Love and Work: what really works in family intervention, being

Love and Work: what really works
in family intervention, being
relational and good at what we do.
Honor Rhodes OBE, Director of Strategy,
Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
and Trustee at the Early Intervention
Foundation
@honor_rhodes
[email protected]
Why love and work?
Why we should think about love and the quality of relationships
and, remembering that, thinking and working relationally is not
promoting marriage, heterosexuality or any other normative
arrangements….
• Quality of co-parenting
• Poor relationship corelationship affects:
parenting relationship
quality affects:
• Mental health of individual
parents
• Child attainment
• Parenting style
• Child behaviour
• Child outcomes
• Child’s family and peer
relationships
• ‘Workfullness’
• Child’s adult mental health
• Child’s adult partner choices
http://www.tccr.ac.uk/policy
The families we need to work with
• Complex relationships
• The challenge of
helping families
describe themselves to
us
• How do we intervene,
when and with what?
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Workfull and workless
Why it matters
Work – love balance
Reality of austerity
Reality of being afraid
Reality of failure
What are families expecting from us?
• Help
• An ally in their fight
against each other or a
common enemy
• Magic
• An answer that they
agree with
• No change if possible
even if people expressly
ask for it…
• What we are expecting
is usually rather
different
What is in our mind? Having a
hypothesis
• Don’t go ‘empty minded’
but open minded
• “This family finds arguing
exciting and oddly unifying
as everyone gets involved.”
What do families want and need help
with?
• The things we talk
about….
• Warmth
• Parenting styles
• Children’s behaviour
• Rules and boundaries
• Money
• Change making
• Plans
• The things we don’t
talk about…
• Parental couple
relationship quality
• Sex and intimacy
• Sex and violence
• Grief and jealousy, any
of the ‘ugly’ emotions
• Forgiveness
Why are some families harder for us to
help?
• The Wilsons and their
biggest secret
• Cracking the code
• Bearing the answers
• Acting as a thinking
human being
• Any family you know
and their secret(s)
Using research, new and old
How much do you phub?
To get a sense of how often you and your partner phub each other, answer each item on a
scale from 1 (never) to 5 (all the time):
1. During a typical mealtime that my partner and I spend together, my partner pulls out
and checks his/her cell phone.
2. My partner places his or her cell phone where they can see it when we are together.
3. My partner keeps his or her cell phone in their hand when he or she is with me.
4. When my partner's cell phone rings or beeps, he/she pulls it out even if we are in the
middle of a conversation.
5. My partner glances at his/her cell phone when talking to me.
6. During leisure time that my partner and I are able to spend together, my partner uses
his/her cell phone.
7. ( R ) My partner does not use his or her phone when we are talking .
8. My partner uses his or her cell phone when we are out together.
9. If there is a lull in our conversation, my partner will check his cell phone
Roberts, James A. and David, Meredith My life has become a major distraction from my cell
phone: Partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners –
Computers in Human Behavior. 2015
Phubbing matters to our relationships
• The study shows that
46.3 percent of
respondents said their
partners phubbed
them, and 22.6 percent
said it caused issues in
their relationship.
• It patterns our
behaviours and that of
our children
That was new research and quite
tangential but there is so much more
• Research can and
should guide our
question areas
• It should help us
identify possible
obstacles and issues so
we can plan to
overcome them
• It helps us convince
families they are not
alone with their trouble
• https://www.rip.org.uk/
Respecting systems
• Family systems need to
be understood
• The system the family
lives in needs to be
understood too
• And our own multiagency system
• Children’s systems can be
geographically and
temporally very different
Boundaries and defences
• It is a truth universally
acknowledged that
‘containment’ is important
• Boundaries and defences
need a healthy respect
• Know what we are pushing
against
• But do push
…He is all pine and I am
apple orchard.
My apple trees will never
get across
And eat the cones under his
pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences
make good neighbors'.
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Resistance and the battlegrounds
• We now know quite a
bit about this family and
yet…
• Heart sinking
• Futility
• Back sliding
• Lack of grip
• ‘Bad’ thoughts and
referring on
Remaining interested and calm
• Easier said than done – of
course
• But we need to focus,
lazer-like, on the family’s
relationships, with each
other and with those
beyond their boundary
walls if necessary
• The necessity of excellent
supervision, another
relationship in which to
‘play’ and for the family
echo to be heard
• Relationship therapists
treat the relationship as
the patient not the
people
What is work? Physics?
• We are working and the
family will be too if we do
our work well
• Work is the transfer of
energy from one object to
another, especially in
order to make the second
object move in a certain
direction. Work is equal
to the amount of force
multiplied by the distance
over which it is applied.
Hard yards and a big push
• The state of ‘stuckness’
• How can we dislodge
stuck families?
• Where is our WD-40?
• Behaviour in repertoire
• Shutting doors, “we
don’t do that now”.
• When the end is in sight
plan for all sorts of
trouble….
Love and work, and ourselves
• Looking after ourselves so
we can continue the work
• Remembering Donald
Winnicott
• ‘A good-enough parent
allows themselves to be
used by the infant so that
he or she may develop a
healthy sense of
omnipotence which will,
naturally, be frustrated as
the child matures, this is
all to the good.’
So…..
• There’s a crack, there’s
a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets
in, that’s how the light
gets in’.
L. Cohen
• Love and work, work
and love.