1 Introduction—About Dr Paul Gibney

Paul Gibney's career spans decades in social work, therapy and academia. After graduating with a social work degree from the University of Queensland in 1979, he worked as a psychiatric social worker from 1980 until September 1988 in Brisbane, gaining valuable experience in both short-to-medium and long-stay psychiatric facilities.

During this period, Paul pursued extensive professional development, training as a Gestalt therapist and later as a family therapist. He also completed four years of supervised psychoanalytic casework training with Frank Pavlin. His dedication to theoretical understanding culminated in a PhD in 1993, with research focusing on the intersection of family therapy, psychoanalysis and the emerging worldview of post-modern science.

Paul transitioned to private practice, starting part-time in 1986 and moving to full-time in 1988. He later contributed to academia, serving as a lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of Queensland from 2001 to 2005. There, he taught ‘A Systemic Intersubjective Approach to Casework’ and co-led a family therapy stream with Dr Peta Briner.

In his current practice, Paul provides therapeutic services to individuals, couples and families. He is also a sought-after consultant, offering professional supervision, group supervision services to agencies and ongoing training in therapeutic practice, supervision and service delivery. A prolific author, Paul has more than 20 published works, including the book The Pragmatics of Therapeutic Practice (2003), and is a regular presenter at professional conferences across Australia.

2 Background to the Interview

This interview is based on a virtual meeting conducted in December 2025, with the purpose of reflecting on Paul's contributions to the field of family therapy to date and ensuring his unique approach to the work is captured for future practitioners in all fields.

My initial encounter with Paul Gibney occurred over 20 years ago, during my fourth year as a social work student. At that time, Paul taught a final-year social work subject focused on therapeutic theories and practice. I distinctly recall this experience as a pivotal moment in my early professional development, as it facilitated the crucial integration of social work practice with counselling and therapy. This included a valuable exploration of systems thinking and the evolution of therapeutic concepts from psychoanalysis to systems theory, and subsequent post-modernist approaches. This experience reinvigorated my academic focus, leading me to undertake a four-subject major in family therapy, also taught by Paul, as part of my further postgraduate studies. Given Paul's known passion for Jungian work and synchronicity, it is perhaps fitting that I now find myself lecturing one of the very subjects he taught me. Following these teaching experiences, Paul and I maintained a professional connection. This included my attendance at several of his training workshops and engaging him for professional supervision during key junctures in my career. I continue to be inspired by Paul's unique synthesis of psychoanalytic and systems thinking, as well as his pragmatic approach to working with clients from diverse backgrounds and with varied presentations. For this reason, I invited Paul to be interviewed to capture and share his unique perspectives and experiences in the field of family therapy.

4 The Conversation

ME: Hi Paul, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. I'm interested, over your time in practice—over 45 years now—whether you've noticed changes in family presentations. What you've actually seen in the room.

PG: Hmm. It would be biased to me to say yes, because what I see in my rooms are people who deliberately … when I see families in my rooms, they're people who typically seek me out and are willing to come to therapy, and to pay for their own therapies. That's a different presentation to what you see in Child and Youth Mental Health or Department of Child Safety. But the times I've consulted to and taught family therapy in children's hospitals and, child and youth mental health, in the last decade. I'd have to say … at some very basic level, no. Families are very similar. Families who are very marginalised often have very chaotic presentations. But I think you're seeing a greater discussion these days about neurodiversity, and people being much more aware of cultural diversity as well. But the actual patterns you see, I think, are still very similar.

ME: I know you've done a lot of training, and I'm aware you've got a background in teaching for a period of time as well, in family therapy.

PG: Yes, it is. I love teaching family therapy theory, that's for sure, but I'm always thrilled and surprised at the innovations that happen when people work in teams, and to see the process of feedback and what does and doesn't work with different families. And it's often quite surprising what input from the team actually seems to be the most beneficial change, and it's often not what you'd imagine.

ME: Do you have an example of that?

