Systems-Centered Training

An Illustrated Guide for Applying a Theory of Living Human Systems

Yvonne M. Agazarian, Susan P. Gantt, Frances B. Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000291100
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia clinica

This illustrated book shows how "thinking" systems offer new ways of seeing people which can help us see and do things differently. The authors describe how a theory of living human systems was developed and even recently revised. This major revision led to a theory of the person-as-a-system and its role-systems map that helps us see which system in us and in others is running the show.

The authors illustrate how life force energy fuels the hierarchy of living human systems and how theory and practice with role-systems can be useful in everyday life. They begin with describing how they have used the new illustrations as a map to locate the contexts of our roles. Using this map has also enabled the authors to identify the role-systems and explore the territory of ourselves and our groups in new ways that deepened our understanding of roles and role locks.

This book illustrates systems-centered therapy and training (SCT) theory by offering a practical theory to guide group psychotherapists, leaders and consultants in working with group dynamics.

Chapter 1
Illustrating the nuts and bolts of a theory of living human systems

A theory of living human systems (TLHS) defines a hierarchy of isomorphic systems that are energy-organizing, goal-directing and self-correcting. Don’t get put off by this sentence or go away. At first, hearing this definition can be a bit daunting, yet the rest of this entire book is about making the meaning of this sentence clearer. By bringing these words to life through illustrations, we can experiment with what it is like to see ourselves and others through the lens of this theory.

This book is a guide to a TLHS. It defines each of the words in this statement and illustrates these ideas. The illustrations help us both apprehend the theory and build a link from theory to systems-centered practice. Importantly, these illustrations have helped us not only formulate the theory but also translate the theory into practice and make it possible to see things and do things in the real world differently from the way we saw or did them before. Yvonne’s theorizing (and consequently that of all systems-centered therapy and training [SCT] practitioners) was heavily influenced by Lewin (1951a), who said, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (p. 169).

For Yvonne, as a deductive reasoner as many theoreticians are, it has always been necessary to find a sign or a symbol or a picture that can build the bridge between the intuitive sense that she knew something important and the words that will describe what it is so that she could communicate to others. Once having found a symbol that seems to represent the idea, she could then keep it in her mind (or in front of her on paper) and think about and explore what it represents.

For many of us, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Our boundaries are often more open to visual information than words, and the visual can help us access a different part of ourselves. Putting an idea, an intuition, or apprehensive information into words is a vital journey we must take, to make use of both the nonverbal and verbal information we all have available to us as resources in living our lives and in working with others to live and work with less of the anguish of personalizing. Going forward in this book, we put pictures into words and words into pictures. By illustrating a theory of living human systems, we hope to make it easier to understand the ideas and help shift from thinking about people to thinking about systems and back again, from thinking about systems to thinking about people. What is new is taking to heart the work of illustrating our theory as a bridge to more theorizing and also as a pathway to practice and everyday life.

Why thinking systems matters

Figure 1.1

This chapter focuses on “thinking systems” as a different way of thinking about people. A TLHS gives us a common language to think about a person as well as the environments or contexts within which we all live. System dynamics powerfully influence us as people or, as we say often in SCT, who and how we are at any moment has as much, and likely more, to do with our system context than our own dynamics. Seeing the system dynamics of individuals, subgroups and the whole group helps give us an understanding of not only our own experiences but also our experience as part of our larger environment or context.

A new language and a new way of thinking

Why is it worth learning a new language and a new way of thinking about group psychotherapy? Systems ideas are not new; they have long been popular. There are many scholars in the field who have addressed system ideas and a whole committee in the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) that devoted many years attempting to find ways of applying systems thinking to group psychotherapy. Applying systems thinking to our own disciplines is not an easy exercise, but we propose it as a useful one. It has provided us with perspectives that allow us to enrich our vision about and our practice in groups, individual therapy and couples therapy and in consultation to professionals who are involved as change agents in many organizational, educational and social settings.

Building a theory means finding the words that will express the idea: a TLHS defines a hierarchy of isomorphic systems. We then take the important step to define each word in this statement. As soon as we have defined each word, we can make an operational definition. An operational definition is like a blueprint for putting the idea contained in the word into practice. Operational definitions lead to hypotheses, and hypotheses lead to testing in the real world. This process is how systems-centered therapy and systems-centered training were developed from a TLHS.

Yet these words are only part of the story. It has always been for us that using images and illustrations helps us elaborate our apprehensive sense and allows us, in turn, to apprehend from our illustrations. We start first with the image of a circle. This image has been essential to the heart of how SCT sees the system and how it organizes the flow of energy in and out. The circle was our first step to give us an illustration that expresses the idea of a system itself.

The system as a circle

Figure 1.2

We have used the drawing of a circle to make the bridge between the word “system,” which is an abstract idea, and visualizing the properties of a system that are important to understand if the idea of a system is to be of use to us. A person, a couple, a family, a team, an organization and a country are all living human systems and can all be represented by a circle.

When we look at the family silhouettes in Figure 1.3, we start to think about mom and dad and even gender roles. When we shift to think of the family system as a circle, we can then start to think about all the things that can happen when we see a system, any system, as a circle, and as an abstraction. For example, if the circle represented a therapy group, we can think about how to best draw the circle of the group. We could draw a closed circle for a closed group or a circle with dotted lines for a drop-in group. Thinking about the circle and how open or closed it is helps us think about the group boundary and it might also give us ways to think about how each group functions. So simply by drawing a circle to represent a group, we have started to think about how group boundaries impact function. This gives a good sense of how illustrations have helped us develop our theorizing. Before we elaborate on boundaries, we shift to introducing the nuts and bolts of our theory.

Figure 1.3

The nuts and bolts of a TLHS

We start with an overview of a TLHS and follow with the methods for SCT that have been derived from the operational definitions of its theoretical constructs. A TLHS includes definitions, some of which you will recognize from general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968) and others of which we defined in the process of developing a TLHS (Agazarian, 1997).

Yvonne was often fond of saying (with a smile on her face) that the overall sentence which defines a TLHS represented her life’s work and only took about 30–40 years to develop. Returning to this same sentence that we used at the beginning of this chapter, the two main constructs of the theory are identified here in bold type. These constructs and the variables (in italics) are the fundamental building blocks of a TLHS upon which SCT has been developed.

A theory of living human systems defines a hierarchy of isomorphic systems that are energy-organizing, goal-directing and self-correcting.

Defining the constructs and variables in systems language has given us a common language to explore the relationship between individual systems and group systems. Without a common language (which a systems approach provides), we would have no alternative but to use psychodynamic language to describe individuals and group dynamic language to define groups. This would be a significant liability as without a common language, there are no common variables with which to link the two for research.

Hierarchy

We start with the construct of hierarchy. Hierarchy defines that a system exists in the context of a larger...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Illustrating the nuts and bolts of a theory of living human systems
• 2 Energy, information and communication
• 3 Transitions in SCT theory and practice 2013–2016
• 4 Role-systems: theory and implications
• 5 Role-systems in systems-centered practice
• 6 Exploring our inner-person system roles
• 7 Implications for practice from our role-systems map
• 8 Theorizing about phases of system development
• 9 Putting the phases of system development into practice
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Index