Couples in Conflict

A Family Systems Approach to Marriage Counseling

Ronald W. Richardson

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780800696283
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451417746
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Perhaps no single issue is of greater importance for families in Western culture than the one of marital conflict. When couples fail to successfully negotiate the emotional difficulties of their relationship, it can lead either to years of unhappiness within the marriage or to the breakdown of the marriage and to divorce. Unhappy couples negatively affect their families and even their communities.

Couples in Conflict describes the nature of the emotional process leading to marital difficulties and how a minister or counselor can be a resource to help couples in conflict. The minister/counselor will be able to help them improve their lives personally, as well as their relationship and family life. By extension, couples will also develop skills that will improve their work life and their life in the community. The book provides practical and specific approaches to helping these couples and the issues that a minister must deal with in order to be useful to them.

PART 1

FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY AND MARITAL CONFLICT

1

A New Way of Caring

George and Martha came into my pastoral counseling office for our first meeting. After some preliminaries, I asked, “What brings you in?” George said, “After over twenty-six years of marriage and fighting nearly every day, we are thinking of splitting. Our grown-up son thinks we should, too. A friend of mine said you might be able to help us.” Martha, with a much angrier tone, filled in some of the details as to what they fought about. More important to her than the issues themselves (“All my friends say they fight about these things with their husbands”) was the intensity of the anger she felt. She was so resentful of what George had said and done over the years, and what he had failed to do, that she did not think she could ever forgive him, let alone have warm feelings for him again. George was more optimistic but he appeared rather clueless as to why she was so upset. He claimed to have none of these feelings himself. I will trace my work with this couple through the rest of this book.

The number of things couples can argue and fight about is unlimited. There are the standard issues like money, sex, love (as in “Do you love me?”), affairs, children, relatives, work schedules, roles in and out of the house, reliability and trustworthiness, vacations, beliefs, politics, and so forth. Each couple has its own creative way of discovering twists and turns in these issues. George and Martha fought over all of these. In addition, George had had a couple of one-night stands at conventions he attended.

So what do we do when couples in conflict present us with their unique stories of warring with one another, wanting our help? How do we proceed? How do we provide pastoral counsel? What will be truly helpful? I want to introduce you to a new way of caring for people in emotional difficulty.

A mature, experienced minister had a reputation for being of help to couples in difficulty. He had a young seminarian working with him who had heard about his reputation and asked if he could sit in on a counseling session. The minister said, “Sure. As a matter of fact, a couple is coming in right now and you can join us.” So the couple came in and the minister asked them what the problem was. The husband started with a long list of complaints about his wife and all the ways she was wrong and behaved badly. At the end of his complaints, the minister responded to the husband, “You know, you are exactly right.” Then he turned to the wife and asked her how she saw things. She launched into a similar list of complaints about her husband, how wrong he was and how fed up she was. Then the minister said to her, “You know, you are exactly right.” The seminarian, staring at the minister in disbelief, blurted out, “But Reverend, you just told each of them they are right. They can’t both be right.” The minister then said to him, “You know, you are exactly right.”

This is not a postmodern book about the relativity of perspectives, or a book that claims there is no ultimate good or bad, or right or wrong in the world. As its author, I am more of a positivist than that. I believe in facts, I believe in values, and I believe there are better and worse ways to accomplish our goals. Part of the point of this story has to do with how we think about all of these things. And that is where I want to start this book: How do we think about human beings and the difficulties we get ourselves into in our close, intimate relationships? Moreover, what is a good way to get through it all and get on with doing the good things life and marriage can be about?

The Importance of Theory

Our assessment of the nature of human difficulties stems out of the theory with which we are working. Whoever we are and however we proceed to try to be of help, we will be operating out of some kind of theory about human functioning that assumes some answers to the questions above, whether we have consciously thought about the theory or not. This is inescapable.

