Internal Family Systems and Marital Therapy

 

As most of my readers know, I believe in a family systems view of the way patients who are repetitively self-destructive or self-sabotaging are acting. I do not think it’s “all in their heads,” but that it serves some sort of purpose for the members of their families as a whole. 

Furthermore, this is ongoing and continues to take place in the present, not only when they may have been initially traumatized as children. The family continues to interact over the trauma, because most people continue to have relationships with their parents. If they don’t seem to, it’s often because they are communicating through third parties. In this and the following post, I’m going to illustrate how the field does not take this into account, even when they look at systems issues.

I have also been writing about how the psychotherapy profession has seemingly given up on family systems theory, except for some masters level family therapists, because of a variety of social factors. Some readers may argue with me about that because of the growing popularity of Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy. I really had not read much about it because I always wondered why he was dealing with internal models of the family system and not the actual living family members. Sort of like Schema Therapy or working on one’s “inner child.”

I finally got around to reading a book he wrote for lay readers in 2008 called You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For. Although I think the kind of treatment described therein can indeed be helpful in many situations in which interactions with one’s parents are not too complicated, I do not think it would have helped most of my patients with severe personality disorders.

And even in cases in which it does work, IMO it would be even more effective if it paid attention to some other factors which the author seems completely unaware of, as illustrated by an extensive case example he wrote concerning a narcissistic doctor he names “Kevin” and his wife “Helen,” who was described as a bright woman with a career of her own. I will talk about this case in a moment.

One thing about the IFS model that I’m not enamored with is his descriptions of peoples’ personality “parts” — protectors, controllers, exiles, critics and tor-mentors. I would like to believe he is speaking metaphorically, but he seems to be following along with the tradition (in my opinion inaccurate) of dividing up a personality into little beings running around inside someone’s head with thoughts, desires, and feelings all their own – not unlike the animated characters inside a girl’s head in the Inside Out movies. Just like the psychoanalysts used to refer to id, ego, and superego as if they were parts of the brain. I find the concept of a “false self” to be much more useful.

A bigger problem is that he sees the problematic behavior of people as trying to protect themselves from reliving past hurts. He says they scan the environment looking for threats and run away at the slightest hint of one. 

That wasn’t at all what I saw in my patients. 

People who couple off with people in a dysfunctional relationship were not only not looking for red flags, they were actively ignoring them! If anything, they seem to be attracted to certain dangers, like a woman from an alcoholic family who marries one alcoholic after another.

I see them as protecting their parents and the ongoing systems dynamics, not themselves per se. I fail to see how being self-destructive can be selfish, unless someone is unbelievably unintelligent. I will give a possible explanation of Kevin’s and Helen’s behavior in that case, consistent with this idea, so back to that.

According to the author, for thirty years Helen had put up with Kevin’s “carping about her taste in clothes, her child rearing, her political opinions, her education, her intelligence, and her logic.” He frequently dissed her in public. She also was said to hate his long work hours and felt neglected. And now she suddenly said if he didn’t straighten up and fly right, she was outta there.

Wait…she put up with this behavior for thirty years before the ultimatum? Why so long? And how did Kevin interpret her staying despite the fact that he must have repeatedly heard many of her complaints during that period. The author attributes Helen’s sudden attack of courage to their youngest child graduating high school, but many people with kids still at home get divorced. 

Furthermore, the book does not mention any ongoing interactions during the marriage with parents and in-laws, despite the fact that he attributes Keven’s behavior to his parent’s behavior towards him when he was a kid. Did the parents just evaporate? Did Helen possibly get brave because they - or her own parents -  died? We don’t know.

According to the book, Kevin’s father left his mother when he was seven, after a fight between them in which the dad hit his mom. The Dad remarried and never saw Kevin again. Mom then went on to have a series of problematic relationships. Sometimes, she seemed to not want to have Kevin around. Kevin handled this by throwing himself into academic and professional success and becoming fiercely independent. I believe this was meant to demonstrate to his mother that he did not “need” her or anyone else. 

After some individual and couples counseling with the very empathic Doctor Schwartz, and when he is starting to get in better touch with himself, Kevin remembers blaming his mother for his dad’s leaving and making her cry just after the breakup when he was seven. He says the “little boy” inside him would rather die than upset her again.”  That sounds like, in his mind at least, he is protecting her - not himself - and feels guilty about what he did.

