The Role of the Disturber in Process Oriented Family Therapy

I begin this article by presenting three cases that illustrate the role of the disturber in family functioning. The disturber is any family member who upsets and disrupts family life over a significant period of time. I will then discuss the role of the disturber in general in families, the role of the disturber as a teacher of impermanence, and end with a discussion of how families can embrace and benefit from the disturber.

Three Families Troubled by Disturbers

About twelve years ago I saw a family terribly distressed about their son, whom we will call Bill. The family presented a story that I had heard repeatedly in my work with teens. Bill had been a fair student and a well behaved, normal teenager who was popular with both students and teachers. As Bill progressed into his later high school years, his grades and behavior went into a dive. Suddenly his parents began to worry about whether Bill would even graduate. Bill's family placed tremendous value on hard work and getting ahead in life. His father managed a, busy shop and his mother worked in another business. His older sister was an academic star and his younger brother was excelling in junior high. Because the family was so disturbed, school counselors, principals, and his parents all pressured me to fix Bill quickly. When I met the family the first time, I was struck by how nervous and uptight everyone seemed, except Bill who slumped in his chair and looked like he was watching television.

I had been supervised and trained in different kinds of family therapy, with my primary supervision being in Structural Family Therapy. As a structural

therapist I began to look for the dysfunctional structures I had come to know so well. Indeed, mom looked over-involved and dad very detached from Bill. Bill and dad seemed in a coalition against mom and her strictness. I intervened to empower the parental unit to be a unified front in discipline. Restructuring also involved getting Bill and dad to do weekend trips together and dad tracking some of Bill's school behavior. Mom was told she was overworking both as a mother and as an employee, and should take more time for herself. Bill began to "get better" quickly and the family and school loved me. I had a funny feeling that the trouble wasn't over. A few years later, when the younger brother arrived in high school, I heard that he had changed. He was having behavior problems and his grades were rapidly falling. I began noticing that my results in family work were not sustainable over time.

This case was the beginning of my examining my approach to family therapy and particularly my view of the role of the disturber in family therapy. A more recent case illustrates how my work has changed. The next client is another teenage boy close to graduation who starts to get in trouble. He is a fair student, a star athlete, and has a good possibility of getting an athletic scholarship and going off to college. He is the youngest of several children who have come out of this lower middle-income family, made it through college and entered good careers.

My scope and focus has changed as a therapist, as I am now a practicing process oriented therapist. Arnold Mindell, the founder of Process Oriented Psychology, taught us that the disturbing elements in families and groups are nature's way of helping

growth occur. With my new perspective I ask myself, what meaning for the whole family can this teenager's lack of interest in work have? Why are his parents in so much terror about his actions? What do his actions have to say about his family's style in the whole task of helping teens leave the nest? Why is he having to leave in such a stressful way? What does his carefree attitude represent?

During the fourth session, we have a breakthrough that begins to provide some answers to these deeper questions. The parents begin to talk about all their fears, and not just their fears about their son, whom we will call John. The whole family is panicky about its dwindling income. Dad has had a recent health scare. Mom has recently discovered her own abuse as a child and is confronting her parents about this, and is finding the whole process terrifying. John has stirred up the hornets nest and suddenly everyone in the family is having to face themselves, their traumas, their fears, their death and transitions. The family identity is in crisis: the parents are about to have their last child leave the nest, are about to go back to living as' a couple, are faced with their own fears of aging, and many other issues are beginning to surface. The therapy shifts to intense communication between John and his parents and for a while John is perfectly behaved, but then trouble resurfaces. He has skipped school even under the threat of expulsion. Dad can't understand how John can take such risks as both he and his wife are extremely conservative careful people who try not to risk anything.

