Dear reader,
today I am talking about "problems" and once again about "paradoxical missions". First of all, I would like to mention a few pioneers in the field of systemic therapy and then I will talk about my own examples and views from my work with clients as a systemic integrative consultant for family and social affairs. Also I recommend a very unique movie, including a sex doll.
The problem is the solution
That "problems equals solutions" may not be heard for the first time by those who regularly find themselves confronted with problems in their work, such as a teacher dealing with a disturbing student. Or a biologist with a resistant virus strain. The solution for the teacher is the teacher and the solution for the virus is an effective remedy. If both workers would locate the problem somewhere else or not identify one at all in the matter they are dealing with (students/viruses), they would not need a solution and would not work on it. The biologist would quit his job and accept that people are killed by viruses and the teacher would get along very well with the student.
The fact that the solution for the teacher should be the teacher may seem confusing at first glance, but since the order of things for the teacher is that of the adult person who takes responsibility for the situation, it is up to the teacher to find the solution to his problem in himself (the teacher feels disturbed by the student and not the other way round - although by the way, that would be interesting to investigate, too ; -).
A popular question from a systemic point of view is: "Who has the problem? And who has it most?"
Changing without changing
As I said in my last article about Alfred Adler, the limited view of the "patient with an isolated problem" has been dropped by therapists over time to address the development of individuals through their interaction with their environment. A union of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers was the "Palo Alto Group" from California, which was founded in the early 1960s. Inspired by Gregory Bateson, they originally researched schizophrenia and later on communication, psychotherapy and family therapy.
The Mental Research Institute influenced the development of systemic therapy to a large extent. In addition to Virgina Satir, its founding members included Paul Watzlawik, as well as Jay Haley, among others; the latter provided important impulses towards strategic systemic and hypnotherapy. Satir became famous for her "family therapy" and creative use of Gestalt-elements like the "family sculpture" within her therapy sessions.
The Palo Alto Group also influenced its profession in the rest of the Western world, including Mara Selvini Palazzoli and her Milanese group. She caused confusion in the field of psychotherapy with her co-written book "Paradox and counterparadox", published in 1977. In the field of family therapy, Palazzoli formulated the sentence (a family could say): "Take the symptom, but do not change us under any circumstances", which was understood as a paradoxical call to action. The therapists of the Milanese model answered this request as follows: "Yes, we will change you, but on condition that you do not change."
How do you understand that?
In practice, this meant, for example, that a supervised family was confronted with the following final commentary, which contained two elements: first, a paradoxical task such as "At present, it seems too early to propose a change to you. We think that you should at least leave everything as it is in the near future. The family's cohesion is more important than anything else right now!"
On the other hand, to find a positive connotation of all the acts or omissions that characterized the family by pointing this out as a way of ensuring the family's cohesion.
Example: The family is defined by the massive illness of the mother. Everything is organized around the mother or excluded. Since caring for the mother's wellbeing is an important part of the family's daily routine, a change in routine would be counterproductive. However, this does not rule out that the family visited the therapists precisely because of the stressful situation, but in the environment of medical treatment and permanent care within the family there is no one who has interpreted the situation positively. Aspcets could be that the family gained a significant amount of knowledge and practice in nursing and handles medications as well as doing smart scheduling.
However, the positive re-framing of a situation
that is mostly experienced as stressful has to be logical and conclusive for the clients and is not as easy to accomplish as it might read here.
To illustrate this with another examples, I quote from my previous article on the subject of positive reframed disturbances:
- Sleep disturbance is the ability to be watchful and get by with little sleep
- Depression is the ability to react with deepest emotionality to conflicts
- Schizophrenia is the ability to live in two worlds at the same time or living in a fantasy world
- Anorexia nervosa is the ability to get along with few meals and identify with the hunger of the world"
So problems themseves could be seen as positive.
What do you call "problem"?
Has anyone ever told you that what you consider problematic is just a hint that you already have a solution to this problem? How about someone answering your lamentation,"This is exactly the problem you need right now." Most of the time we want a problem to go away, we want to get rid of it and turn to the "real". But what is that? When you think about your problems in such a way that they are only made for you to develop through them and activate your abilities and resources, do you have a different relationship to them?
When you really think about it, when someone else has offered you the solution to your problem: what did you think or feel? Could you just accept that and say, "Thank you! This is the right solution for my problem!" Or were you not rather dissatisfied and disagreeing with your friend's suggestion, since it wasn't you who came up with it?
Remove the problem from the field?