What I would hypothesize is that the mother indeed felt very guilty about the Dad leaving her and how it affected Kevin, and was blaming herself. This is why she became uncomfortable when he was around and seemed to prefer he be gone and be independent of her “bad” (in her view) influence on him. So he tried to make her feel less guilty by being successful without any need of her. And later maybe displaced the anger he felt towards his mother onto Helen (while displacing his anger at his abandoning father onto his co-workers). 

So perhaps Helen’s “job” was to stabilize him by allowing him to do this displacing. Her initial attraction to him was probably due to something similar to this dynamic going on in her own family.

When he got better, he was able to be more empathic with his mother’s behavior because he realized she felt she did not really deserve any love. I agree that understanding a parent’s problematic behavior helps people feel better about themselves – and about the parents. But of course this aspect of her mother’s behavior just kicks the question of the reason for all this back another generation. Why was she like that?

Schwartz comes quite close to understanding of the dialectical way dysfunctional couples interact, with each enabling the false self of the other and punishing any evidence of each's own true self. Each denies that they need this help themselves even as they give it to the other. They have motives for doing so that have to do with stabilizing their parents, but they also hate that they have to be like this. They are ambivalent. So they also complain about it. Mixed messages!

Schwartz gets away from these ideas by instead thinking that "vicious circles" of interactions are present- just as systems therapists also suppose. But then he also calls it a dance. In a dance one member of the couple may be leading, but simultaneously, the other is closely following. If either fails to do their part, there is no dance.

Once a couple gets in touch with these patterns, however they do it, this means that there is another issue (apart from ongoing interactions with living parents) that arises that may further greatly complicate making changes. Even if, say, the wife is ambivalent about her role, she has thought all along that her husband wanted and needed her to perform it. So if he suddenly says he no longer wants this without acknowledging his ambivalence, at first she won’t believe him. 

But if he somehow convinces her he is sincere, the wife is still prone to think to herself, “Hey wait. I have been sacrificing for him for all this time, and only now he tells me that he did not want me to! And he no longer wants to enable me?” She feels betrayed. This of course also comes out as a double message as her true self really wants the change too. Schwartz talks about members of the couple being triggered by the other, but misses this very important reason why.

 

The Relationship between Marital Problems and Family of Origin Dysfunction

The essay In Consultation: Becoming a Therapist for Each Other: How to Deepen Couples Therapy by Ellen Wachtel Ph.D. in the Psychotherapy Networker from July/August 2018 answers a therapist’s question about a difficulty the therapist consistently ran into in his work with married couples. The question involved how to deal with the emotional difficulties of one of the members of the couple without derailing the work on the couples’ relationship issues.

Since in my experience both members of couples who seek marital therapy usually come to the relationship with pre-existing emotional issues – which I believe to be highly relevant if not crucial to their marital problem – that problem would come up no matter which member of the couple the therapist focuses on. Dr. Wachtel seems to understand this when she correctly points out that, “It’s common for one person in a couple to believe that the lion’s share of the problems in the relationship arises from the other’s emotional difficulties. As a firm believer that ‘it takes two to tango,’ I try to resist joining with that point of view.”

Unfortunately, she also adds, “But sometimes it’s just too big a stretch to see both partners’ contributions as anywhere near equal.” Nonetheless, she goes on to point out that, no matter how clear that seems to be,  the person “chosen” for individual work invariably reacts with, “’Why me? Shouldn’t she (or he) get therapy too?’ Or ‘I react the way I do because he’s so provocative.’”

I must say I agree with the member of the couple who says that. While one member’s dysfunctional behavior may be far more dramatic or dysfunctional than that of the other, in my opinion both members of the couple have a stake in their relationship continuing in its current dysfunctional form. The way this goes down and the reasons it happens were discussed in my previous posts “I’ll enable you if you enable me” and “The Obvious Secret of Interpersonal Influence in Families.”

Briefly, each member of the couple is enabling the other member to maintain a role function that each believes necessary to stabilize their own parents, who are unstable due to an intrapsychic conflict that is shared by the entire family. I call this mutual role function support. Each member of the couple thinks the other member of the couple needs them to play this role because both of them compulsively act out their roles in the face of repeated and obvious drawbacks and negative consequences. Each person would deny this if asked for various reasons, so the other person has to guess why that person continues in their self-defeating or self-destructive habits, and they usually make the guess based on watching their partner interact with the partner’s parents (cross motive reading).

Wachtel comes very close to this formulation by recommending approaching the couple issues by saying, “We’re all stuck with some emotional issues from our childhoods, and even if we work on them in individual therapy, they’re still likely to have a hold on us. In our work together, we’ll try to find ways to keep these issues from affecting the relationship as much as they are now.” She also helps each member of couple construct their genogram to “get a window” into the source of problematic patterns. 