PG: Oh, you do a reflecting team, with someone, and you know, four or so members of the observing team would come out and sit and share their reflections in front of the family (Andersen 1991; Chang 2010). And you'd think that one of the participants was going off on a tangent, that you would think, “Oh no, they've taken up the wrong point there, that's not helpful at all”. Then the family would come back, and the interviewing therapist would say, “Have you got any reflections on what the reflecting team said?”. And one of the parents would start crying and said it was only when that person, who you thought was going off on a tangent, said that, that they seriously felt understood. And they felt deeply touched that someone finally got them, and you go, “Wow, I clearly was out of touch with what was really important in that situation”. It's very humbling and really enriching.

ME: I think that reflecting team process adds so much to that therapeutic process, not only for the family, but also for that primary therapist. And in a way, it's such a shame that it's pragmatically not possible in more settings.

PG: Yes, I think that's very, very true. I think it's not family therapy training, and you haven't been trained as a family therapist unless you've done tens and hundreds of hours interviewing in a team. I think it's an embodied epistemology that only really becomes alive when you've had that experience of multiple levels of feedback influencing complex interactions. And reading about it, studying it doesn't replicate the extraordinary experience of it. And I think it can be an extraordinary experience, and really alarmingly fabulous, and sometimes it's just banal and getting through the hour with the family and the team, and yet, people seem to benefit enormously from it.

ME: Tell me a little bit about your understanding about developing a practice framework, as a summary, of what that involves.

PG: It was an obsession in social work. Professor Edna Chamberlain was fascinated by reflective practice, and your “Framework for Practice” was the final essay in Fourth Year. Various agencies eventually asked me to teach this, and in 2007 I put together my thoughts. You must have standardised ideas; it's not helpful just to say, “I'm eclectic”. My approach includes your theoretical origins, orienting principles, area of professional concern, specific purpose, major processes, and techniques in action. Your origins and principles inform your techniques, but you might pick up a technique and then restudy its theoretical roots. This process constantly informs at different levels and changes depending on the population you're working with. The other two pieces I add are areas of lack, future research or current dilemmas—the things you're currently struggling with—and articulated anomalies, things that never sit well where you have to sit with the paradox. Someone at a workshop once said the pieces on the outside “keep it honest”. People often present frameworks that are so watertight and glib, as if they could cover any clinical dilemma, but I don't think that's so. If you're growing, you're always going to come up against things where you think, “I have no idea how this fits with how I've traditionally thought”. That is what keeps you developing and pushes you back into learning.

ME: For me, I like to think of frameworks in systems theory terms as well, and thinking about that balance of wanting some structure to it, some consistency to it, but also some flexibility, some openness to new ideas, so that I think you're right, we can't necessarily develop a framework that covers every single presentation for every single kind of client or family. Neither can we become so open to anything under the sun that we then start to get into eclecticism, and have nothing to actually tie it all together.

PG: I completely agree. And one of the areas of my practice has gone on, inadvertently, so to speak, since 1988, I was invited to do work supervising staff in residential care settings. That has just been a major theme of my practice forever, and I still am involved with a number of agencies, teaching, coaching, doing group supervisions. And that's changed over the years. Like, for example, using the “Framework for Practice” case, once it would have been, how do you educate staff to be culturally thoughtful around seeing young persons in care from different cultures? Now, you know, I'll run a cultural capability workshop for some agencies, and the staff come from 17 different cultures. And so then you're dealing with the issues of young people, attacking staff around racial issues. And that makes you think about, “Okay, how do we think about cultural capability? How do we think about developing sensitivities across the board?”. You know, so that's a real area of change that's kept me thinking a lot in that area.

ME: So it sounds like, particularly from that training perspective, you've noticed shifts in terms of your approach. What about in terms of your practice framework? Have you found that it's evolved over time?

PG: I have a very funny answer to that. I'd imagine it has, often in response to the clients I see. But also, I sometimes read new literature, and I can be interested in some new idea that's coming out, but I often go back to classic texts that I read years ago, or classic texts that I bought years ago, I never read, and read some psychoanalytic work, or some classic family therapy, or some variation of Jungian material, and then spend time, of course, reflecting on “how does that affect my practice?”, or “how's it similar or dissimilar to my practice?”, and I'll discuss it with colleagues or supervisees, and those conversations keep enriching, hopefully, my thinking and hopefully theirs. So I don't always think you have to be on top of the most recent developments, some of which are financially driven, I think. But often it's actually re-immersing yourself in interesting literature and reflecting on how that speaks to or doesn't speak to your practice, and where you're at variance with it. I think that's the reflective practice piece for me.

