family mapping has been a game changer for me when it comes to doing family therapy if you're new to working with families and get the hang of this technique early on you're going to feel so much more confident and empowered when you do your work now if you're already a pro at working with families I'm pretty sure you're going to find this tool as helpful and useful as I do my name is Oliver and I'm a Clinical Director of family systems therapist here in Los Angeles and I occasionally Moonlight as a professor and a teacher the easiest way for me to explain family mapping to you is through experiential activity so go grab pen and paper if you're gonna play along and when you get back do me a favor and hit subscribe so that you're the first to know whenever I put up a new family systems video the first map that we're going to create will be about you and me and our relationship and the second one is going to be based on an interaction from the movie The Incredibles 2. at its most basic a family map consists of boxes or squares for people and you can use the entire space of paper for it as far as I know is just you and me right now so I've got to put two boxes somewhere on my page family Maps represent relationships so what I have to think about is what I know about you and our relationship which is essentially not very much because we're doing this online I don't know who you are I don't know your name I don't know if you know me or if you're going to come back it's basically Anonymous I want to capture this Dynamic on a piece of paper and there's really only a few ways that I can do this I've decided though that I'm going to turn that disconnect between us into distance on the paper I'm going to put me at one end of the page and you all the way at the other now this distance is a representation of a lot of different things I'm recording this in April but you could be watching this in December um so there's a sort of chronological distance that this represents there's also Geographic distance as well I'm based in Los Angeles but you could be well literally anywhere in the world when you create a family map in a session think about what that distance might represent to you in the family so family maps are based on your experience of the family on your observations and what you know about them the second aspect I want to capture in our family map is about power or influence now we could argue that you have a lot of power in so far as you can turn this video off at any time and find another one and this is true but for the sake of the argument let's pretend I'm the only video there is on structural family systems and as a result I have considerable more power or influence right now and that's because I've got something that you want in the form of knowledge or experience whenever somebody's got something that the other person wanted automatically creates differences between us now on top of this I might have more experience than you I might have set myself up at the start as being a bit of an authority or maybe I'm licensed and you're not quite licensed yet these are all subtle differences in power or influence that need to be represented on the map to accurately portray what's going on between us and as a result I'm going to actually draw you as a smaller box and no offense here but I'm going to be a little bit bigger than you now you might disagree entirely with this and that is fantastic totally fine and actually encouraged unlike genograms which are all fact-based and data-driven family mapping allows for more of a subjective experience to come through so maybe you don't experience me as having more knowledge than you in which case your diagram is going to look different than this the only person that this really has to make sense to is you and you probably have to be able to explain it as well so for that reason I love how creative family mapping is and later in this video I hope you get to see how useful it is as well too so another thing that I want to capture in my diagram is boundaries and if you're watching this you probably have some idea that structural family therapy is kind of big on boundaries boundaries in a structural systems lens are in some way about Rules of Engagement so a boundary around one group of people represents a segment of people who all have the same set of rules and what the rules of engagement are between them and people in another group I know that's a mouth for her so imagine you've paid good money to come and see me uh in a lecture that's live you would be in a group of people that would call the audience and this audience has a set of rules imposed on them by cultural Society I guess and it goes something like this you agree to abide by the rules of being in the audience and that means that you generally sit in the dark you stay quiet you might be able to take notes but you're not going to speak until a section in the speech opens up where you can ask questions those are the rules of engagement for an audience member as a speaker I have a whole different set of rules and those being something like I have to stand on the stage I have to deliver a talk I probably have to prepare this talk for you um so those are the rules that separate you from me we separate out speakers and teachers by putting them on a stage or raising them up or elevating them and sometimes we even shine spotlights on them aliens visiting from another planet would be a able to go oh that person doing the talking with the lights on him is in a different category from those people who are sat in the dark not saying as much I am going to represent this in my visualization or my family map by the use of lines I'm going to use double lines here to represent very clear or very harsh rigid boundaries and I think YouTube teaching is a great example of when we use a rigid boundary or double boundary because I do feel very disconnected from you and there's no flow of information back and forth those are my double lines now at some point in the future I might do a version of this presentation in person in which case my map is going to change physically I'm going to be in the same room as them but emotionally as well I might feel a little bit more connected as I feel closer to people I can see them I can hear them laugh at my dumb jokes and there's going to be more interaction between us so I'm going to change the boundary to be a little more healthy and that is that single line right there now I still have some influence or power as a teacher somebody with experience so I'm going to remain above the other person but I tend to see people as colleagues so I think the size of the boxes are going to be more equal there and just to show you one more example this is what it would be like with the porous boundary I think it would be like if you and I had decided to hang out as friends at Starbucks well I explained family mapping to you physically would be a lot closer obviously but the conversation might be less organized and less structured so um because of its informality I might change our Dynamic to look like that the aliens would have a hard time knowing who the teacher was and who the student was it's going to be harder to put a boundary there because there's no real difference between the groups so I might put a single line or a dotted line if you're uh if you're on pen and paper use a dotted line but there is no real distinction between the two subgroups now I don't know about you but my ideal way of learning would be be in person so option number two I don't want the chaos of someone listening into my conversation at Starbucks I I don't really like disorganized teaching I want things to be a bit structured and I want to be able to ask questions you might have a different opinion about this example but hopefully you'll agree that in general there needs to be a bit of organization a bit of hierarchy a bit of structure and some rules when it comes to teaching at least now this is exactly the same for families to raise happy healthy functioning young adults a family needs to have a bit of organization a better structure and some leadership from adults structural family systems believes that when a family doesn't have these elements in place then we start seeing dysfunction and symptoms showing up and that is when the family comes to us for help Salvador mnuchin and his team had