Now I ask myself, is John as the disturber pointing in the direction of this family's development? Is he like the Zen master who when asked, "what is enlightenment," points at the moon? Both John and the Zen master are pointing in mysterious ways, but both are trying to bring about a shift in consciousness. The Zen master does this kind of work consciously, and John as the family disturber does it not so consciously. We talk in the session about taking risks and Dad suddenly begins to open up and share his secret career fantasies of owning his own little shop and pursuing his hobbies as a way of making money. We all get excited about encouraging him to take some risks and do this. Suddenly the air is very charged,

See Arnold Mindell, The Dreambody in Relationships Martial Artist (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).

and dad looks alive for the first time in eight sessions. Maybe John's actions have sparked dad to life. Dad begins to recall earlier times in his life when he loved taking risks and following himself, and talks of the pain of having to feel so responsible for so many children and his wife. We end the session with dad thinking about a career change.

The third case illustrates the disturber as the sensitive, emotional one in the field. Sometimes the most sensitive person in the field seems to actually make huge sacrifices and go through enormous suffering in an attempt to wake up the system. These individuals are like a Buddha who takes on the suffering of others to wake them up. Several years ago I was working with a woman in her mid-thirties who came to me with a diagnosis of severe biochemical depression. She was told that she needed to be on antidepressants for the rest of her life and was on the verge of hospitalization. Since my attempts at individual therapy seemed to be improving the situation but not working completely, I requested that she call in her parents and siblings from around the country to work on the family situation. The family came out to give her a pep talk on being normal, happy and getting it together in life. This woman, let's call her Sue, had all kinds of feelings, not just depression. She was full of feeling what it was like to be in the midst of a family so cold that just being in their presence gave me a chill.

Sue was first able to confront her mother for being cold, critical, and unloving. She confronted her with so much strength that the mother crumbled and began sobbing with remorse for the way she had treated her daughter. We did four sessions in four days, and everyone got into the action, including mom and dad who had a huge fight. It was like Sue had dropped a match into a roomful of emotional dynamite. Even her ultra-proper sister got into a fight with Sue, as Sue challenged her patronizing style of caring. Sue was the Zen master pointing the way to the boxing ring as the path of enlightenment. Her "biochemical" depression left almost immediately. I have followed her progress over a five year period. She has come back to therapy once for a mild depression over some relationship issues in a relatively happy marriage. She has never been on medication.

don and New York: Arkana, 1988) and The Leader as

The Disturber as a Role in the Family System

The shift from individual therapy to a family systems model constituted a huge shift in the field of psychology. Process Work is leading the way to a second shift in the field of family therapy itself. This new view of family functioning proposes that the things that happen to and disturb the family are actually nature's way of bringing about change and growth in the system. Families are viewed as not only seeking homeostasis and security but constant change and evolution. An individual having problems is no longer viewed as a sign of a pathological family, but as a sign of growth and aliveness trying to happen. This shift may disturb the traditional model of family therapy, just as family therapy, when first introduced, disturbed people's notions of what therapy was.

Even as a therapist, I want to disturb the field of family therapy consciously. My action is motivated by my desire to see the field of family therapy develop further. A disturber who can disturb with awareness is important to the growth and development of any system. A disturber without awareness can destroy systems indiscriminately. There is much I value about the field of family therapy and I support much of what a systems view has brought to therapy. I also want to see change. Specifically, I appreciate how family therapy has shifted the focus from the individual to the family system. This shift in focus has moved the stigma of psychopathology off the shoulders of the individual to the shoulders of the entire family. The next shift I hope to help bring about is to move us away from the concept of psychopathology and toward the view that families are doing the best they can to grow and develop. Families need to be seen as not only driven by the need for homeostasis but also by the need for change and development. Families are not only stable rocks in people's lives but also flowing rivers of constant change, and they need support in their fluidity.

Included in the view I have of myself playing the role of the disturber is that I am a catalyst for change. Process Work makes a major shift in family therapy by saying first of all, that the disturber is a messenger of change for a system. She or he is at the leading edge of the family's development, and if the family

can pick this development up consciously, then the disturber will no longer need to be a disturber. In Process Work we view the family as a field. Mindell defines fields as "natural phenomena that include everyone, are omnipresent, and exert forces on things in their midst"2 By nature, all fields have roles inherent in them; roles are the different parts of a given field. For example, the characters in a play may include the roles of queen, king, evil knight, good knight, death, etc. Family members occupy roles in the field like mom, dad, daughter, son etc. Sometimes the actual daughter is in the role of the mom or the father is in the role of the son, and so on. In other words, the roles are not fixed to the individual. At other points in family work, no one in a family is occupying a role and yet it influences the family as if there were a ghost in the house. For example, in John's family, death and rapid transition were elements that everyone was terrified of but which were never talked about. These elements are unoccupied roles. Occupied roles in that family were the distuber, John, who was bringing a message of relaxation and risk taking, and the role of cautious adult, which the parents occupied.

