32 - Systemic Thinking - Ocean 2 - Teleclass - Transcript

Copyright © 2010 Madanes-Peysha Publishing

Understanding & correcting reactive communication patterns – Ocean 2

Teleclass Transcript

MP: Mark PeyshaCM: Cloe Madanes

MP: All right. Welcome to the teleclass and today we are going to talk about the second Ocean film which we will call Ocean 2 and we have some pretty heady and amazing stuff to help you understand group dynamics and group relationships. In particular, I want to think about problems, challenges and patterns that people develop that are really kind of mysterious or resist change when people suggest change. Today’s class will be somewhat complicated actually, I hate to say, but it is really fascinating and so if you hold on and stick with us to understand, this is basically a major theory for understanding how people develop problems when they are in a group of three or more people.

Anyone who has been in a coach or a therapy or a problem solving environment where there are relationships involved have come across challenges and patterns that people developed that are really mysterious and resist change when people resist changes. So this is could end up a performance issue someone might develop or an anxiety or it can be like in Ocean’s case, a teenager suddenly switching off and becoming uncommunicative or misbehaving. It can also refer to someone’s sudden incapacity to perform well at work. It could be any number of behavior issues that can develop in relationship to a family or a group or a work environment and the interesting thing about it is that when people will sometimes resist a change and one of the reasons that people will resist the change or getting rid of the behavior is that it is serving a purpose for the group.

Today, we will be talking about how these changes could be understood from the point of view of the group and then how you can basically create changes in one person and that shifts to all three to five people or seven people and then they can basically get the person to pass their block. This concept is called metaphorical masking.

If you will remember a few modules back, we are talking about the Tahnee film – with the young woman who was depressed and after Tony helped her to understand the Six Human Needs and the Crazy Eight, she took accountability for behavior and she was able to make some commitments which was to get married, to move to her dream location and to start a new career.

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In that session we talked about the difference between safe problems and quality problems. The basic idea is that in life, we have things that we need to learn and risks that we need to take in order to get to the next level. It is a kind of leap. Sometimes you need to leap and the leap is like leaving home for the first time or sometimes in a relationship, you need to leap to a more committed place or having children, or in your career, you might have to take a leap. Bottom line is there are phases of life that demand growth and risks from you. These demands for growth and risk we call quality problems because they are the things that move us to the next stage in life, next stage in development, next stage in growth.

In contrast to that, sometimes people find themselves in a position where it is difficult to make that leap, where they are feeling for some reason, they can’t do it. They feel as if they can’t do it. They have a relationship that is holding them back or loyalty or they may just not have enough confidence. In those kind of situations, they develop a safe problem and so in Tahnee’s case, it was depression and we define a safe problem as being a problem that is strictly speaking is within your control and so it is often something concerning your performance or it can be something about managing your state like depression, anxiety, things like that. Basically, it is safe problems kind of stop you from going ahead and taking some action or making some commitment.

Today, what we will talk about is metaphorical masking which is people develop a metaphor and this can be a behavior or a personality trait or a symptom. Metaphor is a kind of expression of confusion and paralysis. If you think about for instance the Lindsey film that we saw very early on in this training, she is the lady who had done a lot of gambling and she had gone deeply into debt and she also had the challenges with her daughter’s and their help issues and she had challenges with her relationships with her husband, but the metaphor that she developed when she first started to talk to Tony was the bag of debt that was hanging around her neck and holding her down and she couldn’t escape that debt.

For Tahnee, the metaphor was not trusting men. First, her metaphor was depression and then when Tony understood her a little bit better, he understood that she was stuck in a place where she couldn’t trust a man and if she couldn’t trust a man, then she couldn’t get married and she couldn’t move forward with her life.

The truth is that these metaphors are simplifications and there are ways that people deal with more complex situations in a simple way. For Lindsey, it was obviously, behind the bag of debt, there are much bigger fish to fry. The relationship with the daughter’s, their help demands, their help needs, her exhaustion and then her reconciling with her husband and then the resentments up ahead. That is much easier in a sense and this is how people simplify their lives. It is easier to think about a metaphor so the debt-runner neck being the real problem.

For Tahnee, she had a relationship with her boyfriend. She had things that she wanted to do, risks that she wanted to take, she had a relationship with her mother and her mother herself was not seeing men and so there were issues of the mother having been a certain –

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there is a culture in that group of “not trusting men” and so there are all these big issues that really, for Tahnee, it is simplified to depression as simplification.

While we’ve talked about metaphor before, the dynamic we want to focus on today, is that the metaphor often function to mask a bigger problem with the person or a group or a family it is afraid to confront directly and this obviously can happen in a company as well where there is a difficult reality or decision that people don’t want to face and so a metaphor will develop in the face of that.

We will be talking about how to recognize such a metaphor, how to change it or replace it so that the real challenge behind it can come to the surface and how to help with the underlying challenge so basically how to take the person from solving the metaphor to learning what they need to learn, growing how they need to grow and developing the relationships that they need to develop. Cloe, does that make sense?CM: Yes. Also, a metaphor can be an indirect way of dealing with a problem that doesn’t solve the problem because it is in another dimension. When you are talking metaphors, it is like you are looking at two worlds; what is happening at one level in real situations and the metaphor that is like an invention at another level.

MP: So in other words, for instance, with Lindsey, while she is walking around and literally telling herself that she has a heavy bag of debt on her neck…

CM: That is she is carrying a bag. Right.

MP: The only way to really solve that metaphor…

CM: As if that was dealing with the debt. It is not.

MP: That is right. And it’s not. And so when Tony actually tells her, "Listen, why don’t you just throw the bag into the sun?" then he is actually solving that level of her problem because that is [Inaudible][00:07:50.02]. She was giving herself an image that defies a task that you can do. Basically, what happens is people develop these metaphors partially as an expression of when they do not know what to do and also the metaphor kind of stops people from taking action, stops forward things from getting done, people are confused and they kind of reinforce with the confusion. Does that make sense?

CM: Yes.

