How Does Your Family Work?

How Does Your Family Work?

What does it mean to say that a family is a system?  To begin, it means that everyone is connected to everyone else–no one lives in isolation.  Now a person may isolate themselves, but when they are with their family, they will act in a pre-determined way.  If one person in the family changes, that change will affect the other people in the family.  Since each member in the family is connected to every other family member–either in a good or bad way–change in one person forces everyone else to adjust to that change.  Or the more common response of a family to one individual member’s change is that the family as a whole will subtly pressure the person making the change to go back to the way they were.

A key concept in understanding families as a system is “homeostasis.”  That’s a fancy word for “sameness.”  Families will even destroy themselves in an effort to maintain “homeostasis.”  My family certainly learned the truth of this principle when one of our kids struggled with drug addiction.  It didn’t matter what we tried in an attempt to resolve the problem, everything would quickly revert back to the “same status.”  Amazingly, each family member reverted to their old familiar role in the family.  It was like the movie, “Ground Hogs Day” all over again–every day, our family struggles to stay the same.

Another key to understanding how families work is to recognize that causality does not work the way we typically think.  We typical;y think that we can determine the cause of some behavior.  We move in a linear, logical way believing we can trace something back to its cause.  But in family, causality is circular.  For any given behavior, there will be multiple causes.  Some will be in the past, some in the present, and some even still in the future.  That’s what makes the search for a cause so frustrating.

As an example, let’s say that eight year old Johnny has a tough time going to bed.  Mom tries and tries to get him to bed, but he cries and resists.  Finally, dad steps in and yells at Johnny. He quiets down and gets in bed.  But then mom yells at dad for being so harsh with Johnny.  So the next night, it all repeats in the same way.  Dad, at first,  is quiet because he doesn’t want to get yelled at by mom, but finally he’s had enough and he yells at Johnny, and Johnny goes to bed.  Who’s the cause of the problem?  Linear causality typically blames Johnny.  But circular causality says they are all responsible for the problem.  Johnny has learned he doesn’t have to go to bed until dad yells.  Dad doesn’t step in–he holds back thinking mom will solve the problem.  Mom yells at dad for being so harsh which causes him to lay low the next night.   It really is “multiple causality.”  Nothing so fascinating as circular causality!

Question:  When have you been frustrated by tying to use linear causality to resolve a problem in your family?

You can check out an earlier post on this subject at http://drstoop.com/your-family-is-a-system/