‘Spirituality in 21st Century Asia –  

The Spirituality of Capturing Children’s Voices in Family Adversity’ 

 

In this keynote address, Dr Wai-Yung Lee will present her work in capturing children’s voices and making use of them in therapeutic intervention.  

 

Using videotaped segments, she will illustrate how compassion, wisdom, and commitment can be understood in the light of spirituality in working with families going through difficult family adversity, such as spousal conflicts and divorce.  

 

Dr Lee will conclude her presentation with a full video presentation of how a family completed their therapeutic journey, moving from hurt and pain to a spiritual experience of healing.

‘Spiritual Resources and Tools in Family Therapy –  

Engaging Muslim Families using Stories from the Qur’an’ 

 

This keynote address will draw on the speaker’s practice experience with Muslim families in the UK context. 

 

Religious texts and stories have a place in family life and family interaction – more often than not, religious texts and stories are used authoritatively and ‘self-righteously’ by individuals and families to justify, communicate or impose positions and views. This can further create polarities in family relationships. 

 

How can religious texts and stories be utilised in conversations with individuals and families – in ways that opens up deeper exploration and allow for connection and possibilities? How can texts and stories be tapped into as resources to explore multiple meanings in families. interaction?  

 

This keynote will invigorate family therapy practice with the use of spirituality and text-creating conversations with families.  

 

What other spiritual resources and tools can practitioners consider in their engagement of individuals, couples and families? 

‘Researching Spirituality in Systemic Practice’  

 

“Spirituality is an important part of many clients’ lives, but has been absent in family therapy research and theory” (Carlson, McGeorge, & Anderson, 2011; Walsh, 2009, 2010).  

 

Spirituality is often considered incidental to clinical practice but we need to show, as a professional community, how spirituality and religious beliefs are present for both clients and therapists and how they can impact, helpfully or otherwise, on treatment methods. 

 

The integration of spirituality and systemic practice involves a process of attunement. This attunement 

takes place between the people present in the therapy, between those present and not present, between human and transcendental energies, between the different parts of one’s embodied, cognitive, and spiritual knowing. 

 

Attunement is already a form of enquiry. We rely on our different kinds of knowing and know-how to orientate ourselves, to make ethical decisions on where our focus might land, which social or religious expectations to privilege.  

 

In the examples Dr Gail offers, she will show how what we already do in our everyday systemic practice is not a million miles from doing research. She discusses examples of what we are already doing that can be developed for research purposes and mapped into family therapy research.  

‘Spirituality: Being With or Being For?’ 

 

In Family Therapy, we create a relational context where individuals, parents, children, couples, the elderly, other involved persons and therapists - can find their embodied voice.  

  

A place to be with people in their suffering, joy,stuckness, rage, doubts and silence.   

  

Also, when it comes to challenging contexts of high conflict and violence, we can be with people.  

  

Spirituality is part of this radical relational landscape where everything is connected.  Spirituality is a part of daily life; it is not outside of people in the air but is embodied and grounded.  

  

Relational processes of reconciliation, relational responsibility and forgiving have an important place in this landscape.  

  

In her keynote, Justine will invite you to enter this landscape and open up spaces for therapists to allow spirituality to be part of rituals in their practice. 

'The Thread that Connects'

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We are part of the thread that connects with the oneness of all living things that forms the very fabric of life; part of the interconnected pattern of network of relationships. Even in death, we continue to be part of the community of humanity and ecology. We continue to contribute even when we have breathed the last.

 

What will our contribution be to humanity and the whole at large? What is the gift we will give of ourselves to the community of living beings?