Familjevårdsstiftelsen (Family Care Foundation)
Långedragsvägen 28, 426 71 Västra Frölunda
Phone: 0046 31 698401 or 0046 702 398401
E-mail address is carina@familjevardsstiftelsen.se

I started working as a social worker in 1983. In 1987 Family Care Foundation was founded and I still work there as the managing director, or leader as I prefer to say. In the middle of 1990 I got my license as a psychotherapist. My training at that time was psychodynamics, but since I never “felt at home” in that field I searched for other words and ideas about psychotherapy and how to meet people in professional contexts. I have the privilege to collaborate with many people from different places who inspire me and help me to find a way in work, and in life.

The most important issue for me is to try together with others to combine a so called ordinary life with therapeutic knowledge in a professional context. And to try to find a language to describe what it is that happens between people in therapeutic rooms. I have written several articles, published in the Nordic countries, UK and Brazil. I have also written two books, the last one “Ordinary Life Therapy, Experiences from a Systemic Collaborative Practice” was published at The Taos Institute in 2009.

Together with Lena Lundqvist, coordinator at Family Care Foundation, I arrange seminars, workshops and conferences.  We also welcome people to take part in our work, please contact me if you have any questions about that.

Through Tom Andersen, who means a lot to me and my work, I met colleagues from Paraguay working in a project to try to place young people in ordinary families instead of institutions. We have ever since had contact and I supervise them in work and how to write a documentation about their experiences.

I am invited to do lectures and make workshops at different places, where I talk about how to use language in a human way and how to make connections between a so called ordinary life and a professional context. I am also very engaged in how I as a therapist influence and get influenced in the therapeutic meeting. I have started to write on a dissertation to try to find more answers and above all to be able to present our experiences from many years of work. My supervisor is Jaakko Seikkula.

All of them I meet in daily work, those called clients, family homes and therapists inspire and teach me a lot, but I have also been inspired by Tom Andersen, Barbro Sandin, Patricia Tudor Sandahl, Jaakko Seikkula, Harlene Anderson, John Read, Per Jensen and Jim Wilson to mention some of the most important for me in the therapeutic field.

Politics and social questions are important to me, as reading novels, poems and philosophical books.

The most important question is; “How to create a place good for people to stay in, a place without simplifying concepts as for example psychiatric diagnosis, a place which include many “truths” and ways to describe the other as well as ourselves?”