Family Therapies

A Comprehensive Christian Appraisal

Mark A. Yarhouse, James N. Sells

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830889051
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In Family Therapies, Mark A. Yarhouse and James N. Sells survey the major approaches to family therapy and treat significant psychotherapeutic issues within a Christian framework. A landmark work, this volume was written for those studying counseling, social work, psychology, or marriage and family therapy. Fully updated and revised, this second edition includes new chapters on cohabitation, LGBT+ marriage, and family formation. Other issues covered include- crisis and trauma- marital conflict- separation, divorce, and blended families- substance abuse and addictions- gender, culture, economic class, and race- sexual identityYarhouse and Sells conclude by casting a vision for an integrative Christian family therapy and offer timely wisdom for therapeutic practice in the midst of a diverse and rapidly changing global context. Family Therapies is an indispensable resource for those in the mental health professions, including counselors, psychologists, family therapists, social workers, and pastors.Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

Foundational
Considerations

1

A Christian
Understanding
for Family Therapy

Happy families are all alike;

every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.

LEO TOLSTOY, ANNA KARENINA

LEO TOLSTOY’S FAMOUS QUOTE indeed reflects the debauchery within marriage and family occurring within his culture. Pain, injury, tragedy, injustice, and sin left a unique scar on families in that era, as they do today. As with most who seek family therapy, Tolstoy experienced the despair of life within family and anguish within his marriage. Both of his parents died before he was ten. He witnessed the birth of thirteen children and the death of five. He experienced and expressed through his writings the joy of marital intimacy with his wife, Sonia, and the depths of despair in marital conflict and separation. It is in his great work Anna Karenina that he gives his treatise on marriage and family. It was written in 1875, a time when European aristocracy was seeing marriage as passé and even silly. The culture of his day had rejected the idea of sexual fidelity and the role of parents in nurturing children to adulthood. An existential malaise dominated the Russian nobility, and the idea of marriage was seen by many as idealistic, naive, and digressive. Yet he presented a view of human life that is made meaningful through the experience of marriage and family relationships. To Tolstoy, the DNA of civil society was a successful marriage that could provide illumination on life so as to prevent tragedy from creating despair, and bliss from creating naiveté.

Tolstoy lived and wrote during a time when a new idea was pervading Europe—that marital intimacy was based on “love” (where “love” meant a romantically idealized experience in which individuality is made whole by the attachment to the other). This concept had a profound effect on Western society, and it remains the dominating paradigm of marriage today. Aspects of this idea have a clear and definite Christian element. However, many components of love-based marriage refer to a different form of love. The romantic love of the nineteenth century was a sentimental love, and many hold that this idea of an emotionally-centered relationship is a primary reason for relatively high divorce rates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a touch of humor, Stephanie Coontz writes that in the nineteenth century the United States led the world in romantic marriage as well as divorce, when idealized romance was lost: “Between 1880 and 1890 it experienced a 70 percent increase in divorce. In 1891 a Cornell University professor made the preposterous prediction that if trends in the second half of the 19th century continued, by 1980 more marriages would end by divorce than by death. As it turned out, he was off by only 10 years!” (Coontz, 2005, p. 181).

We, like Tolstoy, have a high view of marriage and family, but not the romantic view that has been carried into the twenty-first century. Indeed, we carry a perspective that the Christian faith has a unique significance in understanding the potential of relational life. Furthermore, we believe that the effectiveness of the counselor, psychologist, therapist, and pastor who seeks to bring aid to families or couples in crisis is better equipped when he or she can utilize the central themes of the Christian tradition with the best practices drawn from mental health theory, research, and technique. In this first chapter we seek to articulate how the great themes of biblical Christianity—creation, fall, redemption, and glorification—interact with the essential challenges of marital and family existence: family function, family identity, and family relationship.

Family as Figure and Ground: A Metaphor to Understand Family in Twenty-First-Century Culture

Marriage today is a topic that can raise sharp disagreements. An explanation as to how and why such divergent views exist can be understood through one of the great discoveries from psychological science: figure-ground perception. Most people recognize this concept by two popular images—one is an image of either a white vase or two facial cameos; the other is either an 1890s Victorian woman or a withered, wrinkled older woman. When you see one, you don’t see the other. Much can be said about the similarity between figure-ground and the state of the family in the twenty-first century. We tend to see family in a way that does not permit us to see it any other way. Consider the following issues (listed alphabetically):

• Abortion rights
• Cohabiting relationships
• Corporal punishment
• Divorce
• Family violence
• Gay marriage
• Infidelity
• Pornography
• Poverty
• Single-parent family structures
• Traditional family roles
• Transgender recognition

When considering the issues on this list, are you seeing social change, advancement toward justice, and positive resolution emerging? Or are you seeing decline, disarray, and social degradation? How you see the social/ political issues related to family will influence your perception about the unfolding of events. If we see the family in a state of decline, we will not likely perceive good emerging from any change. If we see the recent changes as good, we are likely vulnerable to a lack of discernment to some of the factors that affect spouses, parents, and children. Consider the basic supposition of notable authors.

Köstenberger states as his opening argument in his book God, Marriage and Family that “marriage and the family are institutions under siege in our world today, and that with marriage and family, our very civilization is in crisis. The current cultural crisis, however, is merely symptomatic of a deep-seated spiritual crisis that continues to gnaw at the foundations of our once-shared societal values” (2010, p. 15). To Köstenberger, marriage and family are under siege and civilization is in crisis—powerful words that we don’t seek to dispute. Rather, we seek to utilize a systemic mentality addressed throughout this book, which is, “If I see it this way, how will I not see it in other ways, even when those other ways might be accurate?”

