The Narratives Which Connect…

GT Findings on “Influence on Personal and Private Life”

“You are the one, you play all the roles” (8, 249) Karen (4)
“I don’t often bring cases home with me” (4, 116) Erik (2)

Introduction

In this section I present the GT analysis of what can happen when personal and private lives are influenced by the participant’s clinical practice. Sometimes the experience from practice as a family therapist may engage the therapist in such a way that it is impossible to go home and leave a special case at the office. On the other hand, in this thesis we find that sometimes the whole work situation affects the therapist in such a way that she or he feels exhausted or burned out. In these situations clinical practice affects the therapist’s personal and private life and sometimes her or his job and loved ones. The connection between professional life and a family therapist’s personal and private life have sometimes this kind of impact.

However, the participants in this research project had far fewer stories to tell about these kinds of connections. Most of the participants could tell about how their professional life has influenced their attitude and behaviour, their world view and understanding and their emotions. The professional practice adds meaning to the participant’s personal and private life. The participants also made connections between their professional practice and their personal and private lives.

GT category 7: The influence of clinical practice on personal and private life

This main category is supported by sub-categories from three full participants, Karen (4), Adam (3), and Erik (2), and Evelyn (5), one of the three “parallel connections” participants. The GT categories and sub-categories that emerged from their material are summarised in this diagram:

Table 15. The influence from clinical practice on personal and private life with sub categories

When we look at the topic of connections, it is even more difficult to find research and professional engagement with how the experience as therapist influences our personal and private lives. Nevertheless, according to my research material, we have some connections here too. These parallel connections are to situations where therapists reach an “experience of despair, fatigue and burnout” (White, 1997, p. vi) and when the family therapist uses methods or techniques from clinical practice in their own family.

None of the family therapists in this material drew strong connections between their clinical practice and their private lives in the sense that they used methods or family therapy techniques from their clinical practice in interaction with their own family. But some of them had examples where they had tried some family therapy methods on their children, especially when they were young children. Some also told stories about their own divorce and how they derive help from their clinical practice in their private lives.

7 a) Using family therapy techniques with our own children

Karen (4) told me that she used “the theory of opposites” (8, 37) in a period when one of her children hesitated when she wanted to give him a hug. She says:

”…when one had children, small children, yes small or big, but where people very easily come into such conflicts, such power struggles, and then I think, it made the idea whether it came from therapy first or home first I don’t know. But…do the opposite, the theory about the opposite. If you’re used to speaking loudly, for goodness’ sake speak softly or, I remember for example my son …where he wasn’t to have any hugs. I thought, damn it, I want to give him a hug, how shall I do it? Of course, I can surprise him, stand behind a door and fall suddenly over him. (laughs) Get the giggles you know. Yes and back to that it’s possible to do the opposite of what I’ve done. Of course I didn’t want to lose physical contact with him just yet. It maybe wasn’t such a big problem then but, the idea of the opposite… which you often try as a therapist, also, you explore alternatives all the time. My ideology is of course not to go in the direction of what people have done, but to…find the pockets of things that haven’t been thought and haven’t been tried, then. And I believe that that is what I try out in my private life… (8, 37-39).

It is not only the therapists themselves who explain some of what is going on in their family lives with their professional background. Adam’s (3) son once told him that a friend of his had complained that he quarrelled a lot with his siblings. Adam’s (3) son remarked that the explanation for why he did not quarrel much with his siblings was that his father was a family therapist.

7 b) Going through a divorce process

A couple’s therapist in private practice and with huge problems in her own marriage said to me: “How should I be able to go on working as a couple’s therapist if my private problems influence my clinical practice? I would go bust in a few months.” This ability to separate private experiences from professional practice may be seen and handled differently. Evelyn (5) and Karen (4) are two examples.

When Evelyn (5) decided to separate from her husband of many years, they still had two younger children. She worked in a family counselling office at that time and she says:

“I got something of a flying start with my own divorce by having encountered many questions concerning second marriage and stepchildren and one’s own children’s relationship with stepfathers. That whole arena there, to have encountered that at work before I was there myself, gave me a bit of a flying start…” (11, 65) she remarks.
We will look more carefully into this example in Chapter 5, part C, concerning “paradigm cases”. However, this example also illustrates that her experience as a family therapist seem meaningful and useful in personal and private life.

Karen (4) claims that working as a therapist has made her believe in change, change connected to a process in which new ideas take root in your life.

“Change happens often that way, where first a new idea forms about something that can be thought about or done differently. And then one can change practice, like I find at work, that it is, like, the way I work as a therapist I think it concerns my life as well.. The idea could be about… something that could be done differently or be thought differently about… That is how I work as a therapist and that is how it is in my life too” (8, 27).