MP: This is heady stuff so let us start with the very concrete example of the Ocean2 intervention. Let us talk about the situation in that family and then how Cloe used her very, very extremely clear strategy which we call the ‘pick three strategy’ to solve it.

In Ocean’s family, the conversation really focus on three people. There is a father, the stepmother and Ocean and these three people form a triangle and each person kind of have a strong position and a weak position in the triangle. So the father for instance, is one hand, he is the biological father and he is supposed to be the head of the household

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and so he has a strong position. He gets to make a lot of positions. His weak position is that he dotes on Ocean and she is the apple of his eye and is very kind of addicted to her affections and so he almost takes a subservient role to her when looking for affirmation from her. Right?

CM: Yeah.

MP: The stepmother is in an unpopular position of being a stepmother because it is very difficult because she is not blood and yet, she is the enforcer in the family. She is the one who has a lot of distinctions and how things should be done. She has the highest standards and obviously then she becomes the nag. So on one hand, she is a strong position and that she takes this kind of leadership position in the family and in some ways more than the father. On the other hand, she needs Ocean’s validation in order to really be qualified as a Mom and so there is always doubt that maybe she is just a stepmother, maybe she doesn’t really deserve, maybe she isn’t fully accepted. Right?

And then Ocean, on the one hand, she is subject to the parent’s policies and so she is a child and a minor and they get to make decisions about her. On the other hand, she is in a lot of ways, takes a somewhat adult position in the family and above them in certain ways in the sense that it seems that she has been elevated as a source of love in the family. And so these two tears between the family – you know it becomes a very complicated triangle and with triangles and the personal triangles, you think of these as three fingers of your hand and you have a loop of string that you are holding in place with those three fingers. Right? And so, if you move two of your fingers closer together, the third finger in order to keep the triangle moves further apart. Does that make sense?

CM: Yes.

MP: This is how triangles work. They are very dynamic. When two people in the triangle get closer, the other person kind of automatically gets more distanced and then you can move away and these other two people come closer and the third person, the other person feels more distanced and so they are very dynamic. It is a great source of uncertainty to people to have triangles. They wonder. Triangles can confuse the hierarchy because people are kind of equivalently looking for their position within the triangle and they basically create a lot of tension and people can get jealous and they make decisions in relation to the triangle that they wouldn’t necessarily make if they were just dealing with one person or if they are making a decision for themselves. Right?

CM: Yes.

MP: Cloe, if you feel free to jump in at any point. The basic point was that this was a very confusing triangle for Ocean because she had the father and the stepmother were kind of taking – simultaneously asking for her love and for her validation and at the same time, they are taking a strict position of being parents of a teenager who had to lay down the law and being kind of intolerant in saying, oh, you know, she is really not paying attention to the family and being sentimental so that is very confusing for her.

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On the other hand, the other way that this triangle work is between the father and the stepmother, the father is you know, probably if you were to ask him what his top source of love was, he will probably say Ocean because it seems like he was very oriented to Ocean as a primary source of love. This of course could create problems with him in his marriage so they have that tension where he is oriented to Ocean. Maybe he is too soft on her. Maybe he is going to spoil her and the stepmother on the other hand is the person who wants to stuff the rules on the household and she might be feeling like, hey, you know, I have to be the bad guy overtime. You just bowl over for Ocean anytime and this happens often when there is a cross gender parenting or when it is the oldest in the family.

There could be basically conflicts or dynamics in the marriage that create uncertainty. One of the ways that people in that kind of situation can create some stability or create some sense of certainty when you are a triangle is for two people to basically team up on one so it creates a common enemy. In a sense, there is a dynamic there where the father and the stepmother were united by disapproving of Ocean, by saying that she is not really paying attention to the family, that she’s got too many friends, that she is not working out enough, that she is not getting good enough grades, that she is staying up too late and basically by having a whole bunch of judgments and criticisms and evaluations of Ocean. It stabilizes the triangle between them.

CM: Yes, and there is also another level of metaphor here that has to do with Ocean’s biological mother because in the past, when Ocean was living with her mother, the father’s focus was compassion and love towards Ocean and criticism of her mother because the mother was an addict, because of her negligent behavior and so on. When Ocean moved in with her father and Barbie, the mother disappeared from the picture basically. Then Barbie and her husband, Ocean’s father, didn’t have an enemy anymore. The biological mother was not really present anymore and so Ocean stepped into that role and Ocean became the bad one. So, in a sense, the interaction between the father, the stepmother and the biological mother was replaced by a system of interaction between the father, Barbie and Ocean that was similar or metaphorical of the previous interaction with the biological mother and replaced it.

So Ocean stepped in to provide a common enemy for her father and Barbie and so held the couple together whereas before the common enemy had been Ocean’s biological mother. So what I’ve called this is a cyclical variation in the focus of interaction. It sounds very difficult but it is really very simple. It is that one system of interaction is metaphorical and replaces another one. In this case, the interaction that developed between the father, Barbie and Ocean was metaphorical of the interaction that had existed previously between the father, Barbie and the biological mother and replaced that interaction. And so what is the problem is when somebody that has been behaving well and has had a good life all of a sudden is compelled to step in to this situation and you cannot forget how protective children are of their parents. So consciously or unconsciously, Ocean wanted to help her father and wanted to help him in his marriage so she steps into the position of the bad one and Barbie and her husband can be united.

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This is what creates the challenge in terms of strategic intervention or the coaching.

Sometimes, when there are several children, the focus can change again. So if Ocean had a brother that was a little bit older then her actual brother one could expect that after a while Ocean will be tired of that role or the little brother would step in and take that on or some other person in the family would. Sometimes the challenge was not bad behavior like Ocean was presenting but a trade, a personality trade like extreme shyness or sarcasm or selfishness or cruelty will have the same function of replacing a conflict with somebody else in the family. What I did there was a very simple strategy on picking three issues. Mark, do you like to comment on that?