What “works” in counseling is a theoretical issue. If we are serious about being of help to others, on a consistent basis, it behooves us to look at the issue of theory. Does the theory fit with our identity as pastoral counselors? Does the theory’s idea of a good outcome fit with our own beliefs and values about marriage?

Dr. Murray Bowen taught psychiatry at the Jesuit-governed Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He would not have spoken about his work as pastoral care, but there was plenty of caring in his work with his patients. He had a decent dialogue with theologians at the university and a number of them were able to claim Dr. Bowen’s ideas as consistent with (though certainly not the same as) their own beliefs about human beings. This was one of my attractions to Bowen as well. This book is a challenge to look at your own beliefs and to figure out where you stand theoretically. I make the challenge by telling you where I stand.

Theory, as I use the term here, does not mean an idea or a hunch as it often does in popular use, as when people say, “I have a theory about that.” Bowen used the term as a scientist would, as a formal statement of how things work. It is based on observation of behavior, forming hypotheses, developing experimental protocols as a way to test the observations, and then confirmation through being able to predict behavior using the hypothesis or theoretical concept. Does the hypothesis fit what is happening? Does it allow prediction as to what will happen next? And does it offer useful explanations for the observed relationship patterns and what to do about them?

Dr. Bowen pointed out that people had long been looking at old fossilized bones embedded in sedimentary rock, of creatures that lived many thousands of years before us. No one knew quite what to make of the bones, especially since many of the creatures were not known to exist anywhere on the planet. Then along came Charles Darwin who offered a theory that could help make sense of what was being observed. As Bowen said, without Darwin’s theory we had a kind of “observational blindness;” we were unable to account for what was right in front of our eyes. This is what a good theory does for us. It provides a way of seeing what has always been in front of us.

Whatever you arrive at theoretically for yourself will have tremendous practical significance. All action is based on some sort of presumption about the nature of reality, of what constitutes human nature, and what it means to be effective in our acts of helping. We cannot function without a theory, whether it is examined or not.

A Brief History of Bowen Family Systems Theory

Dr. Murray Bowen worked with a huge variety of deeply troubled individuals, couples, and families. His truly pioneering work in developing family-systems-based psychotherapy, starting in the early 1950s, is equivalent to the kind of revolution wrought by Sigmund Freud. He won a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant to hospitalize not only his severely impaired schizophrenic patients but also their mothers. Quickly discovering that the emotional issues were much larger than just between the patient and the mother, he got another NIMH grant in 1954 to hospitalize whole families.

He put together a team of researchers to observe, as objectively as possible, family interactions. This was not primarily a treatment program. He wanted to understand the functioning of these families and what sort of family processes might, for example, lead to a schizophrenic break for “the patient.” Whole families lived in cottages on the NIMH grounds as they led normal lives. The father went off to work and the “normal” siblings of the patient went to school. The researchers observed each family member on a round-the-clock basis. They watched the family as it “ate, played, and worked together through periods of success, failure, crisis, and physical illness,” for up to two-and-a-half years.

The prevailing theory at the time was that the schizophrenic child’s problems were a result of a dominating mother and a passive father. However, the mother was seen as the real problem. She was called the schizophrenogenic mother. Bowen wanted to see whether any of this was so, and how things worked in these families. Eventually, he began to see that the psychotic breaks of the patient were, in fact, the symptom of an emotional process at work in the whole family.

Bowen, who enjoyed watching football, said that his research was like observing families from the top of the stadium, rather than being down on the sidelines and having a more limited, partial view of the action. From up high, with a wider angle of view, he could see the whole process of interaction, what each person was doing and how they were moving within the family.

By 1960, he decided that most children’s problems were connected with difficulties between the parents. He stopped treating the children who bore the symptoms and who appeared to be “the problem” in the family. Parents who bought the idea that the issue was theirs and that they needed to modify their relationship discovered that their child’s symptoms disappeared. He began to use his theory exclusively with all of his patients, including those in his private practice, and it lead to good treatment outcomes.