I recently had a client who was confronted with financially supporting her parents who had grown old. Because she had broken with them and thought it would continue to do so, her problem got a very unpopular place. A family system consists only of the members of this system connected by blood ties. We live in a society that recognizes the family as the first great influence on our identity. Therefore, it is not possible to turn away from the family and pretend that it does not exist. It happens the exact opposite of what the client formulates superficially as intention: that she is spared from any contact with her parents. The more distance she brings between herself and her parents, the more the problems push themselves into her subconscious, because only the intention to remove important people from the present life brings her closer than she would like to be. The lack of parents' presence makes them appear in an unchangeable light. They are framed and virtually manifested by the client in a certain image and all their actions and omissions are merely integrated into the image and fulfil what the client expects.
The logical effect of this attitude is that the problem does not get smaller but bigger or at least stays that way.
Benefits of problems
From a systemic point of view, this has a comprehensible benefit for the client. One question, for example, would be what would happen if the person degraded to "Persona non grata" were suddenly loving, caring and benevolent? How would this affect the person who wanted to send him to the devil and who, to a large extent, gave himself identity by being a victim of the outlawed person?
It should be remembered that people who tell a story about themselves again and again over many decades experience their "being I". They have created a "truth" about themselves, from which they have drawn something profitable for themselves over time. That is also called "constructivism".
I've met a lot of people who define themselves by their trauma.
One would take something away from them and even plunge them into an identity crisis if one were to say that there is now enough of the drama and that one should finally pull oneself together.
Let's take a bad case of assault. This caused a trauma and as a result, the patient was treated for a significant period of time. During this time this person was carefully questioned, examined, touched, confirmed and also criticized and corrected. The causal action "assault" is now years ago. But the consequences of this experience are still ongoing. Depending on the extent to which the affected person puts the "profit" thus experienced in relation to the "loss", this experience will constitute a part of his or her identification.
With regard to my client, I have noticed that through the bureaucratic process she had to deal with, she came into contact with her feelings again, in a strength that is actually "illogical" from the point of view of the past time, in which she had no real contact with her parents.
Acting without being asked to do so
As outsiders and observers, we all tend to "leave our long-past experiences alone" and thus "make peace". But it is not up to us to decide when someone else should do this. We don't know much about the gain of a person, which he draws from it, to maintain a part of his identity through a traumatic experience. Nor can we judge which thing, person and activity can trigger a fresh memory of a trauma.
Lars & the sex doll
If no one in the surrounding area would respond to a traumatic story with horror, anger and sadness: What would happen? What if everyone responded in a completely equal and accepting manner?
There's this great movie that shows it in an excellent way. The movie is called "Lars and the Real Girl". A deranged man, who lives in the midst of a small community and is cared for by the parishioners and his brother plus wife, buys himself a life-size sex doll and turns it into his wife. He introduces her to his brother's family for dinner and from then on he takes her everywhere. No one even starts to find this strange or takes offence, since it was quickly agreed that this was the best thing for Lars and he had to decide for himself when he would turn his wife into a doll again.
In my opinion, the main message of the film is to simply accept people's madness as a unique attempt to solve a problem for them. You could say that everything we see as strange behavior for the one who does this is an experiment. He tries to find out how far the people around him are willing to accept his attempts at solving the problem.
If the environment reacts insecurely, aggressively, scornfully and incomprehensibly, it may even happen that someone intensifies his strange or disturbing behaviour and therefore appears to be even "crazier". One could exaggerate to say that a madman merely reflects the madness around him and that the degree of his difficulties depends on the degree of difficulty of others.
Lars said goodbye to his doll at some point. The creativity in which the film realizes this is really impressive and I recommend anyone who is interested in unusual problem solving to look at it.
Back to my client
My client radiated suffering, it seemed as if she was afflicted and I had to do something to reduce her grief. The first impulse I often see in myself is to change the situation for the client as if she had to say: "Well, I know it's stupid to carry so many resentments around with me all these years. I'm only harming myself. It's not worth suffering."
But did I get this assignment from her? I don't think so. What she did in fact want from me was a formally correct response to her request as to whether she could be officially exempted from the legal obligation to take care of her parents. She came to my counselling, because she had already received a hardship exemption clause from the district office herself and now only asked for help with the writing of the document. Behind this, I also noted the desire to confirm that she wanted to renounce her parents' responsibility for the childhood trauma as a justification. To which she showed corresponding emotional reactions and reactivated the feelings, which manifested itself in tears and grief. If she hadn't shown this human reaction, and if she hadn't wanted my support in writing the letter, she might have expected my resistance.