MP: Yes, and what was great about it was that basically the way that the parents were identifying with each other as parents was through judging Ocean and so because this was kind of fuel for their stabilizing themselves as a couple and then the relationships with each other, anything was fair game. They could complain about her closing her door to a room, listening to too much music, staying up too late, not exercising enough, not having a good breakfast, being late to school, having too many friends, having not enough friends and it is basically – she became the source of variety for that couple.

CM: And a rule of life is that few things in life unite people as well as having a common enemy. If you want two people to come together, just find the common enemy and you’ll see immediately. That is why the famous therapist [Inaudible][00:18:47.15] a famous family therapist used to say that grandparents and grandchildren get along so well because they have a common enemy – the parents.

MP: Uh-huh.

CM: This is something that happens in triangles constantly.

MP: What’s funny, last night I saw that movie with Invictus which is about Nelson Mandela when he was taking over South Africa. There is a rugby team that had been for the most black South Africans had been the epitome of the apartheid era. They looked at those green jerseys that they wore and the blacks didn’t play rugby at all. They played soccer so there is a huge class difference and there is a huge ethnic difference and so when Nelson Mandela’s administration took over, they were tempted to switch out, change the color and the name of the team. Instead, he basically put a lot of focus on this rugby team winning the world rugby cup and he basically helped culturally unite whites and blacks in South Africa through this rugby team which became phenomenal and beat all the world’s best teams. He united Africa through a common enemy of whoever they are playing in rugby.

CM: Yeah, that is great.

MP: It was amazing because there was not that much to unite that country except for them to cheer as a country beating other countries.

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CM: That is right. The same thing happens in Argentina and times of terrible terror and military abuses and so on though everybody would come united around the World Cup of Soccer.

MP: Exactly. Right now, I think, actually, I’ve heard someone from Mexico is on the call instead of being in the world cup so I appreciate that.

CM: Mexico is not playing right now. I don’t think so.

MP: Okay.

CM: Go ahead. Just read with these three issues.

MP: Great. So let us get to three things. Cloe used the strategy with this family to stabilize this whole criticism pattern with Ocean in terms of the parents and then on Ocean’s side, she had the double bind because they are both at the same time judging her. They are using the judgment of her to unite themselves in a marriage and at the same time, they are asking her for her love like she has the, somehow the most privileged person of the triangle because she has two people ask for her love constantly and so it is very paralyzing for her. She is obviously a girl who is very tuned in to people’s needs and to try and not saying no to people, not rejecting people. Cloe suggested the pick three strategy is that the parents should pick three things that are criteria for Ocean doing a great job.

CM: Only three things.

MP: Only three things and these should be three things that are easy to accomplish so that they are easy to achieve and this should be…

CM: And pleasurable. [Inaudible][00:22:04.05] have a good attitude, there has to be something concrete and easy to understand.

MP: Yeah, what I found very interesting in that conversation was how difficult for the parents to take on something that was very concrete and very easy to accomplish. The parents tend to focus on kind of intangible feelings or attitudes as being the criteria and Cloe kind of had to whittle them down to make them very clear so the three things were honesty and communication and you went for that Cloe. I was a little surprised because it does a little bit vague. You know but they were asking for total honesty and communication…

CM: Well, not too light. For many parents, that is a very important value that has to be respected.

MP: And that is interesting because it is even much more simple. Not lying is much easier to do than being honest in communication where you know…

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CM: Yeah, but that is what really they meant and I think that Ocean knew that.

MP: That was great. So the second one is Cloe asked the father so what are some things that Ocean should do and he acted like this was just stuff. Very simple, basic thing but he had a whole under list of that. She had to be fit, she had to work out, she had to pray, they need to keep honest, they need to be at dinner together, they need to be together and it became very complicated and so Cloe suggested, so how about this? How about if Ocean doesn’t break the law? You know, they are like, oh, yeah, you know, that is really good. Then still there was some resistance because you know the father starts saying, well, if she was doing all these other things, she wouldn’t be breaking the law. If she was praying, if she was keeping her head clear, is she was thinking about what she was doing in life, she wouldn’t be breaking the law.

It is because the parents are used to a pattern of having intangible criteria for judging Ocean’s performance and so Cloe came back and said, you know, how about we look at this that the goal is to be a law-abiding citizen and Ocean can do it in several different ways. She can pray and be fit and do all those things, too to become a law-abiding citizens but we decide altogether that being a law-abiding citizen is the most important thing and so they agreed to that and you know, you could see the relief coming down from Ocean because she was basically getting this total clarity of what she had to do to be doing a great job.

The third one was she had to take care of herself, again the parents had a lot of very confusing rules about that – sometimes Ocean has too many friends over and she doesn’t take care of herself, she should work out more, she should have a schedule and she should have a different attitude when people interrupt her and she had something else in her plan and she should no to her friends and basically a lot of shoulds. Then they were also kind of confusing the way that she should be with her family, that she should really prioritize her family. It is almost the parents often want to focus on the attitude that the teen should have rather than the action the teen should take. You can’t really control someone’s attitude especially a teenager. It is a losing game. That is why you will get into double binds. So, Cloe, you simplified it to basically that they had to – that they should – that there is going to be respect about what she needed and then you clarified further in terms of when the parents say no, what they needed to do. Right?

Anyway, these three things were – the way they function these three points here is that they stabilize the criteria for Ocean doing a good job. She could focus on three things and then she could relax about the other things. The parents can unite over these three things and not over every single thing that Ocean does.

CM: It change is from seeing her as an enemy to a collaboration between the three of them.

MP: Yes. What naturally happens once you say that that’s solving the masking metaphor. The masking metaphor was that Ocean was unstable, unreliable, unpredictable, she needed to be controlled, she needed to be told how to do, she needed

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to be guided, right? The metaphor was that Ocean was stepping into a similar type of sloth in terms of the family’s consciousness or their attention as her mother had been and that’s confused Ocean. Right? That was the metaphor. And Ocean, as you said, herself was actually conscious that as being the bad guy, she is uniting her father and her stepmother and their marriage.

CM: Right.

