Exploring Postmodernism and Social Constructionism in MFT

Marriage and Family Therapy Program, National University

MFT-5105: Recovery-Oriented Care & Postmodern Family Therapy

What Is Compelling

High-demand religious systems argue through revelation and theology, seeking to prove their truth and defend it from revision. Diagnostic systems classify human experience into categories and then defend the categories as if they were discovered rather than built. Modernism is the epistemological posture beneath all of these: the conviction that reality is objective, that the right method will eventually expose it, and that the authority who finds it has the right to enforce it. This paper argues that two postmodern responses to that posture, narrative therapy and the recovery model, are not parallel developments but the same intervention applied at different scales. Narrative therapy re-authorizes the individual’s story. The recovery model reauthorizes the mental health system’s story about what counts as a valid life. Together, they offer a coherent postmodern response available to MFT practitioners working inside an institutional landscape that the medical model still owns.

Why This Framework Matters to Me

A postmodern clinician cannot offer re-authoring work to a client they have not been willing to do it on themselves. Anderson (2005) named this directly when she clarified that “not-knowing” refers to the therapist’s epistemological humility about the client’s meanings, not to an abdication of the therapist’s own examined position. Gaddis (2016) described the same posture as “de-centered and influential”: the therapist’s values appear in what is asked about power, agency, and identity, rather than in what is prescribed as the correct conclusion. Both authors assume the therapist has done the prior work of examining what they were given, what they kept, and what they reconstructed. That work is the precondition, not the residue, of postmodern practice.

My own experience navigating a departure from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a tradition I hold with genuine complexity and respect, gave me a direct, embodied understanding of what it costs to re-author an identity formed inside a high-demand system. Within that tradition, institutional categories are carefully developed and reinforced across generations. For members who conform, those categories feel like discovered truths, the way things simply are. For those whose family structure falls outside the prescribed definition, the dominant narrative produces a specific kind of damage: it does not merely disagree with you. It redefines you as incomplete, in error, or lost. Foucault (as cited in Glass, 2019) named the mechanism: dominant social groups do not merely hold power; they produce the categories through which normalcy is defined, and they sustain those categories by negating or marginalizing those who fall outside them. I know that mechanism not as a theoretical claim but as the lived ground. My first-principle commitments are not inherited certainties. They are reconstructed positions, and postmodernism does not ask me to abandon them. It asks me to hold them honestly, know their origins, and resist treating them as universal truths applicable to every person who sits across from me.

Postmodernism does not reject the possibility of understanding. It rejects the certainty that any one understanding is final. Gergen (1985) identified that what we take to be psychological facts are not discovered truths but socially negotiated constructions sustained by discourse, shaped by power, and subject to revision. This is not the claim that nothing is real. It is the claim that everything we call real has been named, organized, and made meaningful by communities of people operating inside particular historical and cultural contexts. The clinical implication is immediate: every question a therapist asks either reinforces the dominant story a client is carrying or creates conditions for a different one. Language is not a neutral container; it is an instrument of construction, and in MFT it shifts the relational foundation of the work.

I understand my own worldview as a system of concentric, overlapping rings, each one a social system with its own constructed realities, connected to the others through language and relationship. Social constructionism is what happens when you examine those connections honestly and ask who built them and why.

The Relationship Between Systems Theory and Postmodernism

Early systems theory provided MFT with its relational foundation by shifting the clinical gaze from the individual to the patterns between individuals. That was a significant epistemological shift. However, first-order cybernetics preserved a modernist assumption: the therapist stood outside the system as an objective observer, mapping interaction patterns from a position of professional neutrality (Glass, 2019). Postmodernism exposed the problem: the observer is never outside the system. embedded in the assumption that the observer is never outside. The therapist’s language, cultural location, theoretical commitments, and personal history enter the room and become part of what is happening there.

Second-order cybernetics names this directly: the therapist is embedded in the system being observed, which makes self-of-the-therapist work not an elective enrichment but a clinical necessity (Glass, 2019). Postmodernism does not merely extend systems theory; it challenges the epistemology beneath it. A systems therapist can identify circular patterns and intervene structurally. A postmodern systems therapist must also ask: whose construction of “functional” am I applying, and from which social location, when I decide that a pattern is pathological? That question leads somewhere systems theory alone cannot follow, and it is where narrativetherapy begins. D’Aniello (2013) maps this precisely: contemporary postmodern models, including narrative therapy, conceptualize problems not as internal to the family system but as constructed within and sustained by the broader social and cultural narratives surrounding the family. The system is embedded in a discourse. Effective therapy must attend to both.

