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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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