Читать книгу Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling - James Robert Bitter - Страница 16

Like most people who are attracted to the helping professions, I came from a family that had its happy times and its struggles. You can probably say the same thing about your family. In my particular case, my father was a man who kept a lot inside himself and was somewhat aloof and distant, not really knowing what to do with children and leaving us to be raised by my mother. My mother was a warm, gregarious woman who loved her life as a homemaker and community volunteer. My mother and father were both devout Catholics; they also believed that they were soulmates, and they were committed to a marriage that was to last forever. They adopted me when I was 6 months old. Two years later, they would adopt my 6-week-old sister, Jo Ellen. We were a working-class nuclear family of the 1950s, seeking the promise of a better life through hard work and dedication. We lived in a small town in central Washington known for its production of apples and its traditional values, with little or no diversity acknowledged or appreciated in the community. In short, we were what the world called a “normal” family. Manners were important, faith was important, hard work was important, and extended family and community were important and intertwined. Contributing to others and making a difference in the world were expected and valued.

My grandfather died when I was 9, and my grandmother came to live with us. She and my mother were very close, and they loved being together. My grandmother was respectful of the relationship between my father and mother, and she helped everyone when she could, but she also had her own life and interests. I remember having long talks with my grandmother and being amazed by her stories of being a schoolteacher in Wisconsin before she met and married my grandfather. Having Grandma with us in the family seemed as natural to me as having parents. In a short period of time, it was as if she had always been in our home.

Then, when I was 14, my mother died from cancer. Both of my parents were heavy smokers, and both were addicted to it long before the Surgeon General started putting warnings on the sides of cigarette packages. My mother’s death turned everything upside down. Both my father and my grandmother met my basic needs and those of my sister, but both were grieving, crying with a sadness that seemed as though it would never end. Within a year, I would distance myself from the pain in the family by heading off to a Catholic boarding school. My sister would not be able to find such a convenient way out: She led a troubled life throughout high school and, as soon as possible, she started a lifelong search for her “real” parents.

This is a relatively short synopsis of my early life. When you read it, what issues do you think have been part of my own development as a person and as a counselor? What is emphasized in my life? What do you think I left out? Do you have any guesses about how I have approached women and men? Do you think the limited experience and traditional values that were part of my upbringing had an effect on how I view race, diverse cultures, gender issues, and roles and functions in the family? Do you think that coming of age in the 1960s had any effect on how I see people and life? What effect do you think adoption has had on me—and on my sister? Do you think the two of us are more alike or different? What would lead you to your conclusions? If you had to write your own autobiography, what facts, interpretations, values, and beliefs would you emphasize? What parts would you choose to forget or simply not mention?

Here is a little more information about how my educational and professional experiences began. My father dedicated the proceeds from my mother’s life insurance to sending his children to college. I was blessed with a great education (academically as well as in life) at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. I majored in English literature with a minor in philosophy. It turned out, however, that my father was right: There really were not any jobs waiting for a person with a degree in English literature and philosophy. For a year after I graduated, I worked in a gas station and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I had many of the common developmental difficulties that occur in late adolescence and early adulthood. If it was possible to engage in life the hard way, I usually did. It was the counselors at Gonzaga who really helped me begin the process of growing up. They were the people who, it seemed to me, had a handle on kindness, caring, and stability as well as a moral and ethical life. It was their modeling of effective engagement that led me to want to become a counselor.

In 1970, I headed off to Idaho State University in Pocatello to get a master’s degree in counseling. At that time in the history of the counseling profession, the skills and interventions associated with Rogerian or person-centered therapy made up the majority of our training. We spent hours learning to do reflections and active listening, continually paraphrasing content and feelings, hoping that it would all become second nature to us. For many of my peers, it did become second nature, but I struggled. I always had more questions I wanted to ask: How did everything fit together? Who said what to whom? How did people react when my clients did one thing or another? What were the different parts that made up the personalities of the individuals I was seeing, and how did those parts work for people or against them? I was also far more directive in my interventions than would make any of my supervisors comfortable, because I genuinely wanted to help people find solutions to their problems. In the early days of my training, I seldom felt that I was effective and, in truth, I am sure that I was not.