MP: So once you solved this masking metaphor by giving them the pick three, you’ve created a great deal of clarity. You made a very clear policy for what Ocean had to do. You still had the parents unified in terms of their having criteria for Ocean behaving and doing a great job but these were very clear and easy to follow. When you solve the metaphor, often what happens up next is that you get the real thing, the real challenges that people were not able to face when they started to focus on the metaphor so this would be the relationship between the father and the stepmother making sure that they are meeting each other’s needs in a more direct way rather than through a metaphor or a through a triangle. Does that make sense?

CM: Exactly. This whole intervention applies to every area of life. It is good idea for example for a wife to decide on only three things that the husband has to do for her to know that he is a good husband. The same thing applies to an adult’s parents or to an employee at work. So often, an employee is criticized, then criticized then finally fired and then replaced by somebody else who has mysteriously developed the same problems and somehow also could be solved by picking only three or four issues and not complaining about anything else and saying to the person your job will be done perfectly, we’ll be totally happy if you’d just do these three things.

MP: Exactly. And employees, the typical thing that happen is they become compliancy-oriented so if the rules and policies for getting things done are too complicated or if they have people used to micromanaging and coming in and changing things or they have two superiors who are disagreeing about how something should be done, the employee will become focused on getting everyone’s approval and basically kills the initiative. They start thinking well, I don’t know if they’ll approve this and as soon as you ask them to do something the head starts calculating about, whoa, this boss… how they will react and if they talk, then how will that create and they internalize all these complicated dynamics.

So when you see that happening at that point, the employee will become less effective, they will become less confident, they will not be clear about wanting to get things done. That is when you want to take pick three strategies where you say, you know what, it looks like this person is getting a little fried by all the dynamics and all the people who are looking at them and the complications in the relationships so let’s do a pick three. Here are the three most important things and you trying to pick things that are real requirements that are very task-oriented, very clear and you leave a room for them to exceed them. That is very important.

CM: The most important thing is to reassure the person that you’re not really going to

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focus on anything else, that only those three are the expectation.

MP: Yes. Than can also happen if you’re in the management situation and you’re with – you might have a co-manager of a group or an employee and you have different styles and you might be more, you know, hands off and you’re dealing with someone who is full of thunder criticisms and wants to review everything. Well, one way to solve that is to create a very clear policy for the three things and if there is criticisms that need to be – evaluations of work that need to be done, you give them a structures so there is a certain schedule for it, people get input in a certain time frame, a certain way and then the person who has to create the changes gets a timeline to create those. Basically, you take all the noise of criticism and evaluation and you give it more of a structure.

CM: Yes. So, Mark. I’d like to move on with the [Inaudible][00:31:13.25] for changing interactions and changing metaphors and to get some examples. Is that okay?MP: That sounds great. Cloe has got some case studies and there are basically three major strategies for shifting metaphors and she has case studies for each and these are fascinating.

CM: Okay. So the first test strategy is what I called changing the metaphorical action because I have to remind you that; it’s sometimes a metaphor is a concrete action not just an image, not just a sentence, but something that the person does, that is metaphorical of somebody else’s behavior. For example, Ocean’s smoking pot was a metaphor for the mother’s drug abuse. It was an action that needed to be replaced, all right? So, what is important is to find another action that will replace the metaphorical action that is dangerous, hurtful, interrupts the development and the growth of the person. So let me tell you quickly a couple of interventions that are interesting.

MP: Great.

CM: When I was working at Children’s Hospital in Washington D.C., my students – I was always teaching there. So one of my students got a case that was very difficult and that have the pediatricians very upset. It was a little eight year old boy who kept sticking pins in his stomach and around the waist and the middle of his body and he’s had constantly a wound that wouldn’t heal and there was nothing that the doctors could do because they would treat the wound, they would bandage it and the kid would always find a way of removing the bandages and continue to stick pins into himself.

And so, of course we needed to look at the situation of the family and the mother was a very poor single mother that basically worked as a housekeeper I believe and she had four little boys that were terrible. They destroyed the apartment, they fought with each other, she couldn’t keep anything intact and she’d left them for long hours alone in the apartment because she went to work. And this was the boy number three and what happened when he began to stick pins into himself and created this wound is that the mother would bring him to children’s hospital where she would stand long hours in the waiting room at the hospital waiting for him to be seen. Then again the following week, long hours because the wound wasn’t healing and so on. So obviously a purpose of the

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symptom was the consequence of the symptom which was to have a long time with his mother that became very apparent to me.

MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: And so, I decided that we have to change the definition of the problem and change the metaphorical action and change the relationship between mother and son and do it all in one move. So, I have them the therapist say to the mother and the boy that the problem was not that he stuck pins. Sticking pins is a normal behavior under certain circumstances. The problem was that he stuck them in his stomach. So the issue was, to find a good way of sticking pins and the mother was going to solve this problem. The only person that could do it was the mother. The therapist would just talk to her about it and this is very important because when you are concerned about hierarchy, you don’t want to come into a situation and solve a problem like this, when the natural superior person in the hierarchy is the mother.

The intervention is much better if she solved the problem through the mother than if you come directly and solve the problem. Same thing in any organization when you have a supervisor and let’s say in an employee that has a problem, it’s much better to solve the problem through the supervisor than act directly on the employee which it shows the inefficacy of the supervisor.

MP: Yeah.

CM: So the mother was asked to go to the store and buy the materials to saw a rag doll. So she was going to buy some fabric and buttons for the eyes and wool for the hair and so on and she would make a rag doll and she have to buy a box of pins that should be at least a hundred pins, a little box of pins. Everyday she would sit for a few minutes in a separate room from the other children only with this boy and she would ask him to stick pins into the doll and if she stuck the pins, he has to count up to a hundred pins which would help him with school anyway with arithmetic. Then he had to unstick them one by one and put them back in the box, start counting backwards from a hundred.

