"Changing with Families - A Book About Further Education For Being Human" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bandler Richard, Grinder John, Satir Virginia)

_{PART I}

_Introduction

In the following pages we will present our particular view of the manifold and exciting field of family therapy. As with any complex area of human behavior, the ability of therapists to perform family therapy far outruns their ability to explicitly understand and communicate to others what they specifically do when they practice family therapy. The purpose of this book is to attempt to make understandable to the reader the patterns of which we have become aware in our practice of family therapy and to catch up the theory of family therapy with its practice. Specifically, by extracting the patterns of family therapy, we hope to accomplish several things: First, by forcing ourselves to become aware of the patterns of our own behavior in doing family therapy, we will become more systematic in our work and more effective as people-helpers, and, second, we will be able to more effectively communicate our experience to others involved in family therapy so that a meaningful dialogue becomes possible among all of us as we help one another to become more successful and dynamic in our work.

The way that we hope to accomplish these goals is by creating an explicit model or map for our behavior in family therapy. By explicit model we simply mean a guide for behavior which can be used by anyone wishing to work as an effective family therapist. This guide for doing family therapy will be explicit if it presents the patterns necessary for a therapist to work in family therapy effectively and creatively in a step-by-step manner which makes it possible for the therapist to learn and to use these patterns. As we understand it, models or maps for behavior are not true or false, accurate or inaccurate, but, rather, they are to be judged as useful or not useful for the purpose for which they were intended. Since the model which we create here has as its purpose to assist each of you in becoming a more effective family therapist, we present it to you and invite you to take the model, the patterns we identify here, and to use them in your work in family therapy.

The first task which we need to accomplish is that of finding some common experience with which each of us, as family therapists, can identify. If we can succeed in this, then we can all begin together the journey to a better understanding of our work. If we can find this experience, then we can have a mutual reference point, or point of departure, from which we can build the model so that it will be useful for all of us. In a field as complex as family therapy, there are so many places from which we could start that it is difficult for us to choose among them. However, we have decided to begin with the patterns of verbal communication — the patterns by which the therapist and the members of the family communicate with one another in words. This is not a judgment that words are more important than, or have some priority over, other forms of communication such as body movements, tone of voice, etc., but simply a place — a set of experiences — which we all share and from which we can begin.

In order to assist each of you as you read this book to connect the words before you on this page with the actual feelings, sights, sounds, smells, tastes — with the excitement of working with a real family in your experience — we will proceed by presenting excerpts from transcripts to illustrate the patterns in our experience which we wish to most vividly model. Finally, as we begin, we would like to remind you to identify the patterns from the transcripts in this first part of the book; this part is designed simply to give you practice in identifying the patterns. Once we have identified a pattern, we will not identify it again each time that it occurs, but, rather, we will continue to move on to other patterns. In Part II, we will sort these patterns into natural groups which will help you to organize your experience in family therapy. We suggest that you simply sit back, breathe comfortably and use your skills to connect the words before you with your own experience.