4 Sources of Family Stress — And The Question That Make A Difference
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[00:00:00] e- every family faces stress at some point because, you know, life is just stressful. But the way they handle it is often part of the reason they come to see a family therapist. In this episode of my newsletter/podcast, I will share some of the things that I look for in family therapy as it relates to stress and how to think about the impact of stress systemically.
If you don't know this about me, I walked into my first job as a therapist at a residential treatment center for teens thinking I was hired to run groups. But the clinical director had some other ideas and handed me a caseload of families and basically wished me good luck.
Those first sessions were not my finest work, but what saved me was some rather obsessive reading and lots of consultation around family systems theory, and it changed everything for me. This is my attempt to distill what I've learned from over 10 years of working with families in residential treatment centers and private practice, all in about 15 minutes a week, [00:01:00] and that is what we call over-functioning.
welcome to 15 Minutes of Family Systems. My name is Oliver. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Los Angeles, and this is the audio version of my Family Systems newsletter In Bowen family theory, there's this amazing concept called nodal events. These are just natural life milestones that happen to cause a lot of stress. If you're listening to this, I suspect you've had at least two that I can think of.
One was when you started grad school, and the second was when you started seeing clients at your training sites. And if you changed careers before you went to grad school, that would be a third.
In family systems theory, the stress that technically belongs to one person going through an event gets shared and impacts the entire family. So if one caregiver gets laid off, that is a stressor, which could cause another caregiver to get a second job, which is another stressor, and then the child has to readjust how much each parent is at home, [00:02:00] Which is a third stressor. So now there's three sources of stress, each belonging to individuals, but the whole stress from all three of those things impacts the entire system
Here's what Salvador Minuchin was most emphatic about. The stressor isn't technically the problem because two families can face the same kind of thing, a job loss, a divorce, a sick parent. One of these families handles it just fine, while in another family, one of the kids will develop symptoms.
The events or number or type of stressors doesn't explain who ends up in therapy, but what does is what this newsletter's all about. One of the things that we can try to do is to understand what the source of the stress in the family is, and families are usually carrying pressure from several different directions at once, and I think there's about four of them.
The first is personal stress. One family member is carrying something external to the family life, like a work problem or a health scare [00:03:00] or some financial setback that's theirs alone to deal with. This person's stress will move through the family via every interaction that they have with every other family member, how they speak to their partner at dinner, how much patience is left in the room by 8:00 PM, and how they handle a child who needs something when they're exhausted and it's time for bed.
It's probably the most common source, but also the most easiest to miss because the person carrying the symptoms who's affected most by all of this stress is the child. Parents won't even think to tell us that they've been laid off or that a relative has just died. The whole family is under pressure simultaneously dealing with moving house or moving to a new city. This kind of stress hits everyone at the same time, and families dealing with this are struggling with the practical aspects of moving to a new city or a new house, but also dealing with the stress itself.
sometimes as a therapist, [00:04:00] you might have to get sucked into a bit of action there, get into the gritty details, and help them with resources which is less glamorous than running enactments and doing family systems work. But it could be more useful.
The third source is developmental stress. This is the one families most appreciate it when you name. Every family moves through predictable stages: becoming a couple, having the first child, raising school-age kids, then the school-age kids turn into teens, and then empty nesting and retirement.
But each stage generates more stress because the family has to reorganize. The rules that apply at one stage don't fit a new stage. Roles need renegotiating each time. So what worked in parenting for a four-year-old certainly does not work for a 14-year-old sometimes families get stuck at these stages, and it's useful tell them that it's a stage and it's not anyone's fault, and that can really help reframe whatever it is they're going through.
The fourth [00:05:00] source is kind of idiosyncratic stress, It's a unique stressor that doesn't follow a standard developmental template. A child with a disability or a parent who is in an accident and roles and structure have to redistribute
these situations can completely overwhelm a family that was functioning really well before because they just weren't designed to handle it. So a solid assessment in all four categories helps you out
the whole thing about family systems is that we've gotta look at how individuals within the system interact, but also how the system interacts with other systems, like the environment and work and jobs
So there's four different types of stress, but how and why they impact one family over another is also useful to think about
The image that I always think of is a suspension bridge, and they're actually way more complicated than they appear. engineers actually have to design suspension bridges to be flexible because if a bridge is too [00:06:00] rigid and there's too much wind and too many cars going over it one day, the design can't handle the, the pressure and the stress and the movement, and it fractures. But if it moves too freely when there's too many cars and too much wind on a certain day, it will totally fall apart.
