Every problem has a context, and to solve a problem we often have to work on the context.
—Archibald Hart
Until she turned fifty, Marjorie had been an “ideal” housewife and mother. She had without complaint sacrificed her needs to move with her husband to the country so he could set up shop as a lawyer in a small town. She had raised a daughter to the conservative standards of their town. She was faithful in attendance at church and the women’s group and regularly volunteered for Sunday school duty.
When she turned fifty, though, she began to wonder if life wasn’t passing her by. She became lethargic. She thought her life dull and meaningless and without hope. She became severely depressed. She talked of suicide.
That’s when she came to see me. She remained depressed until her 17-year-old daughter began dating, weekly going out drinking and dancing in a nearby city.
Suddenly the mother came out of her depression: she started dressing like a teenager and mimicking her daughter—much to her daughter’s embarrassment. The daughter got angry, and the next thing I discovered was that the daughter became pregnant.
Somehow most of this was kept from the busy husband. But when he discovered what had been going on, he became extremely depressed himself. He tried to placate his wife and keep her out of the view of the townspeople, setting her up in a separate apartment in the city.
What’s the problem here? Partly, it’s the wife. She just could not handle aging. She had never come to terms with getting old.
But had I counseled this woman as if she were the problem, I would have missed the larger dynamic.
After bringing the husband and daughter into counseling, I realized the wife had, with the husband’s prodding, become deeply enmeshed in her husband’s work: she entertained his clients, she kept up appearances to increase his business. She had started to become the model lawyer’s wife and had no life of her own. Now she was rebelling. She didn’t want anything to do with his work or life.
Her husband had never allowed her to work outside the home, so she had never earned her own money; she had never bought anything for herself without her husband’s approval. In addition to turning fifty, she was pulling away from the family system that had been oppressing her for so long.
The father had also excessively controlled the life of his daughter, and the daughter was rebelling against that.
I realized that we had to work on how the family interacted before I was going to make any progress with the wife’s regression to adolescent behavior.
We started to make some progress, but not without bumping into a few hurdles. The daughter had her baby. She didn’t want to marry the young man who fathered the child, but neither did she want to give up the baby for adoption.
During this time, the father had given up his law practice to please his wife. But he had difficulty at first finding another job. So we had to work through all these other adjustments as well.
Every Problem Has a Context
Marjorie’s problem may be extreme, but it illustrates the fact that every problem has a context and that to solve a problem we often have to work on this same context.
I could have taken an individualistic approach: “Marjorie, you’ve just got to accept that you are getting older. Let’s work on this together.” That would not have addressed some deeper issues in her life.
I could have set her free from her oppressive context: “There’s no reason for you to stick around with such a husband. He’s married to his work. Your husband is your problem, You need to find yourself.” By now she would have been divorced, living alone, and playing the field, feeling miserable and lonely.
To address Marjorie’s larger situation complicated the counseling process immensely. Instead of dealing with one person, I had to think about six relationships (the three among them, and me with each). Instead of addressing one problem, I had to address many.
But it was well worth the extra effort. It produced a larger good than simply helping Marjorie deal with aging. I was able to help a family live together in a healthier way for years to come.
As the Bible teaches: God has designed us to live in relationships. I’ve found that true in my counseling experience—no one has an individual problem that doesn’t in some way affect the family and isn’t in some way affected by the family. So when it becomes clear that the issue under discussion seriously affects family dynamics, I try to involve members of the family in the counseling process. Here are some guidelines I follow.
When to Take Family Cases
When a pastor discovers that a problem goes deeper than the counselee and that others should be brought in, it doesn’t necessarily mean he or she should immediately begin counseling the family. It depends, of course, on the pastor’s expertise, but in general, some of these cases are better referred to a professional specialist.
For example, if the family problem is deeply rooted—it has gone on for a generation or more, it has biological roots, or a family member has a serious personality disorder—then most pastors are wise to make a referral.
