Most major counseling theories today don’t look backward to the past of our family and culture or even inward to our personal values and beliefs.  They are mainly concerned with the here-and-now of interpersonal conflicts.

I, too, see goodness and practical help in this approach, but maybe not for the same reasons as the non-Christian theorists.  The proponents of systems theory are more interested in the process than the content.  That is largely because they do not believe there is such a thing as right content.  And why would anyone try to look for what was wrong if they did not know what right would look like?  As I’ve already mentioned, I do believe that the Bible gives us enough information (and the hope of a supernatural change through God’s Spirit) to strive for the right content in our families.

One of the benefits of focusing on families’ processes is the element of surprise.  They expect us to focus on content.  But when any of us are confronted to change our beliefs or and moral practices, we generally become defensive.  Focusing on the process gets the therapist in the side door by addressing issues and habits that the family probably does not consider right or wrong.  So, if I’m going to be an effective Family Life Chaplain I must collaborate with entire family and not act like a psycho sleuth or a member of the ethics police.  Although this seems so clear to me now, it is – as G&G describe it – a complete paradigm shift in my approach to counseling.

I used to think it was my responsibility to get Soldiers and their family members to “see the light” or at least convince them to adopt some major change in their practices at home.  Now I can more fully appreciate that I should be there to help them, not change them.  I must add one caveat to this thought, however.  When contemporary, secular therapists speak of the client as the expert (as opposed to the counselor), they usually say this because of their presupposition that there is no right way or ‘Truth’ by which we should guide the family.  I agree that we must see the family as the expert but not because there is no truth.  Rather, I believe that it is important simply to remember that the client is the expert in their own history – what they’ve been through, what they want and fell, what has been effective in their family and what has not, etc.  They are also the expert in their passion.  By this I mean that we must enter the therapeutic relationship in the specific door that they’ve opened.  If a family wants to meet with me about their children, I may need to talk to them about their marriage but I will need to do so by entering through the issue of the couple’s relationship as parents.  My new view of the family as a system studied through a cybernetic epistemology (the flow of information through feedback loops) seems to support this ‘side-door’ approach as effective.  If the marriage dyad, parent-child dyad, and a probable parent-children triad (in a family with more than one child) do indeed continually affect each other, then my entrance into virtually any door will potentially impact the entire family.  I’ll use my own family as an example.

At times there seems to be a distance between my wife and I, which I have generally attributed to work-related fatigue.  She spends hours each day on volunteer work – much of it with people who do not share her level of commitment or vision for service.  And I had been coming home from the daily fears and frustrations of my position in Resource Management.  In a completely unrelated concern (so I thought), at the same time I had realized how little time I had been spending with my oldest son.  All he has seemed to enjoy in the past year has been a video game that I do not understand and in which am not able to participate since it is a one-player game.  I had noticed how angry he and his brother seem to be toward their younger siblings, who also happen to be my only biological children.  I also noticed that they seem to express their frustration soon after I’ve spend time cuddling with the younger ones or playing, playing on the trampoline with them and laughing, or praising them for something they did well in school.  In other words, the older two are jealous that I enjoy my time with the younger two.

Now, I wonder what it would be like if I simply stood behind my oldest son while he played his video game with my hands gently resting on his shoulders, occasionally asking him to teach me something about the game.  At first, he seemed genuinely appreciative.  I could feel the tension lessening in his shoulders; the tone in his voice changed toward me; and his attitude toward his younger siblings improved.  But within a few days, his old habits returned.  Why?  I believe it was the principle of cybernetic epistemology.

Our family, like any other, wants to organize itself to maintain control or stability.  And when I introduced something new, even though I tried to ensure immediate rewards for him (physical closeness and verbal affirmation) within days both of us changed in an effort to maintain constancy in the family.  He seemed to be more comfortable returning to his anger.  His rage necessarily puts him ‘one up’ on his ‘stupid father who doesn’t know how to parent’ and functions as an outworking of his desire for independence.  And as soon as he began being disrespectful again, I retreat back into my fun time with the other low-maintenance kids.  Each of us sought homeostasis.  Or, to put it another way, we went back to the comfort zones that appear to meet the desires of our hearts – in his case independence, and in my case, affirmation.  The feedback loops are strong, and if there is to be any change I (as the more differentiated of the two) will need to break with my craving for immediate gratification and change the system until the feedback to my oldest son is regular and strong enough for him to adopt it as his new truth – that Dad does indeed love him.

I loved G&Gs discussion of reciprocal determinism – that events don’t make us do anything.  We make choices about how we respond.  You can hear this mantra in our home every day.  “Caleb made me mad!”, Hannah might say.  To which my wife or I quickly answer, “No one makes you do anything, honey.  You chose to yell at your brother because you were frustrated.”  And while I agree that linear causality is generally too simplistic for relationships which are reciprocal and cybernetic, I do believe that some individual forces have a greater impact on our responses than others.  I think of a pool table with a slightly warped banks and a tilted frame.  The warps and unbalanced top can make it difficult to make a shot, but if you can compensate for those factors, the most important element is still the one shooting the ball.

While I agree that it’s the ongoing processes and not a single event that influences us, I do believe that there is generally a single event that is more influential than the others.  We can still effect change by altering the process, but I would still look for the most powerful dynamic.  I do not mean that I would point my therapeutic finger at a particular member of the family as the primary problem in the family.  But it would be foolish not to work through the person most receptive to change or the one whom the rest of the family seems to follow.