Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name is Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Elaine Carney Gibson. Elaine is a practicing psychotherapist of almost 50 years. She sees individuals, couples, and families, specializing in relationship therapy. She’s taught graduate courses in marriage and family therapy for many years and is the director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Training Institute of The Link Counseling Center in Atlanta, Georgia. With Sounds True, Elaine Carney Gibson is the author of a new book. It’s called Your Family Revealed: A Guide to Decoding the Patterns, Stories, and Belief Systems in Your Family.
To say it the way it is, Elaine Carney Gibson is a master therapist. She has so much experience looking at families and seeing any presenting issue as a symptom of a greater system. Here we have the chance to learn some of the core principles of family [systems therapy] with Elaine Carney Gibson. Take a listen.
Elaine, you’ve been a practicing psychotherapist for almost 50 years now. I’d love to start by going back in time and having you share with our listeners a bit about how you first became a psychotherapist and decided to focus in the area of marriage and family therapy.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, truthfully, I think that many of us who are therapists were kind of programmed to be therapists for our families, and I think that was true for me in many ways. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I always found myself interested in family stories. I was one of those grandchildren that would jump on my bike, go to my grandmother’s house, sit on her porch swing on her front porch, and ask her to tell me stories over and over again.
So I somehow knew that her stories were my stories, even as a child. Because what she’s bringing in terms of what she was—her beliefs and her ways of behavior, her ways of relating, her eccentricities, whatever that may be, that somehow that was all impactful to me. So then I go along, and I actually was in the field of early childhood education, and I was teaching and had volunteered to be one of the first white teachers—this was a time of desegregation in what had previously been an all-Black school—and I really loved this experience. It was in Central Florida.
The grandmothers—I may have shared another time, but the families there, there were about 13 people in a household, $2,000 income a year—the grandmothers took care of the children while any one of working age could work, in the fields generally. And the grandmothers would come and talk to me about the grandchildren and their concerns and what they saw going on. And I found it all interesting.
So I was finishing up a master’s degree in early childhood development and education, and they started a program at Georgia State University called Professional Counseling with basically community counseling, and I thought, “Community counseling, yes, that makes sense to me.” So when I went into that, it was just at the time where family systems theory was beginning to—there were being things written about it and talked about, and I just happened to come to the field during that time and fell in love with the whole idea of the systems theory model and then integrating that with the humanistic model, which is the one I was being trained in at the university basically based on Carl Rogers’s work, which I love.
And so the two of them came together, and so I just feel like I came to—it just evolved, the timing was right, and I fell in love with the subject and went to a center that worked with families. We were one of the first family therapy centers in the United States. We’re still in existence, which is kind of unusual for a nonprofit that started that many years ago, 51 years ago now. That’s how it happened.
Tami Simon: One of the things I feel from you, Elaine, is your deep love and appreciation of the family systems model. So for those of us who are relatively new to it, share with us some of the key concepts, the key discoveries that you love so much.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, it really is—I call it relationship therapy, because that’s really what we’re looking at. It looks at the family in terms of hierarchy, in terms of boundaries, how people communicate with one another, both verbally and nonverbally. It wants to look at what are the triangles in the family, because there’s always triangles, and I say to people they’re natural. It’s not like triangles in a family are this bad thing. They just are, but they can become dysfunctional, if you can use that word. They may become dysfunctional if one or more of the individuals in the triangle is somehow hurt by it, and “hurt” may be again a strong word, but that somehow it’s keeping them from thriving.
And so then I want to encourage people to look at the triangles. If your child is involved and you’re a parent, is there something that you could do differently that would be healthier, more productive for your child? So we’re just really examining many different ways that the system itself operates and how that affects the individuals in the family.
Tami Simon: You have this very interesting quote, “A healthy family system promotes the growth and development of the individuals involved. Thus, the healthy family system serves the individuals. In an unhealthy system, an individual serves the system instead.” And I wonder—this might be a way for us to begin to appreciate the family systems model, if you can explain that a bit. What would it mean for a healthy family system to serve individuals versus individuals serving the system?
Elaine Carney Gibson: I think it’s when the relationships in the family are operating in a way that allow the individuals to thrive, grow, be individuals, as they get to be adults to be more autonomous, or as they’re growing to be more autonomous and have their own thoughts, their own feelings, be able to then to establish their own beliefs, and they’re free to express that in the family, and they’re not bad or wrong or somehow being disloyal to the family by being able to have their own thoughts and feelings that may be different from the family’s.