I worked with one woman who was clearly manic depressive. Stress will bring this pathology out, but biology is clearly part of its roots. She responded to the medication I recommended, but she had three daughters, two of whom had inherited the same manic and depressive tendency. Though in their late twenties, they were still living at home. The whole family system was contaminated with a fairly serious mental and emotional illness that had a biological root. This is clearly a case a pastor should refer to a professional psychiatrist.
Then again, some family cases are more appropriate for a pastor to take, even more appropriate than for a psychologist or psychiatrist. For example, when a family is causing a person deep psychological stress but refuses to become part of the person’s healing, that’s when a pastor can be a great help.
If a professional counselor goes to the person’s family members and says, “I need to see other members of the family to really be of help to So-and-so,” the family is likely to respond, “You’re exaggerating the problem just to get more clients and more fees in your pocket.”
The pastor is one of the few professionals who can seek out and encourage a family to get help without raising suspicions about motives. There’s nothing in it for the pastor but time and effort. If the pastor shows that effort, it often convinces the family to seek out help.
If the problems of counselee and family are moral in nature or require reconciliation and forgiveness, then a pastor, as representative of the one who reconciles heaven and earth, is usually the better person to draw the family into counseling. Generally, reconciliation and forgiveness is more powerfully and effectively handled by a pastoral counselor than by a professional counselor. Such issues are more spiritual than psychological in nature.
Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
A woman comes in depressed: “My problem is my husband. He doesn’t give me attention. He’s not affectionate enough. He’s not interested in me as a woman anymore.”
Or a man says, “My kids are such a pain to me. They just want everything I can give them. They show me no respect.”
It may be true that some family dynamic ought to change, but it’s also true that people are rarely mere victims of other people’s behavior.
In fact, in the last few years, I’ve begun to realize that many people who come to see me, although they appear to be the victims of a bad system, are often victimizers of that system. Sometimes they’re the ones causing most of the problems at home, and they’ve come to me to help them change their families, but they do not understand their contribution to the problem. The counselor easily gets caught in the trap of seeing the problem only from the counselee’s point of view, forming a therapeutic alliance with the counselee against the family.
I guard against this by bringing in all the family members involved as soon as I see some larger dynamics. And when I do bring them in, I try to see the issue from the family’s point of view. That’s when I often discover that my counselee is more a victimizer than a victim.
If counselors aren’t careful to seek out the whole truth before applying therapy, the outcome can be less than ideal.
In one local case, a daughter alleged that her father had sexually abused her. The therapist, believing that the daughter had no reason to lie, wanted to perform an intervention and conspired to confront the father in front of other family members. The counselor and the daughter convinced the whole family of her accusations.
So without knowing what was going on, the father was confronted by the therapist and family about an alleged sexual abuse. He was devastated, and that’s when I was brought in.
However, in talking with the daughter, I immediately suspected that no such abuse actually took place. The daughter was a seriously disturbed woman. I discovered that the therapist had not thoroughly evaluated her mental condition and had misjudged her honesty. It became evident to everyone that there was no truth whatsoever in her accusations. It was all a fabrication of a very troubled mind.
Studies have shown that one out of three children who report abuse from their parents distort the truth. Counselors have to be careful about believing everything they hear. In any case, I always seek to understand the real dynamics of a family before suggesting any action.
The beauty of counseling people in context is this: I’m not caught up in forming an alliance with the counselee against the rest of the world; I’m more concerned about discovering the truthful-ness of what is going on. And I tell people this up front when they come to see me. It keeps deception to a minimum.
Avoid Getting “Triangled”
I get “triangled” when I and the counselee try together to solve the problem of a third party.
For example, a woman with an alcoholic husband tells me “I’ve tried everything. I’m at the end of my rope. I don’t know what to do. Can you help me get my husband to stop drinking?”
An empathetic counselor will have a hard time not biting on the bait: “Let’s see what we can do. Try this first: You go home and pour all his liquor down the drain. Then tell him you won’t give him sex until he quits.”
At that point, I’ve become triangled: the wife and I have ganged up on the husband and together are going to change him.
