Perspectives for the Pastoral Care of Families
Herbert Anderson

The Helper's Family Of Origin

In the Introduction I suggested that an individual's experience in his or her family of origin is the primary authority for understanding the dynamics of family life. Pastors and counselors particularly need to bear this in mind. Whatever else we learn or determine about the family is measured against the lingering influences of our original family. For example, the fact that the theology for the family presented here is tilted slightly in favor of individuation is not unrelated to my own personal struggles for differentiation from my family of origin.

There is, similarly, a connection between our particular ways of helping and the roles we played in our families of origin. It should be clear that in spite of its diminishing influence in the larger society the family is still, for those who belong to it, a powerful emotional system. Unless we self-consciously and intentionally choose to change, we are likely to minister to families in ways that are similar to the ways in which we functioned in our own families of origin.

The kind of role we played in our families affects our pastoral impulses. It is probably even instrumental in our being called to be helpers. As the oldest in my family, the one identified as being responsible, I join a countless host of individuals with similar family backgrounds who have chosen a career or profession that will continue to make it possible for us to be responsible for the lives of other people.

Some people become pastors or helping persons because their parents, out of gratitude for a miraculous birth or an extraordinary healing, gave them back to God. It may be easy for such individuals to hope for miraculous changes in a troubled family, but it is not easy for such persons not to help. They are compelled to care out of a sense of gratitude.

Others may have chosen a helping role as a kind of penance‐in order to pay off a debt they feel for having failed in their first assignment to be a healer. Such failure might have been felt when a parent's marriage, which one had been expected to save, was finally dissolved. Or when one's mother, whom one had been expected to rescue from depression, finally had to be institutionalized. Or when a sibling, whom one was assigned to teach and make smart, finally failed a grade in school. Such family experiences can produce. especially in those who later become pastors and helpers, an overwhelming need to save‐lest the debt be increased.

Sometimes their families of origin can impart a special blessing to a pastor or helper. This is most clearly seen in family histories that show how the mantle has been passed from great-grandpa Gardner or from aunt Lillian to the one who has decided to be pastor. People who have received such mantles from their families of origin are likely to exercise the authority of a "chosen one."

Knowing how we functioned in our own families of origin can help us understand how we are likely to engage with troubled families. Families are often delighted to find a healer who might take away the pain without changing the system, or someone who will take over responsibility for the family's well-being and at whom the family can later vent its anger when "things don't get better." If, in our family of origin, we were the peacemaker in marital conflicts, we will need to be careful about taking sides in a troubled marriage. We are easily "hooked" by familiar roles and patterns that limit our ability to be an effective agent of change.

This focus on our family of origin involves more than an ordinary concern for pastoral self-understanding. Indeed it marks a shift away from the presumed neutrality of the helper. As pastors, it is impossible, and even undesirable, for us not to join the families with whom we work. Even if we choose not to, we inevitably become a part of the family's web. We will be quoted in family disputes, and even when we are not present our authority will be invoked for the sake of discipline. The critical question is not whether but how we join the family, how we enter the complicated web of interactions in a manner that can evoke change. In order to effect change we must join the family on our own terms, not theirs. Therefore we need to be aware of our own family roles and interactional patterns lest we follow unwittingly the impulses that were fostered within us by our original families.

Learning how to work with families is initially more a matter of perspective than a method of intervention. It involves a movement toward thinking about people not just as individuals with a particular identity, but also as units within a system that also has an identifiable life of its own. The family is the primary human system. Thinking about people systemically or interactionally means seeing individuals‐even those who live alone‐in relation to their family as the primary emotional system. Our family of origin affords us our first experience of living in a system in which all the parts interrelate. Throughout our lives, even if we remain single, we live in families, and our families live in us.

The shift toward a systemic or interactional way of thinking about people does not occur easily. Individualism is deeply ingrained in Western thought; it permeates our art, politics, and religion. Respect for the value of each individual is undoubtedly one of the major contributions of Western civilization; here neither the corporation, the government, the faceless bureaucracy, nor the crowd is of greater worth than the individual. Most radically expressed, to be an individual is to stand out from the community. Because the therapeutic tradition from Freud to Rogers has been shaped by the individualistic bias of Western culture, it is not easy to shift to a more interactional way of thinking.

