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Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2005, pp. 518
This essay describes Testimony therapy, the name given to a range of therapeutic practices grounded in the culture, history, and experience of the African-American community. Testimony therapy is an African-centered1 therapy that focuses on the personal stories of those who consult with the therapist, as well as the collective stories of the African experience in the United States. The focus on storytelling relates Testimony therapy to narrative therapies. The focus on and centering in indigenous cultural ways of being relates this approach to therapies such as the Just therapy of the team in New Zealand. Testimony therapy is communitarian, that is, it emphasizes the person within community and is social constructionist in its outlook.
The purpose of this essay is to articulate an approach to family therapy that speaks self-consciously from the cultural standpoint of African Americans and that challenges theoretical and cultural assumptions of universality in dominant Western therapeutic paradigms. This approach, called Testimony therapy is represented by a range of therapeutic practices grounded in the culture, history, and experience of the African-American community. Testimony therapy is communitarian,2
Makungu M. Akinyela, Ph.D., LMFT, is a family therapist in practice at the Family Center of South Dekalb and an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University.
Address correspondence to: Makungu Akinyela, 2616 Old Wesley Chapel Rd., Suite 103, Decatur, GA 30034. E-mail: [email protected].
1Throughout this article, I use the terms African centered and Africentric interchangeably.
2I use the word communitarian as a description of a key characteristic of Testimony therapy, much as narrative therapists and other therapists describe their work as postmodern or deconstructionist. Among many of our colleagues of color, there has been an argument that our work is not postmodern in that we are reclaiming the world view of our ancestors, which does not fall in the European timeline, though it perhaps coincidentally often resonates with European post-modern thinking. In a previous article (Akinyela, 2002), I struggled with the notion of post-colonial therapy. However, it was rightly pointed out by other therapists of color that this term also limits us to the European-imposed experience of colonialism. At this juncture, communitarian seems to best describe how we...