Ever since I attended graduate school as a counselor, I hated the whole idea of viewing people and relationships as systems. I was a maverick in speaking out and standing against ‘systems’. One of the saying used with fellow anti-system people was “You can’t hug a system.”
Looking at relationships as systems both oversimplifies and complicates finding solutions to problems.
Even just talking about relationships as systems makes them sound engineered. Systems imply the ability to control and manipulate.
Systems also make any discussion of your marriage as cold and mechanical. Sadly, many marriage therapists continue looking at marriage relationships through the lens of a system.
When your counselor looks at your marriage as a ‘system’, they see patterns and loops. Seeing these things helps point out unhealthy habits. With marriages, they use the term ‘dyadic system’ since it involves two main people.
Even though the affair brought others into your marriage, which corrupted the special relationship between the two of you, the therapist views it as a ‘dyadic relationship’. That amounts to the linkage of two pieces in a larger machine.
The problem comes along when you look at the affair as part of a that machine-like system. In doing so, you remove all blame and responsibility. No one is to blame, it was just a series of interactions that made the affair happen. The system makes it sound like all that is needed is turning a few knobs and flipping a few switches so that the system corrects itself.
The system takes away personal responsibilities. No one is a bitch or a son of a bitch for their selfish choices. What they did is blamed on negative interactions in your marital system. Accountability for the affair gets lost with systems. It’s no wonder that clients report a majority of therapists never deal with their affair issues. When you look at your marriage as a system, it makes resolving affair issues next to impossible.
Healing requires accountability. Healing also involves effectively dealing with blame and where it belongs.
If you’re looking for help that treats you like a person and your marriage as a relationship rather than a malfunctioning system, I recently had some time slots become available for online counseling. If you are interested in either counseling or a consultation, email me Jeff@RestoreTheFamily.com for available times and prices.
Your marriage is much more than a malfunctioning system. It’s a relationship that has requirements, accountability and expectations. The system does suck. It sucks away all humanness and responsibility. It replaces love with ‘validating interactions’. It just reminds me that you can’t hug a system.
Rather than getting lost in a system, take the step of reaching out today.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
