How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 258

The therapist makes personal adjustments in order to achieve a therapeutic alliance.
Joining and accommodation are two ways of describing the same process. Joining is used when
emphasizing actions of the therapist aimed directly at relating to family members or the familysystem.
Accommodation is used when the emphasis is on the therapist’s adjustment . . . in order to achieve joining.
To join a family system, the therapist must accept the family’s organization and style and blend with them.
(Minuchin, 1974, p.123)
Diagnosis in family therapy is achieved through the interactional process of joining. (Minuchin, 1974, p.
130).
Families like therapists accommodate to the other. A therapist “brings an idiosyncratic style of contacting,
and a theoretical set. The family will have to accommodate to this package, in some fashion or another, and
the therapist will have to accommodate to them. (Minuchin & Fishman, 1981)
In family therapy, a diagnosis is the working hypothesis that the therapist evolves from his experiences and
observations upon joining the family. This type of assessment, with its interpersonal focus, differs radically
from the process usually called diagnosis in psychiatric terminology. A psychiatric diagnosis involves
gathering data from or about the patient and assigning a label to the complex of information gathered. A
family diagnosis, however, involves the therapist’s accommodation to the family to form a therapeutic
system, followed by his assessment of his experiences of the family’s interaction in the present. (Minuchin,
1974, p. 129)


5. Maintenance
Maintenance is one of the techniques used in joining. The therapist lets himself be organized by the basic
rules that regulate the transactional process in the specific family system. If a four-generation family
presents a rigid hierarchical structure, the therapist may find it advisable to approach the great-grandmother
first and then to proceed downward. In so doing, the therapist may be resisting his first empathic
wish—perhaps to rescue the identified patient from verbal abuse—but by respecting the rules of the system
he will stand a better chance to generate a therapeutic impact.
However, in order to avoid total surrender the therapist needs to perform his maintenance operations in a
way that does not leave him powerless; he does not want to follow the family rule that Kathy should be
verbally abused whenever somebody remembers one of her misdoings. As with any other joining technique,
maintenance entails an element of challenge to the system. The therapist can for instance approach the
great-grandmother respectfully but he will say: “I am very concerned because I see all of you struggling to
help, but you are not being helpful to each other.” While the rule “great-grandma first” is being respected at
one level, at a different level the therapist is positioning himself one up in relation to the entire system,
including grandmother. He is joining the rules to his own advantage.
While maintenance concentrates on process, the technique of tracking consists of an accommodation of the
therapist to the content of speech. In tracking, the therapist follows the subjects offered by family members
like a needle follows the record groove. This not only enables him to join the family culture, but also to
become acquainted with idiosyncratic idioms and metaphors that he will later use to endow his directive
statements with additional power—by phrasing them in ways that have a special meaning for the family or
for specific members.
At times the therapist will find it necessary to establish a closer relation with a certain member, usually one
that positions himself or is positioned by the family in the periphery of the system. This may be done
through verbal interventions or through mimesis, a nonverbal response where the therapist adopts the other
person’s mood, tone of voice or posture, or imitates his or her behaviour -crosses his legs, takes his jacket
off, lights a cigarette. In most of the occasions the therapist is not aware of the mimetic gesture itself but
only of his disposition to get closer to the mimicked member. In other cases however, mimesis is
consciously used as a technique: for instance, the therapist wants to join the system via the children and
accordingly decides to sit on the floor with them and suck his thumb.

 NORMALIZATION
Normalization is generally defined as a therapist’s use of indirect or direct statements that refer to client
problems not necessarily viewed “as pathological manifestations but as ordinary difficulties of life” (O’Hanlon
& Weiner-Davis, 1989, p. 93). The goal of this strategy is to pre-emptively depathologize client problems and

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