I would add that the emotional issues are not just from childhood but are in fact family emotional issues that are continuous and ongoing.

I have a lot of respect for Dr. Wachtel. She, along with her husband Paul, wrote a book called Family Dynamics in Individual Psychotherapy: A Guide to Clinical Strategies, the first edition of which came out in 1986.  This was one of the first books that attempted to integrate family systems ideas into individual psychotherapy.  (I must also admit I was a little annoyed when it came out because I was still trying to find a publisher for my first book, which attempted to do the same thing, and they beat me to it!)

Unfortunately, in this piece for the magazine, she falls into the exact same trap that Murray Bowen—the family systems therapy theorist who first started tracing dysfunctional relationship patterns through genogram construction—fell into. With his patients, as pointed out by Daniel Wile in his book on couples therapy, Bowen used education, logic, and collaboration to help educate his patients on the reasons for their self-destructive behavior. 

When he sent them back to their families of origin, however, he taught them to use the paradoxical interventions, therapeutic double binds, and strategic maneuvers that are part and parcel of Jay Haley’s alternative type of family systems therapy. In a way, he coaches patients to use this type of therapy on their family members instead of employing Bowen therapy. Wile asked why Bowen did not coach his patients on how to use Bowen therapy on their parents.

Wachtel starts to go down this route. She recommends to each member of this couple to offer support for, rather than merely challenge, the other member’s need to persist in each one's seemingly unproductive habits. In strategic family therapy, this is a paradoxical technique which often seems to have the opposite effect from what it seems to be intended to have: the partner might, in response to being given a green light, start to “be more able to hear his own internal voice that questioned the need to do the task.”

While this might help in couples that come from only mildly dysfunctional families, in my experience with more highly dysfunctional families, any good that comes from a paradoxical prescription will in fairly short order be undone due to the continued  and more powerful influence of the families of origin of each member of the couple. The parents and other family  member, as I often say, will invalidate the efforts of their adult child to step out of their dysfunctional family role with devastating effectiveness.

I find that members of a couple, with the right coaching, can move from the mutual role function support that attracted them to one another in the first place to becoming allies in the efforts of each to deal with his or her primary attachment figures. After constructing the two genograms, the therapist can help devise strategies for each member of the couple to stop dysfunctional interactions with each’s own parents. This can be done with the full understanding of the spouse so the spouse knows why their mate is suddenly trying to change things and understands how the devised strategies might actually work.

In fact, they can practice the strategies with each other. The spouse role plays the role of the other spouse’s targeted parent – and the spouse is usually well acquainted with that in-law and can do so very accurately – while the spouse practices the moves and countermoves planned with the therapist. This practice allows each one to stick with the script more effectively in the face of problematic responses from the parents.

I go into more detail about this process in my upcoming self-help book, due out November 1.

Themes of This Blog Seen In Newspaper Advice Columns – Part III

This is the third in an occasional series of posts showing how several of the issues I discuss in this blog show up in letters to newspaper advice columnists. In order to assure themselves a wide readership, advice columnists must bring us problems that resonate with a fairly wide demographic, and they therefore provide us with another source of information about human behavior and cultural trends.

I follow Jeanne Phillips (Dear Abby), Carolyn Hax, Amy Dickinson (Ask Amy), and Marcy Sugar & Kathy Mitchell (Annie’s Mailbox).

Of course these letters leave out a lot of what might really be going on with the writer, and I will be admittedly speculating about how the behavior described in the letters may be examples of covert issues that are not being directly discussed.

Before each letter, I will discuss the blog subject that seems to be being discussed. I will also include a link to a related post. I am not including the columnist’s responses to the letters. 

*

In the following letter, a father pushes his son away by constantly telling him what a disappointment he is. The son has rejected the trappings of what the father considers successful living. It is quite likely in such situations that the "disappointing" son might be acting out the father's repressed or covert rebelliousness against the very standards the father seems to embrace. 

In such situations, the father probably does things on rare occasions that indicate to the son that the father is "getting off" on what the son is doing - but then the father rejects him as a way of rejecting that part of himself that he finds unacceptable. In actuality, those parts were unacceptable to his own family of origin.  The son then obliges by keeping his distance. Thus, this could be a possible example of the role of Avenger.

