Family. Mother, father and two children are having dinner. Children are capricious, they do not want to eat what their mother has prepared for them. The father, in punishment for the whims, sends the children to bed without dinner at all. Then he sees how the wife secretly carries dinner to the children in the bedroom. There is a quarrel.
How will they work with this situation in different psychological approaches?
A psychoanalytic psychotherapist will delve into the personal history of each parent. It will probably turn out that the wife had a very tough and harsh father in her childhood, whose behavior, as she unconsciously sees, her husband repeats. She, in turn, enters the role of her mother, who always tried against all odds to caress her children. In the husband’s family, his mother periodically went against the will of his father, which reduced the significance and authority of the latter. Therefore, the husband has a fear of losing a significant status in the eyes of his family, allowing his wife such behavior. Apparently, they, without realizing it, projected the behavior of their parents into their family life.
The conclusion of the psychotherapist: until they become aware of this scheme for themselves, they will not be able to change their behavior, see not images, but a real person next to them, break out of the circle of endless repetitions of situations and results. Need psychotherapeutic work with a couple together. The consultant will offer the husband and wife to remember how they were brought up in the family, what patterns of communication between themselves their parents gave them. When they realize that they are reproducing not entirely successful parental patterns, they will have more opportunities to change their behavior.
A psychotherapist working in the constellation tradition will not work with both, but personally with the one who came with this problem — and most likely it will be a woman. During the arrangement, it will become clear that (for example) the whole point is that her grandmother had an abortion. Now the woman, being in the flow of family history, cannot forgive her grandmother and unconsciously makes amends for her child. The psychotherapist will carry out the forgiveness of a long-dead grandmother, free the woman from the curse of the family, and the woman, having wept over this story, will be released.
Within the framework of the synthon approach, the work will be structured differently. The synton approach prefers to work not with the past, but with the present, and, if possible, seeks a behavioral solution, teaching the participants in the situation the best solutions.
It is clear that in the proposed situation, the husband and wife have not yet learned how to build their relationship. The first mistake of our heroes is that they did not discuss in advance their possible actions in such situations with children. The second is that they quarreled instead of agreeing on the future. Accordingly, for the future they need to agree on all these issues, namely:
- How to behave when the children are naughty at dinner, do not want to eat what they have prepared? In what cases is it right for a father to send children to sleep without dinner?
- If the husband in this or another situation showed authoritarianism, how should the wife react to this? Is it possible, is it right to show in front of children that she does not agree with this? Will there be an agreement that parents with children always support each other, at least do not criticize?
- When the children have already been sent to bed and the spouses are left alone, maybe they should now return to the discussion of what happened? Is the style of discussion friendly, constructive?
In civilized families, all disagreements are resolved in this way, with the help of normal discussion and agreements for the future. The couple learn to live together. If the family is not quite civilized and reaching agreements is unrealistic, other technologies of constructive influence can be used. In our opinion, it is more appropriate to start solving such family situations with a behavioral decision, with determining what we want and how we can get there. If suddenly work with the present starts to fail over and over again: everything seems to be clear to everyone, everyone has agreed on everything, and at the same time the agreements do not work: they are constantly forgotten, instead of reasonable actions there are emotions — you need to look for other approaches, analyze internal benefits and, perhaps, to arrange real psychotherapy for someone in such a family: to treat and inspire, inspire and heal …