I became a family therapist because I wanted to “help” people. I believed that family relationships provided the background to understand someone’s distress and to leverage resources for healing.

Back then, I didn’t use the word, healing. We called it treatment.

But spending decades across many settings have led me to see the power of attachment and how attachment wounds can be a common denominator that plays out in personal, interpersonal, cultural and global affairs. Here, I make the bold claim that attachment quality is a matter of life and death.

In the most traditional sense, therapy might be for couples or families. In the most innovative sense, multifamily psychoeducational groups actually help those with schizophrenia to improve their functioning. Groups of 6-8 families receive education and help for problem-solving and conflict resolution. In the process, each group becomes a “tribe” of support for members and a “community frontal lobe” in which all members participate in brainstorming and problem-solving, functions the brain often lacks during schizophrenia. This doesn’t look like “therapy” or act like “therapy,” but these communities of healing get therapeutic results.