The problem is, once a counselor does that, the third party reacts violently. The husband feels like he’s being ganged up on, and he is. The counselor is likely to become the enemy and the therapeutic relationship destroyed: “That pastor you’re seeing is just causing problems. I don’t want you seeing him anymore if this is what’s going to happen.” Now there is more conflict than ever in the marriage. The counselor has become triangled.
The mistake here is for counselors to think they can change the third dimension of a triangle. We cannot solve the man’s drinking problem directly or fix the relationship between the husband and wife. We do not have direct access to the husband; nor has he asked for help.
We can, though, maintain clearly “differentiated” relationships with the wife and with the husband, nurturing separate relationships with each, helping each figure out what he or she should do to heal the situation. But we shouldn’t try to heal it for them.
I can change only a relationship of which I am a part. I can’t deal with the alcoholism. I can only build a relationship. So I must endeavor to build a relationship with the alcoholic husband directly. Only then can I influence the alcoholic husband.
So instead I would say to the wife, “I see that your husband’s drinking is causing you a great deal of stress. I can’t, however, tell you what you should do to help him stop drinking. You’ll have to work that out with him yourself. But I can help you deal with your stress and help you figure out things you can do to help your husband.”
If I’m able to convince the husband to see me, I could ask him about his drinking, if he thinks it’s a problem, what he thinks his wife’s concern is, and so on.
If the husband refuses to recognize the problem, then I must simply support the wife by encouraging her and helping her react appropriately. But I don’t work through her to change the alcoholic husband. I work at strengthening my relationship with her.
(If the man is dangerous or if he’s abusing her, then the matter becomes a legal issue, and I have no choice but to intervene by reporting it to the appropriate authorities.)
If the husband refuses to acknowledge his problem, the pastor-counselor is in an advantageous position when compared to the professional counselor. A pastor can make friendly calls to the home. He or she can drop off notes or make phone calls—expected behavior from a pastor. The pastor can foster a natural relationship that could develop into a therapeutic relationship.
The Place of Interventions
One of the options a counselor could give such a wife is to encourage her to organize an intervention with her husband. Still, it must be her decision to go ahead, and she must be willing to live with the consequences.
The counselor could be intricately involved in preparing the intervention. Perhaps the key role the counselor plays is making sure the family that gathers to confront the husband will not undermine the intervention with their own discord.
A pastor friend once called me about his alcoholic father. “My brother is going to be in town for a couple of days, and I’m thinking of setting up a family intervention with my dad. My brother thinks I’m rushing things. What do you think?”
“That would be foolish,” I replied bluntly. “Among other reasons, your family needs to convene a couple of times to plan a strategy before meeting with your father. You all need to talk through your feelings about your father’s alcoholism to make sure you agree about the strategy. Otherwise you could begin the intervention and find some members of the family starting to feel sorry for your father; they’ll begin taking sides, and soon the intervention could disintegrate.
“You also need to know how to respond to the reactions that occur in such an intervention. Only when your family is prepared to counteract your father’s possible responses and are in total agreement will your saying to your father, ‘You’ve got to get help,’ do any good.”
Don’t Keep Secrets
One extremely important rule should guide all family counseling: No secrets. That is, no forming an alliance with another with the express purpose of deceiving a third party.
To hark back to the opening story, when the daughter discovered she was pregnant, the mother’s first reaction to me was, “We’ve got to keep this secret. We’ve got to keep it from my husband. We’ve got to keep it from the town, especially from our church.”
I immediately responded, “No. No secrets.”
“Well,” she said, “Then you tell my husband.”
“No, that’s not my responsibility. Let’s figure out a way you or your daughter can tell your husband.”
We talked it over and finally decided that the daughter must tell her father. And although the father and daughter were in severe conflict, she told him. In the end, though, the daughter and the father discovered a new relationship with each other. A tremendous bonding occurred,
If, however, the mother and daughter had waited three months to tell the father, and if he had found out from another source, it would have been disastrous. He would have felt violated, and the relationship could have been worsened for years.
There’s a difference, of course, between confidentiality and secrets. I kept the information about the daughter in confidence. The counselor doesn’t break confidences. So I wouldn’t have said a thing about it.
