Group Dynamics Affect Your Client as a Couple or Family Member

With your client before you, imagine standing beside them, all the groups that have a claim on them, and the dynamics that could be involved.

Thomas Fogarty’s concepts spell out family dynamics.

I have found Thomas Fogarty’s concepts helpful in working with families. Below is a link to his collected papers: http:// cflarchives.org/thomasfogartymdcollectedpapers.html

This article is one of his seminal articles: http://cflarchives. org/images/Triangles.pdf

Triangulation is one of the topics Thomas Fogarty discusses. As you listen to how your client relates to those around them, look for ways they may triangulate a third party to create a comfortable distance. The third party could be a person, a group of people, work, alcohol, or a hobby.

Arty explained that he had enjoyed having his own apartment for some years, making a good living working as an architect, and dating casually. Then, as he began to lose his hair and saw age thirty approaching, Arty felt like the oldest guy at the bar. He decided he needed to settle down. He had joined a Sunday school class at a large church nearby. There he met Lydia, who seemed like a perfect mate.

Now, after eight months of marriage, he felt like he was not very good at being married. Arty was an only child and had always been close to his parents. Lydia and his parents got along okay, but she insisted on cocooning herself and Arty away from his parents for the first months of the marriage. She said she wanted to feel like a couple rather than one part of an extended family.

Arty felt like Lydia was asking him to be emotionally intimate in a way the girls he had dated before didn’t require of him. Luckily, he still had his golf buddies from college he could spend time with. Suddenly, golf became a preoccupation, and he played several times a week, much to Lydia’s dismay. The arguments that followed led him to see me.

In treatment, he came to understand that he was using golf as a way to create a more comfortable distance between him and Lydia. I helped him reframe his difficulty with closeness as coming from a lack of practice rather than a sign that he was not meant to be married. Lydia accepted his early attempts, and they worked through this developmental phase of their marriage.

Family abuse dynamics can be surprising.

Much has been written about the dynamics of abuse. I want to mention one thing that surprised me because I believe it was not typical. People may relate to each other in ways that don’t fit our preconceived notions of how things should be. In those instances, we can make errors because of confirmation bias.

For a thirteen-year-old, Ronnie dressed in a surprisingly bland style. I expected at least an outrageous saying on his T-shirt, since Ronnie was admitted to the psychiatric unit because his parents felt they could not control his behavior. It seemed curious that Ronnie was a model patient after admission, followed the rules, and got along well with the other patients and staff. After some time, he explained that he did not misbehave as a result of wanting to do something forbidden or an inability to control himself.

Ronnie saw misbehavior as a means to an end. He would misbehave provocatively. Exasperated over being unable to control him, Ronnie’s mom would lose control and become violent toward him. Then she would become overcome with guilt at what she had said and done, embrace him, and tell him how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. She would promise that she would never do it again. Ronnie sought this intimate moment of closeness and love and was willing to do all the other behaviors to get it.

I would say that verbal abuse is the most common form of abuse and often goes unrecognized because it can be subtle. Suzette Hayden Elgin has written several books about recognizing and defending yourself from verbal abuse. Her first is called The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. She is a linguist, and the book teaches readers to recognize that when specific word structures are used, it is more likely to be verbal abuse. Elgin shows how people respond to the superficial content of the abuse without recognizing the abusive implications of how it is said. Then, she offers ways to counter the verbal abuse. For example, if someone says, “When are you ever going to take the trash out?” most people would devise an excuse rather than see the accusation of laziness, etc., that comes with the statement (Elgin 1985).

Because of how frequently therapists hear clients describe unrecognized verbal abuse, Dr. Elgin’s book should be required reading.

Parent-child dynamics are fluid because all are continuously growing older.

A discussion of parenting dynamics is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, I would like to make some observations from my own clinical experiences of how group dynamics can affect parent-child interaction.

As parents are raising their children, they and their children are continually growing older, making parenting more complex. When children become parents of their own children, they may appreciate their own parents more.

Eventually, children may take on a more parental role in their parents’ lives when parents grow older. Large families may make group dynamics even clearer as siblings take on different roles in response to family group phenomena.

As children grow and think for themselves, they may develop religious, political, or philosophical beliefs the parents find unacceptable. This development can generate guilt and conflict. Parents may feel they have failed if their child does not ascribe to their beliefs and may fear for their child’s soul.

Some parent-child dynamics are not apparent at first. Clients have often complained about controlling mothers not providing enough freedom or respect. Initially, I believed the one-sided picture the client presented. Then I saw evidence that the client had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and realized the mother was likely perpetually keeping her child from putting their hand into the fire and telling them to put down that fragile vase they were holding.

I once heard one mother described as controlling and overprotective. Later, I discovered she had lost a child and was willing to do anything to prevent that from happening again.

A teen might complain that their parents are like police officers. More history might reveal that the teen continually breaks house or community rules. In treatment, they are told they cannot expect their parents to stop acting like police officers until they stop acting like criminals. Change can begin when the teen finds the locus of control within themselves.

I heard complaints from adults who felt they had not been given direction and structure growing up because their parents were too permissive and not authoritarian enough. They said they were surprised that the world did not let them do what they wanted to do. They voiced dismay that parents had not helped them develop the resilience or self-control they needed to cope with adulthood. If a child’s birth altered a parent’s hopes for their future, the child might sense they have the task of fulfilling that parent’s unmet ambition.

Addicts may profoundly regret the effect their addictive behaviors have had on their family.

I want to mention a couple of things about how people suffering from addiction might feel about how their addiction has affected their families. What seems at first to be individually oriented behavior is later seen to be behavior driven by concern for the family group.

I was working in an alcohol inpatient unit when the Salvation Army brought in large bags of presents one December. In the Salvation Army’s wisdom, they had not brought presents for the patients. Instead, they brought them for the patients’ children. They knew how sad the patients were to not be able to get presents for their kids.

Regret is hard to bear.

On another occasion, a patient with an alcohol problem came into an inpatient facility after a suicide attempt. When I talked with him about his attempt, he explained that he was not tired of living, did not look forward to death, and was not depressed. He said he was just so tired of letting his family down and felt that if he were dead, he would not keep doing that to them. As he saw it, it would have been an altruistic suicide. He did not know how devastating suicide can be for a family.

Tackling a family problem from an angle may work better than the frontal approach.

Sometimes, clients have made progress, yet their families can’t see it. The stories in this chapter all involve some sneakiness. Families come to therapy expecting the therapist to be all about change, and they don’t like the therapist to rock the boat. The therapist can use their understanding of this dynamic to free the family from maladaptive patterns.

Juanita, a seventeen-year-old girl, was very responsible and had good social skills. She was ready to date, but her mom was worried about losing her closeness to her daughter. The family therapist working on my unit insisted that if Juanita were to date, she would have to come in at nine p.m. and tell her mom about the date. Juanita did precisely that. Then the therapist scolded her for not talking long enough with her mom and not giving more details. Mom was reassured that the therapist understood her. So the therapist assigned Juanita to go on another date and come in at ten p.m. Juanita was happy to have the extra hour. The therapist repeated the process with variations. Mom eventually realized she would not lose her daughter, and the therapist’s insistence on the closeness was reassuring.