The type of families structures affects your emotions. For generations professionals have used structural family therapy.
For generations professionals have been using something called structural family therapy. What is this mysterious form of therapy that uses family structural diagrams to reveal the emotional life of a group of people that calls themselves a family? By looking at family structure one may truly have more insight into their family's emotional life.
"The family is a natural group which over time has evolved patterns of interacting. These patterns make up the family structure, which governs the functioning of family members, delineating their range of behavior and facilitating their interaction" (Minuchin, 1981). In order for a family to perfom their routine tasks a viable form of family structure is needed. There may be some knowledge of an individual's capacity to interact with, as well as affect, the behavior of others in the family. "Family members do not ordinarily see themselves as part of a family structure" (Minuchin, 1981). Some professionals have talked about families as systems, where each individual person affects the other. By examining family structure one can often uncover certain patterns of emotional life of the family. Some helping professionals may choose to focus on patterns of behaviors in families as indicators of emotional ties, breaks, and rifts that exist within a particular family. Some of the frequently studied aspects of family structure that may be used to reveal the emotional life of the family are:
Seating - at times one can tell where coalitions, affiliations, and/or over involved dyads and triads are in the family structure by the seating assignments of the family. For example, if a family comes in a room and everyone in the family sits together minus one member, one might start to see that the seating structure may be indicative of emotional problems between the family and this one member.
Interuptions - by paying attention to patterns of how people interupt others one can often clue into what type of boundaries exist with in a family. For example, if every time a child talks a parent consistently interupts that child, there may be some indication that they child may feel devalued, and not heard, hence causing some type of emotional difficulty between parent and child.
Completing Information and Supplying Confirmation
Similarily to interupting completing information and supplying information can be seen as intrusions upon people's sense of space and/or self. For example, if one partner in a couple was trying to tell a story and the other member of that same couple kept correcting the talking member with "correct" information one may start to see that there may be some form of communication difficulties between this couple.
Giving help - by noting which members help other members in a family, and further which members do not help other members in the family, one can start to see where support in the family system exist.
Affiliations and Coalitions/Over involved dyads and triads - for affiliations, coalitions, and over involved triads and dyads one can start to analyze where shifts in family structure need to occur to help improve family functioning. For example, there may be a single parent family with three children and one of the children is paired with the parent. The child paired with the parent may start to take on a more adult role in the family: taking care of other children, emotionally supporting the other parent etc. This may cause stress for one so young and not developmentally prepared to take on their assigned role in their family system.
What does your family's structure say about your family's emotional life? Take a look at your family structure for an insight into how your emotional life influences structure, and how structure influences emotional life, of your family. What helping professionals tend to do is study these behavioral patterns and analyze what types of emotional relationships may be happening between family members. Some times behavior can be powerful and help to cement already troubled emotional relationships betwen family members. Therefore, to change difficult emotional patterns one may start with altering behavior patterns to produce some sort of change in relational aspects of a family. By studying family structure one may be able to get a glimpse into sophisticated and complicated emotional happenings with in a family. Further, one may be able to use their knowledge of family structure to help any given family imporve their relations.