When the family is asking any of the individuals to be sacrificial to the point that they’re losing self, that they can’t have or are not allowed to have their own voice, and to have their wants and needs taken into consideration, then I think that the system in some way is not working.
And of course when we’re in relationship, we know we always make sacrifices. That’s part of being in relationship. We’re going to make sacrifices. But if we’re being sacrificial—and to me there’s a difference in being sacrificial and making sacrifices. Making sacrifices is, more or less, a choice to be in the relationship. Being sacrificial is really putting your wants and needs aside, because you may feel like you have to survive in the situation so you don’t feel like you have a choice, so that you are sacrificing your own wants and needs, your own sense of self. Your identity is more blended in with what the family says it is, rather than for you to feel like you have your own identity and sense of who you are in the world.
Tami Simon: If someone’s asking themself a question right now, “Am I making a necessary sacrifice within my family, or am I being sacrificial?,” how would they sort that out?
Elaine Carney Gibson: To me, it’s a matter of sitting and feeling about it. If I can say, “I want to do this,” then there’s where the difference is to me. An example I’ve sometimes shared is I remember when—and this isn’t a family member, but could have been—I had a neighbor who was in the hospital and I kept saying to myself, “I should go, I should go, I should go.” The big old “should” word. And then finally I wasn’t making time to go, and finally I said, “Wait a minute, yes, I probably should go, but I want to go. I want to be a good friend, so I want to go.”
So even though I had to disrupt quite a few things in my life to do that, it was important to me to do it. It becomes a choice. So I think when you can sit with it and you can say, “OK, yes, that is a sacrifice. Not only am I willing to make it, but I choose to make it.” So that has a different feeling to it, a different energy around it, than if it’s like, “Oh, I should, I have to, I should, I have to.” That’s a different energy around it, and you can feel it in your body.
And if you are sitting with someone and you’re talking with them, you can see it, you can see their body sometimes almost just kind of collapse in on itself rather than it’s like the choice “I want to. I am willing and I want to, and it is the right thing to do, perhaps.”
Tami Simon: So I think I’m pushing on this point because I notice sometimes even just in an intimate relationship, there are things that I don’t really want to do, but I feel like maybe it’s just—yes, I guess I would use the word “should.” I should do it, and I don’t really want to, but yet I don’t think I’m sacrificial. I think I’m being a good partner. So it’s something else. I’m doing a good partner, but I’m kind of going against my natural grain to do so.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Yes, but you’re choosing to be a good partner.
Tami Simon: Indeed, I am.
Elaine Carney Gibson: And so that’s the choice. So in that sense, you’re making the choice.
Tami Simon: Right.
Elaine Carney Gibson: And like I said, I think in relationships, any relationships, we make sacrifices, and we do things at times that we’d rather not do. We don’t even particularly want to do them, but the other person does. It’s important to them, and we want to be a good partner, we want to be a good friend, we want to be a good sibling or child or parent or whatever it is. So we do those things. But instead of walking around with that idea, “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to,” but I choose to because I choose to be a good partner.
Tami Simon: At the very beginning of Your Family Revealed, you introduce the metaphor of the labyrinth, that there’s value for us to go back to the center of the labyrinth and look at where our journey has come from. So I wonder here if you can share why you like this metaphor so much of the labyrinth.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I’m not sure why I like it, but I do like it, because I think that we do start kind of in this small place. And again, birth mother—and so that would be someone who has been adopted, still starts with this birth mother and whatever was going on with her and the issues around birth. And then depending on if they’re not staying in that nuclear system but adopted, then that becomes their nuclear family and those family’s patterns, ideals, and beliefs and ways of relating all get passed down to the individual children.
So you’re starting there, and then hopefully we’re going to be growing. We’re getting older. So hopefully in that process we are also growing. We’re growing mentally, emotionally; we’re getting to know more who we are, getting in touch with our identity that is connected to and separate from the family as we go out into the world.
So I like the idea of that journey, and then the idea of periodically kind of taking a look at—more psychologically than any other way—but taking a look at, “OK, where have we come from? What have we learned? What have been our experiences, and what are we carrying with us now that has been helpful to us, that has perhaps been harmful to us?” And exploring that and then circling back out and periodically circling back in.
I talk in the book about how a 10-year-old understands where she is, and her journey is going to be different than a 20-year-old or a 40-year-old or an 80-year-old. We’re going to be able to look back, have different understandings and perceptions of our experiences. So I’ve always just liked the metaphor.
