How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 248

family. But even if mother should fail to “make it happen” the enactment will at least fulfill a lower-level goal:
it will provide the therapist with an understanding of the dysfunctional pattern and of the more accessible routes
to its correction.
In our specific example, the mother begins to voice orders in quick succession, overlapping her own commands
and hence handicapping her own chances of being obeyed. The children seem deaf to what she has to say,
moving around the room and only sporadically doing what they are being asked to do. The consultant takes
special care to highlight those mini-successes, but at the same time he keeps reminding the mother that she
wanted something done and “It is not happening—make it happen.” When father, following the family rule,
attempts to add his authority to mother’s, the consultant blocks his intervention. The goal of the enactment is to
see that mother “makes it happen” by herself; for the same reason, the consultant ignores mother’s innumerable
violations to practically every principle of effective parenting. To correct her, to teach her how to do it would
defeat the purpose of the enactment.
The consultant keeps the enactment going on until the mother eventually succeeds in organizing the girls to play
by themselves in a corner of the room, and then the adults can resume their talk. The experience can later be
used as a lever in challenging the family’s definition of their reality.
If mother had not succeeded, the consultant would have had to follow a different course—typically one that
would take her failure as a starting point for another reframing. Sometimes the structural family therapist
organizes an enactment with the purpose of helping people to fail. A classical example is provided by the
parents of an anorectic patient who undermine each other in their competing efforts to feed her. In this situation
the therapist may want to have the parents take turns in implementing their respective tactics and styles, with the
agenda that they should both fail and then be reunited in their common defeat and anger toward their
daughter—now seen as strong and rebellious rather than weak and hopeless.
Whether it is aimed at success or at failure, enactment is always intended to provide a different experience of
reality. The family members’ explanations for their own and each other’s behaviors, their notions about their
respective positions and functions within the family, their ideas about what their problems are and how they can
contribute to a solution, their mutual attitudes are typically brought in-to question by these transactional microexperiences orchestrated by the therapist.
Enactments may be dramatic, as in an anorectic’s lunch (Rosman, Minuchin & Liebman, 1977, pp. 166—169),
or they can be almost unnoticeably launched by the therapist with a simple “Talk to your son about your
concerns, I don’t know that he understands your position.” If this request is addressed to a father that tends to
talk to his son through his wife, and if mother is kept out of the transaction by the therapist, the structural effects
on behavior and perception may be powerful, even if the ensuing conversation turns out to be dull. The real
power of enactment does not reside in the emotionality of the situation but rather in the very fact that family
members are being directed to behave differently in relation to each other. By prescribing and monitoring
transactions the therapist assumes control of a crucial area—the rules that regulate who should interact with
whom, about what, when and for how long.
3. BOUNDARY MAKING
Boundary making is a special case of enactment, in which the therapist defines areas of interaction that he rules
open to certain members but closed to others. When Minuchin prevents the husband from “helping” his wife to
discipline the girls, he is indicating that such specific transaction is for the mother and daughters to negotiate,
and that father has nothing to do at this point; this specific way of making boundaries is also called blocking.
Other instances of boundary making consist of prescriptions of physical movements: a son is asked to leave his
chair (in between his parents) and go to another chair on the opposite side of the room, 6