12/6/15, Carolyn Hax.  Dear Carolyn: Through the years, my husband has learned to let go of the hopes and dreams he had for his son, that he would achieve financial and social success as my husband defines it: white-collar job, nice house, nice cars, wife and family, membership to country club, all the trappings that he has achieved for himself and that represent success to him. His son, on the other hand, works in the restaurant trade (not in management), lives a pretty bohemian lifestyle but has neither been in trouble with the law nor abused drugs... Husband has never made it a secret that he feels son could have done better. Son has never married at age 40 but now finds himself the father of a child (he plans to take responsibility for the child). We want to be a part of this child’s life. At this point, the only expectations my husband has of his son is that he respond to his efforts to contact him. To no avail. Son responds on his own timeline or not at all despite repeated requests. My husband wants to draw a line in the sand over this. I think we should go with total capitulation for the sake of the future grandchild. How can I be supportive of my husband (“Yes, I understand how frustrating this communication thing is for you”) but still make it clear that I will not take part in any “line in the sand” stance? This is creating tension between my husband and me. - The Step Mother

*

In the States, we tend to think people are basically selfish and don't care what other people think, especially family members. We think kids growing up are more influenced by their peers and the media. Of course, the questions of which media a teen looks at and with which peers he or she chooses to associate with - and there is a large variety to choose from - is ignored in these formulations. The choices people make are no accident. Also, as I've pointed out many times, kids who appear to be oppositional to their parent's wants and values only do that because that is what they think the parents expect of them.

I believe people really are willing to sacrifice their own opinions and desires in order to please their parents. Of course, how much one can challenge parental values depends on how conflicted the parents are about them. In the following letter, a woman performs summersaults trying to both be her own person and please her parents at the same time. 

12/14/15. Ask Amy. Dear Amy: I have been with my partner for five years; he rents his own place and I live with my parents. My parents are old-fashioned and believe I can only live with him when we are married (I used to share this view, but now I don't). I have finished college and have moved back home to pay off my debt and save for a house (or wedding!). My partner's home is five minutes away from my workplace and my folks' house is one hour away (in good traffic), so I do frequent "sleepovers" at his place. This is causing tension in both households. I pay rent to my parents and I help out my partner by cleaning up after myself and buying bread, milk and eggs regularly. But he says that I'm using him, and that I'm just doing the minimum. He says I should be preparing dinners for both of us when I am there, doing washing, or helping by paying rent or at least one utility bill. Now I'm broke, tired and grumpy. I'm at his house cooking and cleaning, and then when I'm at my parents, I'm doing exactly the same thing to appease them because I've slept over at my partner's house. I've gone cold turkey and have slept only at one home, but then money is wasted on gas driving back and forth. I can't afford to move out and I don't want to get married just so we can live together. HELP!!! — Betwixt

*

When someone is playing a dysfunctional role within their family of origin, it can be difficult and painful. When seeking a spouse or partner, such people will often pick someone who will help them to continue to play the difficult role. They, in turn, help their spouses play a difficult role within the spouse's own family of origin. This is what I refer to as mutual role function support. It can be thought of as a form of mutual enabling.  

It is important to remember that the alcoholic enables the "co-dependent" to be a co-dependent as much as the co-dependent enables the alcoholic. The whole process is bidirectional - it goes both ways simultaneously. In the following letter, the son of a controlling mother marries a spouse who is also rather controlling, as even the advice columnist recognized. In a variation on this theme, the mother and the wife start competing with one another over who will have the most control over the poor guy. If the mother's need to control men were a bigger issue for her and her family, he might never have even become engaged in the first place.

12/15/15. Ask Amy.  Dear Amy: I have a controlling, manipulative, guilt-tripping mother-in-law-to-be! I know that each time I hear from her she is just trying to trap me into saying yes to something. These traps include trying to get me to change our wedding plans, and roping me into a jewelry party hosted by her friend (repeatedly pushing on that). She just can't understand the word "no." When I did say no she whined to my fiancé, saying it felt like a slap in the face (can you say "manipulation"?). This has to stop. My fiancé tried dealing with it by telling his mom that I will say no to some things, but I felt this was really his way of calling me "pushy." My fiancé tried the kid gloves approach and it didn't work. I decided to take matters into my own hands and texted her three examples of her overstepping her boundaries and letting her know it would no longer be tolerated. She had the nerve to say it made her "sad." Now he is having a hard time because his mom is upset. He doesn't understand that we have to back each other up, especially in situations like this. His mom is so bad that she needs a copy of his shift schedule at work because she wants to keep track of him. Maybe my approach is too direct, but so what? We are in our 40s and don't need to be under her thumb. I don't let my mom get away with this kind of behavior, and I'm certainly not letting a MIL do this. What is your opinion, Amy? — Upset

*

One of the most read posts on my Psychology Today blog, and the one which generated some of the most heated responses from reader, posed the question of whether parents who had been cut off by their adult children were really as clueless about the reasons that happened as they portray themselves to be in public. With my patients, unlike the followers of many psychotherapy schools, I always presume that people are never too stupid to notice that their repetitive behavior leads to bad outcomes - yet they continue to engage in it anyway.