Tami Simon: And you write that understanding our family can free us. And this is something I definitely want to hear you speak more about. What I’ve noticed is that actually as I’ve gotten older and I’ve circled back to my early upbringing, I’ve had a lot more understanding of, “Ohhh.” My understanding keeps increasing, but it continues to be quite painful. Like there’s still unresolved, if you will, painful memories that I still have to metabolize from those early childhood experiences. So if it can free us, I’m willing to make the journey, but it’s hard. So I wonder if you can speak more about that.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I think it is hard, and it can be very difficult depending on what one’s experiences have been. And I think about trauma in that that experience is a part of our history, but we can heal, and when we think about it, it is still painful, but we can be on a healing journey from those experiences that have been wounding to us in an emotional, psychological, soulful kind of way. And a lot of times I think that’s why people are in therapy is because it could be a helpful way for them to have that exploration in a safe place with someone who might then offer some different perspectives and some suggestions in terms of what might be rituals or thinking shifts that could help them heal the woundedness from those experiences. And of course we always have to grieve those. So grieving is part of that process, I think, of healing.
Tami Simon: Now when someone comes to you, and they say, “My child XYZ—I’m coming to you because you’re a family therapist, and my child is having anxiety, or my child doesn’t want to go to school.” How do you sort out, “Oh, this is a family systems issue,” or there’s something happening inside this child that may or may not specifically relate to the dynamics in the family or maybe—I’m curious how you see it.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, it takes a little while. It’s not usually automatic that I would know that, because I assume even if this is something going on in the child chemically, biologically, there’s something going on that this is particular to the child that I do know that the system impacts that in a positive or negative way, that the system can be… In fact, I’ll share this story because I think it’s just a lovely story. It’s one of the ones that’s written up in all the textbooks I’ve ever seen in the beginning of family therapy.
It was taking place—I forget, one of the clinics, I honestly can’t remember in the moment. I don’t even want to name one because I’m not sure, but it was in a hospital setting and they were just beginning to observe families and the interactions and the nonverbal signals that we’re sending to one another. And so there was a group observing this young man who was in the hospital being treated for schizophrenia, and it was a visiting day and his mother came. And this man was doing so much better. He was getting treatment, he was doing so much better, and they really thought, “Well, he’s about ready to be released from the hospital.”
And so his mother walks in, and he walks up to his mother to put his arms around her, and she puts her hands up to say, “Don’t hug me.” And so he backed off, and he became a little bit confused but stood there a minute, and then she said to him when he started looking a little sad, “What’s the matter? You’re not happy to see me?” And he went right back into some of the psychotic stuff he had been into, and what the observers were noticing was the double bind—that he wanted to greet her with a hug, and when that was rejected, then he was scolded because he wasn’t wanting to see her, and that we put one another in binds a lot.
But sometimes when the children come in, I want to observe families, I want to help them, I want to support the family, because this could be some very difficult times for the parents, and support them, support their parenting, and support them emotionally, but also then how can they best be with the child, that maybe then whatever’s going on, the child becomes no longer school phobic or no longer so anxious.
But if they are—if this is a chemical/biological issue, then there needs to be another treatment involved as well. With young children, I certainly hate to see some of these young children put on all these different medications, but sometimes that’s what’s necessary. But I think the family can impact—they can create the situation, but often they’re not creating it, but they might be able to find ways that they can all live with this is what is and function so that they’re all feeling more at ease in the situation.
Tami Simon: Now, Elaine, when I asked you to share what are some of the most important concepts in the family systems model that are important to you, you mentioned a few different things, and I thought it would be helpful to go into it a bit. One of them was you mentioned the notion of how in the family systems model, we look at hierarchy in the family, and you write about this in Your Family Revealed. What is considered the healthy functioning hierarchy in a family?
Elaine Carney Gibson: The healthy functioning is that there is a functioning executive system, and generally that’s the parents or parent subsystem. That may be one parent, that may be two parents, that may be parents and grandparents or caretakers of children. So that system may be—I’m not sure who’s going to be in the system beyond a parent, but there has to be an executive functioning system. And that I say to parents, “It’s not only you’re right to be in charge, but it is your duty,” because when children feel like there’s no one taking control and setting limits and boundaries and providing a safe place, then the child feels insecure and that’s certainly going to create a lot of anxiety. So it’s important that there is an executive functioning subsystem in the family.
Tami Simon: How would you know in a family there’s a good executive functioning subsystem? It’s working well, check—versus “Oh gosh, I got some serious question marks here. I’m not sure.”