Helpers are not objective observers
Since I too am a part of society and there is an unspoken, yet still valid intergenerational treaty between old and young, she might have had to prepare herself for a less compassionate reaction from me. We all live in this knowledge, what the generations expect from each other and in the fewest cases we react acceptingly or evenly to the evasion of confronted family members.
In my opinion, it is understandable that the client is holding on to her trauma, because otherwise she has to admit that the neglect of the parents could be interpreted as her wrong behaviour. What would actually happen in the final consequence and would be judged by us as social beings in the same way. If there is no plausible reason for us to turn away from a human being, turning away is "wrong" and turning towards it would be "right". To do this, however, it is logically necessary to go beyond one's own suffering and give up long-term identification. Those who love their "carefully maintained" identification, however, will not give it up so quickly for something that they cannot yet be sure that it can replace the loss of this identity "profitably".
A child, for example, only then gives up a lovely toy when it finds a new and more interesting one, the child has practically outgrown the old toy.
An identity as a "victim" can therefore be very profitable and positively felt by someone.
Even, and especially when people consider this to be useless and bad, this does not mean that those with a victim mentality see it as such. On the contrary, a defensive attitude towards the sacrifice made (physically or psychologically suffered violence) must then be strengthened by the person concerned, so that the fellow human beings react to it also appropriately.
To find out what kind of problem someone really and truly wants to solve is not so easy.
We all have social experiences and exaggerate it in an effort to adapt, some of the problems that have been revealed are not really felt as such or we are not really convinced of them. But we are pretending that they are obvious problems, so that the others can legitimize this.
This can be one of the reasons why some people do not seem to be treatable and cannot be helped even after years of treatment. But whose view is this? And how will it be assessed?
My paradoxical advice to the client could have been:
“Try to bring more distance between yourself and your parents. You should not keep in touch with them for the rest of your parents' lives and immediately break off any form of attempted contact from their side."
Let this advice affect you. Contemplate a while. What could happen?
But I didn't have this assignment. As long as a client does not explicitly instruct me to do or leave something that he wants to happen or not to happen, my job as a consultant is to fulfill the client's wish and accept his situation as it is. You do not believe how surprisingly often it is for me, my question about what I am supposed to do remains unanswered. But my questions about what I should do for the client must never be circumvented. It’s of utmost importance to become clear in that matter.
I always fulfil my task best when I know what is going on with me and have an awareness of it in the consulting setting. And not that I know exactly what's going on with the client. I don't really know anything about that.
It is basically very liberating of dealing with clients in such a way that they are blank white leaves for me and I don't have to make any effort to understand their complex life, but only to know myself well and to know that it can happen to me to have unconscious desire for intervention and prejudice. And I can therefore take care that when it happens, this should not be to the detriment of the client, but for the benefit of him or her.
The art of counselling is therefore not the strict avoidance of prejudices and clumsy interventions,
but rather that when they happen (and they always do), they should be handled in such a way that they belong to the counselling process and can be worked with.
Whether someone actually has the exact problem with which he/she is supposedly peddling is really a matter to be investigated at first and can also be a lot of fun. I would like to say that we treat many of our problems like good old porcelain. It stands in the cupboard for years, stirs dust, is used and cleaned again and again and then put back into the shrine. Sometimes a piece breaks down or disappears at a party.
So always remember: The problem is the solution. Change without being changed is possible.
And don't forget: The universe is a collection of beautiful porcelain pieces.
Thank you for reading!
Picture sources:
Problem: https://www.flickr.com/photos/badjonni/474558791
Virginia Satir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Satir
Reframing: https://www.flickr.com/photos/d_pham/8072408810
Sex doll: by Photograph own work, mannequin created by www.dsdoll.com, with permission granted from dsdoll.com [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Movie trailer "Lars and the Real girl": extern Link
Werewolve: Reynold Brown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Footer Christmas: https://www.madeiraislandnews.com/2015/12/merry-christmas.html
For some fun I have a little riddle for you.
It refers to the matter how we deal with problems. Here is one:
In a building there is a very slow elevator. This is seen as a problem. How would you solve it?
I am curious about which answers you come up with. Have fun! :-)
Thank you to everbody who supported me, the SteemSTEM curation team as well as all my readers and followers! I wish you a Merry Christmas, Love, Health, Luck & Success in whatever you do and don't do:)