Although systems thinking may seem strange to our individualistically oriented Western ears, it really involves the reintroduction of a perspective on being-in-community that is as old as ancient Israel. Indeed, the anthropology of family-systems theory is more compatible with the Hebrew tradition than with the Greek-dominated anthropology of Western Christianity. Human beings are linked together in communities not just because of those early attachments that make bonding essential for survival, but because we are communal creatures by nature. Learning to think interactionally involves for the West a new epistemology in which some of the old rules no longer apply.'

Taking our bearings more from a communal than an individual anthropology is likely to change our assumptions about the purpose of the family. If one regards human beings as naturally community-minded, then it is easier to think about the family as both the context for individuation and the source of social stability. If people are community-minded only after the family has socialized their natural self-centeredness through disciplined training, then it would follow that the family's primary task of socialization is to curtail solipsism and keep self-oriented impulses in check. However, selfishness is not the only expression of sin. Too much togetherness, if it prohibits individuation, is equally sinful. The anthropology that undergirds a systems approach to the care of families holds that being together is as natural as being separate. Paradoxically, it is only as our anthropology is sufficiently communal or systemic that the family is likely to become a place in which individual uniqueness is nurtured.

A systems approach to the family is a way of thinking about persons that seeks to foster the interdependence between individuals and their significant communities. All of us live within a social context. Our interaction with the world around us is shaped by the lingering impact of our families of origin. intrapsychic conflicts not only have systemic origins; they often involve an ongoing struggle with the family within us, long after we have physically left home. Because thinking in terms of systems involves a change in perspective, what we see is more important than whom we counsel. What distinguishes the systems perspective is a recognition of the interactional character of human life, which is an extension of the interdependence of all creation.

When the systems perspective is used in counseling with individuals, the primary goal is to change their ways of interacting with their family. If the family too changes, that is a bonus. Pauline became aware that her depression was a family affair, and although she was unable to convince her family of the benefits of thinking interactionally, she herself continued‐with the encouragement of her pastor‐to respond to her family in ways that gradually diminished her sense of powerlessness at being the only bearer of the family's buried grief.

Thinking about people interactionally changes our approach from focusing on the individual psyche to focusing on the system. It also replaces linear causality with circular causality. Our persistence in asking "why" questions, even in circumstances when that seems inappropriate, is not simply a matter of curiosity; it is a clue to the intensity with which we are likely to hold on to assumptions about linear causality. Because interdependence is a mark of the family as a human system, it is impossible to think about causality in a linear way. Thinking interactionally means that when a family is troubled, everybody is responsible. Because of the mutuality of influence, it is probably more accurate to say that the system is responsible for the system's trouble.

This shift toward circular causality has three consequences for pastoral work with families. First of all, with respect to divorce it eliminates the idea that there is an innocent party. Although churches no longer support the idea that blame can be located in just one person and that only the so-called innocent party may remarry, it is still common for people being divorced to want to believe that they are the ones who had been innocently victimized by their partner. The insistence on innocence in family or marital trouble prevents the realization of forgiveness. People who are "innocent" need no forgiveness because they are "victims." People who have been labeled as victimizers frequently insist that they will ask forgiveness only if the so-called victim will acknowledge his or her fault.

The process of healing after divorce can begin only after both parties acknowledge responsibility for the demise of the marriage. An insistence on innocence precludes forgiveness; instead, the victim hopes for sympathy and looks for confirmatory allies. Pastors who want to be sympathetic may find themselves all too rapidly drawn into the orbit of the self-appointed victim. For that reason, it is as important as it is difficult for helpers always to explore the other side of every question and accusation in a family dispute. "Why did my husband have an affair?" becomes also "How long have you wanted your husband to leave?" Such a question can of course evoke more resistance than is useful. Alternatively therefore the pastor may simply observe: "It is difficult sometimes to be certain whether one wants a husband to stay or to go." Where the insistence of innocence lingers, it can become a way of life whereby individuals and families avoid accountability or responsibility by accusing others and the world around them.

