Tom Nissley's
Ridgelea Reports
Comments and commentary
on Things about Therapy,
and Personal Spiritual Growth
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powerful resources in the family system
Summary: Psychotherapy almost
always includes the change in focus of some piece or pieces of information
that were installed incorrectly into the memory. When work is done that
triggers the memory of the early family system, there is likely to be a
wealth of supportive characters that can be used by the client to build a
realistic and solid support system "within." Ancestral stories and family
legends often provide clues to impasses and significant anchors for a
sense of self-history.
I. How does the all-important PARENT Ego
State develop?
1. Example: a client reports that "my father was no-good. (He left us when I was nineteen)." When pressed he recalls that his father never was friendly to him, and stresses that he (father) embarrassed the family by having an adulterous affair with a woman of far less social standing than his wife within the same small community. The "us" is significant because it indicates that the client's focus was identified with his mother's feelings, probably from a very early time. Scenes describing his family, and his father, are remembered as if seen through her eyes.
a. It is quite normal to experience first glimpses, and later ones, in sync with the sensations of a mother because of the bonding that occurs before and at birth. It is often a problem, however, to be stuck with the recorded data that results as if it were the only reality. That is especially true when the mother involved was depressed or unhappy with other family members: in this case (and often) the father.
b. Appropriate questions lead to memories of family members on both "sides" that are consistent with happy feelings and productive values. The client is the oldest sibling. He has a large internal support system, in conflict with his hatred of his father and whatever in himself reminds him of his father.
2. Example: a client reports that her father was "no good" ("he left my mother when I was young; I don't remember him.") According to her aunt (oldest sibling in her mother's generation), the client is also no good, "you are like your father." Prompted by memories of her father provided by other relatives, the client recognizes and accepts good features in her father, and accepts supportive idea that she is "like your father," in good ways. She also refuses to accept the curse-like attribution of her aunt, and turns it into a resource.
C. When there is an open gestalt the developing child fills in the gaps in his sound and light picture with what he/she imagines or with what he/she is told by parents in the way of family legends.
D. Ancestors — the honored and sometimes feared predecessors of the family of origin, whether they are known by the child in actual experience as grandparents and great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins; as an influence from afar (letters, money, gifts); or only by legend, provide the basis for decisions, third degree impasses, and permissions that are built into the "SCRIPT."
II. It quickly becomes apparent that the notations of counter-injunctions and injunctions which lead to an understanding of the "SCRIPT" are notes on an entire system of family members and others present in the environment of the developing child.
A. As a therapist, I am especially interested in the permissions provided by subsidiary (anyone other than father/mother) members of the family system. Aunts and uncles, for instance, often provide the stepping stones through adolescence that mothers and fathers forbid access to. Holiday gatherings and weddings or funerals are important times when some different input may be gleaned. Senses of humor different than mother/father's; values different than mother/father's; more or less appropriate introductions to adult behaviors before mother/father would imagine them timely; and above all, the fracture of the framework of family secrets; are pegs on which successful paths to maturity are hung.
III. Techniques for prompting the memory of the Family System.
A. In workshops, I use a particular exercise with Russian dolls (the "Ridgelea dolls") to help persons get more in touch with memories of their individual families of origin. The exercise is intended to provide a tabula rasa with a family projected upon it. Participants must complete the projection and find the elements which flesh out the memory of their own homes (systems) at an early age.
B. I am often surprised by professional therapists with
successful careers who are themselves surprised by this simple
investigation of their roots, on a personal or human level. It may not be
necessary to have investigated the past and its influences to be a
practicing therapist; on the other hand it is helpful, and it is
particularly helpful if one intends to help clients look for resources
within their own family systems.
C. I first developed this
approach at a time when some therapists were using "reparenting" as an
approach to help very disturbed persons to make changes. "Reparenting" has
different meanings. My belief now, as then, (it has not changed), is that
clients who have been injured developmentally by their parents' approach
to parenting are more likely to respond to valuable permissions within
their family systems than any amount of permissions from somebody else's
family system (like the therapist's).
1. Even the worst family
probably has something good about it. If the client can't identify it,
he/she is probably looking through a filter that cuts out pain and
bitterness; i.e. makes it possible to accept the pain and bitterness of
personal history. If the therapist won't look for it, he or she is already
in collusion with the filter. A therapist who colludes with the filter
will be helpful only to a limited degree, because in collusion he or she
agrees that the client's historic family is a disaster. I want the
therapist to know, at this point, where the permissions to survive came
from. Who's the internal ally? How did you access him/her?
2.
Muriel James' careful process for self-reparenting, while not developed
from the same family systems perspective, seems to me to result in a
similar approach. It allows the client to use his or her own energy and
memories and imagination to put the pieces for growth and survival
together.
3. I am also interested in encouraging the client to do
self-reparenting, based on the stories and legends in his/her history that
are useful to his/her present plan.
D. A few seeds for thought...
1. "Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love." Freud: in a
letter to Jung.
2. "Only in a loving relationship can
`reparenting' take place, where both patient and healer can experience
total acceptance and to profit from each other's accumulated life
wisdoms." Joseph Zinker: in a letter to me.
3. "... All analysis involves a journey backward to pick up the signposts we have passed.... This is a model of the village where I was born. The man you see before you was shaped here, not merely by his parents, by everything and everybody round him, but by everybody who had gone before: the men who built the church, the masons who hewed the stones, the women who baked the bread and passed down the folk remedies for people's ills. We are all reflectors of a past which we have forgotten, but which is buried deep in our subconscious. Our dreams recall that long and ancient inheritance...." from The World is Made of Glass, a novel about Carl Jung by Morris West. p 147.