Let's now go back and apply this knowledge of roles to the specific role of the disturber. I am suggesting that the disturber is the Zen master in a family, struggling to awaken the system to its own true nature. Many disturbers are beginning Zen masters who need more training and support to get their messages across, and most families need training and support in how to open up to the message of the disturber. Oftentimes families need support to say to the disturber, "your behavior is unacceptable and must stop, but your message is crucial to us and we will take your message seriously so you won't need to continue disturbing us."

The Family Disturber as an Agent of Social Change

Family therapy that honors the disturber can no longer be simply committed to supporting the kind of families society identifies as normal and proper. We usually take that which disturbs us in our families as belonging to our own personal psychology or our own family systems, but much of what I see as a family therapist are changes trying to take place in

Mindell, The Leader as Martial Artist 15.

the institution of the family itself.

I remember seeing a family where the main issue revolved around the intimate and sexual coldness between spouses, and how this was bringing the family down. In this family's story, the couple started out with a rich intimate life both emotionally and physically. They then had children and the focus went entirely to the children, usually with mother playing the dominant parental role. After a few years, sexual contact was down to once a month or once every couple of months. The couple described themselves as roommates, functioning well but passionless. Lack of sex disturbs everyone eventually and gets couples to therapy. This disturbance usually leads to some very interesting work. In this case, the woman felt her career wasn't valued as much as the man's and was furious about this. Both people felt they were overworking, and that there wasn't time for career, parenting, and romance and intimacy. When I look into the epidemic nature of this kind of problem, I see this disturbance is not only calling for this individual family to change but for widespread societal change. I hear the spirits of valuing eros and beingness, feminism and equality expressing themselves, as well as the spirit of community calling out against the isolation involved in raising children.

If we force people back into traditional molds, our therapy blocks out these winds of change that bring in new forms and styles of relating and organizing our family life. So many of our families suffer from the same problems in the way we treat women, raise our children, overwork ourselves, and in many ways create suffering.

Traditional family therapy began by supporting the status quo. Mary Sykes Wylie in her article "The Evolution of a Revolution" clearly describes the underlying bias of the beginnings of family therapy. She says that the Tiberlawn Psychiatric Research Foundation, a founding group of family therapists, "determined that the healthiest of families exhibited clear boundaries and hierarchies of power between generations, 'complementary' roles for men and women (men worked outside the home, women were housewives), open and warm communication with one another and a high respect for personal individuality

and autonomy."3

Feminist family therapists were the first to disturb and challenge this concept, pointing out that forcing conformity to society's standards could be repressive, particularly to women. Process Work carries this further and says that by not honoring the disturber and by holding families up to standards of normalcy, we as family therapists oppress both individuals and the creative potential of the family itself. We become supporters of the status quo who contribute to the oppression and suffering in people's lives.

Disturber as a Teacher of Impermanence

Family therapy bases much of its theory and interactions on a model of homeostasis. Families are seen as naturally wanting to return to a state of stasis and non-disturbance. Salvador Minuchin, the founder of Structural Family Therapy, illustrates this concept in the following statement about a family system. "It (the family) offers resistance to change beyond a certain range, and maintains preferred patterns as long as possible....but any deviation that goes beyond the system's threshold of tolerance elicits mechanisms which re-establish the accustomed range." 4 The job of the therapist is to temporarily disturb this status quo so some change can occur. Mary Sykes Wylie in her article "The Evolution of a Revolution" quotes Minuchin as saying that the whole field of family therapy is the "art of pushing people around."5

All this pushing has been necessary because nature wasn't worked with, nature being the element of change present within the family in the potential energy of the disturber.