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, it’s usually pretty obvious when they present. I mean, there are times when the parents are—this is particularly true with teenagers, it can get complicated. If you’re reading the book, it can be over-functioning and under-functioning. There’s the parents where they have too many rules. And I’ll say to parents, “As the children get older, that what you want to have are less rules, that the child has more autonomy to make their own decisions, and hopefully they’ve learned along the way what could be healthy, positive decisions, actions, etc.”
Because by the time most kids are around 18, they’re leaving home—whether they’re going to college or they’re deciding to travel or they’re going to go work and get an apartment—around that age. We know that more and more young people are staying at home these days for longer periods of time. But in the traditional model, that’s kind of how it worked. So you want your child at that point to be a functioning adult, to be able to make good decisions.
And so you kind of watch how the parents are setting that up. They come in, and the kids are rebelling, sometimes what we call “acting out.” And you look at that and it’s like, OK. Often it’s very interesting, Tami, because there are some times where that means that there’s not enough rules and the kids are doing everything they can to get these parents to be parents. And so I’m going to help the parents step up and set some limits and boundaries and consequences for behaviors.
There are other times where that’s happening, and it’s because the parents have become so rigid and are really treating this teenager like they have to tell them everything to do and don’t do like they were maybe three or four years old, and it’s like, “OK, it’s time to back off. You’ve raised a good kid here, give them a little space to breathe.” So it almost falls into one camp or the other. You don’t know until you sit with them and you hear more from each of the family members.
Tami Simon: Now, you yourself have raised three children, yes, and now you’re a grandparent. And one of the things I was curious about is, as a grandma, do you ever see things happening where you see your kids perhaps over-functioning or under-functioning and think, “Look, I’m not just a grandma but I’ve taught graduate-level family systems theory. I think I have to say something.” Or do you keep it to yourself?
Elaine Carney Gibson: That’s really a good question and a tough question. I generally keep it to myself, unless asked. And if they ask me or there’s a concern about a child and they ask me about it, then I’m going to share with them. I have said something on occasion, but it’s generally not my rule.
I remember I had a graduate student one time, and her son was getting married and she was real upset about it, and she said, “I don’t know what to do.” I said, “Well, I have a theory about that,” because she was going to be mother of the groom. And I said, “Wear beige and be quiet.” And she still—that was about 20 years ago—she still, every once in a while when I hear from her, she said, “That was really good advice, because I’m always wanting to jump in as a therapist and guide my son and his wife and their family.” And she says, “I just always remember what you said, ‘Wear beige and be quiet.’” And so I kind of follow that rule.
Tami Simon: Well, Elaine, I was impressed, as you wrote about in Your Family Revealed, the clear boundaries that you seemed to be able to maintain in raising your children. And you write about a sign that you had in your kitchen, “What part of no don’t you understand?,” and that when your kids would say, “But baba, baba, blah, blah, blah, blah,” you’d point to the sign. I was very impressed by that, and I’m impressed by your answer to this question here.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Thank you.
Tami Simon: And for parents or grandparents or any of us who, having clear boundaries like this, it’s not easy for us for whatever reason. How have you seen coaching people and training people so that they can sit in that executive-in-charge role in their family with really good boundaries? How do you help people develop that muscle?
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I was fortunate enough, again, in my early part of my training to do quite a lot of parenting classes. So as I was teaching parents about being parents, I was learning more and more from them about that, because I always want to learn. I want to learn from my clients. I want to learn from the students I’ve had. I’m always wanting to learn, because I feel like they have a lot to teach me, and hopefully I have something to teach them. And so I want to teach them good parenting skills.
And part of that is they may have some personal work to do, because they’re projecting onto their children in a way then that is not helpful for them and certainly not helpful for the children. So I’m going to do some work with them as individuals, not just as parents, and then to help them learn good parenting skills. There’s a lot written about that. Some people, they want to know about it, but they’re not so much interested in a class.
But if you talk with them about it on their personal basis and their personal situation, their individual situations, then they seem to be willing to listen and to practice, make some changes. And we always evaluate, and that’s what I always say, “Always evaluate.” When you do these things, take time—to not just throw up your hands and say, “Well, that didn’t work,” or, “Something’s wrong with them”—take time to evaluate and look at what is not working. So I don’t know if that answered your question at all.
Tami Simon: Well, I’ll keep going here. You mentioned that with a parenting class, you asked a question to the class, “What do you think is the most important thing for your children?” And many people raised their hand and said, “We want our children to be happy.” And you were hitting the “bad” buzzer. Wrong answer. The most important thing is that children feel secure. And I have a couple of questions about this. The first is, besides being clear about the hierarchy we have—this is the executives in charge of this family—what else helps young children in a family feel secure?