The following letter is remarkable in that, while ostensibly asking advice, the mother of an alcoholic woman, who is also what I refer to as a Minnie the Moocher, admits as clearly as imaginable that "I know I've enabled my daughter for her entire life."

12/28/15. Annies' Mailbox.  Dear Annie: Our oldest daughter is married to a nice man and they have a sweet 2-year-old daughter. My son-in-law makes good money and my daughter can afford to stay home, but they never seem to have enough to get ahead. My daughter has been known to spend foolishly. They only have one car and it doesn't run half the time. They can't afford another. We let them live in our home for a year rent-free, so they could save enough to purchase their first house. I know I've enabled my daughter for her entire life. She is very spoiled and self-centered. We argue a great deal and exchange hurtful words. Regularly, I surrender to her selfishness and give her money or run errands for her, even though I work full-time. I do these things because she is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and I fear she will otherwise return to that life again. She doesn't attend her meetings anymore. I don't know how to handle her. I'm either forced to defend myself or give in to her whims. She never appreciates anything I do for her and she never does anything for me. Her husband is no better. He is selfish and spoiled by his mother, and he also enables my daughter. She's a good mother, but I babysit a lot. Her husband doesn't complain when she gets together with her friends, but he works long hours and they don't have much time together. I think he feels neglected. How do I know when to do things for her and when not to? How do I tell the difference between enabling and being a good mother? When she gets into one of her horrible, blaming moods, how do I handle that? This child has become a bitter pill to swallow, but I love her so much.  — Mother of a Narcissist

Book Review: Ghost of My Father by Scott Berkun

Half of all profits from this edition of Mr. Berkun's book, Ghost of Our Fathers (Berkum Media, 2014) will be donated to Big Brother Big Sisters of America

Our parents, or our primary caretakers when we were growing up, have a profound effect on us for our entire lives. They have this effect whether they like or not, and whether we like it or not. Attachment research has shown that their interactions with us help shape our mental models of both the world and how relationships are supposed to operate under various environmental contingencies (schemas).

The part of the brain called the amygdala, central to our fight/flight/freeze reactions to fearful stimuli, has specific cells that respond only to the face our mothers (or primary female attachment figures) - and nothing else. It also contains cells that respond only to our fathers/male attachment figures - and nothing else.

Even those who have managed to become more self-actualized or differentiated from our families of origin - who can follow our own muse and live according to our own independently formed beliefs - still hear or feel those old tapes of our parents' admonitions whenever we do things of which our parents routinely disapproved. I know I do, and my parents have been gone for decades. We can choose to ignore these tapes, but there is often a nagging doubt that arises in our minds whenever we do.

In his new book, Scott Berkum describes a feeling of being haunted by the past as well as by the ongoing behavior of his father, and does so eloquently using the words of a poet. I'll mention some examples of his beautifully-worded descriptions of some of the phenomena discussed previously this blog shortly.

Most of what I have written about dysfunctional family interactions on this blog as well as my blog on the Psychology Today website concerns what happens when parents give us contradictory or mixed messages about what is important to them, as well as what they expect from us. But what happens when they seem to give us almost no signals at all? When the parent is a big cipher? This is what happened to the author in his relationship with his father, and I suspect, though to a much lesser extent, with his mother.

His father was gone much of the time during his childhood, spending most of it working or at the racetrack gambling. He completely abandonned the family and the patient's mother twice in order to have extended affairs - once when the patient was eight years old, and once when the patient was in his forties. And yet when he returned each time, the mother would want him back, take him in, and take care of his needs.

He seemed to have little interest in what was important to the author. Much of the time he seemed to barely acknowledge his son's presence. The only sustained interactions they had seemed to occur at the dinner table, when the author, his siblings, and his father  would debate political and social issues. Father would seem to purposely take up a provocative position on the issue, and then stick with it no matter what arguments the author came up with.  Dad would never concede a point.

The author was plagued thoughout his life with a feeling that he was unworthy of his father's attention, and that nothing he did mattered to his Dad.

