The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy

Napier receives a call from Whitaker asking if he would like to be co-therapists for the Brice family, made up of David, Carolyn, and their children, Claudia, Laura, and Don. Napier agrees, always eager to work with Whitaker, and takes his time getting to the first appointment. When he arrives, everyone except Don is in attendance, and Napier has the sense that Whitaker has already explained and introduced him. Napier notices that Carolyn seems depressed as well as angry and that Claudia, a teenager, has chosen to sit near her father rather than her mother, who sits alone. With the family present, Whitaker updates Napier on what he knows so far, including that Carolyn and Claudia argue often, that Claudia has begun running away, and that the stress of Claudia’s unhappiness is bleeding into the rest of family life. Claudia reacts with anger to this account, but Whitaker stops her before she and her mother can start arguing.

Whitaker insists on waiting for Don, who is reluctant to join therapy and is nowhere to be found. He explains that the family has likely unconsciously chosen Don to miss the meeting so they can further delay fully addressing their issues. Carolyn insists that Claudia is suicidal and the meeting cannot be postponed, but after a brief question period, Whitaker and Napier decide that Claudia doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger. Their unwillingness to give in to the family shows that they are firm enough to handle whatever problems arise, and a meeting is scheduled for the following day. Whitaker asks Laura, the youngest daughter, directly if she is willing to help him teach her family how to love, thus demonstrating warmth and kindness.

Napier reflects on this first meeting, noting how family structure is deeply embedded in families. These relationships, unhealthy or dysfunctional as they may be, are what the family knows and understands. To change the structure of a family, support is needed, and the family must be confident in that support.

The first session that includes the whole family proves illuminating. Don introduces himself politely and, at age 11, seems to understand more about the purpose of family therapy than his parents. When David is asked to be the one to explain the family dynamic and what daily life is like, he only discusses Claudia, telling Whitaker and Napier how Claudia runs away for days, isolates herself from the family, and writes poetry about death. Claudia also talks about “five levels of reality” (15), which Napier finds confusing. When asked again what the family is like, David gives vague responses, but Don is willing to share details about their daily interactions. He explains that arguments always begin over something to do with Claudia, and his parents often disagree about how to handle the situation. To get his parents to stop arguing, Don often resorts to bothering Laura until their parents have to intervene. Don also explains that his parents have unspoken issues with one another, like how his father works too much and isolates himself at home, or how his mother is still dependent on her own mother. Laura reveals that she worries about her parents divorcing or Claudia ending her own life, and the warmth Whitaker offers her in that moment spreads out toward everyone else.

When it is Carolyn’s turn to talk, she is clearly angry and unsettled. She is asked to talk about the family but can’t help going back to the issue with Claudia. After being pressed a little, Carolyn admits that her marriage is suffering. She then admits that the issues began long before fighting over Claudia, as she and her husband are dependent on one another. Napier and Whitaker theorize that the dependency scares them and causes them both to drift away from one another.

When Claudia is asked to speak, she too struggles to talk about anything other than the conflict with her mother. She feels that her mother is nosy and jealous of her. When Claudia and Carolyn begin yelling at one another, David attempts to scold Claudia, which upsets her and causes her to rush out of the room. David has to bring her back, and at that point Napier suggests that David sit beside his wife, rather than Claudia, to attempt to reunite the parents and dissolve the teams that have formed. Whitaker and Napier conclude the session by explaining that the family’s unconscious efforts to reach a state of crisis are actually a good thing, because it means they are willing to live and want help. They agree to meet again, and Whitaker encourages them to save their arguments for therapy, rather than at home.

The feeling of helplessness that led David and Carolyn to seek outside help initially led them to a child therapist, who later referred them to family therapy. Claudia’s experience in individual therapy made her feel over-analyzed and unjustly blamed for all the family’s problems. She felt her parents were pressuring her to change without doing anything themselves. Claudia was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her parents were told she was unlikely to improve soon, if ever; David saw this as untrue and a poor representation of the strong and capable daughter he knew. By choosing to accept the referral to family therapy, the family unconsciously accepted that the issue was wider than just Claudia, and took a step into a new approach to therapy that involves the larger circle of influence in the person’s life.

While reflecting back on therapy with David years later, Napier explains to the reader that family therapy, like all therapy, originated with Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that the “id” was the most powerful influence within a person and the source of all basic needs and desires. People learned to consciously suppress and unconsciously repress these needs for the sake of social relationships. Napier goes on to criticize Freud for focusing exclusively on the internal state of the individual patient and ignoring of the family that creates and exacerbates the issues. With Freud’s focus on the individual came a shift in thought which deemed the human mind to be both animalistic and machine-like. The result was decades of therapy that ignored the family and often didn’t create lasting positive change. Family therapy aims to acknowledge and examine the wider scope of a person’s life and the outside factors which shape who they are, from childhood all the way through life.

Napier discusses the concept of the family as a system that is made up of individuals but that also acts as its own unique entity. He looks back on studies of patients with schizophrenia and found that their psychosis was influenced heavily by interactions or lack of interaction with their parents. Similarly, each person in a family is influenced not only by their other family members but by a hierarchy of other systems, ranging from the world itself down to the atomic and genetic level. Other systems of influence include work, economic shifts, friends, and ideological expectations. Many of these influences create tension amongst family members, but they can be sifted through and addressed one at a time.

Therapists gradually learned about the influence of family on their patients by first trying to treat individuals and finding that therapeutic progress tended to be undone when patients were reintroduced to their families. Slowly, therapists started involving other members of the family in the therapeutic process and found that virtually all problems within individuals could be traced back to issues within the family. The individual who was initially blamed was instead just carrying and demonstrating the pain that other family members could not. As more and more therapists found that the problems they attempted to address were really the result of a larger issue, they began inviting family into therapy sessions. Between the 1950s and 1970s, family therapy went from a brand new and often questioned technique to a widely accepted and researched field. Napier believes that all families hold the potential for change.