Elaine Carney Gibson: I think having, for really young children, an idea of a schedule, and I think this is particularly true with children with ADHD to have. They know what to expect. They know when bedtime is. They know that there’s going to be dinner on the table or something to eat. They don’t have to go try to figure that out on their own. They know that somebody’s going to get them up in the morning, unless they were—my oldest son decided at six he needed his own alarm clock and that was it, never had to get him up again.
But that there’s somebody else in charge so they don’t have to worry about these kinds of things. Now they may fight you with it, they may not want to go brush your teeth, but the ritual, OK, you brush your teeth or you take your bath or whatever you do and then you’re going to go to bed. For some people, there may be little kids; there may be a bedtime story depending on the parent’s schedule and energy. So they like to know that there’s somebody else who is in charge.
And so I would want to help parents kind of figure that out. It was interesting, because in the ’70s when I was having my first two children, and when I was starting in the field in the early ’70s, there was a whole attitude for a while of just to let everybody do everything. Kids stay up as late as they want, you eat any time of day, there’s just food, go get it when you want it. And that really—it’s a nice idea of freedom, but it created a lot of insecurity, and we find that young kids do better if there is something they can count on and it doesn’t become an unknown, because the unknown is kind of what is scary.
Tami Simon: Now, Elaine, I can’t help myself here. I’m thinking of how you talked about how as kids get older and they approach 18, they have more freedoms. And I’m thinking of people that I know who have teenage kids who are staying up to all hours doing whatever they want, and they’re confused about, “Well, obviously I have to roll with my children now getting older, but what’s going on here? This does not look right to me.” And so how do you address that concern?
Elaine Carney Gibson: Kind of depends on the situation in the family, and for me to get a sense of the kid. Is there something going on here that this is… When families come in, I think of the presenting problem as a symptom. So if they’re coming in because a kid’s staying out too late or whatever else the kid is doing, that they come in with that presenting problem, I think of it as the symptom, and the person is the symptom bearer. And I then want to look at how that fits into the system, and is there some way the system can shift that will then eliminate or drastically create a change in the behavior of this person, individual, who’s coming in as the symptom bearer? And I give several examples in my book, I think, of how that’s worked in different times with different families that I’ve seen.
Tami Simon: Can you share an example here? Because I think it’s a very powerful idea to look at the—yes.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, the one that pops into my mind, and I think I have several, but the one that pops into my mind is the mother. She was a single mom who brought in her teenage son who was drinking too much and his grades were going down. He was a senior in high school, and this kid had been a good kid. He’d not gotten in trouble, he didn’t use alcohol or drugs, his grades were good, but they were going down his senior year and so she brought him in.
So again, I’m going to think I could have done individual therapy with this kid and that probably would’ve helped. But in this case, I decided to do family therapy. And when I listened to the story—the parents got divorced, and the kid was I think around 10-ish or so, and there was an older brother living at home at the time. And the mother—so now this kid is a senior in high school—and the mother is an executive businesswoman, and she has met someone who’s out of state, and she’s going to visit.
Well, that could have been a hypothesis that he’s upset about that, but I thought, “Well, that’s just a hypothesis, so we’ll put that over there as a possibility.” So when I talk with him, I realize he’s very happy for his mother, but she works a lot and she gets home about seven or eight o’clock at night, and they might talk a few minutes but they don’t spend time together. So then my hypothesis became that he was missing his mother, and he wanted more time with his mother.
And I put that out there. I said, “I think he’s getting ready to go off to college in the fall, and I’m thinking before he goes he’s needing more time with his mother.” And they both look at me like I’m totally nuts. But then this little smile creeped on his face, this little turn-up smile. And I thought, “OK, I think I’m getting somewhere here.” So I said, “How would it be, Mom, if you tried to get home a couple nights a week and had dinner with him?” And he broke into a big smile. He said, “I’ll cook the dinner.”
And the mother said, “OK, well, I’ll shop and get some food, and you can cook or we’ll cook together.” So then I saw them each individual a couple times, and then I’d see them together. So that’s how I did it: I’d see each together and individually. So then I realized that some of this drinking issue had to do with his father who left. And that was one of the reasons for the divorce was the father was an alcoholic. So I asked the boy if there was some other way he could honor his father besides imitating that behavior.
And he just sat in the session, his mother was present, and he just looked at me and he started crying, and he said, “Well, you know, people tell me that he was the life of the party and he was really lots of fun, but I always felt like I couldn’t own that,” or not his words, “But I couldn’t express that he was lots of fun, because then I was afraid my mother would feel I was disloyal to her.”
