How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families

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. The Process of Therapeutic Change Consistent with its basic tenet that the problems brought to therapy are ultimately dysfunctions of the family structure, the model looks for a therapeutic solution in the modification of such structure. This usually requires changes in the relative positions of family members: more proximity may be necessary between husband and wife, more distance between mother and son. Hierarchical relations and coalitions are frequently in need of a redefinition. New alternative rules for transacting must be explored: mother, for instance, may be required to abstain from intervening automatically whenever an interaction between her husband and her son reaches a certain pitch, while father and son should not automatically abort an argument just because it upsets Morn. Frozen conflicts have to be acknowledged and dealt with so that they can be solved —and the natural road to growth reopened. Therapeutic change is then the process of helping the family to outgrow its stereotyped patterns of which the presenting problem is a part. This process transpires within a special context, the therapeutic system which offers a unique chance to challenge the rules of the family. The privileged position of the therapist allows him to request from the family members different behaviors and to invite different perceptions, thus altering their interaction and perspective. The family then has an opportunity to experience transactional patterns that have not been allowed under its prevailing homeostatic rules. The system’s limits are probed and pushed, its narrow self-definitions are questioned; in the process, the family’s capacity to tolerate and handle stress or conflict increases, and its perceived reality becomes richer, more complex. In looking for materials to build this expansion of the family’s reality -alternative behaviors, attitudes, perceptions, affinities, expectations- the structural family therapist has one primary source from which to draw: the family itself. The model contends that beyond the systemic constraints that keep the family functioning at an inadequate level there exists an as yet underutilized pool of potential resources. Releasing these resources so that the system can change, and changing the system so that the resources can be released, are simultaneous processes that require the restructuring input of the therapist. His role will be discussed at some length in the following section. 138

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