Narrative Therapy as Individual Scale Re-Authoring

I am drawn to Narrative Therapy as my foundational model, and the reasoning connects directly to what postmodernism makes possible. Michael White’s central clinical move, externalizing the problem from the person, is not a technique. It is a philosophical commitment: the person is not the problem, and the problem is not a fixed fact about the person. It is a story, shaped by dominant cultural narratives, maintained through language, and therefore open to re-authoring (Glass, 2019).

An important clarification is necessary here, because postmodern thought is frequently misread as requiring the clinician to abandon personal conviction. White (2007) described the narrative therapist’s posture as “de-centered and influential.” The client’s knowledge and preferred identity remain privileged. However, the therapist takes ethical responsibility for which possibilities are made conversationally available. As Gaddis (2016) elaborates, the therapist’s values appear in what is asked about power, agency, and preferred identity, rather than in what is prescribed as the correct conclusion. The distinction is between imposing values and holding examined, transparent values that structure the inquiry. Narrative Therapy is what postmodernism looks like when it is brought into the consulting room, one client at a time. The recovery model is what it looks like when it is brought into the mental health system, one institution at a time.

Postmodernism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Once Foucault’s argument about category production is in view, culturally competent care ceases to be an elective module appended to a neutral clinical model. It is embedded in the epistemological foundation of postmodern therapy itself. D’Aniello (2013) notes that narrative therapy explicitly widens its clinical lens to include societal and cultural influences on presenting problems, treating issues of religious expectation, racial marginalization, and gender prescription as clinical material rather than background context. Asking a client about the role of their faith community, family of origin, or cultural system in the story they carry is not political. It is clinically precise. The same logic governs the recovery model.

The Relationship to the Recovery Model

The recovery model did not originate in academic mental health. It originated in the patient-survivor movement of the 1980s, and Deegan (1988) is the foundational voice. Deegan, herself diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, argued that recovery is not a clinical outcome that professionals deliver to passive recipients. It is a lived experience: the active reclamation of the right to define oneself after a system has spent years defining one as broken. The parallel to White’s externalization of the problem from the person is exact. What narrative therapy does for a client across an hour, the recovery model does for a population across a generation.

Onken et al. (2007) carried Deegan’s framing into the academic literature. They identified re-authoring as one of the central mechanisms of recovery, the process by which individuals reclaim the right to define their own experience rather than being defined by clinical labels imposed from the outside. That language traces directly back to White and Epson. The recovery model, at its core, is a postmodern intervention applied at the level of systems of care.
A tension worth naming is that the recovery model’s emphasis on self-determination carries an embedded individualism. Price-Robertson et al. (2017) argue that contemporary recovery discourse has been progressively assimilated into a Western individualist framework that locates recovery in the choices and agency of the lone consumer, while obscuring the relations and communal conditions in which recovery actually occurs. They propose relational recovery as a corrective: recovery understood as an inherently social process. This is not a weakness of the recovery model. It is the point at which narrative MFT, with a native commitment to family and cultural context, is positioned to do the integrative work the recovery field has been waiting for. The clearest existing proof of that interaction is Open Dialogue. Seikkula and Olson (2003) describe a Finnish model for first-episode psychosis that integrates postmodern epistemology, family systems work, and recovery principles within a single clinical practice. No conversation about the Client occurs without the client in the room. Treatment decisions are made dialogically rather than expertly, and the therapist’s job is to sustain the conversation rather than to resolve it. The outcomes Seikkula and Olson reported, and subsequent research, have continued to support the theoretical argument this paper makes, demonstrating that what it argues is already happening clinically. Narrative style reauthoring, recovery model self-determination, and family systems work are not three separate things that a postmodern clinician must somehow balance. There are three names for the same commitment.

