Criteria for Qualifying Continuing Education Activities for Licensed Marriage & Family Therapists in Massachusetts

Content Criteria: Three broad categories of content can be certified.

1. Professional Practice Activities

These activities enhance clinicians' ability to understand and function within the legal, economic, and regulatory environments. Some of the possible topics are:

• Practice Development
• Mental Health and Domestic Law, Including Legislative Issues
• Therapist "Burn-Out"
• Expert Witness Testimony
• Managed Care
• Risk Management
• Financial Management
• Ethics for Clinicians

2. Family and Systemic Therapy Activities

Clinical, theoretical, research, and all other activities will be eligible for certification if they expressly address at least one of the following (for the purposes of this section, you may assume a very broad definition of "couple" and "family" to include diverse relationships):

• Methods: Clinical or research methods that can be used with couples and families.
• Theory: Ideas about how couples and families function.
• Research Methods or Results: Focusing on families and/or practice of MFT.
• Training and Supervision: Learning to teach or supervise other MFTs (ongoing clinical supervision is excluded).

3. Other Relevant Clinical Activities

The following specific content areas and clinical methods have been identified as also being directly relevant to the practice of family and systemic therapy. CE activities addressing these issues will be eligible for MFT certification, whether or not they prominently address family and systemic therapy.

• Adoption
• Adult children of abusive families
• Bereavement
• Brief Therapy
• Child abuse and neglect
• Co-dependency
• Crisis Intervention
• Divorce, uncoupling, custody, and mediation
• Domestic Violence
• Eating Disorders
• Ethnicity and multi-cultural clinical considerations
• Family law
• Family medicine
• Fertility
• Foster Care
• Gender identity
• Genetics and family therapy
• Home-based clinical services
• LGBT considerations
• Parenting
• Postmodern (narrative, collaborative language, internal family systems) practices
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Psychopharmacology
• Sex therapy
• Sexual abuse and recovery
• Sexuality and sexual dysfunction
• Solution-focused therapy
• Substance abuse and recovery
• Supervision of clinical practice
• Trauma

Instructor Qualifications:

To be eligible for MFT CE certification, at least one of the instructors or presenters present at each meeting of the activity must meet at least one of the following criteria.

1. Licensed MFT (in any state or Canadian province).
2. Clinical member, or approved supervisor or supervisor-in-training, NEAFAST or AAMFT.
3. Other licensed mental health professional with two or more years experience doing family and systemic therapy.
4. Staff member of an agency providing family and systemic therapy services, with at least two years of experience.
5. Faculty member of an educational institution teaching family and systemic therapy.
6. Other qualified professional with experience relevant to this particular activity (enclose explanation).
7. Non-professional with relevant experience (enclose explanation).

Professional License Type (for coding on the form):