Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation - NSU Access Only

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisor

Venetia Bennett

Abstract

Family therapists contribute to the heartbeat of systemic practice. Kerr and Bowen (1998) described emotional systems as receiving, processing, and responding to information from themselves and their environments, recognizing that work settings and organizations are also viewed as emotional systems. Research on collaborative-multidisciplinary medical settings (CMMS) has primarily focused on patient satisfaction, patient outcomes, and the improvement of therapeutic interventions in practice; however, the emotional processes of how family therapists experience their roles, navigate multiple paradigms against anxiety evident within the emotional system of the CMMS, and the societal emotional process remain ambiguous. The study examined six family therapists (pre-licensed and licensed) as participants in this emotional system, rather than merely observers. Therefore, the central research question of this study was: What are the lived experiences of marriage and family therapists (MFTs) working in a collaborative-multidisciplinary medical setting (CMMS)? The research employed Jonathan Smith’s Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the central methodology and Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) as the theoretical framework to interpret the results. The study’s inquiry yielded three superordinate and nine subordinate themes aligned with the research aim to increase insight for future MFT training, marrying both therapeutic and medical paradigms, increasing personal reflexivity in tandem with larger systemic processes, with implications for clinical practice in the CMMS, the applicability of systems pedagogy to clinical practice, and the enhancement of policymaking in multidisciplinary medical settings. Keywords: Collaborative-multidisciplinary medical setting (CMMS), integrated care, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)

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