I have a strong aversion to brain teasers and logic problems, in the same way you might, say, wrinkle your nose and turn away from a whiff of sour milk or fresh skunk spray. Oddly, though, I have always enjoyed the logic problem aspect within family therapy.
What I am referring to is the way in which our job is to try to figure out, essentially, what is going on beneath the surface.
In Functional Family Therapy (FFT), we have a structured approach to sorting out what keeps the problem alive in relationships. We refer to this as the Relational Assessment process, and it is a distinct phase in FFT.
Relational Assessment in Functional Family Therapy is the phase in which therapists identify recurring family relationship patterns, assess relatedness and hierarchy, and develop a hypothesis about the function of the referral behavior. This understanding helps the therapist create a change plan that responds to the family’s existing relational needs rather than working against them.
All families have patterns and predictable ways of interacting (a la Systems Theory). The therapist’s job in Relational Assessment is to identify those patterns and understand the function of the problem in those relationships. In other words, what serves as life support for the problem affecting the client-family?
Have you noticed how easily people can predict how their own parents would have responded to some situation or behavior that comes up about a young person? They rarely even hesitate to know what they could have expected.
Snuck out at night? My mom would have grounded me for a month!
Stood up for someone getting picked on at school? My dad would have been proud that I stood up for someone being hurt.
These predictions are based on patterns of interactions that occur reliably even when the situation or event changes.
The Relational Assessment Phase in FFT calls for the therapist to purposefully look for patterns between family members that occur across time and situations. Behind the individual’s behaviors toward another, there are strong motivations- drives that influence how family members relate to one another.
As FFT therapists meet with families, they are engaging in the logic problem of coming to understand how the individuals in the family characteristically relate to each other. FFT considers two primary dimensions: Relatedness and Hierarchy. Of the two, Relatedness is the most motivating dimension in relationships.
In FFT, relatedness describes how a person characteristically seeks connection or autonomy in a relationship. On a continuum, people relate to others from a position of autonomy on one end and a position of connectedness on the other.
Hierarchy describes how influence, decision-making and authority operate within a family relationship. In terms of hierarchy, it is common for someone in a dyad to carry more influence over the other. This person is more able to make decisions or demands of the other.
Consider, for example, a mother and son. So, truthfully, this is a story about me and my son. Let us call him Nate.
When Nate was young, I felt strongly connected to him and he was strongly connected back to me. Things felt ‘right’ in the world when I was able to have a sense of closeness with Nate daily and this was true for him as well.
When he moved into adolescence, part of his healthy development involved seeking more independence. As his high school years passed, Nate spent more time at school, in sports and with friends. Nate started enjoying self-reliance and independence.
At the same time, things were not feeling great for me. Things felt ‘off’ without the time and connection we used to have so reliably. Eventually, we slid into a circular pattern of me trying to connect with Nate while he, in turn, tried to find more space.
I found myself looking around for things I ‘needed’ him to do as an excuse to interrupt him and engage in a conversation. This was my way to force contact with him. He started to dread me talking to him because it was always about a chore. Unsurprisingly, as he dreaded it, I felt pushed away even more.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with either of these two motivations. Neither closeness nor autonomy is the ‘healthier’ or more correct motivation. The problem begins when family members start doing things that bring trouble to their relationship in a misguided effort to get their needs met (as I did with Nate).
As FFT therapists, our logic problem is to develop an understanding of the needs driving interpersonal behavior so that we can support families. We aim to attend to the unique needs of everyone.
Additionally, we avoid asking or expecting someone to begin to behave in a way that does not address their fundamental relational motivations. In the example above, if a therapist had come in and began explaining to me the developmental needs of a teenager and instructed me to be less engaged with my son or lectured my son on how he should appreciate his mother and spend more time with her, we would likely have dropped out of therapy and found it unhelpful.
In terms of hierarchy, as I was the person with more influence in the relationship, it would also have been important for a therapist to work with this rather than against it. This would mean developing a change plan that left me in the ‘one-up’ position rather than asking me to begin allowing my son to make decisions that would require me to be ‘one-down’ to him.
FFT therapists focus on assessing the relational motivations or drives of individual family members toward others and then crafting change plans that are compatible. FFT argues that existing relatedness and hierarchy motivations do not need to change for the family to improve their functioning.
We work to find ways to help family members get their relational needs met in ways that increase protective factors and reduce risk factors. This supports the family’s likelihood of maintaining change into the future.
In other words, I can remain a mother who is strongly motivated to connect with her son because I was able to identify other ways to feel connected to him that did not result in him pushing me away and allowed him developmentally appropriate autonomy.
The second main objective of the Relational Assessment Phase is to develop a well-grounded hypothesis about the purpose of the referral behavior or problem pattern in the family system. When we look carefully, it is often apparent that the problem bringing a family to therapy has origins in an attempt to solve a problem. FFT therapists work to understand how the problem behavior is serving a purpose or ‘function’ in a family (albeit a painful one).
“The behavior bringing a family to therapy may be creating serious problems while also serving an important relational purpose.”
An FFT therapist may consider:
Without taking the time to understand what is really going on below the surface (and sometimes beyond the awareness of those in the relationships), we run the risk of failing to be effective in how we intervene with families.
In my experience, the most effective interventions in therapy are those that cause the least systemic disruption to the client-family. Understanding their patterns and assessing the function of behavior leaves us much more able to develop change plans that allow individual needs to be met without a major overhaul of the structure, while reducing the risky behavior that resulted in a referral to family therapy.
Relational Assessment helps ensure that change in FFT is grounded in how each family actually functions. By understanding the motivations and patterns beneath referral behaviors, therapists can build change plans that are more responsive, practical, and consistent with the model. This careful attention to relational fit is a central part of how FFT helps therapists support families in making meaningful changes that can continue beyond treatment.
To learn more about FFT and training in the model, please go to www.fftllc.com.
Learn more about Functional Family Therapy and how FFT LLC supports effective model implementation; contact us today.