Bypassing the Nuclear Family

– The term bypassing the nuclear family refers to a completely new method of psychotherapy that I developed at Georgetown from family research in 1967 and ’68. In the long history of the human race, people tend to cut off intimate relationships with their families of origin and to live their own lives into the future with their spouses and with their children. This is common in the human race. That would be the children to some degree would cut off emotional contact with their parents and then to live their lives with their spouses and with their children. There are all gradations of this cutoff. The child may cut off intrapsychically while still living with the parents. That’s an emotional cutoff. It’s more common for most of us to use a combination of emotional cutoff and physical distance. It is said that this nuclear family is better off to move away from this and to live its life on its own. That is so only within certain limits. The more intense the cutoff from the past, the greater the incidence of problems in this nuclear family so that somebody who is really cut off from the past will automatically have more problems. These problems can be any kind of problem in this family, it can be conflict between the two parents, it can be dysfunction in a spouse, or they can transmit the problem to their children. The greater the degree of cutoff from the past, the more these people will want some method of psychotherapy which cuts off from the past, the more they don’t want to go back up there for psychotherapy. People who are involved in a cutoff and who don’t go back, they’re inclined to some kind of short-term therapy that focuses only on symptoms. Or they’re inclined to interminable therapy that goes on and on and on. Or they tend to divorce, that is one of the ultimate answers to this kind of a problem. As the more people cut off from the past, the more they will cut off from each other and problems. The greater the incidence of divorce as repeating divorces and remarriages are becoming much more common in our society, children who are exposed to divorcing parents are more likely to run into divorces on their own so that this is a common thing. These people cutting off from up there and then cutting off from each other is a problem for people, it’s a problem for therapists. Fortuitously in 1967 and ’68, more through family research than an attempt to do therapy, I discovered that the nuclear family conflict became much milder in people who were motivated to define a self in the families of origin. That the problem down here became much milder, more manageable, and therapy was much better. And that is when each spouse, alone and individually, would attempt to work out a self with their families of origin. That would be the ultimate for society if this spouse could work it out, could work out a self with the family of origin. And if that spouse could work out a self with the family of origin, then this would be a better marriage. That’s one of the basic theses in this whole thing. Anyway, it was a fortuitous discovery in 1967 and ’68, which has influenced the course of our program here at Georgetown for the past dozen years or more. The conflict in the nuclear family, in this, might go away completely if either spouse is successful in defining a self within the family of origin. And this problem disappears automatically. That is another major thesis of this form of therapy. The greater the cutoff from the past, the more these people are addicted to working out therapy between them. It is almost as if when the therapist starts seeing the two people alone, they get so addicted to it that they will not work on the extended family. People are cutoff from the past and once the therapist starts participating in this, he’s a part of it too. So that’s one that the therapist has to keep in mind. And once he goes along, you see these people are motivated to work out that problem. Over here with the other spouse, that’s where the motivation goes. The more the therapist gets into that and believes that that is the answer, the more it can become therapy interminable. Now this method of helping spouses to define a self in the family of origin is a subtle and complex thing. It’s too complex for a single videotape. It involves knowledge of all of the theory and then all the little subtleties that go into this. It took years for these people to develop this cutoff with the past, and it can takes years to reverse the process and some kind of knowledge of how the process takes place. It is not a simple technique that people learn. There are people who go away from Georgetown and who believe it’s a simple technique. If this one and this one just use simple techniques up there, it will be better. Well it’s not as simple as going home again or going to family reunions, nor venting one’s dissatisfactions with the family. There are people who believe that. It is not that simple. One does this by slowly reestablishing a relationship back in this whole family, the bigger, the better. By reestablishing the relationship as it once was, and then by going home time after time learning to observe, learning the rules of interlocking triangles, and eventually reaching a state when this one can communicate feelings up there calmly and objectively, and the other can communicate feelings back. That’s one of the things in this. I won’t try to explain them all, that is the subject of other tapes and of writings from the center. It can take years for dissatisfactions with the family to subside and for a calm emotional state to evolve to the point that this one and these can both be adults, they can be adult human beings and they can deal calmly with each other. This method is so different and complex that the therapist has to have as much awareness as the spouse or the patient. For instance, this one grew up as an individual in this family. If one is to recover a self from this, one optimally should go back into this as an individual and not with one’s spouse or one’s children. To go back into it makes it much more complex. There’s a good example in this. It can be almost as much productive, say for this wife to go back into this when both parents are dead as it would’ve been if both parents are alive. The return is to the emotional field and not to a person in the field. I’ll explain that in a little more detail later. Some of the principles involved in this method will be discussed in this particular family. Steve and Kathy first came after they had been in psychotherapy for about twice and they were on the verge of a divorce. It was easy for me to see that the conflict between these two was so great they couldn’t sit in the presence of each other without retaliating, without speaking to each other about it, and without a volatile exchange. Kathy’s mother had died, and then her father shortly after that when she was in her late teens. Her mother had a fairly big family, including an older sister who was with mother when she died of a cancer. And she had uncles and aunts and nephews who represented this family. On her father’s side, he was the youngest. He had some older siblings, he had an older brother with a wife, he had people who represented the family. She had sort of drifted away from her family after her parents died, following which she became attached to Steve’s family. Now Steve was emotionally embedded into a very conflictual family so that this marriage was real conflict. Every time that Steve would get upset in his relationship there, Kathy would get upset in relation to him. I could see this from the very beginning and after about two interviews, I separated the two. Now if a therapist wanted to see these two people together, he would have the task of calming down the emotional reactivity between the two. What I did was to separate them for, oh, six months. I told them what I was doing. And the goal was to help Kathy get back into contact with her family. On the one hand and in separate sessions, to help Steve get in contact with his. Then Kathy had a much easier time of it. In other words, she could get across this barrier much easier because most of her cutoff had developed after her parents had died. Steve had a harder time because he was literally working in the family. I believe that if Cathy could be a self over here, and then Steve could relate to her, he would be the one through which this family would pull up to a higher level of individuation. I’ve now seen these people for a little over three years. The first time I saw them some like six months separately before I began seeing them on videotape. After I started seeing them on tape, I had planned to put them on this videotape series. Now it is possible for a therapist to see two people like this together as long as he keeps these people focused more on this and more on that than the relationship between them. What these people do is they will automatically focus on each other so that my whole course of therapy, which went for six months seeing them separately at about monthly intervals, then went to monthly intervals with the two together with infrequent appointments with each separately. The goal of the whole thing is to help each focus on their families of origin and not to focus on the relationship between them. That’s where the title comes from, Bypassing the Nuclear Family. This is one of those good families in which the whole effort, for the most part, has been to help Kathy with her family of origin and to help Steve with his. It’s unavoidable for some kind of issues between them to come into focus. But the major focus is always back on the family of origin with the full belief and knowledge that if they can do this, the whole thing will work out better than it would work out in trying to solve the problems of these people in the relationship between them. This is the whole basis for our method of family therapy at the Family Center, and it’s the whole basis of this one in which I’ve been seeing Steve and Kathy.