Process oriented family therapy is closer to Buddhism and its appreciation of impermanence than it is to traditional family therapy, with its emphasis on homeostasis. Process work says that we must support the stability of the family and their identity as a unit, as well as support the elements of change present. I offer here some quotes from Sogyal Rinpoche, the wonderful Tibetan llama, from his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He quotes the Buddha when he says "If you want to know the truth of life and death, you must reflect continually on this: there

Maiy Sykes Wylie, "The Evolution of a Revolution," The Family Therapy Networker, January/February 1992:18. \ Salvador Minuchin, Families and Family Therapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) 52.

is only one law in the universe that never changes -that all things change, and that all things are impermanent." He says later in his book that, "taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we built everything." My own goal is to support both the forces of togetherness and stability and the winds of change simultaneously. Rinpoche says,"so there is a way in which we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping."8

This is why I see the disturber as Zen master. Lately I have been encouraging the disturber in family work to try to directly demand of the family that it grow or change in certain ways. This is usually very difficult, but I find that if the disturber can bring this out, the family often finds the key it is looking for. For example, I remember working with a family where the disturber was a child who kept hitting his brother. This family was in the middle of a divorce, and his parents wanted to live out their ideals and treat each other with great kindness no matter what The woman was involved in an affair that was incredibly painful to the man, and the man in some financial rearrangements that were very painful to the woman. In spite of this they valued being kind to each other. Their child was becoming a terror, beating up everyone in sight. He was actually their salvation. I asked him to demand that his parents have the fight between them. He was able to do it. Only by picking up this aggression was the family able to process the divorce. After listening and being passive for months, the dad woke up. He started talking about "the wild man," Robert Bly and men's groups and started bringing out his power. His wife was then able to respond with her power. They had some nasty fights which eventually resulted in a clear and solid divorce agreement.

The child also changed - I remember one day working with the boy and his brother who was the most frequent target of his hitting. We were working with puppets that can box and hit each other. The boy took the puppet's outstretched punching arms and put them around his brother's puppet giving it a hug. This was the beginning of his integrating love into his

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying 7Ibid., 34. 8Ibid., 35.

roughness, and the growing edge of the whole family - to integrate toughness, love and kindness. He was leading the way at the age of nine. He was being their Tibetan llama in the best way he knew how. The school and psychiatrist they sent him to had diagnosed him as hyperactive and wanted to suppress him with the drug Ritalin, but luckily his wisdom was transformed and not repressed.

Let us go back look at the first two cases presented and examine how these disturbers were teachers of this kind of Buddhist wisdom. In the first case, Bill was a teacher of detachment from worldly concerns and successes. When he stopped being the disturber, his brother later picked up this role. This is the problem I saw with so much traditional family therapy. The role and message of the disturber were successfully repressed. People started to make rapid progress, and family therapy was as popular as the drug Prozac (an antidepressant) currently is. But like Prozac, traditional family therapy is a method fraught with side effects. Traditional family therapists viewed this transferring of symptoms from one family member to another as a refusal to address the pathology of the family as a whole, so the sickness is transferred. I don't think the sickness is transferred, but the energy of change is stored up and incomplete. The teacher taught but the family refused to learn.

In Bill's family, workaholism is an addiction. Positive addictions are very difficult to overcome -by a positive addiction I mean a behavior or substance that is harmful to the individual or family but widely approved of by the society. People had ulcers, high blood pressure, and other symptoms of overwork. Bill was pointing in a new direction - don't take life so seriously, let go, laugh, have a good time. His friendships were the most important thing. Bill offered his family Zen classes in the importance of relationship, love, connection, and also in detachment and relaxation. When he was knocked out of this role by his well meaning therapist, his brother took over as the family teacher.

