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The Intercultural Exeter Couples Model
Making Connections for a Divided World Through Systemic‐Behavioral Therapy
Janet ReibsteinReenee Singh
This edition first published 2021
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CHAPTER 1 Introduction
The public debut of the Intercultural Exeter Model (IEM) at the annual conference of the UK's Association for Family Therapy in 2017 was in the year that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement, and, with that, came a worldwide, populist interest, an interest not ever before so publicly recorded in the area of intercultural couples. This striking public attention put the focus on something we, the authors, along with others working in this field for years already knew: there is a dearth of either research on, or reports of, best clinical practice about working with couples of this sort. How do you do it and do it well?
Indeed, most clinical models of couples work do not even nod to the contribution culture will make to any of the myriad presenting conditions people need help with. Those clinicians working systemically will know that an exception has been within systemic theorizing (e.g., Falicov, 2014; Gabb & Singh, 2015b). Broadly, systemic theory explicitly encourages practitioners to be aware of culture, both pointed to in a general way and a more specified one by referring to the ways in which gender, race, religion, age, sexuality, ethnicity, and class shape experience (Burnham, 2012); and more particularly as a background to specific events in the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) model that also denotes ways in which culture, events, and cultural beliefs contribute to people's reality (Pearce, 2007). However, despite this admirable emphasis on cultural context and consequence, therapists need more. There has been no systematic effort to translate systemic ideas that take into account a cultural perspective into working with couples. None has existed to enable the clinician both to focus on and utilize data about cultural differences in a theorized way, or even in a way that incorporates other existing clinical tools to adapt them specifically to address cultural differences.
This is a significant and gaping hole in working with couples who come from different cultures. That is the raison d'être for this book: it describes a method that helps clinicians to do so.
There is another purpose to the book: to join up best practice, to make the systemic behavioral and the behavioral systemic. There has been work with couples in which both behavioral/cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches and systemic ones have had much to contribute to ameliorate distress in a variety of conditions (cf. Reibstein & Burbach, 2012, 2013). But till now there have not been attempts to marry