So the two of them talked about that and her giving him permission to have some kind thoughts and loving thoughts about his father, that she wasn’t asking him to choose her, and he wasn’t being disloyal to have those thoughts and feelings. Well, his grades went up, and I’m sure he was still drinking now and then, but he wasn’t getting drunk, and that was one of the reasons that brought them in—he’d gotten drunk. And so that stopped.
But again, that was talking about the system, talking about the relationship, the divorce, his wanting time with his mother, feeling that there was too much distance between them. And so being able to look at that and kind of pull the picture together so there wasn’t so much distance, and because there wasn’t this issue he feared of being disloyal. And then it really turned out to be a happy ending with them. So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’m not just labeling the kid.
Tami Simon: It’s interesting in listening to you talk about the story and talking about “I nominated this hypothesis or this hypothesis.” It’s like you’re an investigative scientist in a way, really trying to see clearly.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I think there’s truth to that. I think that that’s kind of what we do, is that the hypotheses are out there, but not to just jump on one, to let them just be there and kind of figure out—the right answer will come up eventually if you just sit with it. And in this case it did. But yes, I do think you have to do a little bit of that. You have to be curious. That’s the word I tell a lot of my supervisees. We’re curious, and out of our curiosity is the hope that the individuals we’re seeing, that they’ll become curious about themselves in a way they haven’t been.
Tami Simon: Now, I wanted to ask you a question about being raised in a family where you feel secure. And for those of us who didn’t feel secure for whatever reason, maybe it was a bonding issue with our mother, or our mother or father, or maybe it was just feeling like an outsider in our family, or maybe we weren’t even fed properly and the executive function was really not working well and we didn’t have regular meals provided, that kind of thing. Talk to me about the journey of repairing, of healing that, if you felt like you weren’t raised with a sense of security.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, depending on when that started, it’s a long journey. So if that was your very early experience, yes, it’s a very long journey, and it’s for all of us, I think, is finding that place in ourselves that feels that it’s safe to know ourselves and to honor ourselves and our own wants and needs, and to be able to have voice. And so to kind of go along and help people identify that, because a lot of times people can’t identify that. They’ve had no experience.
So even being able to identify your own feelings, your own wants, your own needs, and then to be able to have voice, to give voice to that, I think that’s part of the healing process. And if you’re in relationship, to be able to share that together and then in creating that intimacy, and hopefully then that’s a healing experience.
Tami Simon: There’s a sentence I pulled out from Your Family Revealed: “I believe we cannot have intimacy without conflict.” And I pulled that sentence out because I think sometimes there’s this sense of as you grow in your intimate relationships, you won’t fight anymore or something like that. And I thought, “Is that true?” Or maybe conflict is serving an important function as we bring our voices forward, and we say, “This isn’t working for me, or this isn’t working, or…” So anyway, tell me, yes, what’s behind it.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I think that I don’t know how we cannot have disagreements about things, and we’re not always on the same page. So it’s how we handle that; it’s how we handle the conflict. And the safety that we have in the relationship to be able to say, “I disagree. I don’t want to. I’ll do that, but I don’t want to do it on your timeframe.”
So it’s creating the safety in the relationship to do that I think is very important because it’s going to happen. We’re not going to all be on the same page at the same time, and we are going to go through our own personal trials and tribulations and that’s going to impact the other, and the other’s going to have their response to that, and that’s OK. And then to be able to deal with that in a way that can become growthful and connecting rather than it be something that separates you and disconnects you.
I’ve told couples before who’ve come in, and they’re fighting, and that’s the presenting problem. They’re fighting, fighting. And I’ll sometimes say to them, “Oh, then there’s hope.” And they’ll look at me like, “What?” And I’ll say, “Yes, because if you came in and you were each sitting there on the couch and you had no energy to even talk about one another or to one another, I wouldn’t be very hopeful. But the fact that you’re fighting means there’s some energy in this relationship. Let’s tap it and put it towards a positive direction rather than the negative direction.”
Tami Simon: Now circling back for a moment, when I asked you what some of the most important concepts and principles are of family therapy, you mentioned looking at triangles in the family. So in addition to seeing hierarchy and the role of this executive function and having clear boundaries, we need to look at triangles. And you mentioned a little bit this notion that you’re not supposed to make one of your children parentified. And I think we hear about that a lot. I wonder if you can talk about what a parentified child looks like and how parents—don’t do this. How do you avoid that?