ME: Is there anything in particular that really stands out about your framework at this point in time?

PG: It would be fair to say that I have a very conversational model of therapy. And that I try to weave therapeutic concern and interest and the client-specific issues in with broader themes that occurred to me and to the client. And that I'm currently, at this moment, having a Jungian revival, and rereading a lot of Jungian material. And I still always have worked with people's dreams, individuals, and sometimes in couples and families, and I find that quite fascinating.

ME: I'm drawn to that conversational style. It's easy to get caught up in “flashy” interventions, but isn't 90% of the work essentially a meaningful, deliberate conversation?

PG: Agreed and I say this when I teach professional supervision for our government department here. It's a technical discussion in the context of a normal conversation, and I think that's how it should be in therapy, too. It's specific, it's directional, it's purposeful, but it fits in the process of a regular conversation. And I think that's what people find helpful, and you know, you'll often talk to a client who's been to see a previous practitioner who they got a good value from, or that person might have stopped practicing, and they'll say, “What I loved about (they name the practitioner) is I was never made to feel like a patient or a client. I always felt well-engaged and supported”, and essentially, that had really good conversations with someone who was very useful and purposeful, while making them feel comfortable. And that's real therapeutic capacity, in my opinion.

ME: So tell me more about this integration of early Jungian psychoanalytic ideas, and that systemic influence. In a way, it's quite a unique combination in practice.

PG: Well, to be honest with you, I mean, for me, my doctoral thesis, which had a bizarre title called A Postmodern Science Description of the Therapeutic Domain (Gibney 1993), came about because I had an epistemological crisis in which I was reading and was very interested in brief therapy. I was reading brief psychoanalytic therapy, I was reading strategic and systemic brief therapy, and I was reading task-centred casework, which is brief therapy and from a social work perspective. And it just drove me, quite, into a distressed state, trying to see how they all fitted together. So, I finally found a way of fitting them all together through going to various models that were available in post-quantum science. And then I was really interested in, is there broad ways of describing all therapy, where you can fit into an overall model, all therapies, which is what I found and wrote about. So I don't see an incredible difference between therapeutic models. Some of them emphasise behaviour, some of them emphasise meaning, some of them emphasise, you know, scripts, or schemas. But the long and the short of it is, you know, Bradford Keeney said, “all a therapist provides is meaningful noise” (Keeney and Ross 1985). And I think that's what … we provide reframes through conversation that may or may not be useful to the client and to the family. And those reframes can come from various theoretical origins, or they can come through regular conversation and regular wisdom that people pick up on and make use of. So, all therapeutic theories are essentially really large reframes about human purpose and human interaction and human behaviour. It's just which ones fit best at any one time.

ME: I know Jung often referred to the healing fictions that we provide (Rabkin 1977). Gregory Bateson would talk about the double descriptions (Bateson 1979).

PG: Absolutely. And I think that's at the heart of it. It really, really is. And one of the pieces of what's so important about psychoanalytic reframes, is that it introduces the idea of a very, very complex and nuanced understanding of the therapeutic relationship. Now, sometimes you don't need a complex and nuanced understanding of therapeutic relationship, but sometimes you do, and it describes it better than anyone else. And I should say, as an aside, Mary Ellen Richmond, the mother of American social work, said in something like 1915 that often, the social worker or the clinician had to grow and develop emotionally and psychologically, so they can meet the needs of the client (Richmond 1917). So, she had that idea of intersubjectivity and mutuality long before a lot of therapeutic theorists had it.

ME: I think you wrote about similar ideas to that in an early paper too, that idea of co-evolving with families through the work. It reflects that second-order cybernetics perspective, that we're not merely sitting on the outside observing and studying, but we're a part of this system now. We influence, and therefore are influenced by it as well.

