This post
will continue on from my posts (2/24, 3/19 and 4/14, and 6/2) summarizing how I incorporated ideas from from fields
outside of mental health into my psychotherapy model, as well as how I
tried to fit together seemingly contradictory theoretical aspects of several other
psychotherapy schools. I've discussed why family members shape their behavior
and the the rules by which the family operates in order to to maintain
homeostasis. The rules allow family members to be predictable and to maintain
their function within the system.
I also discussed how and why people can be highly conflicted about
some of the roles they play in their family but cannot and will not admit to
this ambivalence. Often they won't even talk about experiences they had in the
had that affected them and led to this situation. In my post of 4/1/14 I described a study I did which identified
unexplained contradictions in the behavior of parents in regards to how
members should love, work, and play, and what opinions they seem to think are
established realities. This phenomenon was seen considerably more frequently in the
families of subjects with personality disorders than in those without one.
In this post I'll describe benefits that the academic field of
linguistics can provide psychotherapists.
My book Deciphering
Motivation in Psychotherapy discusses in detail the
following, which is also discusses in two previous blog posts:
Since these parents are conflicted about their parental roles, they constantly give off mixed messages to their children about what is expected from them. Much of what they say about things and how they behave in various contexts is often highly ambiguous, but they will deny it if confronted about it. The yearnings they won't admit to somehow come out indirectly in their behavior and conversations.
The aspects of language that gives this away was described in the previous post: http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2016/07/ambiguous-language-and-recognizing_19.html. Any sentence in any language can always be interpreted in at least two different ways. Important examples include the use of adjectives with a seemingly wrong connotation ("excuse" vs. "reason"), a misleading tone of voice or body language, and direct contradictions of previous statements. It is also important to remember that the meaning of anything is interpreted with the context and repetitiveness of all previous statements and behavior - over the entire course of a relationship.
This is also what family and couples therapists need to be aware of when evaluating interpersonal behavior seen in a therapy or research session. Two people who have a history together know important implications in a conversation that an outside listener would not be privy to.
This leaves the children to try to figure out how to simultaneously meet their parents’ contradictory perceived needs to be, for example, both needed by their children and, simultaneously, for their children to just go away. Believe it or not, there's usually a way to combine them into one pattern of behavior. How they do so is detailed in the blogpost:
http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/search?q=actions+speak+louder