Girgis, Anderson, and George wrote in the opening chapter of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, “In just a few years, the battle over marriage has engaged every branch and level of American government and the whole of our civil society . . . . It is hard to think of a more salient cultural conflict” (2012, pp. 4-5). Again, this is portrayed as a “cultural conflict” depicting warring parties in which the most powerful wins.

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin wrote in The Marriage-Go-Round,

In the space of a half century, then, we have seen the widest pendulum swing in family life in American history. We have gone from a lockstep pattern of getting married young, then having children and for the most part staying married, to a bewildering set of alternatives which includes bearing children as a lone parent and perhaps marrying at some later point; living with someone and having children together without marrying; or following the conventional marriage-then-children script, perhaps later divorcing, then probably living with a new partner maybe remarrying. . . . Consequently we choose and choose again, starting and ending cohabiting relationships and marriage. (2009, p. 8)

Cherlin emphasizes a “bewildering set of alternatives,” with Western civilization itself as literally dazed, befuddled, or confused. The wording is powerful.

Balswick and Balswick carry a different tone in assessing the landscape of family. They wrote in A Model for Marriage: “Though many family social scientists are concerned about these modern trends, some hold to a postmodern optimism that embraces alternative forms of marriage.” According to them, the outdated, traditional, lifelong monogamous marriage needs to be revised. They advocate for alternative forms to better accommodate the diverse needs of a postmodern society, such as “same-sex marriage, cohabitation, remaining childless, serial marriage” (2006, p. 18). The nature of the cultural war emerges more clearly here; it becomes the battle between the “outdated” and the “updated.”

Stephanie Coontz wrote in Marriage, a History:

Many of the things people think are unprecedented in family life today are not actually new. Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before. There have been societies and times when non-marital sex and out-of-wedlock births were more common and widely accepted than they are today. Step families were much more numerous in the past, the result of high death rates and frequent marriages. Even divorce rates have been higher in some regions and periods than they are in Europe and North America today. And same-sex marriage, though rare, has been sanctioned in some cultures under certain conditions. (2005, p. 2)

This gives us reason to pause, to study—to think and then to act.

Finally, as Waite and Gallagher wrote in The Case for Marriage, the most basic becomes the most controversial:

In America over the last thirty years we’ve done something unprecedented. We have managed to transform marriage, the most basic and universal of human institutions, into something controversial. For perhaps the first time in human history, marriage as an ideal is under a sustained and surprisingly successful attack. Sometimes the attack is direct and ideological, made by “experts” who believe a lifelong vow of fidelity is unrealistic or oppressive, especially to women. (2000, p. 1)

Indeed, in regard to marriage, some see an impoverished old woman, some see an elegant youth in the prime of life. Figure-ground makes it impossible to see both at the same time. When addressing a contentious theme such as family, it is easy to see only what we want or only what is familiar and disregard everything else.

For us in writing this book, and for you in reading, great care must be exercised so that we don’t end up confirming our bias in regards to marriage. How we see politics, theology, real experience, and desired experience emerge in how we think about marriage and family—both our own and those with whom we will sit, listen, understand, and provide care. The rules that govern what you will see and how you will act with families are influenced by starting points. In the statements above, Köstenberger begins as a theologian, but Coontz is a family studies historian, Waite is a sociologist, and the Balswicks are marriage and family professors. Some used a theological lens that explicitly influenced their thinking, some used worldviews that were less articulated. Each examined the content from a preconception and had postdestinations in mind. We all do.

Your freedom and restraint to advocate positions to the public classroom, the Christian college, the private counseling and consulting room, and the culture at large must be conducted with care. You may bear a license— extended to you by the state or country—with the expectation that you will exercise restraint in regard to your beliefs pertaining to a client’s moral choices; you also bear a conscience that renders you as a moral agent subject to God. This requires you to make decisions about how to act. Jesus acknowledged the moral tension that those in his day faced and that those in ours must still address: “Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.’ And they were amazed at him” (Mk 12:17 NIV).

The natural inclination is to read ideas from authors and interact with others who already think as you think and believe as you believe. People who see the figure prefer to hang out together; people who see the ground sit at the other table. So we “retweet” those whose ideas on abortion, race relations, LGBTQ rights, or support for single-parent families in poverty we resonate with, and we delete ideas that are challenging or threatening. Our views of family are reinforced by others who see the same thing we see. And so learning becomes limited to reinforcement of what we already believe. A family therapist must be skilled to enter a relational community to bring peace, justice, hope, mercy, forgiveness, insight, acceptance, and countless additional virtues amid both people who see the figure and people who see the ground. This is not just a therapeutic skill. It is also a life skill, maybe even a calling.

Defining the Range and Reach of The Family Relationship

There is much discussion today about the family—about what makes up a family, who counts as family, public policies to support the family, family values, and so on. It is humbling to think of writing about a Christian understanding of the family because there is so much discussion and debate associated with the topic. Any strong claims seem to leave some people today feeling like they do not belong or have any place, and yet not saying anything of substance about something as important as the family seems to be no viable alternative to us either.

We would like to begin by discussing a biblical view of the family. By this we mean to ask what we can know about the family based on a reading of Scripture. We must start with the essence of family that transcends culture, circumstances, and time. The examination of the family cannot be limited to North America, the twenty-first century, or upper-middle socioeconomic class. The initial examination and understanding of family must begin with a “transcendent family,” the basic biological and sociological relationship that endures over time and across cultures.

When we look to the Old Testament for an initial understanding of the family, we find that the word used in Hebrew is mishpachah, a word that “blurs the distinctions between family and tribe and between family and nation” (Moynagh, 1995, p. 372). It includes what contemporary Western culture thinks of as family, at least with respect to a nuclear family or family of origin, but also includes “servants, resident aliens (ger...