PG: Yes, and that particular paper you're referring to is called “Coevolving with Anorectic Families: Difference as a Singular Moment” (Gibney 1987). I might have changed the name of it if I was writing it now. But it was about using different models of therapy with different families who had, typically, at that time, daughters suffering from anorexia nervosa, and finding that something that worked remarkably well with the previous three families didn't work with this family, and we'd have to rethink how do we approach this, and it was often another model of therapy that gave us a different idea that made it more useful, you know what I mean? Whereas, I think if you've just got one way of seeing it, it can be very limiting.

ME: It reminds me of something else I know you've spoken about previously, of this idea of theory ultimately acting as different doorways into that therapeutic relationship, and thinking about that as being the heart of the work. I think that ties into that idea of theory in itself as being a reframe.

PG: Oh, totally. My fantasy, what I call a therapeutic domain, one of my fantasies about it, it's like the therapeutic domain, that space in which we attempt to be useful to others is like a room. And every theory is like a window or a door into that room, and when you look into that room from the vantage point of that window, of that doorway, you'll see certain amounts of things in the therapeutic domain. But if you're only looking through one window or one door, you're going to have a limited view of it. If you look through different ones at different times, you will notice the variations of what's helpful. And it goes back to that family therapy idea about discontinuous change, too (Hoffman 1979). I mean, there are times you can see families, and over a period of time, seeing them once every two weeks for 18 months, they slowly but surely change. That's fabulous. And there are other times—two sessions in, something's really changed because there's been a discontinuous jump in someone's understanding. So you need models of practice that can describe, such as family therapy and systemic therapy, discontinuous change, first- and second-order change, and you need theories that can describe incremental change, like behaviouralism. But if you don't have both, you'll miss it. When you'll miss the pivotal change piece when it's happened, or when it hasn't happened.

ME: So this, for me, connects a point to another area I know you've spent quite some time providing workshops on. Can you summarise your concept of the “Second Practice of Psychotherapy” and creativity in practice?

PG: It comes from the composer Monteverdi, who was criticised for not following the musical rules of the previous generation. He replied that he wasn't doing the first practice of composition, but the seconda prattica—fitting the music to the text rather than fitting the words to the music (Dolinšek 2022). I believe this happens when a practitioner has been working for a long time and has a real competence in multiple models. You arrive at a point where you can fit your theories to the “text” of the client, rather than squeezing the client's experience into a single model.

ME: Yes, and there was a lovely piece to that, I remember, about challenging or confronting this idea of creativity in practice, that creativity doesn't just mean artistic creativity or music creativity, but perhaps that idea of being able to link seemingly disparate points.

PG: I believe that is correct. We often think about creativity, and we bring it down to art or drama or music. But it's actually the creativity of being able to hear the client's story, respond as a person, respond as a clinician, hear theoretical reframes, discuss it with the client in such a way that eventually it starts to bring meaning and purpose into the room, and possibly direction. And that's creativity.

ME: It reminds me of how Bradford Keeney would say that therapeutic schools shouldn't sit within schools of human sciences or behavioural sciences, but in schools of creative arts (Keeney 1991). You've mentioned honouring the random thoughts or instincts that arise in the room. How does that manifest when working with families?

PG: It's a tricky piece. I've seen clinicians follow intuition to magnificent results, and others where it went nowhere. Wilfred Bion had a great line: “Thoughts look for minds to think them” (paraphrased from R. W. Bion 1967). Sometimes you'll have a random thought that seems at odds with the session. Gestaltists call it “field theory”; analysts call it “counter-transference”. The pinnacle of practice is picking up those thoughts or feelings and putting them back to the family in a way they can use. For me, a Bob Dylan quote might pop into my head. It takes years to trust that and not just come across as unhinged, but to find a way to say it that is actually helpful.

ME: I guess it comes back to that piece about reflective practice, doesn't it? It's not only noticing that thought, that intuition, but in the moment, being able to reflect on “where does this come from, does this offer potential value, and then how can I insert that into the moment here?”.

