GOAL OF CHAPTER 1
Positive Family Therapy combines systems theory and positive psychology to derive an approach that builds upon the strengths of a family to enhance the growth of each individual member. We believe our approach has some unique aspects; however, the approach is based on research from many sources. This chapter presents the broader theory and empirical basis for Positive Family Therapy.
Family therapy has deep roots in viewing families as systems. Identifying Positive Family Therapy as systemic does not inform the sophisticated systems thinker. The information may be similar to saying we live in the western hemisphere when you ask for our address. Each family therapy theory focuses on the application of some systems concepts.
Similarly, saying our approach is based upon principles of positive psychology only begins the journey. The rich research and theories that historically anchor the current wave of positive psychology activity have taken many different routes from personality and social psychology. Carl Roger's and Abraham Maslow's Humanistic Psychotherapy unfolded very differently from Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg's Solution Focused Therapy, but each of these inform Positive Family Therapy. We are enriched by their foundational work in positive psychology embedded in psychotherapy. We also have the advantage of Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Barbara Fredrickson, Shelly Gablel, Shane Lopez, Michael Scheel, and many more researchers and thinkers cited throughout this volume. While we cannot name all of those who deserve credit, we do want to thank our scholarly forebears and colleagues.
Like every field of study, family therapy has a language used by its scholars. The language has the advantages of precision and shared understanding for researchers. Such scholarly languages have the disadvantage, however, of making important constructs inaccessible to learners or novices from other fields (i.e., jargon). The following pages outline the key theoretical perspectives and research results that form the basis of techniques described in Positive Family Therapy. In subsequent sections, these constructs will be presented in everyday language so that practitioners will have assistance in translating complex and nuanced psychological realities to people who are not mental health experts but who need a working knowledge of how to improve their lives.
Key concepts: boundaries, causality, circularity, constructivism, ecology, equifinality, homeostasis, morphogenesis, morphostasis, permeability, physical science metaphors, positive psychology, recursive, similar proposition, social constructivism.
THE MAJOR CONSTRUCTS
Systems Theory Basics
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1976) devised general systems theory as a universal theory that would allow understanding of all living systems. While, perhaps, not achieving the original intent, his general systems theory was used by scholars and practitioners in family therapy as a way to describe the relationships operating in families. Systems theory grew in application beyond mere biological systems to organizations of many different sizes and structures.
The definition of a human system is people in interaction by some similar proposition (von Bertalanffy, 1976). The key issues are the interactions and similar proposition. The term similar proposition means that the interaction among the people is somewhat predictable or governed by the norms of the system or family. When one person in the system acts, every other person is influenced, which again influences the person who initially acted, and so on and on. This is the recursive nature of living systems. Because the system is living and developing, a constant process of change is always in place, which is called morphogenesis. Yet the change remains small enough so the system remains intact, which is called morphostasis (Keeney, 1983). The mutual influence of systems describes the foundational contribution of the theory to family therapy. A system member can be helped or harmed by the system. Similarly, a system member can help or harm the system. Interaction happens continuously. Because a family system, however configured, is the most influential system in a person's life, facilitating the family's functioning helps each member. Each member is the family change agent who cares more about and is more consistently involved with the family than any family therapist.
The definition of a family system identifies a family as people in interaction by a similar proposition. A family system includes people who historically could be considered extended family, nuclear family, or nonrelated people who live together intimately. While we will often use examples that do not include larger family units or nonrelated units of people, these constellations are applicable. Family from our systemic definition is not culturally bound but is functionally defined. We wish to work with the system(s) that is/are most influential to the individual's or individuals' growth.
Positions in family systems relate to family role or family subsystems (e.g., parent, child, stepparent, parental child), age (e.g., birth order), temperament (e.g., tendencies to compromise versus to demand singular compliance), and to the family's history and culture. For example, in the U.S. majority culture we expect the father in a family to have greater influence than a child and older children to be more powerful than younger children. We also observe, however, that in many one-parent families or families with a large number of children, a child starts to take on the role of a parent because of the parent's need for support or help in raising other children. Family therapy welcomes different configurations of families and influence within families. We have worked with families that include grandparents, aunts, and friends who were imbued with great influence within the family.