Then he made a huge, unprecedented jump: he began to apply his concepts to himself and his own family. Thus began a twelve-year effort to study his own family of origin and his part in the emotional process there. He discovered a consistency of emotional process through all of the families he worked with, including his own. The primary difference between them was in the intensity of the emotionality, with the most symptomatic families being the most intense.

In addition, his psychiatry residents at Georgetown tried out his ideas in their own families as well as with their patients. He noted that the students who worked on relationships with their own family members were also doing the best in their clinical work. They were working out their own personal and relational issues with the use of his theory, and presenting themselves less often for therapy.

The Family as an Emotional Unit

Bowen developed the idea of the family, rather than the individual, as the primary unit for understanding human functioning. He thought trying to understand problems from the individual point of view gave only limited information. Individuals’ problems (and strengths) are strongly connected to their interactions with others. Individuals contain only a part of the problem. They are not “the problem.” A good understanding of any one individual is accomplished only by seeing that person as part of a larger whole.

This perspective is not the same as seeing the family as a group. The group concept is still about a collection of individuals who have “group interactions.” His approach conceives of the family as a single emotional organism, not simply as a group of individuals who have somewhat closer emotional ties. Even though the forces may be invisible, the governing power of the emotional system over the individual can totally affect the trajectory of a person’s life.

Bowen’s thinking about families went against the prevailing theoretical and therapeutic ideas of his day. Nearly all of psychology and psychoanalysis focused on the individual and the deep inner processes of the psyche. In couple conflicts, for example, the difficulties might be because an obsessive personality had married a hysteric personality. This was a typical diagnostic formulation. Each person needed psychotherapy in order to get past their impasse. I used this model when I began doing counseling after graduate school. I did not just use it with counselees. I could also diagnose my wife’s problems, or anyone else with whom I had conflicts. Conveniently, the individual model allowed me to leave myself out of these diagnostic formulations.

One small, nontherapeutic example of the usefulness of the perspective of family as the primary emotional unit is when I do consultation with various kinds of staff groups. As part of my work with them, I often ask them to do a presentation of their family of origin to the group. As each staff member presents his or her family, the others express some variation of enlightenment like, “Ah, now I get it. I can see how you got to be the person you are with us here on this staff.” The person’s staff behavior is put in a larger perspective. It is as if they are seeing a person whole, as part of a larger unity that they knew nothing about before; they are now getting the complete picture and the person makes more sense to them. Staff groups find this helps them stop personalizing their problematic interactions with one another.

Thinking about People in Their Emotional Context

Seeing the family as a single emotional organism requires a major shift in our own thinking. From infancy, not just in graduate school, we are taught to see problems as a result of processes within individual people and their personalities (“You are a bad little boy”; “You are a good little girl”). This goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. When God asks Adam about eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam blames Eve. She was the problem, not him. Then she blames the serpent, attempting to excuse herself. Neither one included him-or herself as a part of the problem. The more anxious we are, whether as participants in an emotional difficulty, or as helpers, the more likely we are to fall back on the individual model—“The difficulty in this relationship is you. You need to change and things will be better.”

George and Martha each perceived themselves as a victim of the other who was the oppressor. We as helpers can easily take on the expected role of rescuer, siding with one individual against the other. This is a standard triangle. It is automatic. All families do a version of it around many different issues. Being a fluid process, the role of each family member can change. Family is where we learn our specific ways of acting out the pattern. Then we can play it out in any social grouping as adults: in a congregation, in our workplace, with friends, and even at a societal level between groups of people.

George and Martha had been to another counselor many years before coming to see me. George had the clear sense that the counselor sided with Martha and saw him as “the bad guy.” George said, “I know I did a lot of bad stuff, but I don’t think it was all just me.” After just a few sessions with that counselor, George refused to continue so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Family Systems Theory and Marital Conflict
• Part 2: Family Systems Theory in Counseling
• Afterword: On Character
• Appendix 1: Family Diagram Symbols
• Appendix 2: Training Programs in Bowen Family Systems Theory
• Selected Bibliography
• Index