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

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.

Although the most 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.