One of the shifts that is implicit in my shift as a clinician moving from individual holistic health to the psychological wellbeing of individuals, is that in the latter it is necessary to consider the person’s environment as an organizing principle. In my work as a homeopath I took into consideration the effects of the environment and the person’s own view of reality and their understanding of their environment and I looked for the underlying organizing principle why they found themselves in that environment. This is a fascinating study and one that can point to many inner organizing themes in the person’s psyche.
Yet in psychotherapy, while working with the individual, it is necessary to pay attention to the family structure – or the lack of that – when striving to bring about health and balance in one’s inner world. In homeopathy I did not consider it to be my role to help my clients understand their family structure and their place in it, nor using that matrix of family bonds in relieving them from their underlying anxieties and discomforts, I merely needed that understanding to bring us to a general understanding of the person’s constitutional makeup.
In therapy the inner experience of the person is dependent on the maintaining factors, the environment. (It is called “maintaining”, when the circumstances cause suffering and as long as the person is in that environment, healing is extremely difficult). Bringing light on an experiential level to the inner workings of these relationships I believe I can be of utmost help as a therapist. It is most often true about people that they are in certain environments and relationships for a reason but in many cases the person is tied in that particular situation and has no option to move out of it. So while keeping it in mind that this person has a larger organizing principle in their life that keeps them in that particular unconscious set up, a way to dissolving that discomfort can be through solving the puzzle in their family environment.
A large group of people for whom this is true are children. This is complicated enough for young children who are stuck in abusive or unhealthy circumstances but I find even more excruciating some of the situations of inner and outer conflict and paradox of adolescent life. Adolescents are on the edge – they are still children but they are budding adults. Several clinicians and authors spent their careers working with adolescents and tried to untie the knots of the complex hardships of transition from childhood to adulthood, in this most active phase of individuation. I find it a rewarding thought as a clinician that I might be able to intervene at this juncture of one’s life.
Adolescents have the mental capacity to see the intricacies of mental emotional and relational (interpersonal) life yet they are operating on the platform of the well-tried and familiar childhood. It is often the very parents who admire their children and want the best for them in becoming healthy adults, who keep them back from making those steps and allowing them to detach from them. It is hard to see a loved one leave. Working with families of adolescents is rewarding as I feel I am allowed into the life of people at this intricate time when one (the parent) needs a little whisper of help to let go and the other (adolescent) needs the whisper of encouragement that it is ok to go.
