The Cultural Story in Multicultural Family Therapy

Abstract

Cultural story assumes that a family brings to therapy not only a story of their idiosyncratic family problems, but that this story has been developed within the context of society's stories about gender, life cycle, ethnicity, class, and race. To utilize cultural story in therapy, therapists need to know something about various cultures. This approach allows the therapist to hold more than two “stories” at a time and thereby gain multiple perspectives on the family's concerns. The use of the genogram to develop the family's cultural story in therapy is discussed. Three case studies illustrate how the concept is applied to resolve presenting problems of families.