The Systemic-Minded, Person-Centered Psychotherapist's Guide to the Galaxy

Systemic-minded psychotherapists posit that problems people face are often stuck in an intricate web of interrelationship that makes it difficult to sustain changes made in the vacuum of individual therapy. Person-centered psychotherapists wrestle to stir clients' and families' latent energies so they may free themselves from being stuck in their own quagmires outside of session. Contrary to popular assumption, psychotherapy isn't in the best case a solving of clients' problems or where enduring changes are made.

Life's web of feedback loops is sufficiently complex to confound common notions of linear causality, as while thinking affects perception, states of mind affect thinking, emotional experiencing affects thinking, behavior itself influences emotional experiencing and thoughts, ad infinitum. The paths of influence are multidirectional and, in many cases, self-reinforcing. Philologist Friedrich Ast (1808), among the first to parcel out errors in philosophical and psychological reductionism, argued—

"The foundational law of all understanding and knowledge is to find the spirit of the whole through the individual, and through the whole to grasp the individual."

Ast's "hermeneutic circle" is a term intended to reinforce the notion that one's understanding of a whole is established by reference to its individual parts and that one's understanding of its individual parts is informed by reference to the whole. Neither the whole nor the individual part can be adequately understood without some reference to the other. This circular aspect of understanding does not, of course, prevent us from knowing, yet it emphasizes that truth always has a multilayered context.

Facing Contradictory Dualities

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1850) made a curious re-assessment over a decade after his early academic dissertation on Socratic irony, noting with disappointment his sometime uncritical use of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had touted a particular idealism that assumed all of reality can be possibly known rationally and, therefore, sought an integrated synthesis of knowledge, an "absolute idealism" to transcend all contradictory dualities. Socrates, on the other hand, had sought to elevate an understanding and responsibility only of "the individual."

Kierkegaard wrote that in his youthful criticism of Socrates, influenced by the novelty of Hegelianism, he had missed Socrates' intentionality and brilliance in focusing only on the particular, the person in-and-of-themselves, contending, "It is precisely this that powerfully demonstrates what a great ethicist Socrates was."

So it is with psychotherapists and psychotherapy—we must both acknowledge the multilayered complexity that is the ecological web of a person's life while remaining focused and centered in our immediate psychotherapeutic work with the particular understandings and responsibilities of individual persons. This is no small challenge, yet to focus only on the systemic context is to risk missing the person, and to focus only on the individual is to miss that in which the individual is firmly embedded. Either error risks psychotherapy as an adventure in missing the point.

The field of psychotherapy has by and large engaged individuals in ways that ignore the complex webs in which individuals are entangled. For nearly a century, a movement within the field has remained engaged in an effort to amplify a "systems thinking" in the field, joining together the enterprise of individual psychotherapy with the ecosystemic philosophy of the whole, of general and natural systems theories.

Mental health care, psychotherapy, and, in fact, the entire field of health care, is finally and increasingly aiming toward more holistic understandings and integrationist approaches to services in acknowledgement of the realities of the inextricable complexities of health and pathology and the failures of linear thinking and practice. Some of this work, of systems focusing increasingly on the systemic, may produce some positive shifts toward better help; yet we must be careful not to swing too far one direction or the other. Systemic psychotherapy sounds nearly like an oxymoron, yet along its way, there remains an honorable tension.

Systemic-Minded Psychotherapy

Five strategies provide a glimpse into a systemic psychotherapy mindset—

#1 - Remaining fluidly responsive to changing environmental feedback and collaboratively exploiting setbacks in the course of achieving established goals.

On August 6, 2014, the Rosetta space probe arrived at its destination after a nearly eleven year journey of more than 600 million miles through our galaxy. When it arrived, it spent months carefully orbiting around comet 67P, aka Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in order to study it from afar. Rosetta first had to get a sense of the shapeliness of the mass, understand a bit of its terrain, and strategize where best to send its lander.

Philae, the landing module that Rosetta had brought along, eventually made its careful descent to the comet on November 12, 2014. Unfortunately, despite careful planning, the lander bounced twice on the surface of the comet after anchoring harpoons failed to deploy and a thruster designed to hold the probe to the surface did not fire. When it finally landed in the shadow of a deep crack near the bottom of a towering cliff, it was unable to absorb the sunlight necessary for its battery and the continuity of the mission.

After the mishap, scientists assessed that the immediate non-optimal position of the lander may have an eventual upside—as the comet neared the sun, the lander would find itself again exposed to beams of sunlight necessary to charge itself yet remain shielded enough from its heat to further its mission closer to the sun than planned.

As therapists survey territory of a client's surface world to gain preliminary images and positioning during early stages of exploration, we must be skilled enough to avoid major obstacles and constructively exploit setbacks as we traverse through pummeling, disorienting space dust in order, ultimately, for clients to gain an awesome, sometimes catalyzing, perspective of larger processes governing their lives.

#2 - The use of client feedback about the therapeutic relationship to engage the isomorphic and parallel emotional process between our relationship and others.