This was a good way of sticking pins. It was part of a game that it was just something between him and his mother and they began to do this and she did it every single day. So, she was giving this boy ‘the alone time’ with her, all the attention and changing this sticking pins into something that soon became like a boring ordeal. At first, the boy was very interested in this. Later, he really don’t want to do this anymore but the mother kept insisting he had to do it every single day and he stopped sticking pins into himself. And when he stopped sticking the pins into himself, the therapist could talk with her about other things, how to discipline the children better, how to get some training so she could get a better job, how to take care of her health. Underlying all this was the mother’s health issue and her very self destructive behavior about her own body and her own health. That was the metaphor of the boy sticking pins into his stomach, was a metaphor what the mother was doing to her body.

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MP: Hmm. Wow.

CM: Yeah. I love – I love that case. So, another… [cross-talk]

MP: That is an amazing… Can I reflect on that for a second. So, what’s very interesting to me is that when, this is a boy who was meeting his needs, on one level, he’s meeting his needs in a way that is very negative and damaging, right? And a lot of people have the philosophy with children that if a child is meeting their needs in a destructive or distracting, basically disruptive way, that you should not reinforce that behavior. You should not even acknowledge it. And this is going absolutely the opposite. You’re basically saying, you know, these boys are poking pins in themselves. So, the first thing you did is to understand and to respect those needs. So, yet there is a meeting certain needs. You empower the mother, first of all, by having her solve the solution, create the solution. Second of all, you have her create the doll. You didn’t have her just buy a doll or just give it to him from the garage sale.

CM: That’s right. That’s important.

MP: It has to be handmade so it is the product of her effort and her ingenuity and it was a gift for him.

CM: Uh-hmm.

MP: Right? And that made it a very unique ritual and a very unique object. Third, you replaced the actions so instead of putting the pins in himself, he’s putting it on the doll. But not only did you replace it but you also regulated and systematize it. So you created a specific situation where they go into another room, you have them a number of pins, you count the number of pins that go in, you count the number pins that go out. And then you ritualized it so that you made it a – you took away any spontaneity from it. It became a regular thing and so the boy would use this to – it’s basically a behavior that would, first of all, that would meet the needs of the boy, it would capture his attention and meet the needs that he was meeting through the destructive behavior. Then it kind of stabilize the relationship and gave them both what that negative behavior had been doing and then he became this kind of obtrusive, annoying, regular chore.

CM: That is right. It was like homework.

MP: Exactly.

CM: For the boy, he’d made him loose all interests in pin.

MP: Yeah. That’s amazing. And then while that was happening right? I mean that I don’t know how many sessions this…

CM: It was brief – the whole thing was solved. He stopped sticking pins into himself after the first week. But then we stayed in contact with them for at least for a couple of

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months.

MP: Wow. And then basically after you’d solve the metaphorical masking which was the sticking the pin and of course, you had the trademarks of metaphorical masking is that it defies an action or orientation. What do you do about a kid sticking pins in himself for being self destructive or someone who is not acting in their best interest or someone who’s protecting people on their weird way? Why it’s very difficult to take action? You give them specific actions to take. And then while that was that metaphorical masking was being kind of pre-occupied by this ritual, you went to the quality problems that they really needed to resolve.

CM: Right. I want to add this, something that I forgot to say was, the mother of course had tried to eliminate all pins from the household but then he would find more dangerous sharp objects that he would stick into himself.MP: Exactly and that is the example …

CM: So removing the object has not been a solution.

MP: That is the example of one people try to resist the behavior or they try to make it wrong.

CM: Right.

MP: Or they try to forbid it. Right?

CM: Yeah.

MP: And that just leads to escalation. It doesn’t lead to understanding of the needs and it doesn’t lead to an understanding of the dynamics.

CM: Right.

MP: Of the family.

CM: Yeah. So I want to give another example.

MP: Great.

CM: Can I move to the next? Okay, so this is...

MP: Sure.

CM: …also an example of changing the metaphorical action. This was in Philadelphia, actually, a Puerto Rican family went to Children’s Hospital because their fifteen-year-old daughter had frequent seizures. The seizures were preventing her from going to school. They were dangerous and of course the doctors immediately said that they have to do an

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EEG, an Electrocephalogram to determine whether this reaction is epileptic seizure. The parents refused to give permission for a child to have an EEG saying that they did not approved of anything like that on the brain no matter how the doctors try to explain that it was not a harmful thing and that it was really needed because epileptic seizures can be very dangerous. The parents said, no way because this had nothing to do with a real medical problem. This was the result of the evil eye. The child was under the influence of the evil eye and what they needed was some way of removing the evil eye.

They knew it was the evil eye because not only the girl had seizure but the father had become ill with mysterious symptoms that kept him from going to work. So, basically father and daughter stayed home. The father because of his ailment, the daughter because of the seizures and the mother worked and so, in many ways, the girl had replaced the mother in the household. So the doctors in frustration referred the family to us. I was working at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic at the time and I was asked to supervise this case and I noticed right away that there was a great deal of defiance on the part of the parents defying the doctors about the EEG and about the medical examination.

And it went, I think it was – I thought it was more extreme than just defying the doctors. They were defying the whole culture. It was as if where they were taking the stand “We’re Puerto Ricans and this is about the evil eye. We don’t belong to your culture. You don’t understand anything,” and so I decided that I had to go along with this and I asked the therapist to tell them that her supervisor was from Argentina which is true. I am from Argentina and that in Argentina there is a cure that always works for the evil eye. Would they be interested in learning the cure? They said that they were interested and I tell you it was important to say that I was from Argentina because Argentina is even further away from the United States and Puerto Rico and more defiant about American culture than Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is actually quite American compared to what Argentina is. So they said yes, they would be interested.

The therapist told the mother that the mother had to resolve this. She had to buy a red ribbon in a store that sold red ribbons. Go to what I think what they are calling millinery stores or something like that and buy a bunch of red ribbons and tie them in little bows and sew the little red bows in the underwear of the father and the daughter. The mother did this and the therapist said, as soon as this is done, the evil eye will be defeated and father's symptoms will go away.