If the father had asked me directly about it: “There’s a rumor going around about my daughter being pregnant. You’ve been seeing her and my wife. Is it true?” I would have replied, “Whether it’s true or not, I can’t comment. What goes on in the counseling session is confidential. If you want to know something about your daughter, you better talk with her.” And I would have continued to urge the daughter and mother to talk to the father.
Certainly there are judgment calls. A woman troubled about an abortion she had a decade earlier while in another relationship probably isn’t required to tell her husband of eight years. A man habitually addicted to pornography should certainly tell his wife. But many cases lie about halfway between these extremes.
Sometimes the information shared would, in fact, do more harm than good. I’ve counseled married men who’ve confessed homosexual fantasies. I’ve not encouraged them to share those with their wives, it would put an unfair burden on them.
Sometimes groundwork must be done before information is shared. A husband has a one-night stand and wants to confess it to his wife. I usually ask the husband to remain faithful to his wife for a year or two, improve his relationship with her, show her by his actions that she is the most important woman in his life. Then both are in a better position when he confesses.
Although there are exceptions, then, my usual course is strongly to encourage clients to tell their loved ones any information that bears directly on their present relationship. At a minimum this includes telling their important loved ones that they are getting counseling.
Two Cautions
As I begin working with families, I stay aware of two dangers.
• Sabotage. Families develop patterns of responding to their problems. Homeostasis develops; a level of psychological equilibrium is found that helps keep the peace in relationships. Each person finds his or her level of involvement and balance with each other person. Everyone finds a role.
So families are reluctant to change their system of interacting, even if it’s causing one person great stress. In fact, family systems are far more difficult to change than individuals. The more you try to change the system, the more stress the system causes.
A family system is a much more complex organism to work with than an individual. Individuals are complex enough; but multiply that two, three, four, five times, and now you have tremendous complexity. So, families are fraught with dynamics that cannot always be understood or differentiated.
And if you push families too hard for change, they are likely to sabotage the healing process: “Ever since this counselor started working with us, we’ve had nothing but arguments. I say we’ve had enough.”
Or instead of admitting how they are contributing to the mother’s depression, family members might start making excuses for her: “She’s just the melancholy type. There’s nothing wrong with her or our family.”
The best way to prevent the sabotaging of the counseling is to pace my probing. If I ask threatening questions too early or if I suggest changes too quickly, I’m likely to undermine my objectives.
• Collusion. Sometimes families can be gullible and believe anything a counselor says about the main counselee.
Consider this recent child-abuse case. A therapist saw a 4-year-old playing with anatomically correct dolls and doing so correctly; she obviously knew how people had intercourse. He assumed the child must have had intercourse with her father: how else could she have known?
When he explained this to the family, everyone thought it made sense and concluded the father was guilty.
Only after the court case was it learned that the father owned a porno shop on the side and would frequently bring home porno movies. Apparently the girl had surreptitiously seen a few of the movies. Exposure to porno movies may be a form of abuse, but it’s significantly different than incest.
I mustn’t assume that the family’s diagnosis is correct just because they all happen to agree about the problem.
Stay Calm
Families are complex systems, and if I’m not careful, I can let the complexity get to me, making me anxious and tense. That not only harms me, it undercuts my counseling. So I have to remind myself to maintain a calm presence when I do family counseling.
It’s especially easy to overreact when counseling with more than one member of the family at a time. Things can get out of hand too easily. Sometimes the family starts fighting; someone throws down a cup and says, “I’m getting out of here.” Some couples who come for marital counseling seem to think that I am an audience they can fight in front of.
In such situations, I don’t want to over-control things. If you’re just riding one horse and the horse pulls ahead, you don’t have to do much to get it to slow down. But in driving six horses and one gets out of line, the temptation is to overcorrect. And that only causes more problems.
If an entire family starts blaming the father for his controlling behavior and the father starts to feel the weight of their criticism, I may be tempted to console the father, taking his side. If a rebellious teenager starts to attack his mom, I may want to come down on him for a bad attitude. If I were to counsel these people alone, I would have an easier time maintaining a empathetic but neutral stance.
