Successfully Confronting One's Family of Origin Members: What Comes Next?

A commenter on one of my blogposts posed what I thought were some very good questions. The post itself was about how some other therapists think I'm a horrible therapist because I send my patients who come from highly dysfunctional or abusive families back into the hornet's nest to confront and hopefully change ongoing repetitive dysfunctional interactions with family of origin members.

The anonymous commenter asked: Even if a patient is able to confront or dialogue with their parent to stem the abusive behavior, wouldn't that be just the beginning of the work of patient? Just because Mom and Dad have stopped being the insufferable fools that they are, a) they don't necessarily understand the family dynamics at work and b) their corrected behavior is not going to help the patient with his habitual emotional responses that have hampered his life. Once Mom and Dad have been more or less straightened out, what is the patient's next move?

I realized that, although I covered this in detail in my books for therapists, I had not really addressed the answers to these questions here in the blog. So here goes:

First of all, the dialog with the parents usually does include an empathic discussion of the family dynamics and the reasons for the parents' problematic behavior (metacommunication). The goal is to do this without condoning any of their past or current damaging behavior. That problematic behavior is the most powerful trigger and reinforcer of the patient's dysfunctional role within the family. (Many of these roles have been described in detail in previous posts, and are models for the various personality disorders).

How individuals play the dysfunctional roles in everyday life is based on a model in their heads of how to respond to various social situations with significant others. These models are called role relationship schemas. These schemas and the resultant behavior are performed automatically and subconsciously in response to various pre-determined social cues, and are therefore performed thoughtlessly in most situations.

When the parents stop feeding into and/or triggering someone's schemas, this seems to start to free the person up to experiment with alternate ways of relating to others. While going through this process, however, the individual may often also experience something called post-individuation depression or groundlessness in which they come to the realization do not seem know who they are any more. They have yet to become acquainted with the true self that they had been, before this, invariably suppressing throughout much of their lives. Paradoxically, their role behavior or false self feels real, while their true self feels false!

As a therapist, I explain this feeling to them and reassure them this horrible feeling will soon pass.

Many patients will then spontaneously start to experiment with new ways of relating to others. If not, typical cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy interventions from the therapist - which would have before this point been quickly overpowered by the reactions of family members - suddenly become very effective in moving patients forward.

Finally, the patient is instructed on how to handle the issue of family relapses. It is almost inevitable that they and the parents will at some future point fall back into their old dysfunctional habits. As we all know, long-time habits are indeed quite hard to break. However, once the earlier metacommunication had taken place, it is fairly straightforward to bring the relapse up with the parents and refer back to what had been discussed and decided upon earlier. The patient is instructed to wait until everyone cools down before attempting this maneuver.

Before I terminate therapy with a patient, I praise the patient for taking what we had discussed in therapy and employing that which we had decided to do so effectively. I believe it is important that patients take a realistic view about giving credit where credit is due, so they can have confidence that it was they who had actually accomplished the goals of therapy. This reassures them that they can therefore carry on without the therapist's help - and without the therapist having to pretend that the therapist had nothing to do with it at all, as some family systems therapists recommend.