How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 249

as a buffer; mother and daughter continue talking because grandma’s intervention, which usually puts a period
to their transactions, is now being blocked; father and son can not distract one another through eye contact.
As powerful as the creation of specific events in the session may be, their impact depends to a large extent on
how the therapist punctuates those events for the family.
4. PUNCTUATION:
Punctuation is “the selective description of a transaction in accordance with a therapist’s goals”. Therefore it is
verbalizing appropriate behaviour when it happens.
Punctuation is a universal characteristic of human interaction. No transactional event can be described in the
same terms by different participants, because their perspectives and emotional involvements are different. A
husband will say that he needs to lock himself in the studio to escape his wife’s nagging; she will say that she
can not help protesting about his aloofness. They are linked by the same pattern, but when describing it they
begin and finish their sentences at different points and with different emphases.
The therapist can put this universal to work for the purposes of therapeutic change. In structural family therapy
punctuation is the selective description of a transaction in accordance with the therapist’s goals. In our example
of enactment, the consultant organized a situation in which the mother was finally successful, but it was the
consultant himself who made the success “final.” Everybody—the mother included—expected at that point that
the relative peace achieved would not last, but the consultant hastened to put a period by declaring the mother
successful and moving to a different subject before the girls could misbehave again. If he had not done so, if he
had kept the situation open, the usual pattern in which the girls demanded mother’s attention and mother became
incompetent would have repeated itself and the entire experience would have been labeled a failure. Because of
the facts of punctuation, the difference between success and failure may be no more than 45 seconds and an alert
therapist.
Later in the same session the consultant asked the parents to talk without allowing interruptions from their
daughter. The specific prescription was that father should make sure that his wife paid attention only to him and
not to the girl. Given this context for the enactment, whenever mother was distracted by the girl the therapist
could blame father for the failure—a different punctuation from what would have resulted if the consultant had
just asked mother to avoid being distracted.
A variety of punctuation is intensity, a technique that consists of emphasizing the importance of a given event in
the session or a given message from the therapist, with the purpose of focusing the family’s attention and energy
on a designated area. Usually the therapist magnifies something that the family ignores or takes for granted, as
another way of challenging the reality of the system. Intensity is achieved sometimes through repetition: one
therapist put the same question about 80 times to a patient who had decided to move out of his parents’ home
and did not do so: “Why didn’t you move?” Other times the therapist creates intensity through emotionally
charged interventions (“It is important that you all listen, because your sister can die”), or confrontation (“What
your father did just now is very disrespectful”). In a general sense, the structural family therapist is always
monitoring the intensity of the therapeutic process, so that the level of stress imposed on the system does not
become either unbearable or too comfortable.
4. UNBALANCING:
This is a procedure wherein the therapist supports an individual or subsystem against the rest of the family.
When this technique is used to support an underdog in the family system, a chance for change within the total
hierarchical relationship is fostered.
Unbalancing is a term that could be used to encompass most of the therapist’s activity since the basic strategy
that permeates structural family therapy is to create disequilibrium. In a more restricted sense, however,
unbalancing is the technique where the weight of the therapist’s authority is used to break a stalemate by
supporting one of the terms in a conflict.
Toward the end of the consultation with the family of the “uncontrollable” girl, Minuchin and the couple discuss
the wife’s idea that her husband is too harsh on the girls:

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