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Families can do what individuals cannot do.
The primary function of most families is
to provide a safe place to nurture children to maturity.
Family
relationships focus on making rules, communicating rules, enforcing rules ...
and punishment
You are a member of many overlapping relationship systems. You are
a member of your family of origin, your friends, your culture and your country. Each
system creates, communicates and enforces rules, some of which will contradict
the rules of another system. Systemic conflicts are inevitable. We help people explore and change
how their relationships are affected by often-unspoken family rules.
If your parents never had children, chances
are that you won't either!
Virginia Satir introduced systemic family coaching (see her
book New Peoplemaking). Satir showed how individuals respond to family dynamics. Her
systems theory showed that a system is more than the sum of its parts.
Challenges faced by a family are not the sum of the challenges of its members.
Our family coaching examines changes in rules, roles and tasks; and
explores disruptions such as divorce, illness, or death, as well as factors such
as culture and gender.
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In my family,
emotional displays and abuse occurred so often that immature and impulsive
behavior were normal ... the consequences of my parents' immaturity included
addictions and mental illness. I reacted to my parents ... I repeated their
behaviors with my own children ... since those sessions with you ... we
now support each other to be happy! |
Our coach training supports the progressive integration of
theory with practice - we use demonstrations, case histories and practical
exercises to encourage healthy change as well as learning.
Training Overview: Systemic Family Coaching
1. Expect complexity
Our systems coaching deals with complexity and can
be adapted to all human relationship systems. These skills are useful in
predicting and maintaining family, team and organizational development. Systemic
assessment differs from, and can be integrated with, individual assessment. We
excel in helping people resolve complex emotional and relationship problems.
2. Perceive a family as a hierarchy of interrelated subsystems
Most human systems have subsystems - families have parents, in-laws
and children separated by often-unspoken rules about who does what with whom and to whom.
Common coaching goals are to confirm roles and set boundaries between subsystems - between
groups of family or team members.
3. Examine the influence of each member of a system
Human systems are often controlled by dysfunctional people. Families
often succumb to covert control by a victim, and adapt to victim-like behavior with lies,
denial, excuses and justifications. A victim can destabilize a family system (a parent
may act like a child, or a child may act like a parent). Systems coaching can find the
right place for dysfunctional people in the hearts and minds of healthier members.
4. Who protects the family?
As you probe into family dynamics, a family member may demand
attention, to distract you and to protect the family's status quo. See the family
as a system rather than as isolated individuals ... you might praise the
family for being so closely-connected, and that member for being so protective.
5. Emphasize "these things cause each other"
rather than "this causes that"
Parental stress may result in parent-child entanglements, with
coalitions against other family members (see
Parental Alienation). Example: if a
victim-identified Mom explodes with anger, Dad and Daughter may become closer.
Individual coaching could dissolve Mom's identification, while systems coaching
would encourage Mom and Dad to communicate to their children better about parenthood
issues.
6. Focus on present behavior and future solutions rather than
on past conflicts
Many couples argue about how problems started. Instead, we focus on
solutions. Although genetics and family stress play their parts; we focus on solutions.
Perhaps offer couple coaching to improve parental communication - and that helps them
dissolve arguments, nagging, etc.
7. Use negative feedback loops to promote
stability and positive feedback loops to promote change
When an addicted family member stops drinking or using, family
members often subtly try to push him back into addiction to avoid destabilizing
the system. Use negative feedback loops to help prevent this.
If an argument between children escalates into a parental
fight, a child may try to calm the parents back into homeostasis. Positive
feedback loops may make such explosions unnecessary.
8. Use integrated feedback loops to provide a dynamic expression of wholeness
Emotional or verbal abuse can
escalate from unwanted advice through criticism to insults. Abuse leads to more abuse.
Use systems coaching to help people manage their emotions and improve their relationships.
As their partnership improves, the parents better solve problems. Their affection
can deepen and their children can carry a blueprint of happy partnership into their
future relationships.
9. Assume that people can and should take responsibility
for their own healing
People who grew up in refugee camps may want a happy family as
much as people who were raised by loving parents. How people choose to perceive
their original conditions is more important than those conditions. We often coach
survivors to own their emotions so that they can move on; rather than becoming
chronic victims stuck in traumatic and abusive memories
(often called PTSD).
10. Provide first-order change to help a family stabilize.
Provide second-order changes to coach a family to be more effective.
Families are likely to be symptomatic if key events
like marriage, birth of children, children starting school, children
leaving home, changing jobs, etc. coincide with emotional stress.
Listen
empathically and help members through these fundamental changes to different
relationship dynamics.
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First-order change implies minor
improvements to past practices that extends current knowledge and skills.
Second-order change implies a major step forward from current behavior,
and requires new knowledge and different skills. Third-order change implies a
super-system that can initiate, evaluate and adjust second-order changes.
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Summary
We affirm the five freedoms described by family therapist
Virginia Satir:
- The freedom to feel what one feels, rather than what one
should feel.
- The freedom to think what one thinks, rather than what
one should think.
- The freedom to choose one's own self-actualization,
rather than playing a rigid role.
- The freedom to perceive what is here and now, rather than
what was, will be or should be.
- The freedom to want (desire) and to choose what one
wants, rather than what one should want.
Families and other human systems seem to work best when subsystem boundaries
and interactions are clear, chains
of authority are visible, rules are spoken yet flexible and stressors are confronted.
Members of healthy families can speak openly and affectionately to one another.
They
know who's responsible for what. They can freely discuss what behavior is permitted and
what isn't, and they have flexible roles.
We offer the essentials of our systemic family coaching in
this training. We build on your current coaching skills to
deeply explore couple coaching, relationship systems and relationship ecology, family roles,
family rules and inter-generational
enmeshments:
- how to coach families to change
- how to understand a family: love, protection and control
- how to assess a member's roles and responsibilities in a family
- how individual strengths and weaknesses are formed and
can change
- how families can both protect and damage members - often
simultaneously
Online Family Coaching & Mentorship
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2002-2012 All rights reserved. |