Sure enough, the father became well. Right away, the girl went to school and didn’t have seizures and this went on for several weeks and so I think it was around the week three or four that I had the therapist say well since they were well now, the evil eye had been defeated. Now, they could remove the little red ribbons and they did and that week, the girl had a seizure in school. So the therapist apologized and said obviously that was premature. The evil eye had not been completely defeated. So it was important to sew the little red ribbons again and they went back in place and the father’s illness or the girl's seizures did not recur. We followed this for a long time and so the father was able to go to work and restore his position in the family which had been damaged by so much illness and the family was able to defy the American culture with a cure for the evil lie

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that proved actually that the evil eye existed and that was foreign and very different from what the American doctors would have done.

[Crosstalk]

CM: This gives the opportunity also for the girl to see that the father was actually happy going back to work and that she didn’t need to stay home to take care of the father. What were you going to say, Mark?

MP: Well, I was curious about putting it behind the underwear, why the underwear? But I guess that’s probably because…

[Cross-talk]CM: That is true. This happens in Argentina. This is how they do it in Argentina.

MP: Oh, really.

CM: I didn’t invent it.

MP: That was okay. It has to be an underwear. Or probably because [Inaudible][00:48:55.16] you were working consistently.

CM: Because it shouldn’t be seen. It should be outside of the view of other people.

MP: Yeah, and it should be supposedly you wear everyday rather than some other day.

CM: You wear everyday no matter what you’re wearing. Yeah.

MP: So very similar steps. You respected the needs of the metaphor that the metaphor is meeting and the belief system that was behind the metaphor. Secondly, you restore the hierarchy by putting the mother in charge; putting one of the parents is a great solution.

CM: And I kept them special. Before they were so special because the girl had seizures that didn’t have an explanation of father had illness, that didn’t have an explanation. Now they had the little red ribbons that did something mysterious.

MP: Exactly.

CM: But that was much more normal than the illness is.

MP: So because metaphors tend to focus or they tend to confuse people so they don’t have a task orientation so they don’t know what to do.

CM: That’s right.

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MP: In this case, sometimes you respond to metaphor with another metaphor. At least, it gives you something to do.

CM: That’s right.

MP: Right? So, if in the face with the evil eye and the mysterious illnesses, well yeah, tie some ribbon. And it makes total sense of that metaphor for a way of thinking and it gave them something to do even when, you know, exactly and I’m sure you find it in a way…

CM: It was a metaphor that was harmful and was still defiant.

MP: Yeah and they get to show the doctors who really knows what’s what.

CM: That’s right.

MP: So they get to beat the doctors at their own game.

CM: That is right. Okay. Let me move on because we don’t have much time. So another strategy is to provide a metaphor for success instead of failure.

MP: Yes.

CM: Sometimes the metaphors that people choose represent a failure that is usually when people have challenges is because they are using metaphors of failure instead of metaphors of success in their lives.

MP: Yeah.

CM: So this was a situation of a thirteen year old boy that was depressed and the parents took him to a Department of Psychiatry and he had been in therapy for months and because of his depression he was not going to school and the attitude of the therapist was that the boy should not be stressed and should not be pushed to go to school. He should just stay home and however, there was no progress with his therapist so then I was asked to take on the supervision of this case. And the first thing that I did was redefine the problem in terms of cause and effect. We said that the boy was impressed because he didn’t go to school, because he’s had at home all the time doing nothing, anybody would depressed. And so the depression was the consequence of not going to school instead of the cause of not going to school which was what have been defined before.

So then, we asked the home who had had a similar problem in the family and we found out that the mother had had post partum depression after the birth of twins, not of this boy but of younger children.

MP: Uh-hmm

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CM: And she had had a very hard time coming out of that depression and marital problems in relation to her depression and so on. So it was clear that boy and mother had a bond over the issue of a depression and the father disagreed with the mother’s approach to the depression. The father fought that the boy should go to school and agreed with us that the depression was the consequence of doing nothing and not the cause.

It was a difficult disagreement to handle but we did, then we had a meeting with the mother, father and the boy and said that the solution to this problem would be that the mother and father would take him the next day to school. Then it needed the two of them because he was thirteen years old and the mother could not really get him into the car or anything like that if she resisted. And if he went into the school normally and went to his class, the parents would leave but if he refused to go into the school and into the class, the mother would take him by the hand and walk with him to class and sit with him through all the classes all day and this would happen every day.As the therapist was explaining this, the boy began to cry. He was crying softly sort of sitting all hunched up and crying very softly and of course the parents were upset seeing him do this. The therapist said that actually the boy was just expressing his sensitivity that is normal in children and that at this time these days it’s okay for boys to cry. It used to be that only girls could cry but now fortunately boys can express themselves and that was okay. When the soonest their therapist defined the crying as an okay behavior, the boy began to scream in a really terrifying manner and so therapist defined that as more normal adolescent misbehavior. Crying is not typical of adolescent as he is screaming and carrying on and disturbing everybody. So maybe now he was really becoming a teenager at age thirteen in his screaming.

So, they went home after agreeing that they would take him to school and that afternoon the boy run away from home, was gone for two hours, called the mother and said that he would only come home if she promised that she would not take him to school the next day. And so she promised and then she called the therapists and said now what do I do? I promised. The therapist said, when your son come home, you have to explain to him that sometimes mothers lie and it’s okay for mothers to lie and the face of dangers behavior and for a thirteen-year-old to be out in the street, running away from home was dangerous behavior and that’s why she had to lie but she would take him to school the next day.

He got in the car the next day and went to school. The mother was very proud of herself. We gave her all the credit for doing this. She did not have to go into the classroom and as soon as he began participating in school, he became interested in the sport. I don’t remember exactly what it was. He went at, oh, it was skateboarding. And so then, he began to go to school because he was interested in the skateboarding that was somehow an activity inside the school. And as he became interested in that, he developed other interests and the so called depression disappeared.

MP: Wow, so it’s very interesting that you basically define something that had been caught – defined as a cause and you defined it as a result.

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CM: That’s right. That’s right.

MP: Very interesting.

