Family Systems

Both of my parents grew up as only children. They often seemed baffled by the reality of their marriage and their very-different-from-them children. Before bedtime they would sometimes tell us humorous family stories about their ineptitude in merging their expectations and dreams into their newly consecrated marriage, the merging of two family systems. As children, we laughed heartily at the thought of their mistakes, not aware that at the time those errors were for them major crises. Mom and Dad often tripped over “the way it should be.” Both expected that the other would serve their unexamined personal and marital ambitions. They did not talk much—they missed being part of the communication generation that began in the 1950s. Both often seemed frustrated and exasperated, unsure of the rules. Drinking (and other distancing maneuvers) was the accepted way of coping with stress, patterns they had learned from their growing-up years. As kids, we were often anxious within the overall atmosphere of uneasiness.

Many years later when I married into a well-connected, churchgoing family with traditional rules and roles, I felt almost as excited about them as I did about my new wife. I felt as if I was finally at home. Life was planned and wonderfully predictable. Yet issues from my own family of origin often upset the balance of our new family dyad (my wife and myself), and I never felt completely accepted or understood in my extended family. They also felt that I never fully accepted their values of what family life should be. When families of different kinds merge in marriage, there is the potential for change—this is what I call good trouble! My early marriage and family had lots of good trouble.

In this article family life is understood as a system, that is, as a whole composed of interconnected and interdependent members that are all the time influencing one another. No one lives entirely by himself or herself. This is true not only within the smallest family unit, sometimes called the nuclear family, but also between generations as family systems influence each other. The term family of origin refers to the family or families in which one is raised. Virginia Satir stressed the importance of the family of origin as “the main base against and around which most family blueprints are designed.” She suggests that “it is easy to duplicate in your family the same things that happened in your growing up. This is true whether your family was a nurturing or a troubled one” (p. 124). This foundational insight, so often observed by psychiatrists and family counselors, was expressed centuries ago in the Bible where God says, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me” (Deut. 5:9-10). The promise of intergenerational grace in this last phrase is restated in Deut. 5:29, which indicates that people are to live in harmony with God’s ways “so that it might go well with them and their children forever.” While family systems theory is less than fifty years old, it is essentially in harmony with the biblical revelation of how families, communities and the people of God function (Collins and Stevens, pp. 92-107).

Family of Origin

The problem with us as people is that we had parents, and of course so did they. While parents are sometimes a problem for us, it is a good thing that we had parents—and a good thing that they did as well. In our families we not only duplicate the lives from our families of origin, we sometimes potentiate (that is, increase the intensity of) the problems. To be a healthy member of a family, we need to practice forgiveness, which permits us to free our parents from the resentments we have accumulated about them. Forgiveness also frees us to determine our own way of living without the burden of the demands from our family of origin. This is a key to growth and maturity in thinking about the family as a system.

Through our family histories we can view the relationship dynamics and values transmitted through generations. Virtues and values can be embraced, and curses and criticisms can be challenged. This is the understanding of covenant making. Throughout our growing-up years, we learned how to make and keep covenants and the value of promises. We learned this from our parents, or we noticed the lack of this and promised to ourselves that we would be promise keepers. Through forgiveness, promise keeping and covenant making, we are empowered to bring health and grace to the next generation.

We did not choose our parents, nor did they choose us. Further, none of us had the opportunity to choose how to live in our families of origin. We adapted to pressing circumstances as best we could with the skills and experiences we had, just as they did. However, all of us can choose how we will live in our current families and interact within our various systems or communities. We do not need to replicate the unhealthy patterns of our families of origin, nor do we need to overadapt and do the opposite.

Wholeness

Virginia Satir uses the image of a mobile to explain how a system works. In the family mobile, every part of the family is understood in terms of the whole family and how individual parts affect the whole. Each part is considered to be interdependent, not autonomous. A movement or change in one part of the mobile affects the system throughout. Picture a mobile that hangs over an infant’s crib as having people instead of animals or parts of the planetary system hanging from it. Envisioned in this way, events that initially touch one member of the family mobile cause other family members to reverberate in relationship to the change in the initial member. Thus, if a member of the family marries a distant cousin or a person from another race, graduates from medical school or contracts the AIDS virus, the surrounding family system is affected. The family mobile is altered, not just the individual member.

For example, Barry (a fourteen-year-old boy in a single-parent family from my counseling practice) stayed away from home for several weeks and made no contact with his understandably frantic mother. At a loss as to what to do, she became depressed, and the younger kids began to suffer as she drank from morning till night, ignoring their basic care. When Barry finally came home, he vowed to God that he would stay. His mother gave up drinking, and the family mood improved greatly. The siblings were delighted at this change and blessed their older brother for doing what was right in their eyes. As the mom became more functional and pleasant, Barry figured the family problem was solved and he could now live his own life again without the presumed obligation to be the “designated father.” (Barry’s father had divorced his mother and the children when Barry was just six years old.) Since life was now okay, Barry began to skip some school and stayed out late at night. Barry’s mother then became upset and was soon as depressed as before, precipitating a crisis in the younger children, who began to display their own symptoms of depression. Barry again saw the cost of his behaviors on the family and promised anew that he would be a “good kid.” The family resumed functioning as normal until the cycle repeated itself again. Barry’s growing up affected both his mother and his siblings, and he felt trapped into being the absentee father that all people long to have and resent missing. His feeling of being trapped was felt by each of the other members of the system.

