Outlaws and Invaders: The Adaptive Function of Alcohol Abuse in the Family-Helper Supra System

Dilution of Family Process in Social Services: Implications for Treatment of Neglectful Families

“…Their members are loosely connected, often responding less to each other than they do to agency workers, who become permanent fixtures in their life (Selvini‐Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980). They stay involved with “the system” for years, even generations (Miller, 1983), exhibiting patterns of chronic neglect rather than abuse. The parents may abandon their children to indulge in drug binges, fail to provide adequate shelter and food, or abdicate authority as the children reach adolescence, but they do not exercise physical or sexual violence against them — although they may render them more vulnerable to abuse by others.…”

“…Even in situations where power was originally taken away from them against their wishes, family members may “collaborate” by withdrawing from further participation in family life: many parents of children placed in foster care fail to show up for visits and, in general, display ambivalence about their parenting role, which frustrates any efforts to “reunify” the family (McCartt Hess & Folaron, 1991). It could even be argued that the workers are the ones who play a passive role, as victims of the family's need to control them (Miller, 1983), or as unwitting replicators of the family's dysfunctional patterns in their own interactions with the family and with one another (Schwartzman & Kneifel, 1985).…”

Assessing and Constructing a Meaningful System: Systemic Perspective in a College Counseling Center

“…The meaningful system, as identified by the therapist, refers to a context for the presented problem that includes sufficient sets of relational patterns and meanings to be able to organize information related to the problem in a useful way (Imber-Black, 1985). It may include the family plus particular supporting social structures the family has engaged to help in resolving their problems (Imber-Black, 1985;Miller, 1983;Selvini-Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980;Webb-Woodard & Webb-Woodard, 1983), the family plus nonhousehold significant others (Dammann & Berger, 1983), or the individual's own solution cycles (Weakland, 1983). On the college campus it may include the individual plus significant members of the college environment (Searight & Openlander, 1984;Terry, 1986).…”

A family-larger-system perspective.

“…The problems arising between families with handicapped members and the larger systems have been discussed by Berger (5); Bloomfield, Neilson, and Kaplan (6); Combrinck-Graham and Higley (9); and ImberBlack (17). Bokos and Schwartzman (7), Harkaway (11), Miller (24), Schwartzman and Kneifel (26), and Schwartzman and Restivo (27) have examined the ways in which systems designed to address and alleviate the problems of drug abuse, obesity, alcoholism, residential care for children, and delinquency tend to perpetuate problems, often by replicating patterns of family interaction and contributing to a reified macrosystem that becomes less and less capable of change.…”