‘Family’ ≠ ‘Systemic’

A Hong Kong made movie about family as well as living and dying

My training in the last 2 years is in the field what most would call ‘Systemic Family Psychotherapy’.  But what is really meant by ‘systemic’?    Can one apply such ‘systemic’ approach to non-family entities including individuals?

‘Systemic’

It is a big word.   The more I pay attention to it in the field of therapy and coaching, the more I realize the word means different things in different practices.   When a practitioner says, ‘I intervened systemically….’, it could mean, for example:

- Bigger Picture – ‘…. I helped the client see things more holistically.…’

- Stakeholders – ‘…. I started by asking the coachee “What the stakeholders may like us to work on in this session?” .…’

- Group – ‘…. I helped the client see how his / her emotion, and thus behaviours, may have been mobilized by the organization….’

- Circularity – ‘…. I helped the client see virtuous cycle they are in, instead of investigating who caused the problem ….’

There must be many other versions of what people mean in saying ‘I intervened systemically…’    In fact, the term ‘systemic’ is getting more and more popular these days e.g. on Linkedin.

Strangely, during my training so far, I have not yet encountered a clear description on what is meant by ‘systemic’, though people would say ‘This is / is not systemic…’, ‘You need to work with a systemic supervisor…’   So the word is supposed to mean something specific but is not explicitly defined, at least in my experience.  Perhaps it is not defined on purpose so that we are motivated to work out our own version (like what I am doing now…)

My wild take is that the field sees ‘systemic’ as any approach which is ‘beyond individual based’ or even ‘non psychoanalytic’…. But again, like many things in life, it matters more to come up with my own definition - 1) to cover most if not all the practices in the training; 2) more importantly, to serve my purpose i.e. to intervene better in my helping role.   As an evolving definition, I would say:

'I intervene systemically' when I focus on factors outside the presenting unit (e.g. a person) and specifically:

1.    its RELATION with other units in a chosen level of system e.g. an executive team or a family;

2.    the RELATION between different levels of system - higher e.g. societal culture or lower e.g. biochemistry on the level of brain.

I will reflect further on subsequent posts what it means, how this definition is helpful to me, and most importantly how it may look like in action (but I realize I have actually written some posts on this already e.g. Relations Rather than Parts.)

‘Systemic Family Psychotherapy’

I find this name rather confusing.  The most prominent organisation in the field in the UK - Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice (AFT) adopted this new name recently from Association of Family Therapy.   And it calls the field ‘Family and Systemic Psychotherapy’.  I find this more helpful for people to understand the field by separating the two terms ‘Family’ and ‘Systemic’.

In fact, if I can choose, I would use the following descriptions as:

• Family Psychotherapy - psychotherapy interventions which are conducted in ways with the underlying family in mind.   In a session, there may be the whole or part of the family present or just an individual.   The interventions may be systemic or not.

  
  

• Systemic Psychotherapy - psychotherapy interventions which are informed by my evolving definition mentioned above.  Similarly, in a session, there may be the whole or part of the chosen level of system present e.g. a family / team or just an individual.   The interventions may be for family well-being or not.   If I go further and take away the term ‘psychotherapy’, systemic interventions can readily be applied to help organisations and teams!

The confusion for those learning about this field is that the term ‘Family’ and ‘Systemic’ are used interchangeably.   It was well said by (Spronck & Compernolle, 1997)

“…Family therapists often tend to equal ‘system’ with ‘family’, thus thinking that a ‘family approach’ is the same a ‘systems approach’.  They forget that an individual, the brain, a single cell, an atom, or society are systems too….”

(Spronck & Compernolle, 1997) illustrated even more clearly by describing how it may look like when one term exists without the another one:

“…A family therapy method can be not systemic at all.  One can work with a family using a reductionistic linear casual method: isolating the family from its context, seeing the family as the cause of the symptom, seeing a person as the cause of violence, etc.  On the contrary one can do individual therapy using a systemic method: seeing the individual as only one possible level of organization, interacting with other levels, itself being constituted of interacting parts, etc…”

Reflecting further, I cannot help wonder what may have made the field use the two terms interchangeably.   And why the term ‘systemic’ is gaining popularity these days?  

Works Cited

Spronck, W., & Compernolle, T. (1997). Systems Theory and Family Therapy: From a Critique on Systems Therapy to a Theory on System Change. Contempory Family Therapy, 19.