In early 1971, one of my professors went to a conference in which a man named Ray Lowe demonstrated Adlerian family counseling. My professor brought back tapes and books, and later he even brought Ray Lowe himself to our campus. I absorbed everything I could about the Adlerian model. The more I read about Adlerian psychology, the more at home I felt. Alfred Adler was systemic before we even had such a word in our profession. He saw people as socially embedded; he took into account the effects of birth order, the family constellation, and family atmosphere; and he considered interaction and doing central to understanding human motivation and behavior. Discovering the works of Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs helped me to make sense out of my own life as well as the lives of the clients entrusted to my care.

I was part of a team that opened up the first public (open-forum) family education center at Idaho State University. I even conducted the first family counseling interview ever done there. I had lots of support and was given lots of room to make mistakes—and to learn. But I had found my approach. As graduate students, we ran parent study groups, held weekly family counseling sessions, and carried what we were learning into local area schools and community agencies. I stayed at Idaho State University to get my doctorate in counselor education. In 1974, we held a conference on Adlerian psychology that featured, once again, Ray Lowe and such masters as Heinz Ansbacher, Don Dinkmeyer, and the man who was to become my best friend and colleague for the second half of my life, Manford Sonstegard.

Sonstegard was simply the best family and group counselor I had ever seen in action. He had an enormously calm manner that reflected what Murray Bowen called a differentiated self. He listened very carefully to the positions and counterposi tions taken in families and groups, and he always stayed focused on redirecting motivation. When I graduated later that year (1974), I was able to get a position in the counseling program of which Sonstegard was the chair. Over the next 13 years, we established and conducted Adlerian family counseling sessions in multiple states in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States from our base in West Virginia.

Adler (1927/1957) had called his approach individual psychology, but it was anything but oriented toward the individual. He used the term “individual” to emphasize the necessity of understanding the whole person (rather than just parts of people) within that person’s social contexts. Adler focused on the individual’s movement through life (one’s style of living) and how that style was enacted with others. He spoke of having a “psychology of use” rather than possession. From Adler’s perspective, people had a purpose and use for the symptoms he encountered in counseling. Others in the clients’ life generally reacted in ways that maintained the very problems for which the individuals sought help. Without question, Adler was a systemic thinker, and working with systems was part of his therapy back in the 1920s. A fuller presentation of Adler’s model is presented in Chapter 6, but I mention his work here because it fit so well with how I saw individuals, groups, couples, and families. I did not have the language of systemic thought when I first read Adler, but the ideas were all there, and his psychology has served as a wonderful foundation for me for more than 45 years.

In 1979, I had the opportunity to attend a monthlong training seminar called a Process Community led by Virginia Satir and two of her trainers. The training program focused on applications of her human validation process model to individuals, groups, couples, and families. Centered in her now-famous focus on communication and self-esteem, it was as much a personal growth experience as it was a learning experience for family practitioners. More than 100 participants were accepted for the program held just north of Montreal, Quebec, in Canada. Half of the participants spoke only English, and half of the participants had a primary language of French, so every word was offered in both languages. The power of Satir’s work in this cross-cultural experience was overwhelming. I came away from the month with a new dedication to experiential teaching and learning and a determination to integrate Satir’s human validation process model with the Adlerian principles I used in clinical practice (see Bitter, 1987, 1988, 1993a; Satir et al., 1988).

In 1980, I became a member of Satir’s AVANTA Network, an association of Satir-trained practitioners who used her methods and processes and were engaged in training others to do the same. For the next 9 years, until her death, I was privileged to work with Satir during three more Process Communities; to coauthor an article and a chapter with her; and to spend at least a week each year learning the newest ideas, hopes, and dreams of one of the most creative family systems therapists ever to have graced our planet.

