Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling. James Robert Bitter
Take some time to put an adjective next to each person in your genogram. Choose an adjective that represents the quality that the person brings to your life. Next to your parents and your siblings, put three adjectives instead of one. Think of the adjectives you assign to your parents as relational (Bitter, 1988). If you give your father the adjective “critical,” ask yourself in what way he was critical of you and how you felt. If you say your mother was “loving,” in what way did you feel loved by her? What tones of voice did each parent use? How did they phrase their criticism or offer their love? What meaning did these experiences have when you were little? What meaning do they have now?
We often find an initial place in the world in relation to our siblings. Which of your siblings was most different from you? In what ways? Which of your siblings was most like you? Again, in what ways? Have these relationships stayed the same or changed over the years? What meaning do you associate with the adjectives that you assigned to yourself and each of your siblings?
You can take the adjectives that are part of your three-generation genogram and think of them as a wheel of influence (Satir et al., 1991). Put yourself in a circle in the middle of a large piece of paper. Draw spokes out from that circle leading to each of the adjectives and the people who represent those adjectives. Make the spokes of the wheel of varying lengths to indicate which of the qualities, traits, or descriptions you want to keep close to you and which ones you want to keep at a distance. What influence do the various adjectives actually have in your life? My wheel of influence is shown in Figure 3.1.
FIGURE 3.1 • Jim’s Wheel of Influence
Another tool you may want to create is a historical timeline of your family of origin. Starting with the birth of your oldest grandparent, mark by year all of the comings and goings in your family up to the present time. When were all of the people in your family born? When did they go to school, change schools, or graduate? When did each family member marry, move into a new home, have children, launch children, start jobs, change jobs, or retire? Who died and when? Put all of this information on top of a year-by-year line. Below the line, note what else was happening in history during the various periods of your family’s chronological development. To give you an idea of how this might look, I have included a small section of my own family timeline in Figure 3.2.
Putting together all of this information may in and of itself raise all sorts of emotions and old memories. We are all human. So were all of our family members. Some did better with us; some did worse. We were all imperfect. Having the courage to be imperfect is also having the courage to be more fully human—and to validate and respect the humanness of others. If you are in a course on family counseling, you may find it useful to share what you learn about yourself with your classmates. Sometimes telling your story to others helps you organize it and own it. Sometimes the questions that others ask open up new avenues of investigation.
As you begin to learn more about yourself and your family of origin, you may want to explore your life through personal counseling. Although I believe that couples and family practitioners can gain a great deal from being a client, I am not in favor of requiring personal counseling for all trainees. Such a requirement flies in the face of freedom and is inconsistent with the democratic ideals that are part of my own life. Still, it is hard for me to understand how anyone can flourish in the helping professions without a dedication to self-reflection, self-awareness, and personal and family explorations.
Counseling should not be limited to those who suffer from pathology or dysfunction. Some of the field’s most important work has been in supporting the growth and development of those who help others. Counseling can help you examine your own attitudes, values, convictions, beliefs, and needs. Counseling can help you understand yourself and your own family so that you will not inadvertently impose your own values on the families you see in practice. And as you begin to practice, ongoing personal counseling and supervision can offer you chances to understand and reconsider the issues in your own life that occasionally interfere with your ability to help others. The more we can learn about ourselves, the less likely we will be to enter into countertransference—and the more likely we will be to be fully present with the families we meet in counseling.
Hanging Hats and Clearing the Mind and Heart to Focus
Virginia Satir was one of family therapy’s great models of presence when working with families. Her full focus was on the family and each of its members. Her focus was characterized by congruence and allowing the full use of her senses from seeing and hearing to touch and intuition. Her clarity of heart and mind is not something that everyone seems capable of achieving, but she always claimed it could be learned: It did not have to be innate. Here is an exercise she called Hanging Hats that she used to help people become more fully present (see Satir et al., 1991). She used this name for the exercise to emphasize the natural human tendency to proj ect internal images onto others, to hang old hats on the new people we meet. This kind of exercise is a useful step in gaining Bowen’s differentiated self.
FIGURE 3.2 • A Small Segment of Jim’s Family Timeline: 1957–1961 (Ages 10–14)
Satir would start by asking those who wanted to be family practitioners to close their eyes. This was not an attempt to shut out the outside world; rather, it was a decision to focus internally. She wanted those who would help others to start with themselves, focusing on what was natural and even physical. Her first suggestion was almost always to “pay attention to your breathing; just notice that air, which gives us life, comes easily in and out of our bodies, supporting us, nurturing us, and requiring nothing beyond what is already natural for us to do.” Then she would often ask us to extend that natural function, to see what it would be like to take a little more air into the center of our bodies, and not hold it but release it easily back into the environment. To be sure, there is all sorts of evidence that this kind of breathing releases tension (Kabat-Zinn, 2005) and distress (especially the act of breathing out), but this was also just her first step in preparing counselors and therapists to be present.
She often mixed this first focus on the physical with visualizations that were designed for health, wellness, and enhancement of self-esteem (see A. Banmen & Banmen, 1991; J. Banmen & Gerber, 1985). She might ask people to visualize looking up toward the sun, and heads would almost automatically tilt upward, a physical act that we now know also tends to release individuals from feelings of fear. Within the visualization, she might wonder whether people could feel the warmth of the sun flowing over them. She might also wonder whether people could open themselves up to an appreciation of changes that being in the sun brings to one’s life, bringing all of the value of the sun into the very center of their being. And could we appreciate ourselves for all that we had been through to become the people that we had become, an acceptance of who we were as human beings? Satir would often suggest that this was preparation for becoming more fully human: “Very little change goes on without the patient and therapist becoming vulnerable” (M. Baldwin & Satir, 1987, p. 22).
When people, listening to her voice, were centered in rest, their heart rates slowed and their breathing calm, she would ask them to open their eyes and look at the people with them, perhaps an individual, a couple, or a family. Satir would often have participants in triads, which she considered the basic unit of the family. She would ask people to use their eyes to take a picture of each person in front of them, placing the pictures on the otherwise blank screen in the participants’ minds. Then she might suggest that participants go back inside themselves, letting any other picture from the family practitioner’s past or present come forward, placing it on the mind’s screen right next to the initial pictures. All sorts of questions