Elaine Carney Gibson: Yes. Well, I think it is one of the things we see quite often. And if a child is brought in as the symptom bearer, I’m often going to look as that as being one of the reasons why they’re the symptom bearer. Because the parentified child has a lot put on them, and a lot of children get parentified, but it may not last long.
I give the example even in the book of when I was four years old, and my mother—I had a younger brother, and then my sister was born, and I was the oldest—and my brother and I had mumps or measles. I say it was measles, my brother thinks it was mumps, but we were sick with one of those childhood diseases, and my sister had infected fingernails, and my mother had to come into our room, take care of us, drop her clothes, take a shower, go in the baby’s room, and after several weeks she had an emotional breakdown. At four years old, I’m washing the dishes. I’m standing on the stool in the kitchen and washing and drying the dishes. Well, that only lasted for a week or two, and then I’m no longer in that role being the parentified child.
So a lot of times children move up into that space because they need to; the family needs a child to do that to function. It’s when they get locked in that position, and oftentimes then they’re getting pulled either against another parent, the other parent, or they’re having demands made on them that’s beyond their level of being able to do that, or is putting them in such an awkward position. I can’t remember, I think I put this example in my book of the mother who is dating and then confesses all the stuff to her teenage daughter about what’s going on in her dating experiences, including her romantic sexual life.
And the daughter didn’t want to hear that. It was too much information; it was inappropriate. It brought her up to the level more of a peer, and then the expectations she had of her to do the things around the house because she was out having her dating experiences. So then the child wasn’t getting to be a child, and that was not healthy. This child was having a lot of anxiety and depression.
And so it was OK, you need to let your child be a child and find somebody else to share a lot of this stuff with you if you want to talk about it. This is not appropriate. So there’s a lot of ways that we parentify a child from all ages, but it’s when a child gets stuck in that or when it becomes the child has an emotional negative experience around it.
Tami Simon: Now, you write that triangulation in a family system is an attempt to reduce anxiety, the anxiety that’s in the couple and they can’t handle it, work it out themselves in their intimate relationship. So then this triangulation occurs. What occurs to me is just how many parents have difficult relationships, difficult marriages, and then how that plays out with the impacts on children. And I guess I just want to hear more about what you have to say about that. I mean, I know so many people who of course get divorced in the course of raising children, and it’s clear that the marriage isn’t working out and their children are experiencing the impacts of that. I’m just curious how you view that in your role as a therapist.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I want to say a couple things about that just to… Let me come back to that one.
Tami Simon: Sure.
Elaine Carney Gibson: I’m going to forget the other comment if I go right there. It’s an interesting thing because I think we all long to be seen and known, and we’re all terrified of it. So I think there being some anxiety or tension in any relationship can be pretty normal. And depending on how frightened we are of truly being intimate, we carry the anxiety and tension. So a lot of times when we’re drawing a child in, it’s not because we’re fighting with our partner or we’re even unhappy or anything else, it’s just simply that there’s anxiety and tension about even the intimacy.
So by bringing in—and doesn’t always have to be a child, but we can triangulate with a pet, with work, with other things, but oftentimes then we’re talking about triangulating with the child. And the child then can be a parentified child. It can also be a child that has a problem in some ways, and that becomes the focus. So there’s different ways that we can triangle children, but we can also use other individuals and things to triangulate.
So I think that in the situation where marriage is not working, and it’s quite common—50 percent of marriages end in divorce—that yes, it’s going to impact everyone in the family, including the children. But we know that there’s healthy divorces, we know that there’s ways to do that, that children can both still feel loved and important and it’s not their fault that the parents got divorced, which is often a belief the child has.
And so that can still happen, that not every relationship works. So there’s a way I think parents can do that. And oftentimes people will come in to have help on, how can we do this in a way that we know it’s going to impact our children? Of course it is, but how can we do it in a way that it is the best way we could possibly do it, so that they can still feel secure, they can still feel loved, and they still have family, and it’s just different. It’s just going to be a different form. That can work.
Tami Simon: We started our conversation, Elaine, and I wanted to know a little bit more of your love for this field of family therapy, because truly that’s what I get from reading Your Family Revealed is how much you deeply respect and value this way of looking at growth in individuals as part of a system. And I’m curious to know as you look at the future of family therapy, what you see, what you think is on the horizon, what evolutionary developments might be occurring even as we speak right here?
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, there’s some wonderful programs out there, ways that people are working with families, but I think it comes back to the basics. And the basics are what I share in the book. I mean, like I said at the end of the book for therapists, this is just kind of the cream off the top. If you want to know more about these subjects, you really need to delve into each kind of systems theory a little bit more.
