Jean has been a Faculty Member of the Ackerman Institute since 2006. He currently co-teaches with Markie Sallick the Didactic Seminar of the Ackerman Institute’s Clinical Externship in Couples and Family Therapy. This course offers a bridge between clinical practice and systemic theories and supports clinicians in integrating skills and knowledge with couples and families.

He is also a member of the Ackerman Institute’s Center for Children & Relational Trauma. The Center “assists children affected by life altering trauma including family violence, the death of a parent or sibling, and sexual abuse through a therapeutic model that recognizes family relationships as the nexus of trauma and as points of access for care.”

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Jean had the opportunity to participate to a case conference in the Department of Psychiatry at Saint Vincent’s Hospital. The live case consultation and case conference highlighted principles of transgender-affirmative clinical care as well as the importance of relational dimensions of transition (community, marriage, relationships, etc).

Jean was honored to lecture in Peter Fraenkel’s “Family Systems I & II” doctoral course. Case presentations articulated the application of multi-contextual thinking with same-sex couples and relational thinking with couples going through gender transition.

This presentation addressed couples faced with the coming out of one of the partners as transgender. The couple’s gender transition is viewed as an opportunity for either collaborative change or a risk for relational impasse. While keeping a transition-positive stance, therapists learn to handle the complexity of making room for loss, grief and unpredictable outcomes; as well as examining potential changes in the couple’s viability, sexuality and/or identity.

Dr Celia Falicov addressed a novel, bi-national, bi-cultural model for working with transnational families. She also discussed the perils and resiliencies that such families face while dealing with separations and reunions.

Case consultations on therapy with immigrant families were provided by Ackerman faculty members Miguel Hernandez, MSW, Mary Kim Brewster, PhD, and Jean Malpas, LMHC, LMFT.

This seminar, co-taught with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW, focused on issues of sexual orientation, sexual functioning and gender identity, integrating lecturing, case presentations and videos of cases.

Shoshana Bulow focused on the integration of sex therapy and couples therapy with a multi-issue heterosexual couple who presented with sexual dysfunction. Jean Malpas focused on multicontextual, systemic work with a gay couple presenting with issues of monogamy. Material related to transgender transition, families and gender variant children was also discussed.

Similar programming as in Santiago, Chile.

The Shinui Institute’s faculty invited Shoshana Bulow and Jean Malpas to present their innovations in couples therapy. Shoshana Bulow introduced her integration of systemic and sex therapies, while I articulated issues of sexual orientation and gender identity and couples therapy.

Training questions addressed: How can people change gender while remaining in the relationships they have created in their natal gender? How do couples negotiate a-stereotypical genders and sexual intimacies? How does gender transition differs from and impact sexual orientation?

The paper articulated how couples negotiate open relationships and monogamy as well as living outside of the “male/female” binary of gender.

“Crystal Meth and You” by Lance Lamore. As part of Sero-Zero’s Healthy Sexuality week in May, there was an engaging talk presented May 4 on the topic of crystal meth by Jean Malpas, a psychotherapist from New York City who works in the field of addictions. While the drug is still not as prevalent here in Montreal, the goal of the talk was to provide information on the drug and on what education and prevention campaigns in other cities look like. (…).

This half-day training for mental health service providers presented an overview of crystal meth abuse issues in the gay male urban communities as well as strategies for culturally competent counseling. Clinical strategies included systemic interventions, motivational interviewing and community empowerment.

Relational models of treatment for transgender couples and families have followed a parallel evolution with the individual models of transgender care. The role of the relational therapist has moved from the enactment of a moral sanction against the menace of the trans pathology on the family, to the support of multiple forms of empowered gender-variant families. Relational treatment outcomes are not restricted to gender transition or compliance with heterosexual binary norms of couples and families. Using interactive media such as videos and clinical cases, this lecture focused on two major objectives. First, it outlined basic transgender terminology and emphasized the importance for the clinician to respect and work within their clients’ conception of gender. Second the lecture introduced some of the major clinical challenges associated with three transgender family models: Trans families (transgender-headed families), families in transition (families where a member comes out as transgender) and couples in transition (non-transgender couples adjusting to the coming out of one partner).

How are gay male couples both different from and similar to heterosexual couples? What impact do shame, trauma and oppression have on gay relationships? How to take the therapist’s sexual orientation into account to provide culturally sensitive therapy? This workshop, co-taught with Gene Gardino, LCSW, addressed how, when working with “marginalised” couples, relational therapists are to balance their understanding of the presenting problem between hypotheses that would apply to the “universal couple” and those that take into account the couples’ current and historical contexts of oppression.

This staff training covered techniques used in working with the clients using crystal methamphetamines and included Harm Reduction and Recovery Readiness approaches.

Co-taught with Gene Gardino, LCSW, this presentation at the joint American Family Therapy Academy-International Family Therapy Association addressed integrating cultural issues in couples therapy and focused on clinical dilemmas arising when heterosexually-identified therapists work with gay and lesbian-identified couples.

Providers working with the transgender communities often lack engagement and clinical-intervention skills. This all-day workshop initially stressed cultural competency and sensitivity concerns including transgender vocabulary, barriers to care and ethnic, cultural and class differences within the transgender communities. It also provided an overview of transgender mental health and medical-care issues and introduced a model for clinical intervention that emphasizes personal identity and community development over pathology and diagnosis, shifting the practice emphasis to the management of stigma associated with transgender identities, gender identity management and recovery and harm reduction. The final part of the workshop addressed the relational trauma created by transphobia in the family of origin and introduced relational strategies to work with transgender-headed families and transgender individuals, their families of origin and their communities. Co-presented with Carrie Davis, LCSW from the Gender Identity Project.

Co-presented with Andres Hoyos from Center CARE, this workshop highlighted clinical & community issues helpful to the clinician supporting gay men in their recovery from crystal meth. Combining non-pathological and motivation interviewing approaches, it emphasized the role of trauma, shame and longing for communities of belonging as underlying factors for meth use in these communities.

According to the Gay & Lesbian task force, the population of gay and lesbian elders (over 60) in 2006 was roughly 6 million. Still according to the same group, every week, 10,000 LGBT Americans reach retirement age, often without equal access to aging services or economic safety webs. In other words, there is a large and significant gay and lesbian senior population that might need particular attention and advocacy. This panel organized by the Council of Senior Centers and Services emphasized the needs of these hidden and often under-served populations.

Jean provides case consultations in training groups at the Ackerman Institute for the Family.

Supervision and training of family therapists, in collaboration with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW. Cases presented with various issues around sexual orientation and sexual functioning.

Supervision and Training of Family Therapists, in collaboration with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW. Cases presented with various issues around sexual orientation and sexual functioning.

Supervision of Israeli family therapists working with families facing gender and sexuality issues.