Beyond the One-Way Mirror - Page 6


Structural Family Therapy as the Framework for Change

I'd like to say I had immediate success transporting PLL to the public sector, but that wouldn't even be close. In fact, I had so little luck during the next six years that I nearly gave up the struggle. In the early days, agencies would use parts of the PLL model for a while and then go back to their old way of doing things. I kept asking myself what I was doing wrong. I remember calling my wife in tears from a plane that was taxiing down the runway after leaving yet another public agency that wasn't using my model. To make matters worse, I'd left my carry-on suitcase in the airport restaurant. At that moment, I almost gave up. But luckily I remembered Thomas Edison's words on the subject of failure: "I have not failed 5,000 times in trying to invent the light bulb. I have successfully discovered 5,000 ways that do not work and I do not need to try again."

I remember the exact day and time when my own personal light bulb went on. I'd contracted with a state and its local agencies to train their therapists, but as I walked into the training session, I saw 20 angry clinicians staring me down. I was clueless as to why and
didn't know what to do about it, so I just began the training. After half an hour, one of the therapists raised his hand and asked, "Why are we here? Our bosses told us that we had to come to this training, but we still don't know why." As far as these clinicians were concerned, they'd been ordered to listen to some stranger exhort them to add one more difficult job—a new therapy method—to their already packed days, without discussing it with them beforehand. Needless to say, they weren't ready to "buy into" the new program.

I later realized that despite all my attention to how to heal tough families, I'd failed to apply the principles of family therapy to tough organizations. As Minuchin himself might have said, I'd tried to restructure the family (the local agency) without first joining and being invited into their world. An aha moment occurred for me right then and there: the effective application of the methods of good structural family therapy were vital to achieving transportability.

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