We also see that family position can be influenced by the temperament of the individuals. Explosive and demanding parents or children may gain inordinate power in a family if the others are submissive to their tantrums or if the tantrums are extreme. Skill differences can play a role in family position if, for example, English speaking children become the translators or culture brokers for their non-English speaking parents. The child can accrue great influence within the family beyond that predicted by their ages or their heritage group.
The more influential subsystem of a family can be thought of as an executive system (preferably the adults). The executive subsystem can promote or mute change with greater power than the other systems. Understanding who belongs to the executive system and how well it functions is important. The executive system can contain a grandparent or religious leader who is not living with the family but may need to be included, even symbolically, in all important decisions.
If not every family member can attend therapy sessions, the members present can be asked to speak on their behalf (e.g., "If your father was here today, what would he say?"). Part of the executive subsystem is the memory of historical family members who communicated the family culture. Their contribution is important to respect. We particularly notice these influences when the family culture is very different from our own or when rapid acculturation is occurring or when immigration experiences have required parting with extended family.
Systems can be thought of as having boundaries (Minuchin, 1974). A boundary determines who is in a particular system/subsystem and who is outside. Systems within families or between families must interact. For example, the subsystem of children should be in communication with the parents. And the family should be in communication with the children's schools. Boundaries are constructs that allow us to describe the amount or quality of the interactions. These boundaries may be quite permeable, suggesting that, for example, information, affection, and supervision flow easily between parents and children.
Or the boundaries may be impermeable. Parents may keep secrets from each other or from their children. Or a parent may be distant or unapproachable to children, thus representing a disengaged or rigid boundary. Families that are pressured by illness or economic distress may withdraw from others as they attempt resolution and, thus, inadvertently be deprived of important resources. Some boundaries must exist for there to be an entity that can be defined as a family or a person. The most adaptive amount of boundary permeability is complex to estimate. The functionality is determined by the attributes of the individuals, their developmental tasks, and their culture. These metaphorical membranes influence the family system's resilience in the face of stress. For example, during a crisis these membranes may be too open or too closed. Family members can experience negative feelings because others seem too intrusive or too distant, resulting in an experience of being abandoned, exposed, or controlled.
Another essential prediction from systems theory is that the totality or whole of the system is more than the sum of the parts (von Bertalanffy, 1976). Knowing the individuals in the system does not tell us everything about the system's functioning. For example, well-meaning people can develop very poor relationships within families-an outcome that may not be readily predictable from knowing each person individually. Conversely (and more happily), troubled or troubling people can blossom and thrive in a facilitating system or family. A massive research tradition from social, community, and developmental psychology illustrates the power of the setting and group on the behavior of the individual, which gave gave rise to a school of ecological psychology (Bronfenbrenner, 1999). This theoretical and research tradition is closely related to systems thinking and explains the importance of developing healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive environments to support developing individuals. The ecological perspective also provides explanations for the long-lasting effects of trauma and deprivation on human development. Ecological approaches to physical and mental health goals are informed by general systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1999).
Equifinality. This principle in systems theory emphasizes that there are many ways a final state can be reached by an open living system (von Bertalanffy, 1976). The final state could be a goal, signifying that there are many ways to reach a goal. By extension, there are many ways that we could arrive where we are today. The principle of equifinality has direct implications to psychotherapy. Understanding that there are an infinite number of ways for us to reach our goals opens up a great deal of flexibility and optimism. Alternately, people with the same problems or strengths can have very different early life experiences.
