Keynote Speakers
Prof Adrian Blow
Professor
Michigan State University
Biography
Dr. Adrian Blow grew up in South Africa and is Professor of the Human Development and Family Studies Department. He is the former Chair of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies and the former Director of the MSU Couple and Family Therapy program. He obtained his PhD from Purdue University in 1999, served on the faculty at Saint Louis University for six years, and subsequently joined Michigan State in 2005. His research focuses broadly on families and trauma, and on military families in particular. He also studies and writes about change processes in interventions pertaining to marital, couple, and family therapy including a wide range of articles on common factors across theories of systemic family therapy. He is the associate editor of The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, Volume 3, which focuses on Systemic Family Therapy with Couples. He has won several awards including the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Training Award (2017), the Michigan State University Community Engagement Scholarship Award (CESA), and the Michigan State University Outreach and Engagement Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Research. He is the current President of AAMFT.
Abstract
What our history as Systemic Family Therapists suggests about our Priorities for the Future
Panellists:
Dr Arnon Bentovim
Prof Ivan Eisler
Esther Usiskin Cohen
Dr Reenee Singh
In this talk, Adrian will look back at the field and describe its theoretical and research history highlighting both strengths and gaps in our work over the years. Next, he will identify opportunities and priorities for our future work based on our history. He will draw on his unique perspective as President of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, as well as his experiences as a family therapy researcher, author, and associate editor of the Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy.
Dr Dwight Turner
Integrative Counsellor and Psychotherapist
University of Brighton
Biography
Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, and a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice. Dr Turner is the author of Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Depoliticised pathways towards intersectional practice (2025), The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021). All are published by Routledge.
An Intersectional Psychotherapist, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker. He can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk or on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on BlueSky at @dturner300.
Abstract
The Long Walk to Freedom; Intersectional Pathways Towards Community & Wholeness
The current political landscape is one of polarisation and separation form those around us, be they families who have fallen out because of their different positions over Brexit, to communities which have been disrupted because of COVID, Lockdowns and vaccines, or because of political splits driven by the rise of the far right and the positioning of the far left in opposition. The reality is that we are perhaps more opposite to each other than we have ever been in at least a generation. The polarities will hold echoes in our work as psychotherapists and counsellors of all modalities.
This talk, which takes an intersectional approach to the splits that will happen within our society, recognises that these splits are also internal ones and that much of what we are wrestling with is as much around the internal re-alignments and reconnections that we have to go through, as it about the external representations of these projected aspects of ourselves that we have to interact with and reconnect with. This is the long walk to freedom, a freedom from these polarities, a freedom which will hopefully bring us back into reconnection and re-alignment, not just with ourselves, but with each other, our communities and beyond.
Prof Umberta Telfener
EFTA President
European Family Therapy Association (EFTA)
Biography
Psychologist, epistemologist, systemic thinker, activist, teacher of the Milan School of Boscolo and Cecchin, President of EFTA, the European Family Therapy Association.
Abstract
"Without roots we do not fly"
Panellists
Dr Glenn Larner
Dr Sharon Bond
Dr Paulo Bertrando
Our aim as clinicians is to create a generative process that awakens evolution. To do so we need to explore the past - even trigenerational - the future and be aware of the culture in which the system we are working with has grown. We know that any system has resources and acts at its best at any moment. Sometimes we have the feeling we are stuck; it is that moment we need to explore the client's loyalty to their stories: what they know and what they do not know that they do not know, what they easily tell us and what needs to be explored together. That is the moment in which we need to deepen the family history embedded in the historical context.
Exploring the genealogical tree, I will propose some unwritten rules in families: commands one has given oneself, repetitions of past events, traumas, invisible loyalties, substitute children, settling of ancient scores ....
We will speak together also about the anxiety of the future which rightfully is so frequent among young people.
All this through clinical cases and possibly in a dialogue with the public.