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We are writing this chapter in the contexts of our work as systemic psychotherapists, supervisors and supervisees, drawing on our practice as clinical psychologists in sexual health and child and adolescent medicine services within our public health service. This work often involves conversations with clients, supervisees and supervisors about intimate bodily experiences, including sexual feelings and behaviour that can challenge our usual professional psychotherapy discourses. In supervision with us, supervisees from a range of services have presented both arousal and disgust as unwanted bodily sensations in relation to clients and have described dif?culty ‘admitting’ these feelings to themselves or supervisors. This chapter focuses on supervision practices we have developed to address strong bodily sensations and experiences of arousal and disgust in supervision conversations.

This article explores how we might bring forth and value the voice of the person with intellectual disabilities alongside the voice of their family and carers so that all those present can feel understood and appreciated. We offer a description of systemic empathy as the ability to connect with one person while maintaining the possibility of connecting with other individuals in the system and at the same time tuning in to those people's connections with each other. We share examples from practice that challenge our ability to work empathically when there are several people in the same room holding different or opposing perspectives and who evoke different emotional reactions in us. We offer principles and practices through which we have been able to make empathy systemic with examples from our work with adults with intellectual disabilities and their families. These include empathizing through curiosity and irreverence, co-creating meanings with more than one person, double listening with ears, eyes and bodies, preparing our own emotional postures, taking the perspectives of others and creating reflecting processes.

This article describes the ‘Beads of Life’ approach – a five-part methodology informed by narrative therapy to enable children and young people to make sense of their cancer journey in ways that make them stronger. Young people are invited to use beads as prompts to tell preferred stories of their identity to create a safe place to stand from which to story their cancer journey. The approach positions young people as experts in their lives. It aims to change their relationship with cancer to reduce its negative impact on life by lessening isolation. By enabling medical staff to get to know the young person apart from the cancer, this approach aims to create hope for the future and improve quality of care.

Family therapists from 10 different countries (China, India, Israel including Palestinian citizens, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom) describe systemic therapy in their contexts and current innovative work and challenges. They highlight the importance of family therapy continuing to cut across disciplines, the power of systems ideas in widely diverse settings and institutions (such as courts, HIV projects, working with people forced into exile), extensive new mental health initiatives (such as in Turkey and India), as well as the range of family therapy journals available (four alone in Spain). Many family therapy groups are collaborating across organizations (especially in Asia) and the article presents other ideas for connections such as a clearing house to inexpensively translate family therapy articles into other languages.

This paper describes a model of crisis intervention to families of adolescents below the age of 16 who deliberately harm themselves and summarizes the premises which guide our practice. The adolescent's "overdose" is understood as an attempt to resolve relationship conflicts and so the initial interview aims to explore the predicament for the adolescent and the family and decide what further help may be required. Verbatim extracts from one session illustrate this process. Language: en

This article weaves research findings and clinical practice to address five ethical dilemmas: How to include children in sessions so that they feel listened to, appreciated and not judged; how to attend to children's feelings without making the focus solely their troubles; how to create a context in which children can express themselves when they cannot find the words; how to ensure a suitable time, place and relationship for talking; and how to create a safe context for respectful co-ordination between the different views of children and adults. A practical example including transcripts from sessions is presented. The authors show how a toy bear joining two therapists in a reflecting team can create opportunities for a 10-year-old girl and her parents to voice their different views and hear the different perspectives of each other. The parents, who generously agreed to share details of their family sessions, offered useful feedback on this write-up, suggesting that this article may be useful for staff and parents who join therapists in a playful approach to reflecting teams with children.