Changing with Families - A Book About Further Education For Being Human

by Richard Bandler

  For example: If the therapist were to ask Tom why he objected to Amy's going to work, Tom would probably elaborate on what he has already told the therapist and, in so doing, increase the demand on the therapist to judge who is right and who is wrong. Instead, if the therapist asks Tom how he is succeeding in his aim to give security to his children, and how Amy is in agreement with this aim, then the therapist's questions will yield information and awareness which will enable the pair to make a start in a new direction. Asking Tom why he does not want Amy to go to work only reinforces the old tendencies. The therapist, himself, needs to develop perspective at the process level. What this means is that the therapist must become freely involved, with his eyes, ears, and body responding to the family members, while, at the same time, remaining outside of their family system. The therapist is involved in the process of exploring, feeling his way, taking steps and risks. The family members are involved in content, trying to get their way, to look good, not to be at fault. They are trying to find a way to cope with today — the therapist is educating them with tools which will be resources for them for the rest of their lives. To provide learnings which will permeate a family system in this way, the therapist needs to add another dimension to the transformation of the family system. This is accomplished by simply providing the family members with a new perspective, a view from his eyes of their own system. Breaking the calibration will succeed only to the extent that family members learn that they must get feedback and break calibrated communication loops. Family therapy becomes even more pervasive when the therapist adds to this his own explicit perception of system process, from inside as well as from outside. Family members, involved in content with each other, at a point in time need to stop and tune in to process, to get a perspective which will enable them to go further. Staying with content has limited possibilities. Many content issues can be resolved with the new ways of coping, once the family members begin to understand their system and obtain the tools necessary to make it work for them. Our goal is to get as many of these tools in the hands of each family member as is possible. Our approach is that problems are endless. The therapist is in a no-win situation if he uses a "problem-centered" approach. Therefore, we use a "new-coping" approach. The problem is not the problem; coping is.

  One of the most powerful techniques to achieve perspective of process of which we are aware at this time is sculpturing, by which the therapist translates the family's processes into body postures and movements which represent the communication he has observed in the session. For example:

  A father, Jack, might start out standing erect, with a rigid body, his head tilted up, appearing super-reasonable, a pillar of strength which is impenetrable. As he does this, his wife, Joyce, is kneeling in front of him in a worshiping, admiring position, staring up. Meanwhile, one by one each of their three children climbs onto Jack's back, until he can no longer bear the weight and collapses to the floor. At this point, Joyce springs up, taking a blaming posture, pointing her finger, her nostrils flaring, until Jack finally struggles to his feet and becomes a stiff board again so Joyce can kneel and worship him.

  This visual display presents family members with a picture of process. It allows them to see how the patterns of their communication cycle change the content while the process remains the same.

  Added perspective can be achieved by the therapist's describing the process as he moves the family members through this physical, as well as visual, process:

  Step One: Jack stands erect, Joyce kneeling, children beginning to climb on Jack.

  Therapist: I see Joyce appearing to admire Jack's ability to hold things together, being so smart and being someone she can look up to, while the kids are pulling on him to get some attention because he is always so busy keeping things together, and you people want some connection with this big, strong, smart man. And he is tough to get through to, so you pull harder and climb on him more to get him to notice you. Maybe you get in trouble in school so he has to help you with your homework. Or, you could ask him a continuous stream of "why" questions, and, because he is so smart, he'll have to answer. Meanwhile, you, Joyce, look on, admiring his ability to hold things together, until Jack, who looks so sturdy, suddenly falls down and has another breakdown. Now you kids can have contact — he can spend time with you, but poor Joyce is abruptly thrown into the position of keeping everything together. And where is her big, strong man? He now needs her to take care of him, so she nags him and nags him and finally reproaches him into getting back on his feet. Finally, Jack gets so scared of what Joyce might do that he struggles up and pretends that he is as strong as an ox. Now, he has to leave behind him his connection with his children, because he has to work extra hard to make up for the time he was sick. You kids miss him, so you begin to climb on him once again.

  This adds yet another dimension to the process picture. The therapist can go even further and ask family members to report on their internal experience as they move through this process ballet. Jack, for instance, who is standing strong and erect, might say he actually feels lonely and like a tree branch which is about to break. While Joyce is blaming a broken Jack, she might report that she isn't really mad but scared and desperate. This, too, can add perspective to process. It might be carried yet another step by asking each family member, in each position, what would take off the strain. Jack might ask Joyce to stand up and help him instead of admiring him. As she stands, she might say, "I always wanted to help you and be on the same level with you, but I thought you could only stay strong if you thought I was weak and needed you to be that way." This kind of perspective on process not only removes blame and breaks calibration, but it also gives the family members an awareness of the process. This provides yet another choice for the family members to focus on in times of trouble. Before, they only had one perspective, their own. Now they can add to that a perspective of process and an awareness of how each family member's perspective of the same process can be different.