In the analogy of the family mobile, every time one part of the family changes position, the entire mobile shifts. All parts are unbalanced until the changed part returns to its original place. Barry feels impelled to “do good” for the good of the family. When Barry eventually moves out permanently from his family and creates his own independent life, the other parts of the family will adjust themselves to a new form of stability and security. Until then the family will require that he stay and function in ways that permit their stability and security. In family life each person is part of the whole. And the whole is more than the sum of the parts, as Aristotle said long ago. We are linked together invisibly in a relational, emotional and even a spiritual unity. But change within the system is not all bad.

Good Trouble

The Chinese word for crisis is composed of two pictorial characters, one meaning “danger” and the other “opportunity.” Shifts in the family mobile can be considered family crises and are potentially good trouble through which positive change can come. Think of the crises that would be induced in the following examples: the middle son of a solid Orthodox Jewish family becomes a Christian; the workaholic father rolls the family minivan over a cliff and nearly dies; the ultrastable mother does not come home after work until 9 p.m. and looks a bit like a floozy; another child is conceived although the couple had agreed that “two is enough”; two families blend, resulting in two fifteen-year-old stepsisters; a younger brother suffers a prolonged death from leukemia while the older sister does not feel understood; a middle-aged dad buys a sports car and begins wearing a jogging suit. All of the changes caused by these events can result in greater satisfaction and security. It would be a shame to waste such terrific crises.

Boundaries and Subsystems

Mother and father (wife and husband) together are a family subsystem. Their children are another family subsystem, as are the grandparents and other extended relatives. In our family, our cocker spaniel and two cats are a significant, and too often an expensive, subsystem that precipitates some growth-producing tension between father and daughter! We would not be the same family without each competing system within our larger system we call with much affection “our family.” Our family dinner table is a cacophony of information about other systems that are affecting our family: what happened at school, what craziness Tim did on Home Improvements, the CD sale at the mall and other families who are reported to be in greater crisis than ours. Some of this information enters into our family and affects us; some stays out or is kept out. This has to do with how our family is defined and the values and structure of our family unit. In systems thinking this is referred to as family boundaries, or the openness of the system to other systems.

The peer groups of both parents and children are systems that affect the experience of the family. Teenage kids may have friends who wear their caps carefully turned backward. Being their peers, they influence the kids and thus the family. The parents’ peer group may be other middle-agers on the sideline of a soccer game or prayerful Christian adults in a church fellowship group. When these peer groups interact, there is a good chance of a crash at the intersection. Imagine the cap-wearing teen with his Bulls jacket coming to church one morning to meet a “suit” carrying a well-worn King James Bible who asks him to remove his hat out of respect. It should be said again that subsystem collision can result in growth for each subsystem. The issue of boundaries is whether we will permit what is outside of our understanding and experience to change us so as to help us grow.

Conclusions

This brief reflection on some of the basic dimensions of family systems shows that family life sets us up to know God and gain Christian maturity right at home. We were built for relationships, and family life helps us to see that isolated individuals simply do not exist. Further, we were built for covenant making and promise keeping—two graces we may experience in our lives whether our family experience has been good or bad. Even very hard experiences in family life can be experienced as God’s good invitation to make changes for the better and to practice the grace of forgiveness. The influence of subsystems and other systems on our family system causes us continuously to define our family goals and family values—once more seeking God’s mind in prayer and Scripture. Through it all the multigenerational impact of our behavior, whether bad or good, mentioned in Deut. 5:9-10 is not just a curse but a blessing: God’s love extends “to a thousand generations.”

» See also: Blessing, Family

» See also: Family

» See also: Family Communication

» See also: Family Goals

» See also: Family History

» See also: Family Problems

» See also: Family Values

» See also: Parenting

References and Resources

R. Anderson and D. Guernsey, On Being a Family: A Social Theology of the Family (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985); J. O. Balswick and J. K. Balswick, The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989); W. M. Brody, Family Dance: Building Positive Relationships Through Family Therapy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977); P. Collins and R. P. Stevens, The Equipping Pastor (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1994); E. H. Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guilford, 1985); R. Richardson, Family Ties That Bind (Vancouver: Self-Counsel Press, 1984); V. Satir, Conjoint Family Ttherapy (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and Behavior Books, 1967).

—Paddy Ducklow