These cross-categorical structures are precisely the balls Peter is trying to juggle. He is beset with five, ten, fifteen balls, each one a different loyalty, value, expectation, or conviction. He can no longer throw them to Anderson because Anderson no longer wants to catch them. A juggler in control of the juggling understands that he is really

While the family, to varying degrees, feels that Jamie is failing at life, the therapist explicitly calls Jamie a success at keeping the family stable, at being a good, devoted daughter, at staying a child who needs a mother’s close attention.

An informational stance leaves the form as it is and focuses on changing what people know; it is essentially a training model for personal change. I would contrast this with a transformational stance, which places the form itself at risk for change and focuses on changes in how people know; it is essentially an educational model for personal

Although the terms of the family mind might have changed, if there is no change in the structure of at least one family member’s mind, it seems doubtful that anyone’s relation to “the family mind” will be different.

since the focus of the therapist’s formulation is not inferences but the system that organizes or creates inferences, since its focus is not relationships but the relationship between the relationships, what governs the relationships, and since its focus is not on people as the repositories of their feelings but as active creators of their

Along the same lines, the formulation attends to more than the feelings family members have inside them, or, we might say, it attends to the family members themselves as something more than the suffering carriers of painful feelings of worry, discouragement, and frustration. Instead, it constructs the family members—each one of them—as active

the therapist’s formulation focuses on the relationships between the relationships, the way the various relationships are all under the governance of a single principle of undiscussed family loyalty and devotion.

If the self is derived from cross-categorical ways of knowing, as seems to be the case with Peter, the looming failure to preserve a collection of irreconcilable expectations may be experienced as a difficulty in holding himself together. There is no reason for Peter to experience this as “dependency,” or for us to suggest that he is any less

When it comes to sexuality and adolescents it may be that the way we will “get them to change” their behavior tomorrow will depend on our changing the way we think today.