Muslim reader wanting to know more about how the Islamic faith and psychotherapy are engaging with each other in a modern clinical context.

A young female client presents with anorexia nervosa and believes that her problem has its roots in magic; parents are helpless in the face of their son's substance abuse issues; an interracial couple cannot agree on how to discipline their children. How would you effectively help these clients while balancing appropriate interventions that are sensitive to religious, cultural, social, and gender differences? This handbook answers these difficult questions and helps behavioral health practitioners provide religio-culturally-competent care to Muslim clients living in territories such as North America, Australia, and Europe. The issues and interventions discussed in this book, by authoritative contributors, are diverse and multifaceted. Topics that have been ignored in previous literature are introduced, such as sex therapy, substance abuse counseling, university counseling, and community-based prevention. Chapters integrate tables, lists, and suggested phrasing for practitioners, along with case studies that are used by the authors to help illustrate concepts and potential interventions. Counseling Muslims is also unique in its broad scope, which reflects interventions ranging from the individual to community levels, and includes chapters that discuss persons born in the West, converts to Islam, and those from smaller ethnic minorities. It is the only guide practitioners need for information on effective service delivery for Muslims, who already bypass significant cultural stigma and shame to access mental health services.

This unprecedented volume provides a primer on diverse couples and families—one of the most numerous and fastest-growing populations in the United States—illustrating the unique challenges they face to thrive in various cultural and social surroundings. In Diversity in Couple and Family Therapy: Ethnicities, Sexualities, and Socioeconomics, a clinical psychologist and couples and family therapist with nearly two decades' experience leads a team of experts in addressing contemporary elements of diversity as they relate to the American family and covering key topics that all Americans face when establishing their identities, including racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexual orientation identity, religious and spiritual identity, and identity intersections and alternatives. Moreover, it includes chapters on cross-cultural assessment of health and pathology and tailoring treatment to diversity. Every chapter includes vignettes that serve to illustrate the nuances of and solutions to the concerns and issues, as well as the strengths and resilience often inherent in diverse couples or families. Effective methods of coping with stereotypes, intergenerational trauma, discrimination, and social and structural disparities are presented, as are ways to assess and empower couples and families. This text includes experiences and traditions of subgroups that typically receive little attention from being seen as too common, such as white and Christian families, or from being seen as too uncommon, such as couples and families from specific Native American tribes and multiracial couples and families. Thus, it addresses the curricular changes needed to master the diversity found in contemporary American couples and families. The text offers a holistic perspective on diverse couples and families that is consistent with the increasing prominence of models that transcend individual diagnoses and biology to include social factors and context. Theory, policy, prevention, assessment, treatment, and research considerations are included in each chapter. Topics include African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American, white, biracial/multiracial, intercultural, LGBT, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim couples and families as well as diverse family structures. The depth of every chapter includes attention to subgroups within each category, such as African American and Caribbean couples and families, as well as those who represent the intersection between varying oppressed identities, such as an intercultural gay family, or a poor, homeless interracial couple. Additionally, each chapter provides a review section with condensed and easy-to-understand summaries of the key take-away lessons.