The introduction of circular causality not only puts an end to the myth of innocence in troubled families. It also, in the second place, allows the pastor more freedom to suggest to the family creative alternatives. One can "play around with possibilities" if the seriousness of linear thinking has been modified by the perspective of circular causality. As long as "this" does not simply and directly cause "that," families in conflict can have more freedom to explore possible resolutions that do not create winners and losers. If the crisis can be understood as the result of a failure, then the entire family can be invited to redirect its creative energies away from blaming and toward a solution of the crisis.

Third, the shift toward circular causality enhances our understanding of corporate sin as over against individual sin. Families sin as surely as the people within them. By insisting that it is the family that is troubled, we shift the locus of blame from individuals to the organism as a whole. This focus on the organism as a whole does not eliminate individual accountability; it simply means that in a functioning human system, such as the family, it is not enough to blame one person for all the trouble. Nor is it necessarily useful to fault each individual. The family as such sins.

The interdependence of all things and the mutual influence or effect that each individual has on every other and on the whole undermine some of our traditional theological assumptions about fault and guilt. An individualistic understanding of guilt is not terribly useful, either for effecting change in a family or for understanding how a family functions. People are nonetheless likely to hold on to old assumptions about linear causality because they find it uncomfortable always to be accountable themselves for a family's sin. And because it is impossible to fix blame outside ourselves, we are of necessity thrown back on the dynamic of forgiveness as the Christian tradition's central contribution to living in a family.

Regarding change as a goal for the pastoral care of families is consistent with an understanding of creation in which change is normative. Families become troubled because they cannot cope with the change that is a necessary part of any organism's life. Denial of the inevitability of change often precipitates family crisis. A family may enforce rigid and unrealistic rules in order to keep children from growing up and going away. It may elect a scapegoat in order to divert attention away from necessary change. It may have developed fixed patterns of communication in order to avoid the grief that always accompanies change. Families become troubled because of the patterns they create in an effort to avoid inevitable or necessary change.

When a family is in crisis, the needed pastoral intervention must be primarily in the interest of change. Even families that seek help, however, will be ambivalent about change. They will resist any change that would substantially alter the family equilibrium. They would prefer to have a change in the identified problem or scapegoat‐so that the system as a whole would not need to change. However, by the time a family asks for help, someone or something has usually made change no longer optional; it is essential for its own survival that the family alter its patterns of interaction.

Families often find themselves stuck with a pattern of interacting so that the more they change the more they stay the same. In such instances the members of the family keep changing roles, but nothing new happens. What is needed in this case is a change in change itself‐actually a change in the fundamental rules that govern the system‐so that, for example, a child might get credit for actually practicing the piano even if she doesn't want to. What happens is more important than why it happens.

Interdependence, we have noted, is characteristic of family life. Because of that, change in one individual will have consequences for the entire system. Small change, it is said, makes for large change. That is a hopeful word for families in trouble, who often assume that they will need to make what they regard as an impossible major overhaul. One small change, though, may be enough to alter counterproductive interactional patterns. Sometimes it suffices, as in Karl's case, just to make a public acknowledgement that the family is troubled and needs help. Even though the change in question may appear to be small, pastors need to recognize that anything new in the family is likely to be perceived as frightening. Because of their fear of change and of the unknown, families resist change even when they are admittedly miserable. From a pastoral perspective, then, every change, however small, must be tended carefully.

The presence of the pastor in relation to a family is a primary source of change. Family interactions will change simply because another person has been added to the system. For this reason a helping person is never neutral in relation to the family. The way in which the pastor enters the system becomes itself a critical determinant in the effectiveness of the help offered with a view to facilitating change. Pastoral work with families is complicated by the other relationships the pastor may have previously established with people in the parish. The pastor may already have been looked upon as a surrogate parent, as a replacement for a beloved child, or as a substitute spouse. Pastors must take into account their own prior relationships with the family as well as the family roles originally encountered upon entering the family system at a time of crisis. When a family seeks help, the pastor must usually join the system in a new way.

