TENETS OF THE MODEL
Structural
family therapy is primarily a way of thinking about and operating in three
related areas: the family, the presenting problem, and the process of change.
The
Family
The
family is conceptualized as a living open system. In every system the parts are
functionally interdependent in ways dictated by the supraindividual functions
of the whole. In a system AB, A’s passivity is read as a response to B’s
initiative (interdependence), while the pattern passivity! initiative is one
of the ways in which the system carries on its function (for example, the
provision of a nurturing environment for A and B). The set of rules regulating
the interactions among members of the system is its structure.
As
an open system the family is subjected to and impinges on the
surrounding environment. This implies that family members are not the only
architects of their family shape; relevant rules may be imposed by the
immediate group of reference or by the culture in the broader sense. When we
recognize that Mr. Brown’s distant relationship to Jimmy is related to Mrs.
Brown’s overinvolvement with Jimmy, we are witnessing an idiosyncratic family arrangement
but also the regulating effects of a society that encourages mothers to be
closer to children and fathers to keep more distance.
Finally,
as a living system the family is in constant transformation:
transactional rules evolve over time as each family group negotiates the particular
arrangements that are more economical and effective for any given period in
its life as a system. This evolution, as any other, is regulated by the
interplay of homeostasis and change.
Homeostasis
designates the patterns of transactions that assure
the stability of the system, the maintenance of its basic characteristics as
they can be described at a certain point in time; homeostatic processes tend
to keep the status quo (Jackson, 1957, 1965). The two-way process that links
A’s passivity to B’s initiative serves a homeostatic purpose for the system
AB, as do father’s distance, mother’s proximity and Jimmy’s eventual symptomatology
for the Browns. When viewed from the perspective of homeostasis, individual
behaviors interlock like the pieces in a puzzle, a quality that is usually
referred to as complementarity.
Change,
on the other hand, is the reaccommodation that the
living system undergoes in order to adjust to a different set of environmental
circumstances or to an intrinsic
developmental need. A’s passivity and B’s initiative may be effectively complementary
for a given period in the life of AB, but a change to a different
complementarity will be in order if B becomes incapacitated. Jimmy and his
parents may need to change if a second child is born. Marriage, births,
entrance to school, the onset of adolescence, going to college or to a job are
examples of developmental milestones in the life of most families; loss of a
job, a sudden death, a promotion, a move to a different city, a divorce, a
pregnant adolescent are special events that affect the journey of some
families. Whether universal or idiosyncratic, these impacts call for changes
in patterns, and in some cases—for example when children are added to a
couple— dramatically increase the complexity of the system by introducing
differentiation. The spouse subsystem coexists with parent-child subsystems and
eventually a sibling subsystem, and rules need to be developed to define who
participates with whom and in what kind of situations, and who are excluded
from those situations. Such definitions are called boundaries; they may
prescribe, for instance, that children should not participate in adults’
arguments, or that the oldest son has the privilege of spending certain moments
alone with his father, or that the adolescent daughter has more rights to
privacy than her younger siblings.
In
the last analysis homeostasis and change are matters of perspective. If one
follows the family process over a brief period of time, chances are that one
will witness the homeostatic mechanisms at work and the system in relative
equilibrium; moments of crisis in which the status quo is questioned and rules
are challenged are a relative exception in the life of a system, and when
crises become the rule, they may be playing a role in the maintenance of homeostasis.
Now if one steps back so as to visualize a more extended period, the
evolvement of different successive system configurations becomes apparent and
the process of change comes to the foreground. But by moving further back and
encompassing the entire life cycle of a system, one discovers homeostasis
again: the series of smooth transitions and sudden recommendations of which
change is made presents itself as a constant attempt to maintain equilibrium or
to recover it. Like the donkey that progresses as it reaches for the carrot
that will always be out of reach, like the monkeys that turned into humans by
struggling to survive as monkeys, like the aristocrats in Lampeduza’s Il
Gatorade who wanted to change everything so that nothing would change,
families fall for the bait that is the paradox of evolution: they need to
accommodate in order to remain the same, and accommodation moves them into
something different.
This
ongoing process can be arrested. The family can fail to respond to a new demand
from the environment or from its own development: it will not substitute new
rules of transactions for the ones that have been patterning its functioning.
AB find it impossible to let go of the passivity/initiative pattern even if B
is now incapacitated Jimmy and mother find it impossible to let go of a tight
relationship that was developmentally appropriate when Jimmy was 2 but not now
that he is 18. Maybe Jimmy started showing trouble in school when he was 12,
but the family insisted on the same structure with mother monitoring all
communications around Jimmy and the school, so that Jimmy was
protected from father’s anger and father from his own
disappointment.
