Embracing Our More-Than-Human Family: Growing a Systemic Practice for Planetary Health and Multispecies Justice

Abstract

The roots of rebellion and social justice that have lived in the margins of systemic practice are needed now more than ever to steady our profession for a changing climate. For decades, justice-oriented family therapy scholars and practitioners have supported communities, by taking a stand against oppressive systems, furthering systemic change. This history lays the ground for family therapy to enter the political sphere and take up the counter-cultural act of extending our therapeutic arms beyond the anthropocentric. In this article, we widen systemic circles by drawing attention to antiracist and feminist family therapy scholarship. We discuss the pernicious belief in human exceptionalism and present insights from related disciplines. Listening to Indigenous worldviews and learning from frameworks that consciously include the living world, such as multispecies studies, we widen the circle still. Together, these explorations seed possibilities for systemic family therapy to embrace our more-than-human family: all of us living within our shared home, Earth.