Now I See A Person

Dr. Susan E. Swim, PhD, LMFT, Executive Director of Now I See A Person Institute, is a clinician, educator, researcher, theorist, and author whose work for more than four decades has challenged assumptions about diagnosis, chronic mental illness, and predictions of lifelong disability. Beginning in the early 1980s at the Houston Galveston Institute with Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson, she became part of the early development of what became Collaborative-Dialogical Practices and challenged the deficiency language that defined people experiencing profound suffering as diseased, disordered, or permanently ill.

In 1984, she brought these ideas into clinical practice within a mental health agency, where all new clients, regardless of the severity of their symptoms, were not pathologized in either diagnosis or treatment. People were encountered as persons rather than illnesses, and their experiences were understood within their lives, relationships, histories, and circumstances. She witnessed people, including those previously given severe diagnoses and poor prognoses, experience the dissolution of symptoms, create profound changes, and reclaim ordinary lives. These experiences shaped a lifetime of work demonstrating that people need not remain defined by diagnoses, psychiatric predictions, previous treatment failures, or assumptions about what they can and cannot change.

From the mid-1980s through 2002, Dr. Swim taught these ideas as faculty at the Houston Galveston Institute, bringing what was being learned through clinical practice into conversations with practitioners and learners. Her teaching challenged deficiency-based understandings of human suffering and emphasized dialogue, relationship, and encountering the person beyond diagnosis. Her clinical practice, teaching, research, and, most importantly, what people taught her through their lives and transformations contributed to the continuing development of her work and her articulation of Process Ethics.

Dr. Swim developed Process Ethics as an ethical and relational understanding of practice in which ethics emerges within dialogue and relationship rather than being imposed upon the person through predetermined professional assumptions. She later founded Now I See A Person Institute, a nonprofit clinical, educational, and research institute created for individuals and families who have not found the changes they sought through traditional mental health services. Her work continues to demonstrate what becomes possible when people experiencing profound suffering are believed in, remain in charge of their own lives, and are accompanied in creating the changes they seek. People once defined by diagnosis, symptoms, and predictions of chronic illness have experienced the dissolution of symptoms and reclaimed lives beyond those predictions.

Her current work, Humanizing Ourselves for the Other, extends more than four decades of this history. It asks practitioners to examine not only how we understand the people who seek our help, but who we become in relationship with them. It challenges professional distance, diagnostic authority, and institutional assumptions that separate practitioners from the person before them and calls us toward relational intimacy, full presence, dialogue, belief, dignity, and a willingness to change ourselves in relationship with the other. Humanizing Ourselves for the Other asks us to relinquish the authority to define another person’s possibilities and instead enter relationships in which change, hope, and transformation remain possible.

For more than 43 years, the people Dr. Swim has had the privilege to work alongside have remained her greatest teachers. Her writing, teaching, research, and clinical practice challenge what mental health care has come to assume about people, suffering, diagnosis, and what is possible for human lives. At the center of her work is a question that has remained present throughout her career: What becomes possible when we encounter the person before the diagnosis, believe in their capacity for profound change, and refuse to allow predictions of illness or disability to determine the possibilities for their lives?

Dr. Susan Swim, PhD, MFT 40480

Contact
Phone:  (626) 487-9305
Email:  swiminc@aol.com

Dr. Susan E. Swim, PhD, LMFT 40480
Executive Director, Now I See a Person InstituteNow I See A Person Institute, Devoted to serving Service Area 2 and District 12 CommunitiesEducator, Researcher, Theorist, Author 
Faculty, Houston Galveston Institute
Associate, Taos Institute
Emeritus Member Taos, TIAC
Editor Emeritus, Journal of Systemic Therapies Editor, The Qualitative Report
Retired Faculty, Loma Linda University
Retired Advocacy Chair, AAMFT-CA
Retired Board Member, AAMFT-CAAssociate Member, Los Angeles Bar Association Member, Association of Family and Conciliation Courts
Providing Certificate Program in Community Engagement: A Collaborative Recovery Model
Providing Certificate Program in International Dialogical-Collaborative Practices