PG: It's a balance. And of course, you know, there's models of therapy that are saying, well, Salvador Minuchin said it, you know, the therapist joins with the family, and continues to be part of that system, until the family can take over those functions themselves. And sometimes the function as a therapist is the person that can think thoughts that the family can't think, or pick up feelings the family can't discuss, or find ways of introducing topics that people shy away from. You know, suddenly thinking, “How come no one's mentioning the grief here?”, or “How come no one's mentioning the sense of abandonment that's in the room?”, or “Why do I feel so abandoned when I'm with these people? Is this what this is about?” The therapist picks up things that the family can't discuss. And then your job is to find a way of bringing it into the room, as you've said.

ME: So, in terms of practice at the moment, you've got quite the blend, I think, between individuals and couples and families. What do you find most fulfilling about the work?

PG: And I do a lot of professional supervision as well. I think, you know, at the risk of sounding cliched, I think it's the challenges of meeting different people who bring different problems, different levels of complexity, and different ways of relating emotionally, and working out a way, intuitively or cognitively over time, how do I relate to this person in a way, or this family in a way that's useful? And, you know, it is one of those really simple things, but Jung said, you know, the therapist should never make the mistake of assuming the person's got the same psychology as they have. And I used to read that and think, oh, fair enough. But as the year's gone by, I've really understood in a very deep way, you know, people can have and families can have completely different values, completely different orientations and hopes and goals than you or the people you grew up with would have ever had. And suddenly thinking, “Okay, I'm missing it here. How do I understand what's important to these people, to this group. And what do they hope for their children, or for each other, or themselves? What am I missing? How do I get in on that level of thinking and connection?”. I still find that quite fascinating.

ME: Do you still get nervous before meeting new families?

PG: Yes, to some degree. I wonder what this is going to be like. I don't feel nervous like I would have felt in 1978, when I first interviewed a family. But I certainly think, oh, this should be … Curious? Let's see what this looks like. Though, when I see people over an established period of time, if I see their name in the diary, or they're coming to see me and I feel anxious, or some sort of anticipatory, “Oh, here we go”. Then I sort of think, “What is it counter-transferentially? What makes these people difficult for me to see? What is it about them where it is about me? What's happening here?”. I'm curious about how I feel about the upcoming session, and wonder if it can inform me in some way.

ME: I remember the quote that says, “Psychoanalysis is a conversation between two people, where one of whom is slightly less anxious than the other”.

PG: Wilfred Bion said that, yes, psychoanalysis is a conversation with two anxious people, one only slightly more anxious than the other (W. R. Bion 1961). But to go back to another point that you said before, and it's a beautiful line that my friend Matthew Bambling tells me, Dr Freud said, at the Clark University, when someone said to him back in 1909 in America, what should psychoanalysis look like? And he said, it should look like an honest conversation between two friends. How extraordinary, you know, that conversational piece. It shouldn't look like some stilted piece of weirdness. It should look like a comfortable conversation, albeit that we're really dealing with some pretty sensitive themes at times.

ME: What do you find most challenging about the work?

PG: I'll get psychoanalytic for a minute. Working with people who are really seriously defended, who are just really deeply committed to not reflecting on their own practices or their own behaviours, and use the primitive defence mechanisms of denial, splitting and projection, and it's “everyone else's fault”. And so, seeing people in therapy individually like that, or seeing people in couples or families, trying to develop a space in which someone might be able to go, “Oh, I can see how I'm contributing to this”. As opposed to saying “It's got nothing to do with me, and furthermore, let me say some things that clearly no one else in the room even remembers it as being”. You know, working with people who are seriously rigidly defended. Now, that's really hard work. And I think there's a balance too, isn't there? It's a beautiful balance that we strike in therapy. About how do you help people who have been traumatised or really hurt by life's experiences? Sometimes people say, “Well, I can't do anything because of this”. How do you empathise with what's happened to them, and help them come to terms with what's happened to them, and help them move forward? Or then there's people who say, “I'm not going to deal with that, I'm moving forward”, but the very fact they've never dealt with it keeps them from progressing in their life. So how do you support their desire to move forward, but also the need to consider the sadnesses of what's happened to them, and getting that balance right. I've talked about it numerous times, about the juxtaposition of meaning and strategy. The therapy should be, I think, for me, or the aesthetic that I like in therapy, is helping people think about the meaning of something, but also planning strategically. How can we move forward? How can we develop beyond this? Rather than move forward. How can we develop beyond this? But at the same time, I think that's done more significantly if we think about the meaning of what's happened in our lives, and what the contextual constrictions were, what the contextual opportunities are, to think about the meaning, and to juxtapose that with strategy.

