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Factors Impacting Change

Factors Impacting Change Program Transcript

NARRATOR: Whether or not a change effort is successful depends on a variety of factors. In this video program, Dr. Judy Lewis describes two of these factors, systems and diversity, and explains how they impact change efforts.

JUDY LEWIS: You really can't even think about change without thinking about the concept of systems. Whether you're talking about a family system, a community system, an organization, systems have their way of operating. They like to keep things at a steady state. When an individual tries to change something, you're going to come up against the system trying to maintain itself in the usual customary way. No matter what kind of change you're trying to bring about, you really have to be analyzing what's happening with the systems that impact the individual.

It's an interesting thing about family counseling. Family counselors understand systems to their core. One of the basic things that every family counselor knows is that an individual is affected by the family system, and that it's very difficult to change anything about an individual's behavior without coming up against the need to get adjustments in the system as a whole.

But even though family counselors understand about family systems, they don't always necessarily look beyond the family to the larger system. When you have a family system, that family system is impacted by culture, by diversity in the population, by community norms, by societal norms.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have the coincidence of having the same kinds of things happen in family after family. The distant father, what's seen as the over-involved mother, the differences in gender roles. You wouldn't have that in family after family if that weren't something that people have learned, not just from within their family, but from the culture as a whole.

Suppose that a counselor is working with a family. And that family, you have a situation where the woman is battered. Now, you could look at that from within the family, and you could think about what is the psychopathology of the male batterer? What is the psychopathology of the female victim?

Or you could look beyond that, not to excuse the behavior of a batterer, but to ask, what is it that this man learned about the role of men? What did he learn about that from his culture, from society? What did this woman learn about the role of women? What did she learn about gender, as a person growing up in this society?

If you look beyond what's happening in the individual family to the larger systems, it gives you so much more understanding of what's happening. And it

Factors Impacting Change

also makes you realize that you need to look beyond just your clients in order to make any big changes, and in order to prevent more families from going through this same thing.

I think as a counselor/educator in particular, this is a great opportunity for teaching. Because students will come up against clients like this. They'll come up against families like this. And the way that they're going to learn to have that broader picture comes from the questions that the counselor/educator or supervisor asks.

What are you seeing here? What might you ask this woman about what she thinks about the meaning of being a woman in this society?

What if you were to ask this man about what he learned growing up about the role of a man in a family?

As long as you, as the educator or supervisor are asking these questions, you're going to broaden the outlook of the counselors, and that's going to make all the difference.

When we're talking about working with systems, we need to make sure that our counselor/education students understand this and are able to work with it.

Now, of course, you need to begin with explaining how systems work. They need to understand how it works theoretically. Especially because sometimes it seems counter-intuitive. Sometimes it looks like an individual person in a family is sabotaging the recovery of another person in the family. But you have to change your point of view to understand that it's just the system reasserting itself, and trying to protect itself from change.

So there has to be a general understanding of systems and how they work. But there's no substitute for particular examples, real people questioning what's happening in a particular family, or with a particular individual in a systems context.

So part of what needs to happen is that educators and supervisors need to be alert to opportunities to teach about systems whenever their students are talking about particular cases.

As long as we keep asking questions and broadening the context within which our students see what's happening, I think we're going to have a lot of impact.

The most important thing for a counselor to understand about diversity, or multi- culturalism, is that it isn't just a list of the characteristics of particular populations. It really starts with looking internally at oneself, and the assumptions that one makes, just as a person, rather than as a professional. What are the assumptions

Factors Impacting Change

that we make about, what is good mental health? What is a healthy family? What is an effective way to live in the world?

Our own assumptions that come from our culture may have an impact on the way we work with clients in a way that may be damaging. If we assume that our own assumptions are universal, then we might try to impose those without even realizing what we're doing. And we might be imposing a version of mental health that doesn't fit maybe a different, more traditional culture.

So the counselor has to begin by a lot of self-interrogation. Am I sure that I am being careful not to impose my own views on the client?

Now, that goes up another level to the counselor/educator or supervisor. We really need, as counselor/educators and supervisors, to be careful to do some of that internal searching ourselves, because it's going to be our responsibility to help counselors in training learn to ask themselves these questions.

Now, you can talk about multi-culturalism and diversity in general terms. But when you look at actual clients, when a student is working with a case, it's the supervisor or the educator who's going to be asking the question, what made you ask about that? Or, had you thought about asking the family what they thought about whether people should be independent at a particular age? Have you asked these questions?

I think that that's an important thing for educators and supervisors to be able to do. It means that, in order to have our students start to develop a broad point of view about what the community does to enhance mental health, we need to have that in our own hearts and minds first.

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