When
families get stagnated in their development their transactional patterns become
stereotyped. Homeostatic mechanisms exacerbate as the system holds tightly to
a rigid script. Any movement threatening a departure from the status quo is
swiftly corrected. If father grows tougher on Jimmy, mother will intercede and
father will withdraw. Intergenerational coalitions that subvert natural
hierarchies (for example, mother and son against father), triangular patterns
where parents use a child as a battleground, and other dysfunctional
arrangements serve the purpose of avoiding the onset of open conflict within
the system. Conflict avoidance, then, guarantees a certain sense of
equilibrium but at the same time prevents growth and differentiation, which are
the offspring of conflict resolution. The higher levels of conflict avoidance
are found in enmeshed families— where the extreme sense of closeness,
belonging, and loyalty minimize the chances of disagreement—and, at the other
end of the continuum, in disengaged families, where the same effect is produced
by excessive distance and a false sense of independence.
In
their efforts to keep a precarious balance, family members stick to myths that
are very narrow definitions of themselves as a whole and as individuals—
constructed realities made by the interlocking of limited facets of the
respective selves, which leave most of the system’s potentials unused. When
these families come to therapy they typically present themselves as a poor
version of what they really are. See Figure 1. The white area in the center of
the figure represents the myth: “I am this way and can only be this way, and
the same is true for him and for her, and we can not relate in any other way
than our way,” while the shaded area contains the available but as yet not utilized
alternatives.
The presenting problem
Structural
family therapy conceptualizes the problem behavior as a partial aspect of the
family structure of transactions. The complaint, for instance, that Jimmy is
undisciplined and aggressive, needs to be put in perspective by relating it to
the context of Jimmy’s family.
For
one thing, the therapist has to find out the position and function of the problem
behavior: When does Jimmy turn aggressive? What happens• immediately before?
How do others react to his misbehavior? Is Jimmy more undisciplined toward
mother than toward father? Do father and mother agree on bow to handle him?
What is the homeostatic benefit from the sequential patterns in which the
problem behavior is imbedded? The individual problem is seen as a complement
of other behaviors, a part of the status quo, a token of the system’s dysfunction;
in short, the system as it is supports the symptom.
The therapist also has to diagnose the structure of the system’s perceptions
in connection with the presenting problem. Who is more concerned about
Jimmy’s lack of discipline? Does everybody concur that be is aggressive? That
his behavior is the most troublesome problem in the family? Which are the
other, more positive facets in Jimmy’s self that go unnoticed? Is the family
exaggerating in labeling as “aggressive” a child that maybe is just more
exuberant than his siblings? Is the family failing to accommodate their perceptions
and expectations to the fact that Jimmy is now 18 years old? Does the system
draw a homeostatic gain from perceiving Jimmy primarily as a symptomatic
child? An axiom of structural family therapy, illustrated by Figure 1, is that
a vast area of Jimmy’s self is out of sight for both his relatives and himself,
and that there is a systemic support for this blindness.
So the interaccional network knitted around the motive of complaint is
the real “presenting problem” for the structural family therapist. The key
element in this view is the concept of systemic support. The model does not
claim a direct causal line between system and problem behavior; the
emphasis is on maintenance rather than on causation. Certainly, sometimes one
observes families and listens to their
stories and can almost see the pathways leading from transactional structure to
symptomatology. But even in these cases the model warns us that we are dealing
with current transactions and current memories, as they are organized now, after
the problem has crystallized. Thus, instead of a simplistic, one-way causal connection
the model postulates an ongoing process of mutual accommodation between the
system’s rules and the individual’s predispositions and vulnerabilities. Maybe
Jimmy was born with a “strong temperament” and to a system that needed
to pay special attention to his temper tantrums, to highlight his negative
facets while ignoring the positive ones. Within this context Jimmy learned
about his identity and about the benefits of being perceived as an aggressive
child. By the time he was 9, Jimmy was an expert participant in a mutually
escalating game of defiance and punishment. These mechanisms —selective
attention, deviance amplification, labeling, counter escalation— are some of
the ways in which a system may contribute to the etiology of a “problem.” Jimmy’s
cousin Fred was born at about the same time and with the same “strong
temperament,” but he is now a class leader and a junior tennis champ.
Discussions
around etiological history, in any case, are largely academic from the~
perspective of structural family therapy, whose interest is focused on the current
supportive relation between system and problem behavior. The model shares
with other systemic approaches the radical idea that knowledge of the origins
of a problem is largely irrelevant for the process of therapeutic change
(Minuchin & Fishman, 1979). The identification of etiological sequences
may be helpful in preventing problems from happening to families, but
once they have happened and are eventually brought to therapy, history has
already occurred and can not be undone. An elaborate understanding of the problem
history may in fact hinder the therapist’s operation by encouraging an excessive
focus on what appears as not modifiable.
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