Why family work looks at the whole family
A 14-year-old girl stops going to school. Her parents, understandably, see the problem as hers: she is anxious, she needs help, so she should see someone. But when the whole family comes in together, a different picture starts to appear. Her dad has been working away three nights a week since the spring. On the mornings she can’t face school, her mum stays home with her, and the house is calm for the first time in months. Nobody planned it, and nobody is to blame, but the school refusal has started doing a job in the family.
The idea behind this way of seeing came from an unlikely source. In the 1950s the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in California proposed that distress can come from the patterns of communication a person is caught in, not only from inside the person. That shift, from the individual to the pattern, became the foundation of systemic therapy. A family is a bit like a mobile hanging over a cot: touch one piece and every other piece moves.
In the 1970s a group of psychiatrists in Milan turned Bateson’s ideas into a practical method. Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin and Giuliana Prata developed ways of interviewing families that helped them generate new information about themselves, rather than waiting for the therapist to deliver an insight. Their methods are still taught in UK systemic training today.
In practice, systemic work means being curious about the relationships around a problem as well as the problem itself. Sometimes the whole family attends, sometimes a parent and young person, sometimes just one person thinking about their family. The aim is never to find who is at fault. It is to understand the pattern well enough that everyone can step out of it together.
If one person’s struggle is affecting your whole household in Tunbridge Wells, a systemic approach may help more than individual therapy alone. Read more about the systemic ideas I draw on, or get in touch.