But to bring that into your work, my concern—I think there’s a lot of good family therapists being trained, and they’re learning about family systems. My hope is they’re also learning humanistic psychology, and they’re learning some in-depth psychology or the Carl Jung kind of school of in-depth psychology to bring in as part of it. And that’s more of my concern is that some of the programs aren’t including that, maybe in the way that I would wish that they were.
Because I think that we do—it’s like you said earlier about being the forensic scientist or something to kind of sort through the different hypotheses and what’s happening, but it’s also looking at each individual, we’re looking at the system as a whole, but we’re really looking at each individual and their well-being, and we don’t want to forget that and then how to work with them in a compassionate and healing, strengthening kind of way.
Tami Simon: And then I’m also curious to know how much you look at inherited intergenerational patterns, inherited patterns, and how you view that in your work.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I think the intergenerational concept of Murray Bowen is brilliant and that I want to look at it constantly is because that has to do with the messages, the beliefs, the experiences that the generations have had that are being passed down. I remember years ago, I think, yes, it was now years ago that I had this belief that women carried their mother’s and grandmother’s trauma. I don’t know why; it was just an intuition. Nothing was written about it at the time. But of course now things have been written about it, and we know that that’s true.
I don’t think it’s just women. At the time, that was my belief because I was hearing that more from women. And when I would sit with them and would explore, I realized that some of the trauma or some of the woundedness or some of the fear they were carrying and anxiety was really their mother’s. So I wanted to help them separate that out so that they could know, “OK, I can have compassion and understanding, but I don’t need to carry that woundedness and that pain,” to separate some of that out.
We know now that there’s more scientific research that says, yes, we do carry that in our DNA, that there is the intergenerational transmission process going on both biologically and emotionally, mentally. So I think it’s a very important concept. And I really don’t know if you’re familiar with the work with Murray Bowen, but I just—I’ve always just so appreciated his work around all of this, and he was the first person I knew that kind of jumped into it and talked about it.
Tami Simon: But what would you say to someone who says, “I get it, that this is from a different generation and it’s not mine and I can have compassion, but it feels like it’s mine?”
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, it does. It does feel that way. I think once you have the awareness that you are carrying it, then you do have some choice about—that it does feel that way. But I think it can feel less that way and that you can move to reprogramming your thinking about it. And I think that’s a lot of the work we’re doing in therapy in general. It’s kind of a reprogramming. It’s because with the thought then we also then can have a different feeling about it. So just sitting and working with that idea and really feeling the compassion for, if you know the story—sometimes we know the story, sometimes we don’t. We feel it, but we don’t know the story. If we know the story, I think that can be very helpful, but we don’t always know the story.
Tami Simon: Finally, Elaine, you poured so much of your knowledge into the book Your Family Revealed: A Guide to Decoding the Patterns, Stories, and Belief Systems in Your Family. What do you hope readers will get from the book?
Elaine Carney Gibson: Well, I hope that they’ll be able to have a clear understanding of maybe why they are caught in a pattern they’re caught in, whether it’s their thinking or behavior or relationship patterns. I’ve had a lot of people say to me, “Well, I don’t like my relationship with my sister, but I don’t know I can make it any different.” Or, “I don’t know how to get out of this thing of rescuing.” Or, “I don’t know how to get out of this being pulled into an issue to other family members.”
So I was hoping that it might help them identify it in a way that would then give them some knowledge to make a different choice about how they might want to move forward in their lives. So if you don’t want to stay in a triangle, identify the triangle and the patterns of the triangle, and then you can decide, “Oh yes, I don’t like it, but I do want to stay in it anyway because I get certain payoffs.” Or, “No, I really do want to get out of this triangle. Now that I can identify it, I can make some new choices and behaviors about getting out of it so I’m no longer caught in it in a way that feels destructive to me.”
So that’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping is people will just have a way of maybe understanding these dynamics that’ll be useful to them in making some new choices and making some new decisions about how they want to live their life and how they want to be in relationship.
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Elaine Carney Gibson. She’s the author of the new book Your Family Revealed: A Guide to Decoding the Patterns, Stories, and Belief Systems in Your Family. It’s a deep contemplative mirror for your family of origin and how you were raised and what your experience was in your family. And then if you’re in the midst of raising a family today, please read it: Your Family Revealed. There’s so much good counsel in this book. Elaine, thank you so much. Yes.
Elaine Carney Gibson: Thank you so much.
Tami Simon: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