some very specific thoughts on what the structure of a family should like and 60 years later it hasn't really changed that much although I think today we are very aware that we need to co-create the ideal hierarchy for a family and to respect cultural and religious beliefs which is so important so the idea that we go into a family therapy session knowing what might be best is a little jarring to some therapists but all we're really saying is that an ideal structure for a family is going to be co-created but we're going to have parents with more power and more Authority and we're going to have healthy boundaries between parents and kids so what we're looking at here is a family of four and you'll notice the parents are in a very clear subgroup and we separate out the kids in another subgroup this is kind of a generic ideal family structure that would use as a basis to go from I I want to show you two examples of what you might see when a structure is not like this what I see in Family Therapy when the structure is inverted is a lot of acting out behaviors that can include anything from running away to sometimes self-harm or substance use and oppositional behaviors these symptoms are going outwards that's an externalizing symptom as opposed to internalizing and for me externalizing symptoms are always about an inverted hierarchy the kids have too much power too much influence and they're ruling the house in a sense the kid has kicked the parents out of the parent subsystem another family might disclose to me that their 10 year old sleeps in the same bed as them at night and this might be appropriate In some cultures and some socioeconomic conditions but generally that's not developmentally appropriate and sure enough when I think of families that I've worked with these kids often have behavioral issues as well families with this sort of structure and hierarchy are also going to see kids that are acting out both at home and in school and you can imagine that this nine-year-old or ten-year-old has left the the kids subsystem and got into the adult group okay so I think you guys are more than ready to create your own family map so what we're going to do now is watch a scene from The Incredibles 2 where the family has come together to have dinner I found the interactions that they have and they're so realistic it is perfect for family systems training so if you've not got pen and paper go grab it now and let's create a family map based on this scene and on the other side of the video I'll show you what I did and you can sort of follow along and see um how your map and my map compares there were at least three standout moments in this clip that made me think of family systems and I could Envision the family map as I was watching this so number one Violet asked her brother a couple of different times and a couple of different ways to wash his hands and that made me think of her being parentified what she was saying sounded an awful lot like what Mom or Dad should have been saying to her brother at the very least she was really bossy then and it made me wonder if she's overstepping the mark as a teenager and stepping into the parent Zone remember in the real world the family isn't able to tell us about their structure so we have to infer it from interactions just like this it seemed to me that Violet has a bit too much power so she's going to be larger than others in my diagram and I might think that she's the ip2 she's certainly the center of discussion in the clip so I'm going to put her in the middle of my diagram the next standout point for me was the conflict between Mom and Dad dad seems to be taking Violet's side a lot and this is going to have to show up in my map somehow in terms of the relationship between him and violet Violet's basically getting dad to side with her against mum and this is quite a common Dynamic that makes me think there's an imbalance in the hierarchy and in fact it's sounding a bit like it's actually an alliance between Violet and dad against mum this is a cross-generational Alliance and um it means that I'm going to put Violet closer to Dad and also indicate that Dad and violet are against mum the fact that Dad didn't take mum's side and this means to me that there's some distance between mum and dad and whenever there is too much distance between parents boundaries between the parent subsystem and the child system become more porous and when boundaries like this become porous it gives Violet the ability to move up from her system into the parent Zone and as a result she's going to have more power she'll have more say she'll be more bossy than she should be as a teenager most often when parents disagree on something or get into arguments like this in front of their teen it gets used by the teen and I suspect that this is something that Violet is going to exploit she can work dad in her favor against mum if this was a dynamic going on in front of me in a session I would tell the parents that it's really not a good idea to have that kind of conflict in front of their teenager for that very reason So based on just two minutes of viewing a family you can get a lot of information to put in your family map Whenever You observe a family completing a task or just letting them talk as if you weren't there it's considered a form of an enactment and all that is is really just letting the family do their thing so you can watch and observe and understand and later on in treatment you could interrupt and give them new ways of interacting whatever ideas you pull from watching family or observing your family don't let them get solidified in your mind as a fact yet I consider all of my ideas to be a hypothesis and I'd be looking to prove or disprove things over time so when you compare the family map I just created to the ideal version of the family map and put the two side by side you actually get an outline of what is going to be your treatment plan because essentially what we're saying is that this ideal family this perfect version of our family hierarchy is the goal of treatment and the treatment plan then is all of the steps that we need to take to get there let me give you an idea of what the treatment plan might look like just based on these two versions of the map so number one would be about modifying the role of the IP I'm getting Violet to be less Central in the family I want her to be the right size and I would get Mum and Dad to stop letting her be parent number three one of the structural techniques I would use at this point would be to block or restrain Violet from acting like a parent in front of me in a session and I would try and get mum and dad to notice what I was doing and explain why so they were empowered to be more parental when I'm not around number two clarify boundaries there's a lot of porous boundaries going on here the parent conflict needs to be addressed as I suspect that that is really not helping um that boundaries between the parent system and the child system mum and dad need to have some pretty big discussions um away from their kids so that they can get on the same page about things I would tell them that arguing in front of the kids about topics like this this empowers them from being leaders and actually empowers Violet to be the boss of the household number three is enmeshment I've I've got to toughen that up a little bit and get him more comfortable setting limits with Violet they feel a bit enmeshed there's actually empirical evidence out there in some of the work that Chloe Medanos has done she's one of my favorite structural writers and she was looking at substance users in residential treatment center and found like something crazy like 80 of people in a residential treatment had this set up had a cross-generational Coalition in their own family of origin and if you think about it there's a really confusing message being sent to these kids they're being told that they're a child by one parent and uh told that they're an adult or a co-parent by another these are two overwhelmingly confusing messages to receive from parents I hope that gave you some insight into family mapping and how I use it and if you want to know more hit subscribe join the mailing list download the PDF and I'll do my best to keep these videos coming for you feel free to leave me comments or questions below and I'll do my best to answer them too