  A perspective of system process provides family members with a tool to use to share their different perspectives without fault-finding. This offers family members the opportunity to learn about the various choices available to them within their own family system to send and receive messages. They have a tool to comprehend these differences and to learn from them. Of course, not every family will achieve this perspective in one session; each family will develop a sense of process at its own speed, an inch at a time, and each inch will be valuable to them. The overall strategy of the therapist in assisting families to achieve this perspective requires that he is comfortable with being patient, and that he is able to tap the family's own sources of inventiveness to find ways of allowing them to achieve this perspective of process.

  We wish to emphasize that the particular examples which we have presented here are precisely that — examples. Our hope is that each of you will use your ability to create interesting and dynamic variations on these examples. However, we would make two suggestions:

  1) Fully use the skills and resources of the family members. For example, if a family member is a sculptor or painter, or a musician, encourage them to use those mediums for learning.

  2) Involve the maximum number of channels for learning when creating an experience — all of the input channels (the senses), all of the representational systems, and all of the output channels. Using this principle will encourage maximum learning by all of the family members.

  The crises which occur in families present all of the members with situations in which they struggle to maintain a sense of self-worth. They are caught in a vortex. It is up to you, the therapist, to distill from the data the process description in clusters of information, and to present it in a non-judgmental way, so that, instead of having to understand innumerable bits of content, the family members need only to cope with three or four steps of process. They then can gain a perspective from which to start to grow.

  Transforming the System by Re-calibration

  Although the m
ost well-formed outcome of family therapy is a completely open system, with perspective, feedback, freedom to explore and take new steps, this is not achieved by the therapist's attacking and breaking calibration loops at random like a bull in a china shop. A family system is a delicate structure which serves as the basis for interaction of a group of human beings who are not perfect and who don't need to be. Who can become enlightened overnight? Patience is a prime tool for the successful family therapist. It is not our job to thoroughly transform an individual family member. This could well result in that member's becoming alien to the system, thereby placing even more stress on it. The family therapist's task, rather, is to transform the system as a whole to a point wherein stress and strain are reduced, and nurturing and support can develop, so that all family members can continue to grow. Family therapists should not be trying to gain every possible inch from every family member, but, rather, they should be feeling their way, looking for a minimum amount of change for maximum results, while, at the same time, teaching family members how to use feedback instead of calibration and how to achieve perspective of system process.

  Concentrating on achieving the maximum amount of change with a particular family member can result in skewing the system. Each family already has the possibility of change; our task is to increase those possibilities, those choices for growth and change for all family members. One of the most delightful experiences we can have and one which we continually work to create is that which we call the snowball effect — a therapeutic intervention which results in the family members' taking charge of the process of change themselves. Too rapid a change will disrupt the family system; too slow a change will discourage the members of the family who desperately want some new choices and experiences for themselves. This is the trickiest part of family therapy, to evolve the system as a whole to a point at which it provides a solid foundation of support among family members who have the tools with which to proceed in a certain direction. This is the state wherein individual family members feel free to make choices for themselves. The therapist should realize that family therapy is based upon the understanding that every change in any member of a family system has a ripple effect on every other family member. So, if little Johnny, say, is catatonic, to focus our energies on curing Johnny's symptoms will be futile, since, as soon as he returns to the family system, he will respond to that system in the same old ways, unless the patterns of that system have been changed.

  Actually, focusing on the family member who has the symptoms is taking the hard path. In order for Johnny to overcome his catatonia directly, he will have to change a tremendous amount and in many ways, especially if the change is to survive when he returns to the original family system. However, if each member of the system changes only a small amount, in a few ways, then the result is that the changes will permeate the system, and Johnny's symptoms will become unnecessary. Checking this principle is easy if you review your own experience. If you have left home and gone to college or gone in the service, or even moved away and then returned to visit your original family or old friends, you can remember how all of you had evolved and changed. So, at first, it was an awkward situation for you, and, in some cases, it may have remained that way. You returned alien to the former system, and this is just what we must avoid in family therapy if the result is to be an environment in which every member can be nurtured and can grow from the foundation of support for each which the family system will provide.

  Imagine that you are standing in front of a stack of glasses, water glasses, which have been carefully placed in a pyramid so that each row of glasses supports the row above it. The top row has one glass, the next row has four glasses, the next row has nine glasses, and the one underneath that row has sixteen glasses. Each row of glasses provides a structure to support all of the glasses above it. If you wanted to take these same glasses and build a new structure which would give you greater choices about how you approached the task of getting a glass, you would not start by pulling glasses from the bottom row; you would not even take all the ones on the left. You would have to start at the top, working down a row at a time, or you would have only destruction. This is somewhat similar to how a therapist should proceed through a family therapy session. Viewing the family through the metaphor of the pyramid of glasses will help to remind the therapist that he should not succumb to the temptation to remove the glass with the smudge on it without any reference to the possible effect of his action on the other glasses.