CM: Yes, And then what happened was that the next year, at the beginning of the school year, the boy called the therapist and said he didn’t want to go to school again and he wanted to meet with the therapist to talk about it. And the therapist said, no, he didn’t want to meet with him. He would only talk to the parents because the parents had helped him before and they would help him now. The therapist talked to the parents, the parents did the same thing and the boy went to school normally the whole year.

MP: Wow. What’s interesting about the way that you dealt with it is that it’s very elegant because it is very scaled down compared to the other example with this sticking pins…CM: Yes.

MP: …is that you define the metaphor as the side effect rather than the cause. And it’s an interesting thing about metaphors is that people are very insistent that the metaphor is the cause.

CM: Right.

MP: It is because it is used for explanation, you know. So this boy is sticking pins in his stomach and that is causing all these problems where this boy doesn’t want to go to school…

CM: That is right. Another thing that I want to point out about this is that the boy’s depression had replaced the mother’s depression. Now mother and father could argue about what to do about the boys’ depression instead of arguing about what to do about what to about the mothers’ depression. So, the mother was half the cook in terms of the father who was a very demanding man and who over the years have complained very much about the mothers’ inadequacies that she couldn’t take care of the house properly or the children because she was depressed and so on. Now the whole focus had become on the boy. So by making the mother the solution in her behavior to the problem, the boy was set free from being that hooked and the mother didn’t have to go back to her depression.

MP: Great. Let me ask you a question. I think this is really important because we’re – sometimes if we’re doing – as an interventionist you have a dichotomy that you have to navigate between what the patterns that you observed and sometimes obviously in this case as you have proofs that in families there are certain dynamics that they don’t want to confront. So in Ocean's case, it will be there something between the parents that are unstable and a source of uncertainty.

CM: Yes.

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MP: And second one you have the pins, right, and you have basically the mother’s help and the choice that she had to make to protect herself and take care of herself. In the case of the evil eye, you have the family as an immigrant family and the cultural issues that they are dealing with. Right?

CM: Yeah.

MP: And in this one, you’ve got the mother that have been depressed before.

CM: Right.

MP: When you see these cases, they are largest but you don’t go and call people on it and say that this how it’s working.

CM: No.

MP: If the metaphor is presented, you work with the metaphor and even if you just communicate with another metaphor, you’ll change the metaphor but you don’t go when you accuse people or you track it back or…

CM: Right, because it can be received as an accusation.

MP: Yes.

CM: If for example, saying to Ocean’s parents, so you need Ocean to fail in life so that the two of you have a common issue.

MP: That’s right.

CM: And brings them together would be a nasty thing to say even if it’s true.

MP: Yes, one of our top core principles is that you have to find the positive intent and protect the positive intent of everybody in the group because sometimes…

CM: And I like to solve problems painlessly without confrontations and without interpretations that could be seen as insulting.

MP: Yes, and that is what makes it such a – you know, strategic intervention is very different than in an intervention that is confrontational in the sense that you can solve this or you’re working with metaphors, you can solve problems that people don’t even realized that you solved, which problems you’re solving. They think you’re solving, you’re doing one thing, you have them sew little ribbons on their underwear and we could extrapolate that to different situations that I’d be curious what other kind of problems you can solve by that kind of intervention. But basically, it saves face for everybody.

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CM: Yeah. I want to give one more strategy.

MP: Great.

CM: Even though we’re running late.

MP: That’s all right.

CM: It is short. So the strategy number three is changing the metaphorical solution. So a child can behave in certain ways that offer a solution to a problem of the parent and so the solution has to be changed because the solution that is damaging to the child are actually damaging to the whole family.

This is a fourteen-year-old girl who also refused to go to school. And the family situation was a single father that had raised three girls by himself and the mother had died when this fourteen-year-old girl was five years old. The older sister had helped raise her and this older sister was now in college and she was in a conflict with the father. The father was a laborer – a construction worker and very strict and he disapproved that this older sister was living with a boyfriend and so he had stopped all communications with her.

MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: So the girl, let’s call her Mary was well liked in the school. She had good grades and she was doing well in school and then all of a sudden, she had stopped going to school and it was a mystery for everyone why and of course, immediately I thought that it was in relation to the conflict between the father and his oldest daughter who had been like a mother to her. And so, a meeting was called in the school and Mary ran away. She was supposed to attend the meeting and didn’t come to the meeting so the meeting was just with the father and they couldn’t resolve how to get her to school.

I realized that what was happening was that with the older sister gone Mary was concerned not only about the conflict between the father and the older sister but the fact that the older sister had been like the wife in the household, the person who took care of the home and so on. With her gone, there was nobody in that role but if Mary refused to go to school, she could stay home and clean the house and prepare meals for the father and wait for him to come home and she would be like the wife. So we had the first meeting with the other sister, the middle sister and the middle sister said in passing that Mary was very possessive of their father and didn’t want him to ever get married again.

That gave me the clue of what would be the strategy and so I had the therapist say very seriously to the father in the presence of Mary and the middle sister that if Mary continued not to go to school, had the father would have to work even more because there was a fine in the county for families where the children didn’t go to school and there wasn’t a health problem and so he would work long hours. So it was important for him to get married to have a companionship in his life and for Mary at home to have a friend, the father’s new wife to keep her company so the two of them could do the chores around

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the house and they would all have a happy household.

So if Mary went to school, then that would not be necessary, but if Mary did not go to school the father really should find someone to marry right away, to get married. The father had dated women on and off but had never become serious with any of them. So he had began to take seriously consider this possibility. Now we said that if Mary went to school that week, then in the week end, the father would drive her to visit her sister in college and denies to her sister in college. And that is exactly what happened. That the idea that the father would have to get married because she didn’t go to school, the girl immediately went to school that week, was happy to go with the father to visit her older sister. In the weekend, the father and the older sister reconciled and Mary never had that problem again.

MP: Wow. They shifted the consequences of the behavior. You let her keep her behavior and you just gave it a different meaning and a different consequence.

CM: It was a different consequence to keeping the behavior, right. The consequence would be that the father had to get married.

MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: Which was let the worst thing that the girl wanted.

