How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 137

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.
In the figure at the right side, 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