The author tried on numerous times to do what I recommend to my patients in therapy: attempt to empathically confront Dad to try to find out what made him tick and what he was really thinking (metacommunication). Unfortunately, each time he tried he ran up against a brick wall that would never come down. His father seemed to be incapable of discussing feelings. If the author pressed forward anyway, the conversation would devolve into a shouting match.

The book does not describe what was said during these explosions. With my patients in therapy, I try to obtain a blow-by-blow description of exactly what was said,  in chronological order, as best the patient can remember. This often gives hidden clues about the emotional processes that are taking place in both participants during the battle, as well as to why they are reacting the way they are.  In turn, this can suggest ways to have conversations that do not go in the usual direction and do not become fighting matches.

Interestingly, Dad did apologize for his behavior on one rare occasion and even expressed his love, but both the apology and the expression seemed to ring hollow with the author, who more or less rejected them.

Of course, when the author rejected them, he may not have realized that this let his father off the hook as far as further elaborating on the problem at hand- which was likely the father's goal all along. Saying what a family member wants to hear in a seemingly insincere way and/or when it is least expected often leads to such a rejection of the expressed sentiment. The person who does this then walks away thinking, "Just as I thought - he didn't really want to hear that, but at least I tried." This is an example of the game without end.

The author does discuss some genogram information, although whatever therapists he saw may not have not called it that nor known exactly how that information might best be used to design more productive family interactions in the present. The information about his father's upbringing was rather telling, and seemed to explain one statement the father made in the middle of one of the author's attempts to metacommunicate: "Your problem is you remember too much."

The author's paternal grandfather was described as "the quietest man I ever met." The author adds that he "...was always watching professional wrestling when we visited. He'd stare into the television as if he and it were the only thing left on the planet. His social skills, even with his own grandchildren, were non existent...I don't remember him ever saying a word to me."

No doubt Dad's father had done to him pretty much what he did to his own son. 

Clearly this was Dad's unfortunate role model for being a father. Clearly there was a family rule against fathers and sons communicating meaningfully. The author also admits that he shared some traits with his father - at times more than he cared to admit even to himself - demonstrating the intergenerational transfer of dysfunctional traits. The father must have tried to handle his own feelings by trying to "forget" what had happened.

A clue as to the origin of the family rules is that the father's paternal great grandfather  fled to the US from Ukraine in 1902 to avoid being drafted into the army, leaving his brothers behind. Undoubtedly there was a lot more to that story, especially since the brothers died in the Holocaust many years later. Was there some resulting hidden guilt and shame that had to be kept out of mind and never discussed?

The book is supposed to be primarily about the author's relationship with his father, so Mr. Berkum gives limited attention to his relationship with his mother. While he described them as close, it sounds as though certain subjects were off limits with her as well - like why she remained involved with such a distant man, and why she would take him back after a second betrayal.

The only person in the family who seemed to be able to express anger was the author's sister Tracy, who of course went overboard in doing so. Interestingly, the parents seem to keep her around almost as a pet - she lived with them or next door to them even after she married and had kids - until she, like the author himself did as a rather young man, finally moved away to escape. 

No doubt the parents needed Tracy's expressiveness to release some of their own pent-up rage.

Some concepts from the blog that the author describes poetically:

Distancing: "He mastered wounding us just enough that we'd leave the conversation as quickly as we could." (p. 11).

Existential groundlessness: "...we forget when we become adults that the armor made to survive our youth no longer serves us...yet removing it is painful...it puts us at odds with our family and friends, as tribes prefer to stay with patterns of the past. Most people convince themselves that removing their armor is something they don't need to do. And their families, complicit in the same denial, reward the defense of the status quo, ensuring the...same armor, and the same ghosts, will be passed on to the next generation..." (p. 17).

The power of family ties:  "It is curious, perhaps even strange, that the choices of my father would impact me so profoundly at forty years old." (p. 22).

"I didn't realize that just because you're done with the past doesn't mean the past is done with you."

Mutual role function support: "Each person needs the other badly, in the way an alcoholic needs another drink. When one takes a drink of the other...it feels good. It covers certain holes, allowing them, in moments, to be forgotten, but does not fill them. My mother and father love each other for that feeling, and hate each other  for the same reason." (p. 114).

On the feeling of not counting for his father, after a brief encounter after he returned late from the racetrack:  "It was the bottom of the barrel of his day..." (p. 150).

I could go on. This book is a brutally honest memoir, well worth reading.

