Sema Bruno, a 2024 graduate of the PhD in Couples and Family Therapy at Antioch University’s New England campus, has published her dissertation, Midas’ Children: Affluent White Families and the Effects of Parental Bias on Child Outcomes. Her dissertation examines parental biases directed toward domestic laborers employed in affluent white homes and how these biases might affect the parent-child relationship and the emerging values of children in these homes.
Bruno is a researcher, educator, and clinician who emphasizes systemic change at the level of the individual, the family system, and broader social systems, actively bridging transgenerational and historical events and situations with presenting concerns. In her clinical work, Bruno takes an embodied, decolonizing, multicontextual, and client-centered approach. Her decades-long work dedicated to helping clients process and work through issues relating to trauma, abuse, gender identity and non-conformity, career advancement, non-monogamy, radical co-parenting, classism, racism, and sexism has shown her that family systems and individuals are incredibly resilient when they have the appropriate support, resources, and tools made available to them.
Although trained in several clinical models, Bruno most often utilizes socioculturally attuned family therapy, emotionally focused therapy (EFT), Satirian and other experiential models, Core Energetics, and trauma-informed care while reaching into other schools of thought for continued reference. Her research interests include class and classism, decolonization, gender, co-parenting, and body-centered approaches to therapy.
She earned a BA in Health Arts and Sciences, focusing on trauma-informed care, from Goddard College in 2008, followed by an MA in the same field in 2011. She obtained a certificate in marriage and family therapy/counseling from Antioch University and also became a certified Core Energetics practitioner in body psychotherapy through the Institute of Core Energetics.
Learn more about the program, which has a focus on social justice applications to couple and family therapy and prepares graduates for academic, leadership, supervision, and research careers.
Learn more about Bruno and read the full dissertation Midas’ Children: Affluent White Families and the Effects of Parental Bias on Child Outcomes here.
