Week 3 Overview: Thinking Systemically

In this week, you will be introduced to how systemic thinking is a foundation of marriage and family therapy. If you’ve ever been bowling and tried to hit a pin so that it hits another pin without the help of the bowling ball, you are considering the system. If you’ve ever looked at a forest and wondered why a tree grew crooked to get around another tree for sunlight, or how a new road in your town will impact traffic, or what the effect will be of a mother comforting a child at a restaurant after the father scolds him, you are thinking systemically. You are considering how one thing interacts with the things around it.

Let’s expand on the example of the scolded child. Is the mother’s comforting a pattern, or did something happen previously? Was the mother’s mother comforting in a similar manner? How is the family situated in the restaurant booth? Did the father see the comforting behavior and respond to the mother? Did a sibling scoot closer to the father when the mother offered the comfort? There is too much information to think linearly (single event impacting another single event). There are countless causes and endless effects that can be considered.

In marriage and family therapy, we are curious about all of the causes and effects that may be involved in the “problem.” But cause-and-effect thinking is rarely helpful, because it ignores so much valuable information. Systemic thinking differs in that it is an approach that wants more information and considers the patterns involved and how everything is affecting everything.

Although we may not be able to know where a single raindrop will fall, if we look at that drop in the context of a weather system, we know that weather systems are somewhat predictable in their behaviors, and we can have a pretty accurate idea of where that raindrop might fall. Based on the understanding that all systems have certain ways of behaving, marriage and family therapists can approach helping multiple people at the same time, despite the complexities.