Lipscomb Family Therapy Center - a Place For Healing

This house is now officially the Lipscomb Family Therapy Center. This center is Lipscomb’s newest outreach to Green Hills, to Nashville, and to Middle Tennessee. It is our mission not merely to engage the community, but to make an impact on the community by providing high quality, affordable, and highly accessible mental health services for individuals, couples and families. In this house, some amazing things are going to happen. In this house there will be healing. 

• Couples on the pathway to divorce will walk through the doors of this house and walk out of this house on the road to reconciliation, forgiveness, and relational healing.

• In this house, people who fight the insidious and destructive powers of depression and anxiety will learn how to push back against these monsters and have joy and peace once again. 

• In this house, parents and teens who can’t find a way to get along will find meaningful ways to refresh, renew or reclaim a meaningful relationship with each other. 

• In this house, children who have been wounded, abused, and broken will find ways to heal, and grow and be children once again.

• In this house, the wounds of the past that keep festering will find healing and relief. 

• In this house, engaged couples will learn relational skills that will help their coming marriage for years and decades to come. 

• In this house, people who have lost hope will find hope. 

• Because inside of this house is holy ground. Within the walls of this house is sacred space where conversations are safe, where people can show their wounds, and where healing can begin. 

• Let this be a house of healing.  

Community Engagement: Marriage and Family Therapy Has Left The Office

Marriage and Family Therapists are trained as systems thinkers. What this means is that when an individual presents with symptoms of depression or anxiety, the family and social context of the individual is considered to be at least as important as the thoughts, feelings or biological factors at play. In short, MFTs view the individual through the context in which they are situated.

To push the idea of systems even further, the MFT views the social system as the client, not a collection of clients. MFTs treat families in which someone bears the symptom of depression as opposed to an individual with depressive symptom that also happens to have a family. Context is everything for MFTs.

But what would happen if MFTs engaged on a level one step up from the family system? What if MFTs entered the system at the community level? What does MFT work look like at the community level?

Well, the good news is that it is happening already and it is happening more and more frequently. Here is what I mean: Traditionally when a family comes in with a child with school problems, MFTs think of the family taking their position relative to the school system. That is excellent. But now MFTs are engaging at the school level seeking to help develop systemic processes in the school to help families. When a family comes to therapy because their child is not complying with his diabetes regime we consider the medical community - and that is awesome. But now MFTs are developing ways to collaborate with medical professionals to help families to work in the context of other families with the similar challenges to build supportive communities of families. Healing happens better in community.

As mental health professionals trained in systems thinking, MFTs are taking lead in creative ways to engage at the community level for the benefit of individuals, couples, families, and the overall health of the community.

It is now more common than ever for an MFTs to engage with:

• Hospitals, medical centers, and clinics
• Public and privates schools, homeschool co-ops, and school districts
• Non-profits, service organizations, and agencies that serve specific populations or needs
• International NGOs, mission groups, and relief organizations
• Religious congregations, parachurch organizations, and faith-based agencies
• Neighborhoods and community associations

I am so eager to see the creative collaborations that the new MFTs will develop in the next decade. I believe that the MFTs being trained today are going to be the most creative and innovative MFTs since Minuchin and Whitacker. 

I am excited about the MFT students in the Lipscomb University masters program and the community engagement projects they will develop this Fall. It is going to be a joy to see what they invent and an even greater joy to see them get out in the community and deliver. 

League of Extraordinary MFTs

It happened. For real. Last night a dream that began three years ago came into its complete fullness. The first cohort of MFT students has left the nest and now go into the world to practice the profession they have been rigorously studying for two years. It’s humbling. It’s exciting. It’s beautiful.

Three years ago, when the program was nothing more than an idea, I was reluctant even to consider engaging in it. I had completed my first year of being a new university professor and felt like I needed a couple more years to get my footing. Not only that, the idea was not even mine. I was simply asked to help out.

Well, little did I know that helping would become lots of helping, and lots of helping would become leading, and lots of leading would become being the director of the program. Before I knew it, I was in charge of everything.

Two years ago I met the first cohort at the initial orientation in a downstairs conference room in the student center. I was impressed at the first meeting and eager to get started. I decided to be bold and to challenge them that this program would be rigorous and that they would need their cohort to “cooperate to graduate.” I made promises about quality and rigor and how well prepared they would be by the time they graduated – promises I knew I had to find a way to keep.

My words were not based on any evidence whatsoever. I had no idea what was really going to happen. I wondered whether it would even work. We were working on the curriculum as we went, I was the only full time faculty, we did not have an onsite clinic nor did we have any identified clinical sites. In an ideal world, we would have had another entire year to prepare for the roll out of the program. We had no such luxury. We sailed the ship as we built it.

Looking back after two years, I see that the ship sailed all the way to from one shore to the next – no one fell out and no one drown. More than that, 15 students thrived and excelled and succeeded beyond my most optimistic dream.

There are now 15 graduates, a league of extraordinary MFTs, who will:

• Take the next step in their MFT profession.
• Provide excellent therapy for hundreds and hundreds of individuals, couples and families who need help.
• Advance in the profession and make it a better profession.
• Continue to grow and develop in their own relationships.

So, Aron, Jen, Jenny, Jeanetta, AnnChristine, Adella, Siobhan, Amanda, Nathan, Marcus, Nikki, Bekah, Drea, Juli, and Alyssa, you are amazing. You are forever etched into my life – unforgettable. You are the newest and most promising face of this profession and the field of MFT. You now take you place in this sacred work and will shape this profession in middle Tennessee, in California, in Pennsylvania and wherever else your life journey takes you.

I am proud of every single one of you. I am proud to say you were trained at Lipscomb. I am proud to say that I got to be  involved in your training as an MFT. I am honored and humbled that I got to  be involved in your lives so deeply. I cannot wait for the opportunity to say, “that MFT was trained at Lipscomb,” because the reputation of this program is tied to your excellence – and you are excellent!

May God continue to unleash blessing in and through you so you can continue to bless the world.