What Should Psychologists Know About Polyamory?

Fox

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What Should Psychologists Know About You?

We are a group of graduate students in clinical psychology going around asking people from unique groups what they think psychologists (and other mental health professionals) should know about them and their lives. This is good for us, because it makes us better practitioners, and it's good for you, because you have the opportunity to tell the mental health community whatever it is that you want us to know.

We would love to hear from polyamorous families. You probably won't be surprised to hear that we don't receive any formalized training in this area. So educate us! Send us your comments, stories, or other information at [email protected]. We will gather the emails we receive, then edit them to form a collection of quotes and stories which we will post on our website, http://whatpsychologistsshouldknow.blogspot.com/ Anything you send us will remain completely anonymous.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in this project, which we hope will benefit both the polyamorous community and the community of mental health practitioners. Please feel free to forward this message to other polyamorous families you know!
 
Perhaps you would like to read here for a while... you will find out pretty quickly ;)

In any case, I will send you a message.
 
I have to echo both Red and NYC, Read a few of the blogs, or just browse the forum. That will give you a definite idea of what you need to know.

As for "Poly Families" you need to define that more, or like I said read the forum and then maybe try and ask for a particular segment's input; because poly comes in many forms....oh wait maybe I just answered your question partially.
 
How are you defining a polyamorous family? Does this mean that people who are not cohabiting with their partners nor raising children are excluded?

I suspect they would benefit from knowing that many poly tangles don't cohabitate and yet do function as families. That sounds exactly like something phychologists should know....
 
The students, if they haven't already, should check out Community Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS). They are at: https://carasresearch.org. They attempt to education mental health practitioners of all kinds on various alternative sexualities like BDSM, poly, etc. CARAS would have a wealth of information on what psychologists should know about poly and all sorts of other things.
 
"We would love to hear from polyamorous families."

When I looked at the blog site I got the spirit of the project, and that's when it became apparent that what Fox wants to know about must not just be polyamorous families, per se, but polyamorous people (including individuals), since it will be such people who will sometimes find themselves in the offices of psychologists, seeking assistance.

Fox, How about changing your request to explicitly seek comments from all kinds of poly folk, regardless of their relationship status?
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A note to posters here who point to this site as a place to gain insight into the poly world: Fox is doing a project for graduate school, and that project is, apparently, the blog he linked to. So he needs actual written contributions for the blog, not fingers pointing to this site or that book or this magazine article.... It looks to me that this blog may be read by professional psychotherapists as well as psychotherapists in training, so here we have an opportunity to influence the perceptions and thoughts of the professional psychology world. This is indeed a public service project!

Thanks, Fox, for the opportunity and for your work. I look forward seeing the project unfold, and will send my own contribution very soon.
 
I wrote to these people and got a very nice reply and a list of questions. It seems that poly families is seen as posted below directly from their email.

We've also realized that "polyamorous families" come in all shapes and sizes, from a group of three couples who get together and have sex everyone once in a while to families like yours, where three people live together and raise kids.
 
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