Recursive Interaction, Causality, and Change. The interactional patterns of a family system are recursive rather than linear (Bateson, 1972; Becvar & Becvar, 2003). In this context, linear interaction implies the existence of a first and definite cause. Imagine kicking a rock. Knowing the force of the kick and the size of the rock will predict the outcome. In contrast to linear interactions, recursive interaction describes people's actions as reverberating reactions to other people, situations, memories, and perceptions. In such circular systems, certainty about causality is illusive. For example, instead of imagining kicking a rock, imagine kicking a person. Reactions to such an event are unpredictable. How was the kick interpreted? Was the kick initiated to kill a snake about to bite my leg? What prior relationship existed between the perpetrator and the victim? Speaking of initiation, what initiated the kick? What is the reaction to the reaction of the kick?
The range of consequences emanating from the kick and preconditions to the kick is vast. Possibilities vary from mumbled regrets, to dangerous brawls, to a teasing return kick, to a kiss. Recursive interactions among humans defy exact prediction. Only a known history of interactions and the prevailing propositions of the relationship give us limited predictive power. For example, do the older children in a family bully the younger one with impunity? Or are the older children held to higher standards of behavior because of their age and expected to bear the slings and arrows (or kicks) coming from their baby brothers and sisters? We need to know the propositions that bind the system to make an educated guess. The guess is always an incomplete description because it cannot include the beginning or the end, only a snapshot of the cycle of interactions. A better description contains more cycles of interactions but all description is incomplete.
Causality is a very popular idea for humans. Cause and effect is how we imagine the world works. We are drawn to figure out why things happen and tend to seek singular causes to events we witness or experience. Identifying causes and their effects is a basis of modern physical science. Physical science is the most powerful paradigm or metaphor we have to understand many of the mysteries of our universe. Close investigation of the most basic lawful behaviors and constituent elements is the path we equate with the scientific method. Psychotherapy has been influenced by the power of the physical science metaphor. The link between psychotherapy and physical science can be traced back to psychotherapy's development in Europe and in the United States by physicians trained in the physical science model of causality. In the same way that particular germs, disease processes, or trauma events could be linked to human misery, certain historical or current psychological events or biological vulnerabilities could explain mental illness. Close ties between psychotherapy and medicine are also explained by the medicine's high status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although there are strong benefits associated with understanding humans as singular physical entities (i.e., we are not mind and body-just body), the predominance of the physical science metaphor has some unfortunate influence on the practice of psychotherapy.
A physical science metaphor misleads psychotherapists because the logic leads us to assume that human characteristics (e.g., values, desires, feelings, sense of self) are governed by the same causal principles of change associated with mechanical objects. Translating cause-and-effect reasoning to psychotherapy creates expectations of a straightforward causality. If the engine of a car does not start, the most important step is to identify the source of the problem. What critical part is failing? There is an identifiable cause. After an accurate assessment of the problem the dysfunctional part can be replaced. The car is functional once more! Simple cause-and-effect reasoning leads us to believe that understanding the cause leads inevitably to a cure for the problem. In fact, the very useful psychological field of functional behavior analysis is closely modeled on this approach with specific strategies to identify presenting problems, their antecedents (i.e., causes), their consequences, and the contexts in which they appear (O'Neill, Horner, Albin, Storey, & Sprague, 1997). As useful as this approach can be in certain circumstances, it is not the most effective strategy to support positive change for whole families. The central concern of the approach is on problem behavior and the problem of an individual. Also, the perspective is typically linear in cause-and-effect reasoning.
A physical science metaphor relies on identical inputs always predicting identical outputs. While it is clearly true that installing the correct part in a car or using the right fuel predicts better performance, such certainty is rare with humans. For example, successful family routines such as shared dinner times or family vacations may become distasteful based only on the changing ages of the children. Almost every parent has had the experience of doing the same thing with a child and getting a very different reaction sometime between the ages of 11 and 16 years old. While many physical systems are best cared for by providing unchanging contexts (e.g., salinity of water, temperature ranges, titration of drugs), human systems have developmental trajectories, contexts, and moods that are quite complex to predict.
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Excerpted from Positive Psychology and Family Therapy by Collie Wyatt Conoley Jane Close Conoley Copyright © 2008 by Collie Wyatt Conoley and Jane Close Conoley. Excerpted by permission.
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