The first contact with a family seeking help can either reinforce old patterns of relating among the members or provide the occasion for change. The presence of the pastor will be a catalyst for change only if it does not simply reinforce existent patterns within the system. From the moment of the initial telephone call requesting help, or of the first casual comment following a church meeting, the pastor must be in charge. Only the helping person who is able to take charge of the process of joining the family will find it possible to modify the use of power in that system. The helping person needs to win the initial struggle for power if power is eventually to be redistributed more evenly within the family. Who is present for the first family meeting, who tells the family problem, who sits next to whom, who sets the agenda‐are all issues around which helpers have opportunity to establish their authority.

Effective work with a family requires a willingness on the part of a pastor to exercise appropriate authority. For a pastor this process of joining the family as the one in charge can be complicated by existent limits on the exercise of pastoral authority. Where the pastor does not take charge of the helping process, however, change is not likely to occur. A systems perspective on family care is useful because it reintroduces questions about the relationship between authority and the exercise of pastoral care.

Although helping persons join the family as a functioning member, they must remain sufficiently outside the system to be able to reinterpret the problem that the family itself presents. Such redefinition provides a second source of change within the helping process.

The family is likely to describe its trouble in a way that limits the possibilities for change in favor of the status quo. One individual will often be identified as the family's problem. If Melissa would stop skipping school, or if David would stop nagging, or if Monica would stop running around, or if Father were less depressed, or if Calvin would do his homework, or if Mother stayed home more‐then the family would be better.

We have already identified (in chapter 5) this phenomenon of scapegoating as the system's mechanists for maintaining equilibrium. Because the family often persists in its understanding of the family's problem, the taste of reframing or redefining the problem in relation to the system as a whole is a delicate one. The reframing needs to be done without either disparaging the problem or discrediting the family member assigned to present it.

Reframing or redefining the problem has several purposes. A reinterpretation of the situation can create new freedom simply by helping people think in terms of the family as a whole rather than just the individuals within it. Redefining the problem can reduce the power of the one first presenting it to determine how the family as a whole will function and how the counseling will proceed. Such redefinition takes pressure off the family scapegoat. It expands the possibilities for a resolution of the family's difficulty. It may even mobilize the family to act as a unit in opposing the helper who, as an outsider, simply "cannot understand what we have been through."

The art of reframing requires creativity and gentleness. A family has generally made an emotional investment in its definition of the problem, and they are reluctant to give it up. Family members must set aside self-perceptions as well as perceptions generated by the family as a whole in order to accept the reframing. Chester's family was intrigued by the prospect that they might begin to do something together besides fight. Gentleness and subtle creativity on the part of the pastor can help to make reframing acceptable as a new way of understanding the family's problem.

The person who has entered the system in order to help is able to see and redefine the family's problem in a new way only by also remaining outside the system. Creativity requires distance. Those who are drawn into the family's web can usually imagine only such ways out of the trouble as are likely to perpetuate the family's dysfunctional patterns. The helping person's imaginative capacity depends on being able to see the family as a whole and from the outside. Sometimes it is advantageous to begin with seemingly ridiculous redefinitions of the problem, so that in the end the preferred reframing will seem reasonable after all. And always creativity in the art of reframing needs to be combined with gentleness.

In addition to the helper's presence and redefinition of the presenting problem, change may be evoked within the family by rearranging alliances. According to the principle of interdependence, a family functions best when it has within it no fixed alliances. Boundaries between members of a family and between the family and its environment are permeable precisely in order to enhance availability for everyone. Fixed alliances exclude. Altering a dysfunctional alliance or unsettling a fixed interactional pattern is thus a third source of change for the family.

