Family Systems:

Today I want to talk about what systems theory tells us about families. What is systems theory, you might ask? Systems theory is the idea that the family is made up of individual parts that work together as a whole to accomplish something much greater. Each of those pieces that make up the “whole” has a role, rules, and boundaries. Some roles might include mother, father, son, daughter, caregiver, disciplinary, nurturer, fun person, peacemaker, fighter, etc. we take on these roles based on our interactions with our family. Sometimes these roles are chosen and other times they are assigned by others. We can change our roles in the family if we want but it is not easy. When one person’s role in the family changes the rest of the group is affected and has to change to adapt to the change.

Rules that are in a family are often created do to tradition from the parent’s families or habits that have formed within that individual family. Rules are created through families by reinforcement of behavior. When you do something contrary to the family rules you are punished and when you adhere to the rules you are rewarded. Many families have unspoken rules which you learn through the reinforcement of behavior from other family members and eventually those rules just become natural to you and go without saying. An example of this might be the last person to bed turns off the lights….when you are the last person to go to bed and you turn off the lights nothing happens in the morning BUT if you don’t turn off the lights in the morning whoever wakes up first will yell at you for not turning off the lights before you went to bed… this is a reinforcement of behavior and teaches that person that a household rule is to always turn off the lights before going to bed.

Boundaries in a family are generally pretty easy to figure out depending on your relationship with that person. A bad or unstable relationship would be considered to have rigid or unclear boundary (based on the type of conflict of relationship between the two people involved) a good relationship would be considered as having a clear boundary.

Family culture: this is the natural behavior of the family. If we do not have an active plan for determining how to handle certain situations then we will always revert back to the ways that we know for how to deal with things. This would include how our parents handled things while we were growing up or how we handled things in past relationships. Many times people encounter “cycles” that occur in the family- meaning that if we were raised in a verbally abusive family then we will often raise a family in verbal abuse because that is the only way we know how to communicate. We have to break this cycle by actively changing ourselves and determining before we become parents the type of parents that we want to be. It often takes 3-4 generations to break a cycle like this because it’s really hard to change when you grew up in a certain way, you have to adopt a whole new approach to dealing with problems.