How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 172

Family Life Cycle:
Just like an individual, a family has developmental tasks and key (second-order) transitions like leaving
home, joining of families through marriage, families with young children (the key milestone, and one that
initiates vertical realignment), families with adolescents, launching children and moving on, families in later
life. Key question: "How well did the family do on its last assignment?" Horizontal stressors are those
involving these transitional assignments; vertical stressors are transmitted mainly via multigenerational
triangling. Symptoms tend to occur when horizontal and vertical stressors intersect. Divorce adds extra
developmental steps for all involved families.
Centrifugal/centripetal:
Tendency of family members to move toward or away from a family.
Circular (mutual, reciprocal) causality:
When things cause each other rather than just one causing the other (linear causality). Emphasizes present,
process over past, content.
Open/Closed systems:
Open: Those that embrace new information and display negentropy (growth).
Closed: Those unfriendly to new information; they tend to have a lot of entropy.
Cybernetics:
Norbert Weiner (1948) used this term to describe systems that self-regulate via feedback loops.
Feedback loops: information pathways that help the system balance and correct itself. Can be negative
(maintains the current bias and level of functioning) or positive (changes the bias/level of functioning).
Double bind
(Bateson, Jackson, Haley, Weakland): when the content and process of a message don't line up and you're
not allowed to comment on that.
No-talk rule: an unwritten family rule against members commenting on certain uncomfortable issues.
Three kinds of therapeutic double-binds or paradoxes: prescribing, restraining ("don't change") , and
positioning (exaggerate negative interpretations of the situation).
Equifinality / Equipotentiality:
Equifinality: things with dissimilar origins can wind up in similar places (e.g., an abuse survivor and
someone from a healthy family can both grow up to be good parents).
Equipotentiality: things with a common origin can go in very different directions of development (e.g., of
two abuse survivors, one heals and the other becomes a criminal).
First-order / Second-order change:
First-order change: change that helps the system accommodate to its current level of functioning.
Second-order change: a change that fundamentally impacts the system, thereby taking it to a new level of
functioning.
Pseudo mutuality