Intervention in a family in order to bring about change in its interactional patterns can occur in a variety of ways. It may happen in the counseling session itself. More frequently, it will take the form of homework assignments given to the family for individual and joint work between sessions. In making such assignments it is essential that the helping person demonstrate both clarity and confidence. For the pastor who works with families this means the appropriate use of authority in the interests of change.

It is important that when tasks are assigned they be small and achievable. The pastor's directions to Daniel and Marian simply asked them to do what couples or parents might ordinarily do anyway. It is equally necessary that the assignments be made clearly, authoritatively, and without extensive explanation. When people want to know why they are being asked to do something, the helper or pastor can simply reply: "It seems like a good idea" or "It can't do any harm." The focus for the moment should be on the helper's authority rather than on justifying arguments. It is the exercise of pastoral authority that introduces the possibility of change within a family system. People are most likely to trust a pastor who has strength.

It has been suggested that pastors are limited in their work with families because they do not have enough distance to be objectively authoritative, and even if a pastor were able to be authoritative in relation to family care that people might have difficulty accepting the objective exercise of authority which may be needed to evoke change. The caution is both real and overstated. One of the real difficulties of pastoral care of any kind is that ordinary prior pastoral relationships may preclude the kind of distance that is necessary for effective family counseling. Yet people whose families are in trouble are often more willing to grant authority than pastors are to receive and exercise it. The pastoral reticence is an appropriate hedge against abuse, but it can also limit a pastor's effectiveness in helping families to change. It is most important to remember that our very presence with a family, despite the limits to our pastoral authority, can itself evoke change so long as we can remain outside the family's web.

Parish visitation is an honored privilege available to pastors as to no other caretaking professionals. Pastoral initiative in this regard, however, has for a variety of reasons diminished in our time as a matter of common pastoral practice. If my own parish experience is any indicator, that decline is neither surprising nor simply the consequence of sloth. I was not prepared for all the pain. sorrow, and conflict I encountered when I opened the doors of homes in my parish. I found it easier just to stop calling altogether than to deal with such suffering day after day. Moreover, the parish call at the pastor's initiative has traditionally been a stylized encounter, generally structured to exclude deep probing or a therapeutically oriented interaction.

The recent development of the home visit as a significant method in family therapy provides new impetus for our reconsidering the ancient privilege of pastoral initiative. Therapists are discovering what pastors have always known‐that meeting people in their homes enhances care. The emotional impact of seeing something at firsthand can often reveal the nature of the family situation in a way not otherwise available. The physical household, its contents, and the rules for their use amount to a vast and living representation of the psychosocial life of the family. Because welcoming the pastor into the home is also like showing hospitality to strangers, it can be an observable indicator of the system's openness and adaptability. A home visit can reveal how the family's habitat is created, how the system maintains a balance between public and private space, and how the outside world is kept out or brought into the home environment.

Effective pastoral care of families, however, involves more than simply gathering information. The privilege of visitation requires the careful and gentle use of authority. Pastors whose calling on families has been sensitized by a systems perspective may do little more than augment the frustration unless, within the family visit, they are able to take some initiative for introducing a concern prompted by intuition and confirmed by observation. Taking initiative includes a willingness to be active in pastoral relationships. It can mean, for example, asking about the well-being of a family whose daughter seems troubled at youth meetings, or inquiring about a father who has suddenly stopped singing in the choir, or seeking to reconnect with someone who has become estranged from the parish system. Care for people always includes respect for their reluctance to consider painful subjects and for their rejection of our intuitions. But care also means being willing to take the initiative, even in the midst of the family.

The pastor who visits a family in its home is first of all a guest. The family will show hospitality in its own way in order to make the pastoral guest feel at home. Although it is necessary for the pastor to be a receptive guest, that alone is not enough. Pastoral calling of any kind becomes more than a matter of public relations or social connecting at the point where the pastor becomes the host. The presence of Christ in human life as both guest and host is the paradigm for our pastoral visitation.