ME: That's a different balance for every client and every family, isn't it? Some are looking for more meaning-making, some are looking for more strategy or practicality.

PG: Exactly, and it comes to the point that I've been fascinated by, and I know you're fascinated by it, that matter of the level of engagement. I know you've written about that recently (Ellwood 2024). And it's a very important thing, isn't it? You know, different people want to engage at a different level. And sometimes it's helpful just to get in there and engage on exactly the level they want to engage in, but sometimes that's not the level that's going to cause the most growth. Or the most capacity for them. So that's an interesting thing in and of itself.

ME: Absolutely. Years ago, I had a colleague use this metaphor, I can't source it with anything, but they described how with any client, family, couple we see, we're ultimately looking at this holy trinity of insight, motivation and resources. And that in some ways, perhaps, the ideal client or ideal family is one that possesses all three of those. And yet, invariably, we're going to be working with people who struggle with one or more.

PG: I agree. I think that's a beautiful idea, that you just said.

ME: So I want to talk a little bit about Paul the therapist. Certainly I know over the years of experiencing your training and your teaching, and from colleagues who have experienced it, I'm aware that sometimes you can be seen in quite polarised ways. Some people tend to love you in the work, some people really feel quite confronted by you. In fact, I remember in one of your early writings, you even described yourself as “l'enfant terrible” (Gibney 1999). And I think you acknowledged that at times this is deliberate, at times it's perhaps more unconscious. Do you find this translates into your practice with families as well? That people find you quite confronting and other times quite accessible and quite supportive? What's your reflection on that?

PG: Well, that's such a big question. Thank you for bringing it up. Not! You know, I recently wrote a piece that I think the therapist … I honestly believe the therapist has an iconoclastic obligation, but I think a therapist looking at current literature still has to have an iconoclastic obligation. “Do I really believe this? Is this a bit rich? Is this just a revamping of what's all been said before? Let me think about this, as opposed to embracing every brand new enthusiasm”. Similarly, we have an iconoclastic obligation towards ourself, to think to yourself, “Some of the things that I hold sacred and correct, have I really overvalued them, or do they stop me seeing other things?”. Similarly, when you're working with a family, it's like, okay, this family, for example, this sort of family to whom the Milan Associates often spoke of, this family's deep commitment to loyalty, which they worship is actually causing people to feel limited and distressed, and some people to become very compromised. So, how do I, as a therapist, invite this family to think that this deeply held value of loyalty is actually making people unwell. So I think our job, in some ways, is definitely to be empathic. as your first port of call is to be thoughtful and interested in joining. That is classic family therapy. But then, of course, your task eventually is to help people think about what they're not thinking about, or to address issues that they haven't got the skills to address at this point in time. And that might come across as very confronting. It's an interesting thing. I don't think being deliberately confrontational, or deliberately provocative, typically is a good strategy, you know, “being just a crazy funster that says whatever I like, and if people are upset by it, who cares?”. That's simply not a good therapeutic technique. It's brutal and not clever. But it also comes down to levels of engagement, too. If you've done this work for a terribly long time, what you might find really easy to say, and … you know, you think it's just a regular observation, people who've hid from that observation for 30 years are going to find it very confronting.

ME: It's a matter of perspective, isn't it?

PG: Yes. If you say, “It sounds like your mother was a very difficult woman”, or “It sounds like your father, while loving you, is quite tyrannical”, if people have hid from that thought forever, they're going to go, “That was so confronting when you said that”, and you go, like, “It's fairly obvious”.

ME: Mmm, “but I can't believe you said it”.

PG: Yeah, exactly. So, I certainly wouldn't set out to be deliberately provocative or confrontational. But I'm sure that sometimes all of us say things that people will find confronting if they've been working hard not to see it.