When I ask if she is able to refer directly from her experience as a clinician to her private life, she immediately comes up with two stories about relationship break-up. She connects the fact that she has been able to walk out of two relationships to her competence as a therapist. She claims that this is connected to a process where “…I have struggled with something for a long time and suddenly…the alternative or opportunity to choose suddenly seems simple” (8, 33).

That is also her experience from therapy, that clients are able to act differently when they are able to see their life from a new angle or when they get some new ideas or understanding of their problems. These can be problems connected to relationship break-down, children or young people or other difficulties in life. Her idea is not to concentrate on what clients have done, but to look for pockets of ideas that have not been explored or things that have not been tried.

7 c) Handling family and friends

From time to time friends want Adam (3) to be an expert, to tell them what to do in difficult situations. Women ask him to explain men and men to explain women. He says that his contribution to questions like this is to encourage the one asking to go home and learn to know their man or woman. He says that is better than reading tons of books about such topics. He thinks it is more difficult to be a parent than to be a therapist. However he hopes that his family has felt that he uses his time in conversations with them. “It has something to do with, how shall I put it, something to do with tuning in to each other” (6, 191), he says. But he thinks he is an ordinary person at home and he has not deliberately used methods from family therapy at home. No one would discover that he is a family therapist if they saw him at home, he says.

Elisabeth’s thoughts are that she has a husband who fades out and does not see the children, and she has been blind to the situation. She thinks that meeting this man on the psychiatric ward (see p. 107) has helped her to see that she does not want to live like this, and this has made her take action at home. “But I think that it is also strengthened because my father really died the same way, I mean he committed slow suicide in the same way” (2, 43) “But I still do not understand why he has got under my skin” (2, 48).

Karen (4) says that one of her private strategies is to run away (see p 110). However, this has changed in her life, she says. She can still run away, but nowadays she returns to talk about what happened privately. When I ask her what she does when she meets clients who use the same “method” she says that she tries to keep them in the room.

7 d) Professional practice does not affect private life directly

One of the participants could not tell any stories to illustrate how working as a family therapist has influenced his personal and private life in a direct way. Erik’s (2) story is an illustration of this position. He has worked as a psychotherapist for 33 years and for the past 22 he has worked in a family consultation office. Erik (2) has never been married or lived with a woman. 24 years ago his girlfriend was pregnant and he decided not to marry her. For the last ten years he has had a steady girlfriend. They are together every weekend and every other Wednesday. However, they have never lived together.

When I ask him if this way of organising his private life may seem to have some advantages in his work with couples in crisis every day he says: ”I have absolutely never reflected on that possibility because… and so usually so…it isn’t very often that I take things home with me” (4, 116).

This reflection may illustrate a lack of awareness among the participants when it comes to creating meaningful links between family therapy practice and personal and private life. However, Erik (2) tells several stories from his clinical practice that have affected his life in a way that has kept him awake at night and worried him during the day. These are for examples stories about clients who have committed suicide and heavily traumatised clients.

Summary of GT Findings on Influence on Personal and Private Life

The GT categories with emergent sub-categories are connected to the participant’s own children, the participant’s divorce and to the participant’s friends. Some ideas from family therapy methodology come forward (doing the opposite) and some ideas from a basic understanding of relations (not to draw parallels from literature to a specific case). The resonance occurs for example when Karen (4) looks for ways to go on hugging her son without forcing it on him and when Adam (3) is looking for proper answers when some of his friends generalise about gender or other group characteristics. On the other side, Adam’s (2) position represents an important voice when he underlines the lack of direct connections between his family therapy practice and his own personal and private life.

However, it seems as though these examples are few in this research compared to the categories that emerged when we looked at how experiences from personal and private life can influence family therapy practice.

The researcher’s personal reflections:

The first time someone came to me, after what I considered a normal conversation, and said: “It is easy to hear that you are a therapist,” I was taken by surprise. I have never thought that I should use any therapeutic ways of asking questions or try out any family therapy methods with my friends or my family. I have never had the idea that I may bring my therapeutic skills or knowledge home, to help me and us, to get a better life. I have never believed it is possible or meaningful in a direct way. On the other side, my professional competence and skills is a part of my personality and way of life. In that sense, my personal and private life has been formed by my professional life. I do not know where this scepticism or avoidance of therapeutic knowledge comes from or how I have been able to establish this opinion of therapy. It is probably connected to my avoidance of belief in a rationalistic basis for living my life. Surprisingly, my participants also reported few attempts to use their therapeutic skills at home or with their friends. One exception is therapists’ children. Some of them had tried some methods on their children. However, some of them refer to attitudes and behaviour that they think stem from their clinical practice. I think this refers to my own experiences when someone points out some links between what they see me do in private settings and my professional work. This would be even more distinct when it comes to worldview and how to understand how I participate in a private communication on relationships between friends and even how to explain social and political affairs.