Virginia Satir taught me the power of congruence in communication as well as the forms that metacommunications often take in relationships. She introduced sculpting to my work and gave me processes for creating transformative experiences with families. Her emphasis on touch, nurturance, presence, and vulnerability put my heart as a person and a counselor on the line, but it also opened up avenues of trust and caring that had been missing in my work before. Satir taught me how to join with families and still not get lost in them. When she died, it was as if I had lost a mother, a father, a sister, and a brother all rolled into one. I had certainly lost one of the best teachers in my life.

In the 1990s, I had two opportunities to do monthlong training programs with Erving and Miriam Polster, the master Gestalt therapists. Their emphasis on awareness, contact, and experiment in counseling fit wonderfully with the decade’s worth of knowledge I had received from Satir. The Polsters also had the same kind of great heart that Satir had. Whether working with individuals, couples, or families, both Satir and the Polsters demonstrated the importance of an authentic and nurturing relationship in facilitating change. At the heart of both models was a dedication to experiential counseling and learning through experiment and enactment. Even today, when I walk into a room to meet a family, I feel the wisdom of these great therapists with me (see Bitter, 2004).

As you can see, I have been gifted with great teachers in my lifetime. They have welcomed me into learning situations that I would not trade for anything in the world. Watching great masters at work has provided me with ideas and models for effective interventions that I never would have discovered on my own. To tell the truth, I often found myself imitating them initially in very concrete ways, sometimes using the exact words and interventions that I had seen them create spontaneously. Over time, I would begin to feel a more authentic integration of their influences in my life and work, and I let these influences inform my own creativity in family practice.

I have become fascinated by the flow and rhythms of therapeutic relationships. The two most important aspects of family practice are still the client and the practitioner, with the latter being in the best position to influence the process. I currently think in terms of four aspects of therapeutic movement: purpose, awareness, contact, and experience (Bitter, 2004; Bitter & Nicoll, 2004). You may already have noticed that the acronym for these words is PACE. In both my personal and professional lives, paying attention to purpose, awareness, contact, and experience brings a useful pace to human engagement and provides me with enough structure to support creativity in my interventions.

Purposefulness has always been a central aspect of Adlerian counseling and provides a sense of directionality and meaning to life (Sweeney, 2019). Awareness and contact are most clearly defined in the Polsters’ Gestalt practice. I consider both of these aspects to be critical to an enlivened and energized life. They make being present sufficient as a catalyst for movement and change. Awareness and contact are also essential to more fully realized human experiences. They allow both the client and the practitioner to touch the authentic within them and to find expressions that flow from their hearts. Such experiences are a natural part of Virginia Satir’s work. The therapeutic experiments and enactments common to systemic family counseling are just one form of such experiences.

Although I like the integration of thinking and practice that currently marks my own work, I began by absorbing as much of the great masters as I could, often imitating them until their processes became natural within me. I would recommend a similar process to you. If family systems theory and practice is what you want to do, find a model or set of models that seem to fit you. Then watch as many tapes and DVDs that feature your chosen approach as you can.¹

Each theory chapter in Part 2 of this book has a transcript of an actual family counseling session right after the model is introduced. I have tried to pick couples or family practitioners who represent the most current development of each approach and who are still working and clinically active today. I have also created a fictitious family I call the Quests, which is a conglomerate of several real couples and families I have worked with over the years. I use this created family to demonstrate how each theoretical perspective might work with them. As you read about both the actual family and the fictitious family in each chapter, think about which approach you like best, what you would want to do or use yourself, and what you cannot imagine yourself doing. This is one way to begin to narrow down the choices to the systems perspectives that best fit you.

Thinking systemically about clients is one perspective—or I should say, set of perspectives—that provides a framework for therapeutic practice. For me, thinking systemically just fits the way I see human process and the social world in which we all live. We are social beings. We interact with others every day. We are influenced by the people in our lives, and we return that influence to them. In truth, we are very seldom alone, and even when we are, we are often thinking about and reflecting on life with others. Even the act of giving help involves at least two people, and in my mind, counselors join with even single clients to form a new system. I believe in family systems counseling because it is a reflection of the way we live. And at its best, intervening in systems increases the likelihood that when change is enacted, it will be supported and maintained.