The Obvious Secret of Interpersonal Influence Within Families

It always amazed me that therapists, who are in the business of influencing people to change their behavior, are often somewhat clueless as to how individuals are influenced by members of their kin group – that is, by their families.  Even the analysts, who thought that psychological problems derived initially from family of origin interactions, sometimes seemed to think all of the child’s reactions to the parents were somehow innate rather than learned. Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan were the two major exceptions among the early analytic theorists.

When family systems theory came along, its ideas about cybernetic feedback loops of interpersonal influence seemed to me to be a major step forward. However, perhaps because they had to go to the opposite extreme from the schools of individual psychotherapy in order to distinguish themselves, some theorists seemed to think that individuals almost did not exist outside of their social context. Systems therapy pioneer Jay Haley pretty much said as much.

I kept coming across a peculiar problem in their explanations for interactions in family systems. Actually, I noticed that the same problem kept creeping into explanations of human behavior from the individual psychotherapy schools. They all seemed to assume that, on some level, people are just incredibly stupid.  Somehow they believed a person could repeatedly get the same feedback from other people about the effects of their behavior on both themselves and on others, yet just not notice what was happening!

Now of course if one looks for evidence of people behaving stupidly, it’s not very hard to come up with examples. But are they really too stupid to notice that when they act in certain ways, they invariably get hit over the head with a two by four, in a manner of speaking.  Maybe the first couple of times their perceptions of the chain of events might miss the inevitable result because of preconceived biases, but over and over?  

If anything, I would think that being hit on the head over and over with a two by four would make the sequence rather salient! To think otherwise is to turn the whole evolutionary reason for the existence of pain on its head.

So what if we assume that people are not that stupid? To explore this, I would like to make a detour and discuss the different perspectives on how individuals influence one another presupposed by the therapeutic schools. Individual therapies tend to be based on something called linear causality; systems approaches on circular causality. A more powerful concept of causality is, in my opinion, dialectic causality.

For simplicity in discussions of circular causality, systems theorist have usually used as a teaching example a schematized and admittedly oversimplified version of a couple consisting of an alcoholic who drinks and his wife who nags him to stop, so let me start there. 

A linear model would suppose that the nagging or the drinking is one element which causes the two behaviors in question:

Nagging----------------------> more drinking (though this might be seen by analysts as a mere excuse covering up some “real" linear cause).  

drinking---------------------> induces more nagging.

Circular causality, on the other hand, would presuppose a sort of vicious circle with no beginning or end, although in fact all interactions must have a beginning, even if it is only when this couple first meets.

T1 = time 1, T2 = a short time later, etc.

In this case, drinking---->nagging----à drinking--à nagging    - ad infinitum

The second model has obvious advantages over the first model in that it includes the obvious fact that both members of the couple are influencing each other in a continuous process with constant feedback. Systems theory would say that this creates a vicious circle where more nagging leads to more drinking which leads to more nagging and so forth. But here is where the “problem of stupidity” pops up.  

If we assume that the nagger is not stupid, we must assume that she knows that her husband is, at the very least, using her nagging as an excuse to drink, and will drink more if nagged rather than less. The husband tells here so, and his behavior bears it out, so she would have to have to have the IQ of a turnip not to notice!

Conversely, the drinker knows that his drinking induces more nagging. If each member of the couple wants the other member to stop drinking/nagging, and I do believe that to be the case, then how do we explain the fact that both of them continue in the non-productive behavior?

More importantly, both members of the couple know that the other member is not stupid, even if many therapists do not, so how do they explain to themselves why the other member of the couple is inducing the very behavior that he or she is complaining about?

In fact, each member of the couple in this situation is not giving off a congruent message to the other, but a double message. Verbally, the drinker tells the nagger to stop nagging, and the nagger tells the drinker to stop drinking. The way that this is done, however, says quite the opposite. The nagger, by continually nagging in a situation where both of them must know that this is counterproductive, is saying to the drinker: go right ahead! I'll give you the excuse you need. And vice versa.

If we assume that these people are not stupid, then we cannot assume that this is just a vicious circle. Indeed, it would be more consistent with the clinical picture to say that the nagger nags in order to give the drinker an excuse to drink, and the drinker drinks in order to give the nagger an excuse to nag. A strange concept indeed! But how can this be?

Surely the wife does not want the drinker to drink, and the husband does not want to listen to his wife's nagging. I agree. So what goes? 

The explanation that I am advancing here is that each person in the relationship thinks, rightly or wrongly, that it is the other person who wants the relationship to continue in its current form. Each thinks this, because the idea is borne out by the context of the other's behavior.