I argued elsewhere that "the person-centered process in psychotherapy is the soul of therapeutic change." At every turn, I believe it is my responsibility to circle back around to mindful reflection of my therapeutic interaction with clients. I tell them about my experience of them—what I have felt, wondered, observed, and thought, including my evolving hypotheses. I sometimes go to great lengths to understand and cajole clients to understand some of the basic relational dynamics taking place between us in therapy to stir perspective outside the therapy room. Simultaneously, I elicit client feedback regarding their experience of the process of the therapy and of my own presence and engagement with them, remaining warmly accepting and encouraging of, and dialogical with, client critique. When built on openness, respect, and curiosity, engaging at this level has the potential to infuse the transformative powers of both experiential insight and relational accountability into the therapy process.

#3 - Disentangling perceptual and communicative patterns from one another.

Gregory Bateson (1979), pioneering social scientist and cyberneticist, described how people become stuck in their own rigidity—how, for instance, presupposed ideas are supported by a social system which conversely supports the presupposed ideas because the social system itself is a vast recursion full of individuals with presupposed ideas. The proverbial “chicken or the egg” really cannot do justice at this level of complexity.

Bateson emphasized the need to extrapolate patterns of mental processes alongside patterns of adaptive processes—all forms of communication have an adaptive function, and perception is nearly inextricably tied to processes of communication. We must move beyond learning as insight-comprehension to learning-while-learning—communicative shifts occurring simultaneously alongside perceptual shifts, each reinforcing the other. Bateson (1972) called this “deutero-learning” or “Learning II.”

As people in therapy grasp shared aspects of the perceptual and communicative processes within themselves and their families, the possibility increases that as they gradually decode interrelationships, they will learn to disembody the problem transfixed within them. In other words, they may learn increasingly to dissociate themselves in some way from their problem and thereby become disentangled from it.

Bateson (1977) once wrote, “As you become aware that you are doing it, you become in a curious way much closer to the world around you,” and this is its therapeutic power. This, Bateson (1991) argued, is because “meaning is not internal. It is between parts.”

#4 - Practicing the problem in order to demystify and rend it less powerful.

Once people in therapy have come to experience a problem differently in-session, they will come to experience it differently in life. Experience will beget experience, as it nearly always does. For our therapeutic relationship to affect change in the lives of the people I help, we must somehow experience the problem together in vivo.

When people are tempted to go on recursively explaining problems, I let them know they can choose between carrying on, remaining in the safe position of knowing what they know already, or experientially exploring with me aspects of emotion or communication to risk gaining what they may have never known.

#5 - Evoking images and feelings that support self-extrication from forces within and between relationships as well as within and between meanings.

When the positive end of one magnet is placed against the negative end of another, an invisible force pulls them together. When the magnet’s positive end is placed against the positive end of another, they repel one another. Two pieces of uncharged metal neither attract nor repel. There is magnetism in the emotional systems of families and, to greater or lesser degrees, between every member. The force between two is skewed by a third, and so on. The challenge of therapy is of how to work therapeutically with processes that bind and unbind, generating flexibility and instilling resilience. To grow, people must experience freedom within the pushes and pulls of powerful self-perpetuating life forces in which problems—and families—maintain themselves.

Bateson (1972) himself suggested that painting, poetry, music, dance, and other metaphoric art forms serve as a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, a way of communicating outwardly what dwells inwardly in order to explore relationships between the meanings they express. Whitaker (1989) taught us that what is therapeutic is not necessarily the experience itself but the meaning attached to it. If the person is to change, creative and transformative experiencing must occur.

Systemic psychotherapists recognize that clients are not the sum of their parts nor their problems and understand that the intimately personal, meaning-centered encounter is the instrument of therapy's fundamental utility. We see potential linkages, and power, between the client and every other person, challenge, and opportunity in their world and lean toward them, respectfully and intentionally stirring some of their anxiety-evoking interrelationship within the flux-and-flow of the here-and-now in order for the problems out there to be brought into here to engage the hope for meaningful, second-order, and sustainable changes to occur. How do you engage the systemic in your work?

Blake Griffin Edwards is a psychotherapist, clinical fellow in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and behavioral health champion for the American Academy of Pediatrics whose writing has been featured by the American Academy of Psychotherapists, the Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice in the UK, and the AAMFT, as well as at GoodTherapy.org, GoodMenProject.com, RelevantMagazine.com, and PsychCentral.com.

References

Ast, F. (1808). Grundlinien der grammatik, hermeneutik und kritik. Landshut, Germany: Jos. Thomann, Buchdrucker, & Buchh?ndler.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, G. (1977). Afterword. In J. Brockman (Ed.). About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson (pp. 235-247). New York: E. P. Dutton.

Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Bantam.

Bateson, G. (1991-published posthumously). A sacred unity: Further steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Harper/Collins.

Edwards, B.G. (2016). Person-centered process: The soul of therapeutic change: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/person-centered-process-soul-therapeutic-change-blake-griffin-edwards.

Kierkegaard, S. (1850). Journals and Papers (7 volumes), edited by Hong, H. V. and Edna H. Hong (1967-1978), assisted by G. Malantschuk, index by N. Hong and C. Barker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Whitaker, C., and Ryan, M. (1989). Midnight musings of a family therapist. New York: Norton.