Jean has been a Faculty Member of the Ackerman Institute since 2006. He is currently the Director of the Gender and Family Project. The Gender and Family Project (GFP) provides outpatient clinical services to families with gender nonconforming and transgender children and adolescents. He also runs a support group for parents that meets alongside a play therapy group for children facilitated by Andrea Blumenthal, LCSW and trains mental health providers on family-related gender issues. Watch video series of Jean discussing Gender Variance,Accepting Gender Variance, Children & Gender Variance, Permission for Gender Variance and Onset of Gender Variance

He also supervises students in the Live Clinical Supervision portion of the externship program where trainees have the opportunity to participate actively on a treatment team and, at times, work with families in front of a one-way mirror with live supervision. In addition, group members explore their own family’s culture of origin and its effect on practice.

He is also a member of the Ackerman Institute’s Center for Children & Relational Trauma. The Center “assists children affected by life altering trauma including family violence, the death of a parent or sibling, and sexual abuse through a therapeutic model that recognizes family relationships as the nexus of trauma and as points of access for care.”

He has also taught the Didactic Seminar in the Ackerman Institute’s Clinical Externship in Couples and Family Therapy. This course offers a bridge between clinical practice and systemic theories and supports clinicians in integrating skills and knowledge with couples and families. Watch a video about the Ackerman Institute

Masculinity and femininity are getting deconstructed and recreated outside of the traditional gender binary. As sexualities are declared more openly, new relationships, gay, bisexual, fluid or mixed, get formed by our clients, by our friends, by our family members, and by ourselves. This workshop offers to expand your vision of gender and sexuality and welcome new families in your office and your organization!

During this day-long workshop, Jean Malpas will share his cutting edge wisdom and experience working with kids, couples and families of all ages and from diverse cultures with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender members as well as heterosexual couples and families exploring fluid sexuality and gender expression. Beyond a normative approach, the therapeutic context can support couples and families to embrace and navigate sexual and gender diversities, contributing to the development of healthy and mutually supportive relationships and communities.

The workshop will focus on multicontextual couple therapy with gay and lesbian couples, assisting non-transgender identified couples in gender transition as well as providing parents and families with gender nonconforming children and youth a safe and affirmative road map for gender and identity development. Throughout the day we will learn about: the Contemporary Sexual Identity Model, lessons for couple therapy with gay and lesbian clients including a case of non-monogamy, gender identity and development including transitioning couples as well as transgender youth and working with families of gender nonconforming children.

Through accessible language, videotape and a participatory methodology, therapists, experts and other helping professionals will have the opportunity to developing a dialogue based on real cases. For those of you already doing this work, as the day unfolds you will have the opportunity to contemplate dilemmas about the singularities of therapeutic practices with your own kids, couples and families. For those not yet immersed in working with the coninuum of gender and sexuality, you will improve your knowledge, resources and comfort level. To Register

We live in an age in which gender expression and gender identity—behavior, dress, body image, personal style, hobbies, work choice, or even sexuality—doesn’t necessarily coincide with traditional social expectations of gender. Categories of masculine and feminine once thought permanent and mutually impermeable have proven to be neither. In this workshop, we’ll explore what gender fluidity means to children, adults, and families, and how we can help our clients embrace and live positively their diverse gender expressions. We’ll also discuss how our well-meaning assumptions about gender may actually constrict not only the growth of our clients, but our own personal and clinical development. Through clinical tapes, movies, and interactive discussions, you’ll acquire skills to differentiate issues relating to sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, and learn to navigate gracefully the many shades of gray relating to gender.

One million Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender individuals marched in Rio with their partners, friends and family in November 2010. This event, celebrating difference and denouncing oppression, shows how contemporary Brazilian families strive to live outside of the old models of gender and sexuality. Masculinity and femininity are getting deconstructed and recreated outside of the traditional gender binary. Sexualities are declared more openly, new relationships, gay, bisexual, fluid or mix, get formed by our clients, by our friends, by our family members, and by ourselves. This international workshop offers to expand your vision of gender and sexuality and welcome a million new families in your office and your organization!

During two days, Jean Malpas will share his broad professional experience of working in couple and family therapy with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender clients of different ages and cultures. Beyond a normative approach, the therapeutic context can support couples and families to respect and embrace sexual identities under a non-homophobic perspective, contributing for the development of healthy and mutually supportive relationships and communities.

Through an accessible language and a participatory methodology, therapists, experts and professionals will have the opportunity of developing a dialogue based on real cases. Also it will be possible to present questions and dilemmas about the singularities of therapeutic practices with couples and families in LGBT context, including children and teenagers.

To Register

Jean had the opportunity to participate to a case conference in the Department of Psychiatry at Saint Vincent’s Hospital. The live case consultation and case conference highlighted principles of transgender-affirmative clinical care as well as the importance of relational dimensions of transition (community, marriage, relationships, etc).

Jean was honored to lecture in Peter Fraenkel’s “Family Systems I & II” doctoral course. Case presentations articulated the application of multi-contextual thinking with same-sex couples and relational thinking with couples going through gender transition.

