Meet the Instructor:
Theresa Beeton, PhD, LCSW, has been a social worker since receiving her BSW in 1975, using her skills and knowledge at public agencies, nonprofits, and universities. She currently owns and operates Loudoun Family and Relationship Counseling, a private practice in Leesburg, Va., that specializes in systems counseling of couples, individuals, and families.
As a certified instructor for the National Association of Social Workers, Dr. Beeton provides continuing education to social workers and other mental health providers through her business and has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and George Mason University. She also is a Certified Imago Relationship therapist and uses proven methods of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and the research of John Gottman, as well as many other leaders in the field of relationship counseling. In her practice, she helps people recognize the influence of early-life experiences and how early adaptations and defensive behaviors affect current relationship interactions.
Dr. Beeton has been using and teaching the Family Life Space Drawing assessment tool for more than three decades. She and her husband, Ron, co-wrote a manual, “Assessing Family Relationships: Family Life Space Drawing Manual,” that was published in June 2019 and is available on Amazon.
Dr. Beeton notes that the tool is helpful “for all counseling relationships but is particularly useful when working with more than one person, as in the case of couples and families.”
“An excellent resource for family therapy educators.”—Noah Hass-Cohen, PSYD, MA, ATR-BC
“You can find no better assessment process.”—Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen Lakely Hunt, PhD
Meet the Instructor: A Q&A on Dr. Theresa Beeton and the Family Life Space Drawing Tool
Private Practitioner Theresa Beeton, PhD, LCSW, will teach “Assessing Family Relationships, The Family Life Space Drawing” May 29, 8:30-11:45 a.m. (3 Category 1 CEUs, including 1.5 ethics hours). The workshop will provide training in the use of this expressive task-centered assessment tool.
NASW Virginia: How does the Family Life Space Drawing differ in its approach from many other current family relationship assessment tools?
Dr. Beeton: “The FLSD is different in that it is specific to clients with multiple family members and allows them to share verbal and nonverbal information all at the same assessment session.”
What do you see as the key benefit(s) of learning this tool?
“The best thing about this tool is that clients get a chance to bond with the social worker or counselor by telling a very personalized story.”
You have more than 40 years of experience in the social work field. Have you seen an evolution in the types of family assessment tools used in the field in, say, the past decade? If so, how does FLSD, in particular, fit into the mix since you have been using it for so long?
“This tool is a very old tool that never goes out of style for me, no matter what theoretical perspective I have applied to clients over the years. The FLSD is adaptable to all models of family interventions. Currently, more narrative models of working with families are being utilized.
“This tool is very useful in helping the family or client specifically define their experience. In the past, family therapists were seen more as the experts, and applications of therapy might have been more structural and directive. Family work has been seen as more collaborative in recent years, and the facilitator of family intervention is seen less as expert.
“The FLSD works perfectly in joining this perspective by starting with the client's current situation and letting them define their concerns and desires for the future.”
Registrants will have a chance to use FLSD to assess their own family relationships. Why is it especially important with this tool for registrants to go through the process themselves?
“In the experience of being of a social worker or counselor in mental health, it always helps to obtain knowledge that continues the ability to be self-aware. Self-awareness is a key factor in utilizing the most important tool of the social worker's ability to interact with clients.
“This exercise has the potential to expand that knowledge for social workers who want to learn more about their own family relationships. This knowledge helps set boundaries with clients and avoids projections from worker to client. Having a personalized experience with using the FLSD helps the social worker or counselor see first-hand the usefulness of using the FLSD with clients.”
Has the tool been adaptable to the changing types/trends of mental health challenges and fears that have developed in families and couples over the years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic?
“This tool is most useful in the live setting of working face-to-face with clients. Currently, COVID-19 is causing me to develop creative ways of using this tool from the need to conduct distance counseling.
“Clients will be able to reveal potential knowledge about the experience of living with the pandemic by being asked to symbolically represent COVID-19 in their own drawing. The symbolic representation could provide another level of information that verbal information expression just might miss.”
Do you have any other comments you'd like to make about the course or the tool?
“This tool has provided a chance for us to learn about clients on a verbal level but also on a nonverbal level of information. We can make inference from the client's symbolic representations and find areas that we need to ask more questions about. Sometimes we explore areas we did not know that we needed to explore and would not have known about without the benefit of the symbolic representation.
“We have used this process in a wide range of settings and social work practice. It has been useful in helping people who have been adopted to express deeper concerns or joys about the fact of being adopted. We have seen families at the end of life find healing as they processed through the FLSD. Clients who have a different first language from the social worker or counselor are able to convey information symbolically and facilitate the counseling experience to go to the necessary level it needs to go to deepen the helping experience.”
