The family approach fist came to prominence in the 1970s, a time of huge upheavals in the nuclear family. What made it seem such a radical departure from conventional theraphy was that the system itself was the patient. Classically, parents come in with a troubled child as the “identified patient”. But the child’s symptoms usually reflect some hidden problem between the parents that reverberates through all the family relationships. So instead of focusing on any one individual, therapist concentrate on what happens between individuals. It is the “between” they try to change.
Like dominos: But by the late ’70s, female therapist had begun to realize something was missing from this revolutionary new theory. For one thing, therapist seldom seemed to factor in the profoundly different expectations placed on men and women in the family. Never mind, for example, that the mother had a job or a career to attend to these days. It was she who was still given almost total responsibility for the family’s emotional life–only to be told she was over-involved. It was as if the family system operated outside any context of place and time. “Until about a dozen years ago,” says Betty Carter, director of the Family Institute of Westchester, in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., “we thought the system was all, uncomplicated by gender. Family members would simply fall into place like dominoes.'
Today Carter is one of the women at the forefront of the new consciousness in family theraphy. In 1978, she and three colleagues, Marianne Walter, Peggy Papp and Olga Silverstein, launched the Women’s Project in family Theraphy, a series of lectures and workshops aimed at sensitizing the profession to the profession to the feminist critique. Among the immediate targets was the penchant for “mother-blaming.” Therapist seemed always to be hitting on the mother and coddling the father. they spoke frequently of the need to “pull the mother out” so that distant, unexpressive Dad could become more involved.
In part, the women realized, the onus was on the mother because she was usually the one who sought help to begin with, and was therefore most “available” for change. But also, it seemed a result of blatant sexual stereotyping by people who should know better. “There is a common belief that couples share–often with the collusion of the therapist–that ‘[the mother] can and the [the father] can’t,” observes Walter, who heads the Family Theraphy Practice Center in Washington, D.C. “In theraphy, the a person who needed to change was the mother,” Walters notes.
Although the women’s Project had not to launch a movement, the workshops drew large crowds and ultimately have had a wide impact on the profession. The group’s efforts also angered some of the older guard. “If we had realized the amount of anger and personal criticism to which we would be subjected by colleagues, we might have had second thoughts about setting forth on this new course,” wrote Walters in ‘The invisible web,’ a 1988 book authored by the four Women’s project organizers. Resistance continues to this day among theorists who believe the gender issue creates what one of them calls " a needless distraction” from the issues of theraphy. “It’s very hard to discuss and everybody takes it personally,” says a therapist who thinks it best to without hold her name. “Not with your patient–it’s among your colleagues that it can’t be discussed.”
The hostility merely strengthens the resolve of the feminists, who insist that family theraphy must begin to take account of the cultural and social context in which families operate. Classically, they argue, women have carried much of the responsibility for making the family work. women’s attempts to shift some of the burden to their husbands in large measure account for the domestic havoc that has become part of the social climate of the ’80s. “What we think of as the family,” says Monica McGoldrick, a colleague of Carter’s, “really had to do with the role that women always played–but now are not agreeing to play. "
Interviewed jointly, Carter and McGoldrick provide a kind of impromptu workshop on the subject. In the past, they say, it was the wife-homemaker who held the strands of the family together, like Penelope weaving while Ulysses roamed. McGoldrick: “Women did whatever was done in terms of remembering, reinforcing and making connections happen.” Carter: “It would be the woman who did all the shopping for gifts, who would remind her husband that it was his mother’s birthday end ‘Here’s the present I bought for her,’ and she would plan on having her over for dinner Sunday night.” McGoldrick: “And now she says, ‘Hey, you know, that’s your mother, if you want to invite her over for dinner, go ahead, but don’t invite her on Friday because I’m working all day and I work pretty hard’.” Carter: " So you see, it’s an enormous disruption in the old connectedness–and now we have the fragments. "
Among these fragments are stepfamilies. Unfortunately, stepfamily members almost instantly get into trouble by falling back on the gender structure that got them in trouble in their original families. Says Carter, “The man assumes she will take care of his children. Or she assumes he has to support her and her children, and he ends up supporting two households. It pushes gender arrangements to their illogical conclusion.”
When a couple divorces, they are pertectly capable of carrying gender stereotypes with them into single-parent households. Parents, especially the women who head most such households, generally feel insufficient for failing to provide a male role model. Single mothers typically worry their sons will turn into “mama’s boys.” Carter says her “gender red-alert flag goes up” whenever she hears that from women. “You run into a lot of social dogma, like, ‘We all know women can’t raise their sons without the strong hand of the father.’ Well, of course they can. But mothers don’t know that either–they have this gender-based mythology.” As it happens, adds Marianne Walters, the mythology is supported by therapists themselves, most of whom feel two-parent families are best. But what is best, Walters argues, “is whatever family is working well.”
‘One down’: As the feminist perspective asserts itself in family therapy, a reverse danger has begun to emerge: “father-blaming.” In the process of emphasizing the strains on women, some therapists overlook the problems of men who are made to feel “one down,” as husbands and fathers, says August Napier,apier, director of the Family Workshop in Atlanta, Ga. Napier, author of the influential 1978 book “The Family Crucible,” more recently wrote “The Fragile Bond,” which draws candidly on his experiences with his wife (and cotherapist), Margaret In therapy sessions, he and Margaret don’t hesitate to talk about some of their own marital disagreements. They have come to believe gender issues are so crucial that the most responsible way to handle them is with a male-female therapy team.
Napier himself believes the focus of therapy now ought to be on showing men how to take a more equal family role, something extremely hard for them to do because their own fathers were so often emotionally unavailable to them. He encourages male patients to join support groups where they can help each other learn to be better parents. Many men genuinely want to change their role but don’t have enough emotional underpinning, he says. “Women try to teach us and we get defensive. "
Men and women are different, and perhaps at best their resulting difficulties can be ameliorated only a little. But something has certainly happened in the social order to make the effort more urgent. In nearly every couple he and his wife had seen, notes Napier, “the women were angry and resentful, the men were deeply–if often silently–threatened. ‘Why,’ I asked myself, ‘are we men having so much difficulty dealing with the changes in our wives?’” It is just as well that a discipline called family therapy has begun to address such problems without the very biases that helped create them originally.