This presentation addressed couples faced with the coming out of one of the partners as transgender. The couple’s gender transition is viewed as an opportunity for either collaborative change or a risk for relational impasse. While keeping a transition-positive stance, therapists learn to handle the complexity of making room for loss, grief and unpredictable outcomes; as well as examining potential changes in the couple’s viability, sexuality and/or identity.

Dr Celia Falicov addressed a novel, bi-national, bi-cultural model for working with transnational families. She also discussed the perils and resiliencies that such families face while dealing with separations and reunions.

Case consultations on therapy with immigrant families were provided by Ackerman faculty members Miguel Hernandez, MSW, Mary Kim Brewster, PhD, and Jean Malpas, LMHC, LMFT.

This seminar, co-taught with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW, focused on issues of sexual orientation, sexual functioning and gender identity, integrating lecturing, case presentations and videos of cases.

Shoshana Bulow focused on the integration of sex therapy and couples therapy with a multi-issue heterosexual couple who presented with sexual dysfunction. Jean Malpas focused on multicontextual, systemic work with a gay couple presenting with issues of monogamy. Material related to transgender transition, families and gender variant children was also discussed.

Similar programming as in Santiago, Chile.

The Shinui Institute’s faculty invited Shoshana Bulow and Jean Malpas to present their innovations in couples therapy. Shoshana Bulow introduced her integration of systemic and sex therapies, while I articulated issues of sexual orientation and gender identity and couples therapy.

Training questions addressed: How can people change gender while remaining in the relationships they have created in their natal gender? How do couples negotiate a-stereotypical genders and sexual intimacies? How does gender transition differs from and impact sexual orientation?

The paper articulated how couples negotiate open relationships and monogamy as well as living outside of the “male/female” binary of gender.

“Crystal Meth and You” by Lance Lamore. As part of Sero-Zero’s Healthy Sexuality week in May, there was an engaging talk presented May 4 on the topic of crystal meth by Jean Malpas, a psychotherapist from New York City who works in the field of addictions. While the drug is still not as prevalent here in Montreal, the goal of the talk was to provide information on the drug and on what education and prevention campaigns in other cities look like. (…).

This half-day training for mental health service providers presented an overview of crystal meth abuse issues in the gay male urban communities as well as strategies for culturally competent counseling. Clinical strategies included systemic interventions, motivational interviewing and community empowerment.

Relational models of treatment for transgender couples and families have followed a parallel evolution with the individual models of transgender care. The role of the relational therapist has moved from the enactment of a moral sanction against the menace of the trans pathology on the family, to the support of multiple forms of empowered gender-variant families. Relational treatment outcomes are not restricted to gender transition or compliance with heterosexual binary norms of couples and families. Using interactive media such as videos and clinical cases, this lecture focused on two major objectives. First, it outlined basic transgender terminology and emphasized the importance for the clinician to respect and work within their clients’ conception of gender. Second the lecture introduced some of the major clinical challenges associated with three transgender family models: Trans families (transgender-headed families), families in transition (families where a member comes out as transgender) and couples in transition (non-transgender couples adjusting to the coming out of one partner).

How are gay male couples both different from and similar to heterosexual couples? What impact do shame, trauma and oppression have on gay relationships? How to take the therapist’s sexual orientation into account to provide culturally sensitive therapy? This workshop, co-taught with Gene Gardino, LCSW, addressed how, when working with “marginalised” couples, relational therapists are to balance their understanding of the presenting problem between hypotheses that would apply to the “universal couple” and those that take into account the couples’ current and historical contexts of oppression.

This staff training covered techniques used in working with the clients using crystal methamphetamines and included Harm Reduction and Recovery Readiness approaches.

Co-taught with Gene Gardino, LCSW, this presentation at the joint American Family Therapy Academy-International Family Therapy Association addressed integrating cultural issues in couples therapy and focused on clinical dilemmas arising when heterosexually-identified therapists work with gay and lesbian-identified couples.

Providers working with the transgender communities often lack engagement and clinical-intervention skills. This all-day workshop initially stressed cultural competency and sensitivity concerns including transgender vocabulary, barriers to care and ethnic, cultural and class differences within the transgender communities. It also provided an overview of transgender mental health and medical-care issues and introduced a model for clinical intervention that emphasizes personal identity and community development over pathology and diagnosis, shifting the practice emphasis to the management of stigma associated with transgender identities, gender identity management and recovery and harm reduction. The final part of the workshop addressed the relational trauma created by transphobia in the family of origin and introduced relational strategies to work with transgender-headed families and transgender individuals, their families of origin and their communities. Co-presented with Carrie Davis, LCSW from the Gender Identity Project.

Co-presented with Andres Hoyos from Center CARE, this workshop highlighted clinical & community issues helpful to the clinician supporting gay men in their recovery from crystal meth. Combining non-pathological and motivation interviewing approaches, it emphasized the role of trauma, shame and longing for communities of belonging as underlying factors for meth use in these communities.

Jean provides case consultations in training groups at the Ackerman Institute for the Family.

Supervision and training of family therapists, in collaboration with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW. Cases presented with various issues around sexual orientation and sexual functioning.

Supervision and Training of Family Therapists, in collaboration with Shoshana Bulow, LCSW. Cases presented with various issues around sexual orientation and sexual functioning.

Supervision of Israeli family therapists working with families facing gender and sexuality issues.