Next week is Christmas, and many of us will be spending time with our extended families. Ram Dass, a clinical psychologist and spiritual teacher, once said “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family”. This slightly tongue in cheek quote rings true, because when we spend time with the family we grew up with, we can feel a whole mix of complicated emotions.
Systemic approaches to psychotherapy (mainly used when working with couples or families) has an explanation for this. It is called the ‘family dance’, a term coined by Minuchin (1974). The theory is that each family has a ‘dance’ and everyone in that family has a particular set of ‘dance moves’ that they ‘perform’. This isn’t something we do consciously. Nobody explicitly tells us what our role is. As we grow up, we instinctively learn how to fit in with the rest of the family, and perform our role as best we can, and we mostly assume that this is normal or natural. However, when we grow up and leave the family, perhaps spending time with other families, we notice that other families have different ‘dances’, and members of those families have their own ‘dance moves’ to perform.
In my family, one of the ‘dance moves’ I instinctively learnt to perform was ‘helper’. As I have grown up, I have taken that role with me out into the wider world. I have been attracted to jobs that I perceive to ‘help others’ (like counselling) for example. However, sometimes the roles that we learn to perform in our families can cause us problems. There is a fine line between ‘helping’ and ‘rescuing’. In a blog a few months back, I wrote about the drama triangle, in which someone tries to rescue someone else and becomes resentful and bitter when that help isn’t welcomed. Well, that is what can happen to ‘helpers’ when they perform the role that they learnt in the family dance blindly, without reflecting on whether their help is really needed or appropriate in the current circumstances.
So, as we grow up and spend time living away from our families of origin, we can gradually change our ‘dance moves’. This can happen consciously, when we become aware of the roles we played in our families, and reflect on whether or not they are the roles we want to play in life. Or we can change unconsciously, as we develop new relationships in which new ‘dance moves’ are required – so we shift our roles in relationship to other people.
However, often the original ‘dance moves’ we learnt in our families of origin are pretty powerful and hard to change. They are particularly hard to change when we spend time with our families. That is why, when we go back to our parental homes, we can suddenly be thrown back into those old roles, and start performing those ‘old dance’ moves without even thinking about it. It is like an automatic reflex. We might start squabbling with siblings in the same way we did as teenagers, or find ourselves feeling resentful of being expected to be a certain way – the way we were expected to be as children. The problem is, if we try to perform different ‘dance moves’, perhaps ones we have learnt outside the family, we mess up the ‘family dance’. Other members of the family will find this disconcerting, confusing or even a betrayal. A dance only works if everyone performs their dance moves correctly.
So what if you are fed up of performing your old dance moves and want the family dance to change? Systemic theory argues that it is precisely by one member of a family performing new dance moves that the overall family dance changes. It is like a system, and when one part of that system changes, the rest of the system also has to as well. Once one person performs the dance differently, the rest of the family have to change their performances to adapt.
So, you have a choice this Christmas. You can either perform the dance moves you always have, or you can throw some new moves and step back and watch a new dance emerge.