I’ve found the best way to deal with the tendency to overreact and control is by working as much as possible with individuals one at a time. I break family problems into small components. I talk with each person individually.
Working with families, then, does not necessarily mean bringing the whole family together for counseling. That may be necessary, but I do that only after I’ve spent sufficient time with individual members to know what’s going on in a family.
Getting the Family to Participate
All the above suggestions assume, of course, that one or more members of the family have agreed to become part of the counseling process. That, in many cases, is a big assumption. Still, a number of techniques can be employed to enlarge the scope of my counseling.
• Prepare the counselee. First I prepare the person I’m counseling. If I’m seeing a wife, and I conclude I need to see her husband, I might say, “I think I’m ready now to talk with your husband. But before I do, you should realize that the moment we involve another person’s perspective, your problem may change a bit. Are you ready to discover that you may be contributing to the problem? Are you ready to find out a larger truth?”
Many counselees are not, in fact, ready to have others drawn in. One woman I counseled told me, “No. No. I don’t want my husband involved. I don’t want to hear how bad I am. I want you to work with me.”
Some people are afraid of being discovered; that’s especially true if the person coming is not the victim but the one coming to form an alliance with the therapist against the other party.
So first I’ve got to get the permission of the counselee before I involve others.
• Create an alliance. When I approach another family member, I try to create an alliance with the person I’m calling.
A distraught mother came in to see me about her 16-year-old daughter. The family was wealthy, and the girl had repeatedly crashed the car she was driving. The parents would give her a car, and she would have an accident in a couple of months. Then they would give her another car. The mother was getting more and more upset.
It was clear I had to talk with the daughter, so I called her and said, “Your mom has been seeing me for a couple of weeks now. But I need some other help to understand what’s going on with her. Could you come in and give me your perspective?
“Okay,” she replied. “I’ve noticed Mom has been upset lately. I probably should tell you what’s been going on around here.”
In this way, I formed a relationship with the daughter and together we had a common cause: to understand the mother.
Now the fact is, the daughter had to discover her role in the problems at home, but that was only possible after I had built a trusting relationship with her.
• Use fear appropriately. When the counselee’s problem is serious and the family member resists coming in, I will build on any real tearfulness in the situation.
If I’m counseling a seriously depressed wife, I’ll tell a husband reluctant to come in, “I am really concerned about your wife. She is quite depressed, and I need to give someone clear directions about what to do in case she decides to do the worst. I also need to know if she takes sleeping pills or if there’s a gun around the house. I’d like you to come in and help me.”
I would never exaggerate or lie. I don’t want to manipulate people into my office. But if the situation has some danger—from a relationship being threatened to a possible suicide—I will mention it if I can’t seem to convince another to come in.
No matter how I approach it, though, some people will simply not participate. In that case, I resign myself to working as best as I can with the counselee alone.
Long Expectations
Marjorie and her family, whom I discussed in the opening of the chapter, gradually pulled together again. They began to restructure the way they related to one another and now have found a new life. Her husband has a new job working for a Christian organization, and their granddaughter is the center of their lives.
To counsel such families is extremely gratifying. But sometimes I can’t realistically expect that problems will be dealt with in a few months or even a few years.
Families resist change. They change very slowly. So in some cases, I look to the next generation as the place where family counseling will make its greatest impact.
I worked with one family where the husband, because of his upbringing, was often domineering toward his wife. The man’s father never respected his own wife and treated her harshly. This man was repeating the pattern in his marriage.
I taught his wife how to better respond to him, and I suggested things the man might do differently. But I also saw that the man was never going to completely overcome this tendency.
So my next goal was to help the couple admit to their kids that this behavior was inappropriate and that the father was trying to change. I also encouraged them to teach their children how to live differently as they grew. In that way, they have a good chance of cutting the problem off at the father’s generation.
In either case, no matter the stubbornness of family systems, determinism doesn’t rule. Pastors can make a difference. With patience and reliance on the Holy Spirit, not only can individuals change but entire families as well, even to the next generation.
Copyright © 1992 by Christianity Today