By taking the initiative to become the host in a family's own home the pastor makes it possible for each family member to tell his or her own story. The good host is a person who does not ignore anyone's contribution. Being a good host means forming an alliance with the disenfranchised and neglected individuals in the family. Each individual's unique gift is intentionally and explicitly added to the whole life of the family organism. Pastoral initiative with families does not mean a license to do counseling unawares. It is rather the recovery of a vital sense of being a participant with people in their struggle to discover their own gifts and to find courage to become autonomous disciples in the world for Christ's sake.

Despite our desire to help troubled families, and despite the obvious need in families today for healing and wholeness, pastors must remain free of the family's emotional web if they are to be free to offer what limited help they can. Troubled families will want to be told how to live, and our desire to help may prompt us willingly to tell them how to be or what to do. If we are to avoid this trap of taking responsibility for the family's well-being, we will have to remember constantly our own powerlessness.

Our first purpose in being with a family is to connect with them, not to save them. With each family it is essential to make a connection at the beginning of the pastoral visit. People in families need to believe that their pain has been heard and understood, even if it is eventually reframed. The process of making connections with each family member is enhanced by the helper's ability to empathize. Empathy communicates understanding and builds trust, but it does not necessarily evoke change. It is helpful, but it is not enough. Moreover, because of the emotional power of the family system, unbounded empathy may result in insufficient distance from the family. We can help families change only if we stay outside the system even while we participate in it.

Caring for families is a complicated enterprise in our time. Recent changes in family patterning have produced an unsettling diversity of family structures. Not all of the changes have been constructive for life together in the family. The increase in divorce is an alarming indication of how difficult it is to keep a balance between autonomy and mutuality. There are signs of parental negligence that point to a disregard of the family's obligation to ensure the future of humankind. The increase in family violence gives evidence of internal stress in the nuclear system. Issues such as the advisability and adequacy of day care and the prevention of teenage pregnancy prompt fierce public debate over the role of the family as a guarantor of the common good. In addition, the growing isolation of the family is likely to create more problems than it solves. Ours is indeed a troubled time for the family.

Despite the seeming chaos created by the modern pluralism of values and diversity of structures, we cannot do without the family as such‐or something like it. The family has survived revolutionary changes throughout its history. Moreover the diversity of family structure is a sign of God's extravagant care. The family as a human system is inextricably linked to a creation that is yet unfinished. Change and diversity, however troubling, are characteristics of the family as a part of that creation. Our pastoral interventions will be made in the interest of evoking those structural and interactional changes that can help the family become a workshop for change.

Pastors are able to respond to families freely because they realize that the family is not an end in itself. How a pastor responds to crisis in a particular family is influenced by the recognition that while creation requires the family to be a context for criticism and care, Christian discipleship transcends this necessity from creation. There is truth in the absurdity of the gospel's demand that faithfulness to Jesus set parents and children at sword's point. To regard every follower of Jesus as my brother or sister is an impossible ideal. Yet to be a disciple of Christ is to recognize ever-enlarging communities of concern. Christians are obligated not to take the family too seriously lest it impede our service in the world for Christ's sake.

Our intent throughout these chapters has been to develop a theology for the family, one that will inform and be informed by our pastoral work with families. Pastors have unique access to people during the expected and unexpected crises that occur within their family life cycle. Most pastors have neither the time nor the training to do therapy with families. The systems approach to family therapy does, however, introduce a perspective as well as interventive techniques that are readily applicable in pastoral care. Learning how to think about people interactionally moreover provides a perspective that has potential not just for pastoral care but for the whole of pastoral ministry.

Pastoral initiative in relation to family life is taken ultimately for the sake of individuals. Our pastoral work is informed by the conviction that families need to be open and interdependent systems, capable of fostering the growth toward autonomy that occurs only in those communities which can love and let go. Belonging and autonomy are both vital for human identity. Learning how to live together separately constitutes a lifelong agenda, the first lessons of which are experienced in the family. The systems perspective on family life enables us to acknowledge that growth toward autonomy is most likely to occur in families where the rules are flexible, the roles interchangeable, and the rituals dependable. It is the call to discipleship, however, that pushes us out of such nurturing communities into those ever-enlarging circles of interaction and concern in which God continues to make all things new.