About the Certificate Program

This course creates a supportive learning environment to empower beginning and intermediate family practitioners to becoming more skilled, self aware, confident family-centered helpers and supervisors. It is a program that will enable you to become a practice leader and enhance supervisory skills. Participants gain clarity about their strengths, develop new ways of working and become more articulate about their own model of helping. Special attention is paid to the development of a shared learning experience. The Intensive Program was the hallmark program of the former Family Institute of Cambridge for 35 years. We continue to teach the Intensive Program in the comprehensive, immersive tradition of FIC.

This year will be special in that we will be holding our annual weekend retreat on Chappaquidick Island, Martha’s Vineyard. In addition to the retreat, we will meet for 11 day-long classes scheduled every few weeks to promote in depth learning while balancing work and life.

Helping families through difficult times can be joyful service or a daunting task. Today more practitioners in Massachusetts are being challenged to help families support children at home with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Working well with families is a critical way to improve the lives of struggling children, adolescents and adults. 

Family systems models provide lenses for understanding families and the skills to develop a mutually agreed upon focus. Trained family therapists know how to lead conversations so that everyone participates constructively. They also know how to help parents avoid making things inadvertently worse. Understanding the family as a system supports us to help people do what is best for everyone involved. Without specialized training, holding meetings with families can be overwhelming, difficult to manage and unproductive.

Participants will study concepts and methods from a variety of theoretical approaches, including historically important, enduring models and more recent developments in the field. Drawing on their own unique styles and abilities, students will examine their underlying assumptions about families and therapy, developing a relational, empowering systems-oriented clinical stance.

The goals of the Intensive Program in Family Therapy are:

• learn conceptual models and clinical practices that highlight family competencies, framing their difficulties in non-shaming, non-blaming ways, taking into account the influences of the larger culture and community
• learn a model to hold meetings with families and other working groups with a structure that helps people and process from getting stuck

Teaching methods include discussions about reading material, experiential exercises, live and videotaped interviews. Small group case consultation is an integral part of the course, providing the opportunity to attend to each student's development. Liz Brenner is the Director and primary instructor for the course.  Senior faculty including Carol Becker, Caroline Marvin, Charlie Verge and Kaethe Weingarten will enrich the program as guest presenters.

We look forward to enlivening our work and learning together!

Who should apply: Social workers, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators, parent partners and other professionals interested in learning more about counseling individuals, families, couples and working with larger systems.

Contact Liz to ask questions about or to begin registration for this course.