hubchallenge day 17: Family matters

A relatively new, but very promising type of therapy is family exhibitions. It starts from the assumption that nothing occurs in a vacuum and childhood sexual abuse happens not just to the victim, but inside a family. The role the victim has within the family, the dynamics of the family and even the history of the family generations ago, has it's influence on the victim and their experiences. Esspecially in the case of childhood sexual abuse where the abuser is family (about 40%), this can be a valuable addition to other therapy.

The family exhibits stems from systemic therapy, combined with some NLP like techniques of placement and anchoring it gives insight and awareness of the family and your position in it. Unlike some family therapies, this doesn't involve going to therapy with the whole family, which in cases of childhood sexual abuse is rarely possible and almost always unproductive. Here's how it works:

A group of people is needed for the process. These are usually volunteers, subjects and students of the family exhibit process. One of the subjects is invited to take their place in the room (a rather large space is needed). The subject chooses his/her space intuitively. Then the subject is prompted to pick among the other people someone to stand in for their mother, father, siblings, grandparents, etc. The subject places each of the people thus chosen in the room, at different distances and angles from him/herself. Thus the people present a living picture of the status quo: where people are situated in the life of the subject.

Then the therapist goes around asking questions of the actors, and invites the subject to make changes the way they would want to see them. The process is largely intuitive and the people who have been cast in their respective roles are urged to answer questions intuitively, trying not to think and censor themselves. The result is often magical: people speak the things that the real life people who they represent would have answered, had they been invited to the therapy. Because they are actors, it's safe enough for the subject to hear their comments though.

I've done a small process that was similar to this, using chairs instead of people and just placing them into the space made a few things very clear to me. One of the very visible things was that my abuser occupied a space between me and my older sister. In the process I decided that I didn't want that anymore and had my counsellor move the chair to the left. This felt much better at that moment. My other sister, who has chosen to be loyal to my abuser even after I told her about my abuse, got moved aside as well, moved with my abuser to take a space off in a corner, behind the curtains somewhere. This made me cry: that was the first time I had realized how much her abandoning me had hurt me.

Magically, after almost 3 years of no contact, which was not unusual in my family, my sister called me, asked if she could come over and spend some time with me. I was flabbergasted when that happened. Since then her and I have been seeing each other about twice a year, and it's great to recover a bit of my childhood that way. She holds memories of me that I had forgotten and vice versa.

While I won't pretend to understand exactly what is happening, a bit of theory seems in order. What family exhibit is based on is the theory of the morphogenetic field. That's the one that "What the bleep do we know" is about. Basically it operates from the assumption that everything is connected and that what we do in therapy "over here" has it's effect on "over there". As the above example illustrates: It appears to work.

The elements of NLP that are involved in the process is the anchoring of places and people. When used with real people, the actors appear to become the person whos place they occupy in the subjects landscape. They say what they say in the same intonation and wording as the people who they represent would. Somehow, labeling a spot "Mom" and "Dad" connects the energies of mom and dad to those spots. People report acting completely out of their own character when occupying a spot in the family exhibit.

I'm a bit on the fence about why it works, frankly, I don't know. All I know is that it does seem to work and that's good enough for me. Changing peoples places in your life appears to change your relationship to them. This shifts everything into a new normal. A new type of reality. The bond with my sister was mended by the way my own family exhibit literally created a space for us to meet, without my abuser standing between us. Morphogenetic fields or magic? I'll take it...