I want to talk today about something that I regularly see when I’m working in families or anyone in a relationship – that is looking at relationship dynamics. I started understanding this concept when I was working in residential treatment with substance abuse. I regularly had families come in with their loved one suffering with addiction and their opponents. Any type of relationship with opponent dynamic creates a hard dynamic to work with. My main objective was to bring that opponent dynamic and bring in teamwork. I’ll use addiction as an example. Say this is Johnny. And this is addiction. Regularly people will view Johnny as the addiction. So the family comes in and get mad at the addiction at the same time they are getting mad at Johnny because they view it as the same thing. Naturally the family will start working against Johnny. A big part of what we do is separate and bring apart Johnny and the addiction. Now Johnny can work with the family to work against the addiction that is in that family system. That creates teamwork. It creates the ability to work against the common problem where Johnny is no longer the problem. The concept is simple on paper, but takes more effort. Again, instead of viewing Johnny and his addiction as one piece, separate the two and work with Johnny and the family system against the addiction, or mental illness or whatever your thing is.

If you’d like to dive into this on a more individual basis and work on it with your family dynamics, come on in, I would love to work with you.