There's several famous bridges that collapsed because they couldn't absorb and distribute wind force. The engineering term for this is called damping, which means controlled, purposeful It's a terrible word, so probably not gonna be using that with a family or tell them that they need to dampen more, but the concept is quite solid.
, and just like bridges, families can be too flexible and too rigid. When stress levels increase, some families will respond to pressure by tightening things up, becoming more rigid. Rules get stricter, roles get fixed, patterns get locked down
to that family, it feels like they're holding it together. But from a systemic standpoint, that's a [00:07:00] family who has lost the ability to adapt, and rigidity compounds over time. Patterns that lock under stress are much harder to change the longer that they've been running. When a family is too rigid and not flexible enough, I tend to find that one of two things will happen to one or more of the kids.
They'll either feel restricted, controlled, and become depressed or withdraw, or one of them will start rebelling, sneaking out, acting out, vaping, doing drugs, stealing. It's all a rebellion against the rigidity. In another family, the structure loosens under pressure. Rules will change unpredictability or just don't get enforced at all.
Roles disappear or become poorly defined or swap all the time. There's no stable pattern for anyone to rely on. in general, the family just becomes more reactive, and we want families to be responsive The children in this type of system react to it too. You might also see some sneaking out, acting out, vaping, and doing [00:08:00] drugs, but it's not a rebellion this time.
It's because the parents aren't setting limits or holding the line. They've lost their authority maybe because they're too distracted or too chaotic or too overwhelmed themselves. The other reaction that I think is common to see is kids disappearing, becoming the lost child. They escape into video games, Discord chat rooms, or just withdrawing from social interactions in the real world.
There's a retreat from all of that chaos, and it's likely a reaction to caregivers being overwhelmed with whatever stressors are going on for them. And obviously, some families won't have any symptoms at all because they're able to function despite the stressors because they are flexible without being chaotic, and when pressure hits, they renegotiate.
Rules get updated, roles shift, structure adapts to fit the new situation. The family stays organized because it's flexible and it can adapt. whatever's going on with the family you're working with, the clinical goal is to get the [00:09:00] family to have more adaptive flexibility, either by toughening up if they're too flexible or loosening up if they're too Some of the questions you can ask yourself is, like, what happened to the family's rules and roles when all of these stressors hit? Did they become stricter? Did they loosen up? Or did they get talked or did they just get talked through? When the family had to deal with the new situation or this new stressor, was any of it discussed?
Did the family explore options, talk together openly, or did they shut down? Did someone just take charge? another question is how long has the current way of responding been happening? How long has the family shifted since these stresses? Months, weeks, years? Remember, the more locked down, the harder it is to change.
Does the family have language for what's happening, or do they just think suddenly the kid got depressed or started acting out out of nowhere? With the family at the very rigid end, you'll see patterns intensify under pressure because change, more change feels [00:10:00] threatening.
They'll become defensive and, uh, lock it down even more. That being said, I think these families can look highly functional on the surface, organized, consistent, clear about rules. The rigidity only really becomes visible when something pushes against it or when symptoms start to show up in one person
At the chaotic end, structure will just completely disappear under pressure from stressors. Responses are very reactive, inconsistent. There's no stable pattern to work from. These families might take a while to come to treatment because of that chaos, right? And an absence of fixed patterns might even look like flexibility.
ultimately, this whole newsletter is about which end of the dial the family you're working with is at, And you can assess that by thinking things through yourself. you can assess that by asking what changed and when. Get into some circular questioning. But ultimately, the goal is to help these families become more flexible, either by tightening up if they're too [00:11:00] chaotic or loosening up if they're too rigid.
All right, I really hope that helped. Do me a favor, let me know if this audio version is helpful to you. Do you like it? Are you gonna listen to it?
Let me know, because otherwise I won't do it anymore
