In his practice, Buglione works with many families dealing with the challenges of immigration and assimilation. One family, from Jordan, had been in the U.S. for 10 years. The teen-aged kids were acting out, and the parents responded by becoming authoritarian, worried that America’s more permissive culture would usurp the family’s Middle Eastern values.
To show he was on everyone’s side, ­Buglione met with the whole family first, then with the parents, then with the kids. In Jordan, younger generations are traditionally expected to show great respect for their elders. So rather than challenge the parents, he focused on empathy. Everyone agreed to make adjustments: The parents loosened the reins a bit while the kids worked on handling their freedom responsibly. At the same time, traditional values remained alive at home; there, the kids honored their parents while at school they were less formal. By bringing a systems perspective to the family, Buglione helped them bridge worlds.
We are all embedded within a series of systems—our family, our social network, our community, our society as a whole, our culture, our world. We spread the relationships and communication patterns learned within our families, both good and bad, outward into these other systems. And these connections extend well beyond our immediate kin to anyone who plays an important role in our lives—our friends, business associates, hairdressers, clergy, financial advisers. As a result, these people can be involved in systems therapy, too. With permission from the client or family, systems therapists will include anyone with something to contribute to the therapeutic process.
Another Buglione client, a 10-year-old named Justin, was at odds with his school principal. Justin had been neglected as a young child before his current family adopted him, and Buglione had been working with them to address Justin’s attention deficit disorder and issues with trust. When students teased him or he felt his ­teachers were bossing him around, Justin talked back and reacted impulsively. The principal suspended Justin twice, but the more she cracked down, the more Justin reacted.
Finally, Buglione and the family met with the principal. Buglione helped the principal understand Justin’s other issues, including the boy’s fear that the principal didn’t like him. Together with the family, they came up with ways the principal could help Justin feel special and needed. Now Justin’s behavior has improved, and he and the principal even smile at each other in the halls.
Family systems therapy ­started in the 1950s along with the new field of systems theory, a multidisciplinary movement in which biologists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians began to look at everything from power grids to ecosystems as interconnected. Using systems theory as a basis, a group of therapists, clinicians and social workers developed what eventually would be known as family systems therapy.
Among them was Virginia ­Satir, a social worker who started seeing families as a schoolteacher in Wisconsin. Satir would visit students’ homes to meet their families and encourage parental support. She realized it was a potent way to learn more about her students’ lives than she ever could in the classroom. When Satir became a social worker, she started to share her ideas with psychiatrists, cofounding The Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, where in 1962 she became the director of the  first formal family therapy program in the world.
Satir, who died in 1988, taught that we all have an innate tendency toward positive growth, but this tendency can be blocked—by the negative experiences and signals picked up within our families, among other things. “Let’s think that inside the human being there are countless little jets, but many of these jets are closed,” Satir explained in a 1988 interview. By “opening up all these holes, which are our feelings and our possibilities … we can have harmony moving. We have the total force of the energy possible.”
“Satir ‘saw’ people,” says Carl Sayles, a marriage and family therapist in private practice and director of training at Satir Institute of the Sierra in Fair Oaks, California. “People have things to say, and validating that they’ve said something makes them feel heard. When my voice is heard, I feel connected and that I matter.”
Satir modeled ways for therapists to enter a family system respectfully, by emphasizing communication, empathy and a regard for the client’s unique experience. Satir wanted to find out what was right with a family as much as she wanted to find out what was wrong—and that, she feels, is largely done through listening. “We may be experts on therapy, but the family is an expert on who they are,” says Wampler.
Wampler put this method into practice several years ago in Lubbock, Texas, by sending his graduate students from Texas Tech University to the homes of local families who wouldn’t have otherwise sought—or been able to afford—family therapy. The Parent Empowerment Project (PEP) started in 1998 as a state-funded program that paid 40 community members to take a course in adolescent development, effective parenting techniques and ways to work with families. The project paid those who completed the course to organize parent education programs in their communities. Wampler chose four of those organizers to become parent educators with a special mission: to team up with his graduate students and visit families in a stressed, economically depressed Lubbock neighborhood, families worried about paying the mortgage and the utility bills and whose kids were high risk, on probation or kicked out of the school system.
Those four parent educators were Latinas who had grown up in the ­neighborhood. “They were familiar with the rhythm of life, the location, the areas that were safer to go into than others,” explains Wampler. “They had street cred.” This made them the crucial link between families and therapists—and between families and the wider community.