  To organize this process, you can make a rule that every interaction which opens a door or breaks a calibration must be understood by all the family members who observed it. It goes something like this:

  The therapist has an interchange with the husband/ father and breaks a calibrated loop which the father has about his son's communication. The therapist then turns to the son to make sure that the boy has also broken his part of the calibrated loop and understands that the father has changed (re-calibrated). The next step is for the therapist to address himself to the mother, who has been observing, and to assist her in understanding and accepting the change in the relationship between her husband and her son. This cycle goes on, each step leading to the next, and all members tuning in as changes occur. This process also accompanies moves to achieve perspective with respect to family process, rotating from person to person, breaking calibrated loops and then re-calibrating the rest of the system to this new part. The whole process of transformation then becomes, in a sense, a new chain in which each link now connects with the next one. This guides the therapist in establishing the best speed and direction for that particular family's system. It provides a safeguard against random jumps which might unbalance the system. Thus, breaking calibration, achieving perspective with respect to family process, and constant forging of new links in the family system are the structure and strategies which weave together the individual interventions to transformation of a family system. These constitute the second phase of a family therapy session, and they also build the road which leads to the third and final stage of a family endeavor. In a sense, we, as therapists, work to reclaim the banished parts, to awaken the sleeping parts, and to connect these newly available assets for greater energy and strength. Thus, we are not really adding anything to the family system; we are only making available to the family members for new uses the resources which were already there.

  III. CONSOLIDATING CHANGES

  In the third and final phase of the family therapy session, the therapist works to consolidate the changes which the family members created as part of the model experience in Phase II. We have identified three parts to this phase:

  1) Review of process of the family therapy session;

  2) Getting feedback regarding the process from each member;

  3) Developing and assigning homework.

  This final phase is an important step in each session, whether or not the specific experience which the family members and the therapist identified in Phase I actually happened in full detail in Phase II. The fact that the family members and the therapist have been engaged in the process of working cooperatively to create something for themselves, is the foundation of every session. Again, the process is the foundation for change, not the specific content. Seen from this perspective, each interview session has a life of its own; it has a wholeness of its own. Continuity is established by developing new building blocks at each meeting of the therapist with the family.

  The purpose of the therapist's actions in this, the final phase of the session, is to assist the family members in solidifying the gains which they secured for themselves in the session, in effect building a new family history, which now becomes a base for new confidence in taking risks to change and grow. Verily, family therapy occurs in the real world, with real time constraints. But, when a family therapy session is over, the family members have the opportunity to try their new wings on their own. The therapist works to create the conditions which will make it possible for the family to continue the proce
ss of change between sessions — the returning family will be different from the departing one.

  Review of the Process of the Session

  A family has just involved themselves in a therapeutic session whose announced purpose is to assist the family in change. As we emphasized in our presentation of Phases I and II, the key to effective intervention by the family therapist is identifying and breaking calibrated loops in the communication patterns existing among the family members — that is, supplying explicit, conscious feedback in the patterns of family communication where it no longer exists. This review has, essentially, the same elements of process, the process by which the therapist, again acting as a model of congruent communication, provides specific feedback about the session to the family members. This review of the therapeutic session by the therapist is consistent with the principle of assisting the family members in coming to understand the process by which they arrived at the place where they are now. The therapist begins his review by reminding the family members of the state which they were in when they first came to this therapy session, and then, step by step, he recounts the processes which have occurred: What happened during Phase I, the ways in which they all worked together to understand what they wanted, and then prepared to create a new experience in growth for themselves; what happened in Phase II, actions specific to the therapist and to each of the family members.

  This review gives the therapist the opportunity to teach the family members his understanding of his experience in working together with them for change. He identifies the steps which he considers important in the process of family change, e.g., the identification of calibrated communication loops. He states how, in his perception of the process, the family members worked cooperatively to create new choices for themselves. He carefully enumerates the steps taken by the family in the process of gaining these new options. By this description of the process of the therapeutic session, the therapist makes explicit the tools and skills which the family needs to continue the process of growth and change which they have begun. In our experience, the most desirable outcome of a family therapy session is not simply achieving an experience which the family can use for future growth, but also is understanding that experience, and learning the specific tools which the therapist and the family members employed in the process of its creation. More desirable than just creating an experience of what they want is the explicit learning of the skills necessary to give them new ways of communicating as a family. When this last kind of learning occurs, they move to a truly open system, one which allows them to cope creatively and effectively with any disturbances which might arise, regardless of