ME: Yes, and there are shades for me, and I don't know how familiar you are with his work, but Terry Real's approach to directly naming dynamics from the very first session. And again, I think that similar concept, that we start with a relationship of respect and empathy and trust, but then within that, actually gaining permission, more overtly, to say, “Can we take a bit of a direct approach here”, you know? “Let's call a spade a spade. You don't bullshit me, I won't bullshit you. Let's sort of cut to the core of this a little bit more.”

PG: Yes, I think that's true. And I think, also, therapists who have done this work a lot, and I mean, like, you know, 20, 30 h a week of it, you know, decades in a row. Forty-eight weeks a year, I think eventually get to that point, inadvertently, like, you know, let's have a serious conversation here. If you don't mind me saying, this and this. I think that the time comes where taking, you know, 15 h to say something that could be said in the third hour is a bit silly.

ME: And I think some families overtly or subtly are looking for that, too. They're looking for that kind of outsider who can provide some different perspective, and maybe name some things that they've been struggling to name, but obviously in that respectful way and that empathic way as well.

PG: The Bob Dylan quote we need here is, “Let's not speak falsely now, for the hour is getting late”. Because often people will come when something's really problematic. And, you know, spending a lot of time going round and round in circles and not getting to the heart of the matter is not a good use of the time. They've got over speaking falsely, though. We're really on the knife edge of this now. Let's have a serious conversation. In a respectful, empathic, positively connoting way, and I don't think positive connotation is necessarily just a strategic maneouver. It's actually … people have been exposed to the therapeutic domain a lot. No, the vast majority of people are doing the best they can with the resources, like you said, that they've got, with the insight they've got, with the strategies they've got. They're doing the best they can, there's no need to judge them harshly. You can be deeply empathic to them, and at the same time, say, hey, let's look at this in a broader way.

ME: So, in starting to wrap this up, where do you see yourself headed in terms of practice over the coming years?

PG: I'll put it to you like this, a very senior analyst I know is a lovely man, said to me recently, he's in his mid-70s. He said, “When people outside of our industry ask me, what are you doing? And I say, I'm working, and they say, how many people do you see? And so I do 30 sessions a week. People go, “Why on earth haven't you retired? Why on earth are you still working and seeing that many people”? He said, “People in our industry say, well, why wouldn't you?”. You know, if your cognition's still there, and you've still got some enthusiasm there, you know, you still continue to work. I like doing that. I also have some lovely experiences where non-government agencies, organisations, employ me as a consultant to help enrich their overall culture of practice, and I've got a couple of situations where I do that on a really regular basis, and set up their training, and set up their group supervision processes and their supervision processes, and help an organisation to develop their therapeutic practice. I love doing that. So that really gives me another interest, a double description to the work I do here.

ME: I have a theory, and we've talked about it before, but seeing so many of the greats, Aaron Beck, Sal Minuchin, Irv Yalom, who were still teaching and practising into their 90s, there's maybe a key to longevity in there.

PG: Yeah, I think there might be some real truth in that, the intellectual fascination of the possibility of new conversations keeps us alive, I think.

ME: So my last question for you in finishing up our time together. Do you have any advice for emerging family therapists, people starting to enter this field, who are starting to kindle their own passion and interest for it?

PG: I think I'd have three pieces of advice. One would be to read the literature, and I would agree with you, that it would be to read some of the classic literature that you mentioned from those early authors, and I'd agree with that. Read it, and try to apply it to their practice. Two, to see families. I think you actually just have to immerse yourself in it, and be brave, and be interested, and have conversations with families. But the third thing I'd really recommend is, if you get a chance, to work in a family therapy team. Whether it be a group of people at your work get together on every Tuesday afternoon, four of you interview two families, two observers, two interviewing therapists. Or you, get together with a group of other private practitioners and have a family therapy team where three or four of you interview families in a team format. Myself and Peta Briner and Clive Duffy did that for some years. That process of being in a family therapy team and being involved in interviewing as a team. It will really enrich your practice, even when you're just seeing families by yourself. Because it actually introduces you to a cybernetic epistemology in a very profound way.

ME: Great advice, and a great place to finish. Thank you so much for your time, for your insights, and sharing your experiences, Paul. It's invaluable.