The drinker, by continuing to drink in a context where this behavior is destined to bring out nagging, is in a sense "asking for it." You've all heard that phrase, haven't you? "You're making me mad, you're just asking for a spanking!" What I am suggesting here is that people literally do think this; it is not merely a joking figure of speech.

Now, since both of these people are "asking for it," then they must at some level want it. This contradicts, of course, what I just said. I just said they did not want it. So am I giving you a double message?

What I believe is happening is that each member of the couple is actually of two minds on the subject. On some level, they are more comfortable with the relationship in its current form, but on another level, they hate it. Now, you may ask, why would they be comfortable with such a horrible relationship on any level? I'll answer that shortly, but first I'd like to point out that each member of the couple has no doubt asked him or herself this very question about the other member of the couple. Each correctly ascertains that the other seems to need the relationship as is, but they have not the slightest clue as to why.

If indeed, as I am proposing, they are both ambivalent about it, a direct question will probably lead to a defensive and negative response. These problematic responses could range from the other person changing the subject or denying any incongruity even exists all the way to bashing the questioner in the face.  In therapy I find that, because of these negative reactions, people will not ask their partners this sort of question, and therefore have to make guesses.

Because psychoanalytic ideas have become common currency in America, these guesses are usually linear explanations based upon what I call "bad psychoanalysis" (with apologies to Dan Ackroyd and Leonard Pinth Garnell). As mentioned, psychoanalytic explanations are linear and not circular or dialectic. The wife, for instance, would never in her wildest dreams come up with the explanation that the husband drinks out of a misguided perception that she needs him to.

Leonard Pinth Garnell (AKA Dan Ackroyd, Saturday Night Live)

She, being a product of American culture, would think he needs to drink for some selfish reason, not an altruistic one. She might think that he needs to drink in order to provide an excuse for acting in a hostile fashion - people are often not held accountable for their actions while drunk - in order to vent his otherwise unacceptible hostility towards his own nagging mother.

Because each member of the couple always plays a certain role, each believes the other wants to play the role, when in fact, each is playing the role compu1sively partly because each thinks the other wants it that way. The compulsivity of the behavior reinforces this view. Both usually believe, and in therapy they will tell you, that they think the relationship will end if it gets better!

There is a vicious circle going on here, but it is completely different from the vicious circle postulated by systems theory. Each member of the couple sees the other's behavior as self-generated, not realizing that it is, in fact, reactive to their own behavior. The more the nagger nags, the more the drinker drinks, because he sees her continued nagging as evidence that she wants him to drink. His increased drinking reinforces the nagger’s view that the drinker needs more nagging, and so forth.

This mutual and simultaneous influence on behavior is what is entailed by the idea of dialectic causality. Diagrammatically, it looks something like this:

The people are labeled Al, A2 etc. because the interaction over time is helping literally to create a somewhat changed individual. Dialectic philosophy tells us that nothing in the universe is constant, change is universal, and even though we are always ourselves, people do change, and much of the change is due to the nature of interactions with others.

Cognitive mental models of how to behave in certains social situations (schemas), for instance, are continuously updated through the twin processes of assimilation and accommodation. The diagram above shows that A and B are continuously pushed further apart over time. The confused, mixed message picture within the relationship creates friction which eventually causes these people to move apart, a phenomenon called distancing. The relationship is co-created by the way each person in the relationship perceives the needs of the other.

Unfortunately, I must add one further complication in order to explain why the couple got started in the pattern in the first place. Circular explanations ignore time, and often genesis, but time is intrinsic in dialectic interpretations. The nagger cannot be nagging only because she is trying to please her husband, although that is a very important reinforcer. She must at some level be more comfortable with the role of "the Nag With An Alcoholic Husband" than without it, despite the fact that this role is so horribly ungratifying.

What I am about to propose is that each member of the couple developed the role they play in response to a perceived need in the family of origin of each. Part of the reason that they picked each other in the first place is because they needed help maintaining an ungratifying role. Some of these roles were described in previous posts. That is why each continues to provide this sort of "help" and why each thinks the relationship cannot change. The concept of role function support by a spouse is exactly like the concept of enabling from the 12 Step literature - except that the alcoholic husband is also enabling the "co-dependent" nagging wife.

Each needs to play his or her role at great personal cost because each believes some disaster would befall their parents, or other important family members, if they stopped playing the role. For instance, Mother might become depressed, or Father might start drinking. We all care about our families deeply despite what we might like to think about that proposition, and the prospect of stopping our role behavior is indeed terrifying.