MP: Yep, yep and without confronting it, you made it dove tail with the world view of the family that was going there. So you made it compatible.

CM: That’s right.

MP: So, and often would happen is that with metaphors people take it a somewhat irrational or unreasonable position like the position of a little girl who is going to stay home and do the laundry and she’s going to neglect her education for instance, right? It is kind of a woeful position and the reason they keep it is because it is doing something in a larger context but by changing the consequence of that metaphorical behavior, you kind of took out the needs that were being met where it got shifted. Right?

CM: Yes, I have much more material on these issues and more clarity, more step by step procedures that I would like to discuss with you Mark and to present the next time, for the next module.

MP: That would be great. Our next module is also going to be on families so we could continue this. I think it’s very fascinating. I think it has a lot of applications, also outside the families.

CM: That’s right.

MP: You can do just any kind of, any group that is dealing with a number of

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relationships over nine, you know, between four to ten relationships. The number relationships get too complicated and one of the ways people try to solve them is through metaphors is by simplifying it and it helps them take a position. And then so if you were to solve it…

CM: It’s very difficult to think of relationships in more than three's.

MP: Yes. It is very difficult.

CM: So that’s why if we have six people, it is useful to break it up in two triangles instead of trying to think of six people at the same time.

MP: Yep. So if anyone has a question, star-two to raise your hands. I’m going to, in the mean time there’s a couple questions here in the Q and A from the web cast, Cloe.CM: Okay.

MP: This one is when one partner or parent gets obviously resistant or appears to want to defend rather than fix, what if the father/man is unable or unwilling to step up? And then they also want to know, why you didn’t take up on the father’s request for faith and exercise be it positive or negative in the example [Inaudible][01:08:39.25]? Does that make sense?

So, what if the father and the man in a group and or the family is resistant and also defend rather than fix problems?

CM: I don’t understand very well what defend means instead of fix.

MP: Well, it sound like you – what if you have someone who doesn’t want to, who is resistant basically. One partner is resistant and one’s the defender, wants to keep things.

CM: Typically, they are. I think that everyone noticed, how both the father and the stepmother were fighting me and so this is the typical situation and it tells you that even though the problem behavior of the child makes the family suffer, it has a positive function also. It brings them together in some way or they wouldn’t be fighting the idea of resolving the behavior and so you’ll just have to, in a polite and a kind way, show them that there’s a better way of doing things that will result in the same family togetherness that they want or the same solution that they’re looking for without the pitfalls, without the pain that they are experiencing.

And I didn’t go for the praying and exercising because I thought that there were more important over all issues that Ocean had to comply with. For example, not doing things that are against the law has to do with not using drugs or alcohol which is against the law of her age, not having sex, not being violent. It covers a lot of very important things. I also thought that to make one of those rules about praying and exercising was too intrusive. A fourteen year old girl should be able to make decisions about when she wants to pray or when she wants to exercise.

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MP: So, what happens is that in any group of three or more, you develop not only a triangle but you also develop a culture because of these relationships, these three relationships. It seems like most of these metaphorical intervention have a cultural element to it where there is a family or group that has a certain way of dealing things.

CM: Right. For example, if the father had said I’d like you to come church with us every Sunday, I would say, is that really one of the three most important things and if it is I would go with it. But having her pray every day because her father tells her to, I think is intrusive.

MP: And how do you enforce whether someone has prayed or not? Maybe they are just closing their eyes. It’s not a concrete action-based thing. Also, those three most important thing, they kind of undercut the cultural, they are more – they kind of go beyond the culture of one family or another or one belief system or another. So, if you’re focusing on safety, getting educated, staying out of trouble, doing things that are legal, not hurting herself, those are pretty universal things.

CM: Right.

MP: It gets you out of that cultural fight.

CM: Right. Honesty and communication was important because she had been lying so much.

MP: Yes. So not lying is how you define that.

CM: That’s right. All right, so another question.

MP: Yes, we have a question. I couldn’t understand the difference between strategy 1: Action and strategy 3: The Metaphorical Thing. Let me just quickly – this first strategy was changing the metaphorical action.

CM: Yes.

MP: Second strategy was providing the metaphor for success instead of failure and the third strategy was changing the metaphorical solution. So Cloe, maybe you could clarify that? Those three for a little bit.

CM: Okay. In changing the metaphorical action, that we change actions in one case – sticking pins in himself and the other case – defying the doctors. We change the sticking pins in himself to sticking pins in a doll with the mother there, the defying the doctors to defying the evil eye and the doctors with the ribbons. In changing the metaphorical solution the girl had decided to resolve the absence of the older sister by staying at home to take care of her father.

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MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: We said, “No, the metaphorical solution is the father remarries.”

MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: And that was the solution that the girl didn’t want. So the father remarries if she doesn’t go to school.

MP: Uh-hmm. In other words, changing the metaphor is like the consequence of the metaphor.

CM: The consequence might be a better word. Yeah.

MP: Uh-huh. That makes sense.

CM: Yeah.

MP: Great. So, star-two if anyone has a question. It looks like maybe we don’t have. These are a very heady stuff but I thinks it’s super useful and so what I’d love people to do is if you have any questions about this metaphorical or you have any situation that might be interesting to apply this way of thinking to, please email them to us at [email protected] because I think that this metaphorical happen. I’ve seen it hundreds of times happen in work scenarios. Any group of, you know, of three to seven to ten people often cultural confusion – often confusions in terms of what you know, what people’s roles should be, what should be done and what the next step is, what decisions need to be made that they clouded metaphors and people kind of developing safe problems that kind of defer the problem making, taking an action or making a decision or building a better relationship.

CM: And often the metaphorical solution that a child or a person lower in the hierarchy at peaks, they do it at the moment of crisis in the family or suffering of somebody else in the family. So that‘s interesting and we’ll talk about it more the next time.

MP: Great. Okay, we’re going to unmute now. Thank you everyone for coming.

[Cross-talk]

CM: Thank you guys.

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32 - Systemic Thinking - Ocean 2 - Teleclass - Transcript