Family and relationships
Virginia Satir
Under the iceberg
Virginia Satir (1964 · A founder of family therapy) — Under the iceberg.
What actually happened?
In 1951 she was seeing a young woman who was getting better, and the young woman's mother telephoned in a fury and threatened to sue her. Satir invited the mother in. With the mother in the room the daughter's progress went backwards, and a relationship Satir had never seen came into view. So she asked the father in, and the picture rearranged again; then the brother, and it rearranged once more. She had been treating one person and discovered she had been looking at a quarter of the case.
The iceberg: layers under the behaviour
Above the waterline is behaviour; below it are feelings, perceptions, expectations, yearnings and the self. Conflict happens on the surface and gets settled underneath: anger is behaviour, under it disappointment, under that I want to be treated as though I matter.
A partner complaining that you are home late is not really raising the calendar. Underneath is usually the question of where they rank in this house.
Four stances under pressure
Placating gives up the self, blaming gives up the other, super-reasonable gives up both and keeps the logic, distracting gives up the subject. All four are automatic and all four dodge what is real. The fifth, congruence, holds self, other and situation at once, and is trained rather than inherited.
You lay out the logic point by point and he gets louder: super-reasonable meeting blame, and neither of you is in the room.
The problem is not the problem
Families are often stuck with difficulties that cannot be solved: money, illness, temperament. What decides how the days go is the coping. The sentence moves attention from who caused this to how we handle it, and only the second one is a live question.
A child's grades falling cannot be reversed this week. Whether the household blames each other or works on it decides what the fall turns into.
The symptom can belong to the system
One member's trouble is frequently doing a job for the whole: a child in difficulty gives two parents on the edge of separating something to unite around. Treat that person and leave the system alone and the symptom moves to somebody else.
The parents start fighting the moment the child improves. That usually means the trouble had been standing in front of the marriage.
How do I use it today?
When the same conflict keeps coming back, hold off on who is wrong. Work out which stance each of you fell into, then look for the expectation under the words. And if one person's trouble clears up and something breaks elsewhere, the system is moving, not the person.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
The symptom often belongs to the system, not the person showing it.