Sustaining Postmodern Practice Inside Institutional Systems

A reasonable objection to everything argued so far is that postmodern MFT sounds excellent in a private practice essay and considerably less excellent on a Tuesday morning in a community mental health agency that requires DSM diagnoses, structured treatment plans, and measurable outcomes by Friday. Madsen and Gillespie (2014) developed the most useful response available in the literature: a collaborative helping framework specifically designed for clinicians operating inside mandated, bureaucratic, and involuntary service systems. The argument is that postmodern integrity is not preserved by refusing to participate in institutional documentation and the client. Assessment instruments become artifacts that the client and clinician build together rather than verdicts that the clinician issues alone. Iversen et al. (2005) make a parallel argument that social work assessment can be repostioned as a coauthored conversation without sacrificing accountability to the funder, the agency, or the legal mandate. Anderson (2005) is the philosophical anchor for both moves. Her clarification of “not-knowing” is essential; the concept refers to the therapist’s epistemological humility about the client’s meaning, not to an abdication of professional accountability. The therapist can share a concern, name a legal obligation, or express a clinical judgment, doing so dialogically and transparently within the conversation rather than from an unreachable position of expert pronouncement. Not knowing does not mean being silent. It means accountable in a particular way.

What Remains Open

Two questions remain genuinely open. First: narrative therapy has been challenged by one of the field’s most consequential thinkers. Minuchin (1998) argued that the model’s emphasis on individual narrative and broad cultural discourse risked displacing the live family interaction that gave MFT its relational power. Combs and Freedman (1998) and Tomm (1998) responded that narrative therapy does not erase the family but re-contextualizes it within the wider discourses that shape what “family” means in the first place. The response is persuasive, but the critique still earns its keep: a narrative practitioner who trades the interactional data of the room for purely discursive conversation has lost something important.

Second: in institutional settings that require DSM diagnoses, structured treatment plans, and measurable outcomes, how does a postmodern clinician maintain model integrity without becoming performatively compliant, checking the insurance box while doing something else in the room? Iversen et al. (2005) suggest that assessment tools can be repositioned as collaborative artifacts co-authored with the client rather than expert pronouncements delivered from above. I want to see it practiced before I am willing to recommend it. That posture argues for conviction held alongside genuine open questions, which is what I take from this material into future clinical work and the rest of this program.

References

Anderson, H. (2005). Myths about “not-knowing.” Family Process, 44(4), 497–504. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2005.00074.x

Combs, G., & Freedman, J. (1998). Tellings and retellings. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 24(4), 405–408. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.1998.tb01095.x

D’Aniello, C. (2013). Contemporary MFT models’ alignment with relational common factors. Contemporary Family Therapy, 35(4), 673–683. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-013-9260-8

Deegan, P. E. (1988). Recovery: The lived experience of rehabilitation. Psychosocial Rehabilitation Journal, 11(4), 11–19. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0099565

Gaddis, S. (2016). Poststructural inquiry: Narrative therapy is a de-centered and influential stance. In V. Dickerson (Ed.), Poststructural and narrative thinking in family therapy (pp. 9–24). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31490-7_2

Gergen, K. J. (1985). The social constructionist movement in modern psychology. American Psychologist, 40(3), 266–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.40.3.266

Glass, V. Q. (2019). Postmodernism and social constructionism in family therapy. In Y. Watters & D. Adamson (Eds.), An introduction to MFT: Systems theory and foundational models (pp. 235–250). Northcentral University.

Iversen, R. R., Gergen, K. J., & Fairbanks, R. P., II. (2005). Assessment and social construction: Conflict or co-creation? British Journal of Social Work, 35(5), 689–708. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch200

Madsen, W. C., & Gillespie, K. (2014). Collaborative helping: A strengths framework for home-based services. John Wiley & Sons.

Minuchin, S. (1998). Where is the family in narrative family therapy? Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 24(4), 397–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.1998.tb01094.x

Onken, S. J., Craig, C. M., Ridgway, P., Ralph, R. O., & Cook, J. A. (2007). An analysis of the definitions and elements of recovery: A review of the literature. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 31(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.2975/31.1.2007.9.22

Price-Robertson, R., Obradovic, A., & Morgan, B. (2017). Relational recovery: Beyond individualism in the recovery approach. Advances in Mental Health, 15(2), 108–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/18387357.2016.1243014

Seikkula, J., & Olson, M. E. (2003). The open dialogue approach to acute psychosis: Its poetics and micropolitics. Family Process, 42(3), 403–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2003.00403.x

Tomm, K. (1998). A question of perspective. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 24(4), 409–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.1998.tb01096.x

White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. W. W. Norton.