In the second case, John is pointing towards a forbidden direction for the family, yet in the forbidden direction lives the gold. The parents have settled for secure but unhappy lives. John risks all for fun

Ian Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992) 29.

and enjoyment. I will never forget the look on his parents' faces when John said he skipped school and put his graduation on the line because it was a beautiful day and he wanted to go play with Mends. One can only understand this action in the context of the bigger family unit As an isolated act, it appeared unwise and immature. However, the effect of his actions appeared to at least temporarily snap people out of their depressions. He was a Buddhist teacher showing how attachment leads to suffering. This worrisome, nervous, depressed family was given a glaring lesson in risk taking, in the spirit of risking all.

Embracing the Disturber

The nuclear family has been in trouble for decades. Divorce rates soar, affairs are commonplace, teenagers are in more trouble than ever with drugs, pregnancy, suicide, gangs, violence. What help have we as a society offered to families? Fundamentalist religions and groups like the Oregon Citizens Alliance in Oregon try to force people back into the old traditional patriarchal heterosexual monogamous powerful co-parents in charge mode. This doesn't seem to work. Some of the most troubled teens I have worked with are in rebellion against this kind of repression. Family therapists have tried to psychologize people back into the old molds and that does not seem to work either. In my vision of family life, I hope people make a commitment to continue growing by opening to the information present in what is disturbing them instead of repressing the disturbance.

In my own family I try to practice this in the moments when I realize that trying to get conformity is not working. It is a struggle to remember to value the disturber. When my seven year old went through some difficult times, I noticed she was causing trouble at home. Every little step that used to be so easy, like going to school or brushing teeth, became a struggle. My partner and I tried everything possible including regular discipline, self expression, art work, more loving, and changing our lives around to spend more time with her. Then I began to think like the kind of family therapist I try to be with others. How did my partner and I need to become more like her? How did we need to cause more trouble? Actually, we had been unhappy with my daughter's school and had not acted on our need to cause trouble. We called her teacher and this led to a huge fight that resulted in many changes. Both the physical layout and the emotional climate of the classroom changed. We also changed how we reacted to our daughter once

we understood her school life and the reasons behind her shift in behavior. We were able to quickly change the situation. This for me, would be a new model of family work - we wouldn't just repress the uncomfortable parts of each other, but would own them as a joint developement.

In my vision of a new response to the disturber, families would have this kind of fluidity. People's positions, no matter how difficult and disturbing, would be seen as roles that belong to the field itself, and each family would search out useful ways to bring out and complete these roles. Family life would be seen as a process of development supporting both the development of the individual members and the unit itself. Families would see themselves as research labs for changes trying to happen in the way we structure and pattern our lives together. Imperma-nence and change would be welcomed, as well as stability and constancy. While this may lead to what appears at first to be a more insecure life, I believe it would eliminate much of the suffering and oppression we now feel so present in our own families and in family life in general. Families would become the supportive, alive, experimental growth teams that they have the potential to be.

References and Further Reading

Goodbread, Joseph. "On Getting Dreamt Up: The Politics of Countertransference in Psychotherapy and Life," Unpublished Manuscript, 1988.

Haley, Jay. Problem-Solving Therapy. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Laing, R.D. The Politics of the Family. New York: Random House, 1972.

Mindell, Arnold. Dreambody. Boston: Sigo Press, 1981; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.

.The Dreambody in Relationships. London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1987.

. The Leader as Martial Artist. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992.

. Rivers Way. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

.Working With the Dreaming Body. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

Minuchin, Salvador. Families & Family Therapy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

. Family Kaleidoscope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Minuchin, Salvador; Rosman, Bernice L.; and Baker, Lester. Psychosomatic Families. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Ritterman, Michele. Using Hypnosis in Family Therapy. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1983.

Satir, Virginia. Conjoint Family Therapy. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1964.

Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992.

Simon, Richard, ed. The Family Therapy Networker, November/December 1992; January/February 1993.

Sykes Wylie, Mary. "The Evolution of a Revolution." The Family Therapy Networker, January/February 1992.

Gary Reiss L.CS.Wis a therapist and teacher of Process Work. He has a private practice in Eugene, Oregon and is the director of a group of family service clinics in rural Oregon. Gary's special interests include integrating Process Work into other spritiual traditions, and Process Work and Social Change.