Have you ever noticed when you go out to eat at a restaurant or when you’re at the grocery store the different family dynamics? It doesn’t matter how big or small the family is, there are always certain relationships within the family. For example, you have a relationship between a mother and a father, a father and a daughter, a mother and a daughter, a mother and a son, and a father and a son. In class we learned about Family Systems Theory which is a theory of human behavior that views the family as an emotional unit, or in other words, when you put stress on one person it doesn’t only affect them, it affects the people around them.
I had actually never even heard of Family Systems Theory until now but once I learned about it I started remembering certain situations about my life growing up that probably could have turned out differently had my parents had a better dynamic. In class we were able to watch a demonstration of a family dynamic while some of my classmates acted out a scenario. In this particular scenario our teacher had a family go to therapy to figure out what the problem was in this particular family dynamic and how to fix it. When the family walked in the mom sat on one bench with her son next to her and her husband on the bench next to him on his own. Now if I were in any other class I would have thought this was normal because I’ve always seen children who have a stronger bond with their mothers instead of their fathers, but because we were talking about family dynamics our teacher pointed out that preferably he’d like to see a mother and father sit next to each other. Anyway, back to the scenario. This particular family was going in because they had been having issues, the son had asthma and the mom felt like whenever her son got asthma attacks her husband wasn’t very helpful. Once he was able to ask each family member to share their perspective on the situation, it turned out that the mom would get stressed when seeing her son having an asthma attack which caused her to scream at her husband, which stressed him out seeing her panicking, which caused their son to stress seeing them arguing. In the end all of their behaviors were interrelated but they couldn’t see that because they were focused on their own perspective.
Once my teacher was able to see how all the behaviors were connected he had them all explain how they felt in this situation and once they realized that their stress was causing each other more stress he explained how to manage this situation in the future. Obviously this was just a scenario in class, but a very realistic one. I learned that when the husband and wife don’t have a strong dynamic it can lead to situations like this one.
As I thought about the husband and wife dynamic it reminded me of something I learned from another class where my teacher mentioned that the best relationships are those where the husband and wife put God first. He drew a triangle with God on the top and the husband and wife down at the bottom. He mentioned that the closer we move towards God the closer we get to our significant other. But, this is something both husband and wife have to work towards because it doesn’t really work if only one of them is moving. So remember that in order to have a good family dynamic the strongest relationship in the family should be the one with the husband and wife.
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