An Interview with Family Therapy Scholar Maria Gomori

I think that there are certainly large differences between the Eastern and Western cultures in terms of traditional families. For example, Chinese place more emphasis on family traditions than Western cultures. Also, there's more emphasis on loyalty to the family and on expectations of family members. When we do family therapy work, we must recognize these differences and respect them.

Let's take a concrete example. When faced with stress, people generally have one of four reactions: placating, blaming, ignoring (treating the stress as irrelevant), or being super-rational. In my workshops, I have noticed that Chinese can understand the "placating" stance easily. Chinese are relatively polite to outsiders, no matter what they may feel inside. On the other hand, when I ask them to adopt a stance of blame, many people can't bring themselves to point their finger at someone else. Many students even find it difficult to say the word "no" to others. It seems that in your culture, blame is not a very good thing.

When I was in South America, the situation was exactly the opposite: everyone knows how to blame, but nobody wants to placate. In Britain everyone knows how to be "super-reasonable," like a computer, and they do not blame very much.

Human nature

So culture has an influence. But, the reason that I can work in Taiwan, as in any other country, is because I use a model that puts the focus on the basic needs and human nature of the individual, and pays attention to family interactions-for example, when the family faces stress, how does each member react? What kinds of feelings do they have? These processes are universal, and there are not very great differences between cultures.

Because we are all human, we share in human nature and feelings. For example, we all feel happiness, jealousy, sadness, anger, disappointment, and maternal love. On the emotional level, we are all very similar. To take another example, in every corner of the world people want to be free, to be able to be themselves. Everyone wants to be happy. Most importantly, everyone hopes to be loved; no matter what their culture, they want to be recognized and affirmed.

Thus when people say to me, "I cannot sustain relationships," and I look at the individual experience, and understand what kinds of conclusions they drew from their early lives, I find one thing very often: The parents did not praise this child, or the parents' method of affirmation was not what the child needed, so the child could not feel it.

As a result the child developed self-esteem problems such as the feeling that "I'm not capable of being loved" or "I'm not good enough." I know many people who, though they have advanced degrees and great accomplishments, still feel that they are inferior. This all comes from criticism by parents in their early years, and they carry this pain around with them their whole lives.

Relaxing rigid family rules

In family therapy, we start with some very important concepts about the family. For example, we assume that every parent is doing the best they know how to teach their children. The problem is that they can only do what they know, and these things all come from what they learned in their own families, because family life is the root of all learning-the family is the first school for everyone after coming into this world.

Sadly, even if the parents are doing all they can, why is it so many children still suffer so much pain in the process of growing up? I think that the mistakes that parents make usually come out of good intentions, and not deliberate errors. They simply carry forward some incorrect methods they learned from the previous generation.

For example, people often say "should..." "never..." or "always..." Some family norms require that children never show anger and that no matter what anyone says, they should always be obedient. But, whether they know it or not, this is not congruent with human nature.

For instance, long-term suppression of anger can easily lead to physical or mental harm. Take for instance a woman who always acts to please her husband, and represses her own feelings and desires in order to make him happy. After 15 or 20 years, she may begin suffering headaches, ulcers, and other symptoms, because her body does not like to do this kind of appeasement. In any case, this kind of conflict between the mind and body may leave the husband feeling uninterested and have a contrary effect. I've seen many broken marriages for these reasons.

In the class, we teach people how to transform these norms. We believe that in every rule there's some wisdom, it's just that they may lack choice or flexibility. As human beings, we cannot do "always," the best we can do is "sometimes." And sometimes we can break the rules, and give ourselves an exception.

Family depictions

In the workshop I often use depiction to show what I see. That is, I use externalized forms to display the internal experiences of the individual involved. For example, in a given family, there may be one person who has a great deal of power; I place them in a chair. There may be one person who is constantly trying to please others; I will ask them to kneel. If someone feels distance from others, I set them far apart.

Also, I do drawings based on what the individual involved tells me. When someone sees the image before their eyes, other things come to mind. For example a person may recall how, when he was small, the people around him communicated, or how his father criticized his mother, how his mother tried to please everybody, how he felt at that time. . . . I then ask the person: "In your relationships with your family and certain important friends now, where is your position?" In the end, people often discover that the picture of their relationships today is extremely similar to the one depicting their own families when they were small.

In the workshop, I do my best to let people understand their own motivations and behavior in the family, to let them see what they learned when they were small. After growing up, they can investigate a little, and discard those things that are no longer useful, and of course retain those things which are.

However, I stress that in these models, there's no completely good or completely bad, right or wrong. We are not out to criticize people, we just want to see what it is these people are doing. What makes them comfortable? What kind of price do they pay for the way they act? I also don't make choices for people, I just provide some suggestions, and review with them, in order to understand what they have been through.

This is what's interesting about the workshops. We dig up some things that aren't consciously known, to get to the heart of the problem.

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Family therapy expert Maria Gomori, though already over 80, still loves to go around the world teaching and traveling. She has been coming to Taiwan for a decade to teach and sow the seeds of family therapy. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)