The See-Saw
Copyright 2003, empathic coaching associates. All rights reserved.
A boy and a girl of similar weight are for the first time placed on opposite ends of a see-saw. Up. Down. Up. Down. This is fun at first, but then it becomes old and they want to do something else. "Hey, nobody showed us how to get off this thing! I can't get off when I'm up in the air and if I get off when I'm down, you'll get hurt." So the boy and girl are compelled to continue: up, down, up, down.
This story is a metaphor about relationships that become systems. In this article we draw from the field of "systems thinking," which itself is based on cybernetics, the science that provided the foundation for industrial automation and computer information processing..
A system is a set of interconnected components that form a unified whole bound together by the interrelationships between these parts. One well-known example is the heating system in your house. The thermostat senses when the temperature has dropped below the setting and sends a signal to turn on the furnace. The house warms up, the thermostat senses this, and then sends a signal to turn off the heat.
So what does this have to do with relationships? Psychologists recognized that systems theory provided a model for describing how family and other relationships come together in somewhat stable formations. Here are a few examples to illustrate.
John was starting to have a drinking problem. His wife Mary chided him for it, and John did not take the criticism well. Instead he reacted by drinking more. Mary, in turn, became more aggravated and expressed her anger and disappointment more strongly. In time, this relationship system became an established pattern. He drank, she nagged, he drank more, she nagged more.
Often relationship systems have a third person involved (called "triangulation"). For example, Bob's mother, Margaret, can sense when Bob and Sue don't agree on some matter. She invariably takes Bob's side of the issue and criticizes Sue's opinion. Bob is afraid of hurting his mother and so fails to come to his wife's defense. Sue feels hurt and lashes back at Bob and Margaret. Margaret backs off a bit, and gradually Bob and Sue reconcile - until the next time when the whole drama is re-enacted.
The above two examples may seem to imply that relationship systems are bad, but that is not necessarily the case. Tom's father gets depressed at times. Although careful not to take on responsibility for his father's feelings, Tom sees this as an opportunity to create ways of helping his dad through those difficult periods. His father values this support and Tom gets satisfaction from assisting in this way. The end result is a closer bond between them.
One of the important properties of systems is called "homeostasis." Homeostasis refers to the tendency of systems to maintain their interconnectedness and to resist attempts to restructure the system in a different way. In our opening illustration of the see-saw, children with no prior experience might be stuck going up and down for a very long time until someone shows them the special cooperative technique for safely dismounting.
Likewise, persons involved in a relationship system may have that "deja vu" feeling all over again but still be totally confounded as to how to change the pattern that has somehow developed. Feeling that there's no way out of a painful relationship pattern is probably one of life's greatest miseries. Fortunately there are ways to manage our relationship systems rather than having them control us. Just how that can be done using the Relationship Enhancement method will be the subject of the next article in this series.
