An important part of the cure here is to stop the bad self-talk and replace it by good self-talk. There is interpersonal stress, in which the individuals of a family clash because of bad communication patterns, and intrapersonal stress, in which the person who experiences negative communications from family members (e.g., a verbally abusive father oppresses a son) continues to give himself the same kinds of negative communications internally, via negative self-talk. Laing used to say that until people began investigating families of schizophrenics, the condition was wholly incomprehensible.

What was wrong wasn’t about egos, complexes, or the like what was amiss was the way the family was organized, the way it communicated, the way parenting was done, and the way it problem-solved.

Napier and Carl WhitakerĪs the world of psychotherapy shifts slowly from the old, mechanistic-reductionistic paradigm to the new, ecological-holistic paradigm, it begins to see from a systems perspective and the first thing that strikes it as it moves from a focus on individual dysfunction to a focus on family/kin/network dysfunction is, to quote the author: “Ye Gods, everybody in the family is sick!” The individual that had been (and this is still common) presented by the parents as the sick one was usually just the scapegoat of the dysfunctional family, and it soon became apparent why their previous reductionistic focus on treating the individual was so ineffective: after therapy, the other dysfunctional people in the system would pull the patient back into dysfunctional patterns, because few can function well in a dysfunctional system.

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