Family therapy is not a search for the guilty party, it is a search for the pattern

When I arrange a first joint session over the phone, the same sentence almost always turns up somewhere towards the end of the call. Sometimes the mother says it, sometimes the father, sometimes the teenager in the background. It goes roughly like this: “Just so you know — I’m not the one to blame.” Or, a little more directly: “I hope you’ll see who’s causing the trouble here.”

That sentence doesn’t bother me. On the contrary — it is entirely understandable and it tells me a great deal. It tells me that everyone in this family has been in the dock for a long time, and that each of them expects the therapist to be a judge who will finally deliver the verdict. Some dread it. Others look forward to it. But all of them are waiting for it.

In this piece I explain why that verdict will not come, and why this is the best possible news for the family. I will look at the difference between linear and circular causality, explain the principle of multidirected partiality, by which a therapist holds everyone’s side at once, distinguish responsibility from blame, and describe what happens to anger the moment the search for a culprit ends. At the end I will also say where blame does belong after all — because there is an important exception.

Why we need a culprit so badly

Looking for someone to blame is not a sign of bad character. It is a cognitive shortcut we all use and which often serves us well in everyday life. If you know who broke the glass, you know who will clear it up. Blame puts the world in order: where there is a cause, there is a solution, and where there is a solution, there is control.

That is exactly where its appeal lies. A family living in chronic conflict is above all exhausted and frightened. A culprit promises an end to that uncertainty: once it is known who the problem is, it will also be known what needs fixing. So the search for a culprit is really an attempt to master helplessness — I have written about how blame often plays the part of false control in the piece on guilt as false control.

Social psychology has also described a systematic distortion that helps us along. The fundamental attribution error means that we ascribe other people’s behaviour to their character and our own to circumstances. When my partner is late, he is irresponsible; when I am late, the traffic was bad. In relationships this mechanism is stronger still: in an extensive review of the research, Thomas Bradbury and Frank Fincham showed that unhappy couples attribute a partner’s unpleasant behaviour to lasting, internal and deliberate causes (“that’s just how he is”, “on purpose”) and pleasant behaviour to chance. Satisfied couples do exactly the reverse. And most interesting of all: these explanations are not merely a consequence of distress in the relationship — over time they also predict it.

A question with no answer: who started it

Picture a simple scene that I hear in the room practically every week. A mother asks her son about school. He answers in monosyllables and looks at his phone. She asks more insistently. He gets up and leaves. She says something after him that wasn’t part of the plan.

If I ask the mother what happened, she will say: I ask because he’s closing off from me. If I ask the son, he will say: I close off because she asks me all the time. Both are right. Both are describing the same loop, each simply starting to count it in a different place.

Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues called this punctuation — as with punctuation marks in a sentence, it is about where each person puts the full stop and starts a new one. In a loop there is no objective beginning; there are only different punctuations, and each of them turns the same events into a different story. An argument about which one is correct is therefore endless by design, not by accident.

Circular causality simply means this: every behaviour is at once a response to the previous one and a trigger for the next. The mother’s questioning is a response to the withdrawal and a cause of it. The son’s withdrawal is a response to the questioning and a cause of it. The loop turns of its own accord and needs no ill intent from anyone taking part — all it needs is for each of them to stay faithful to their part.

The same scene, two views

The difference between the two views is easiest to see drawn out. On the left is the explanation families usually arrive with. On the right is the explanation they usually leave with.

Why the therapist will not be an arbiter

Families often expect that after a few sessions I will say who is right. Some even demand it outright. The answer is always the same: I will not take on that role — not because I am non-committal or cautious, but because doing so would end the therapy before it began.

The reason is simple. The moment one of them was proved right, the other would lose any reason to stay in the room. And family therapy doesn’t work until everyone stays with it. Besides, a verdict would only repeat what the family has been doing for years on its own, and there has never been a solution in that.

The Hungarian-American psychiatrist Iván Böszörményi-Nagy, the founder of contextual therapy, coined the term multidirected partiality for this stance. The wording is deliberately paradoxical: the therapist is not neutral in the sense of cool impartiality, but is partial to each person in turn. For each one, she looks for what is fair in their experience, what they have carried, where they were wronged and what they contribute to the family. Nobody is left without an advocate — including those not in the room: dead grandparents, absent fathers, children not yet born.

In practice this looks like constantly changing seats. For a few minutes I am entirely on the mother’s side and make sure everyone hears how exhausted she is. Then I move and make sure everyone hears what it is like to be fourteen and unable to explain yourself. Then over to the father, who has looked like a marginal figure all along. Nobody is alone in that room for long — and nobody is the only one who is right for long.

The Milan school of family therapy named the same stance neutrality, and Mara Selvini Palazzoli and her colleagues described it in terms of its effect: a therapist is neutral if, after the session, nobody can say with any certainty whose side she was on. If they can say it, the therapist was not neutral — and the work has probably stalled.

Responsibility is not blame

Now comes the part that is easiest to misunderstand. If there is no culprit, does that mean nobody is responsible for anything? No. It means precisely the opposite — it means everyone is responsible.

Blame and responsibility are two different things. Blame looks back, seeks a cause and pronounces a verdict. Responsibility looks forward, seeks a share and opens up a possibility. Blame is a state you carry; responsibility is something you do. And most importantly: blame is indivisible — whoever gets it gets all of it — whereas responsibility is always distributed.

In family therapy, therefore, the question “who is to blame” is replaced by one that sounds humbler but is considerably more demanding: what is my part of the loop and what can I do with it? The mother’s part may be the pressure she herself experiences as concern. The son’s part may be the withdrawal he himself experiences as self-defence. The father’s part may be the retreat from the parental role that he himself experiences as “not interfering”. None of them is to blame. Each of them has a share that is entirely in their own hands.

This shift has another quality that people notice only later: it relieves without devaluing. Someone who hears in therapy that they are not to blame often first wonders whether it is merely kindness. It isn’t. It is a more accurate description of reality. I explain the difference between guilt that points us towards repair and guilt that only paralyses us in more detail in the piece on healthy and toxic guilt.

What happens to anger when the search for a culprit ends

Many people expect that in a room where nobody is looking for a culprit there will be less anger. Often there is more at first. That is a good sign, though not a pleasant one.

As long as the search for a culprit goes on, anger serves as a defence. I attack so as not to be accused. When the accusation falls away, and when it becomes clear that nobody is going to declare me the problem, anger loses that job — and beneath it appears what it was guarding. It is almost always one of two things: pain or fear. “I’m afraid I’m losing you.” “It hurts that you don’t see me.” “I’m afraid I won’t manage.”

Anger in itself is not an enemy and I don’t try to remove it; it is energy carrying information about a boundary and about something that matters, as I described in the piece on anger as the energy of change. In family work my task is above all to let anger reach its message — to have the reproach translated into a need. That translation is the same as in work with couples, where I describe it in detail in the piece from reproaches to needs.

When that happens, the room often also produces the scene that makes me do this work: someone who was under the heaviest attack twenty minutes earlier starts to listen. Not because anyone persuaded them, but because they are no longer defending themselves.

“But one of them really is more to blame”

This is the most common objection I hear, and it is a fair thought that deserves a fair answer. It is true: the shares in a family loop are not equal. An adult has more power than a child, a parent more responsibility than a teenager, whoever decides about money and time more influence than whoever has neither. The systemic view does not mean that everyone is equally involved — it only means that everyone is involved.

That is why in family therapy I always take account of the asymmetry of power. I don’t expect a fourteen-year-old to make the same shift as his parents, and I don’t pretend otherwise. When I work with a family with small children, most of the serious work is actually work with the parents — the children come so that I can see and hear them, not so that they carry the burden of putting things right.

And one more thing: the fact that someone carries a larger share is no reason for the others not to look at theirs. Quite the opposite — the shift in a family most often happens when someone who had “less blame” changes their small part of the loop. Not because that is fair, but because that part is the only one they really hold. Fairness and effectiveness in families are unfortunately not the same thing; therapy works with the second without denying the first.

Where blame does belong after all

The systemic view has one limit that has to be stated plainly, because otherwise it can turn into something harmful. Where there is violence — physical, sexual, severely psychological — the circular explanation does not apply. Violence is not a shared pattern co-created by both, and the person on the receiving end is not co-responsible for it. The responsibility is one-sided and belongs to the person committing the violence.

Looking for the victim’s “share” is not therapy but a continuation of the harm. In such cases joint sessions are as a rule not appropriate — safety and separate treatment come first, and only much later and only under certain conditions perhaps joint work. The same applies to active addiction and to unmanaged mental health crises, where treatment has to be arranged first.

One more thing needs saying just as honestly: a circular explanation does not erase the past. If someone in a family has wronged another, that wrong does not dissolve into “the pattern”. This is why Böszörményi-Nagy spoke of the ethical dimension of relationships — of a ledger of what has been given and received, which has to be acknowledged, or else it is passed on. Acknowledging a wrong is not the same as looking for a culprit. The first heals, the second preserves.

What this looks like in my room

At a first joint session I begin by listening to all the versions. Not in order to pick the right one, but in order to see where they touch. Then I start asking questions that sound unusual because they are addressed not to the content but to the pattern: “What does the father do when the mother and son fall out?” “Who notices first that it has started?” “Who in this family gives in soonest?” “If this stopped, what would be the first thing that was different?”

These are called circular questions, and their power lies in inviting each member to observe the relationship between the other two. That alone shifts attention from the person to the pattern — and once a family has seen the pattern, it cannot unsee it. Many people smile for the first time at that moment. Laughter is often the first sign that blame has loosened its grip.

I have described the systemic background to this work in more detail in the piece on the family as a system, and I write about the roles individuals take on within such a loop (the hero, the scapegoat, the comforter, the invisible child) in the piece on roles in the family.

I hold joint sessions within family therapy; I am a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy and I work under regular supervision. If you recognise in your own family a loop you can’t find a way out of, you don’t need to know in advance who should come and what they should say. It is enough that you write — the rest is my job.

And if you take a single sentence away from this piece, let it be this one: as long as you are looking for a culprit, you are looking for something that isn’t there. The pattern, on the other hand, is always there — and patterns, unlike characters, can be changed.