Fourth instalment in the series on third-generation therapies applied to family business. This time: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy.
Series: third-generation therapies in the family business · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6
There is a sentence I have heard in many family councils, almost always delivered with solemnity and almost always by the eldest sibling: “here we are business partners; being siblings stays at home”. Everyone nods. It is a sensible, well-meaning sentence. It usually has the desired effect, but in my experience that effect lasts about eleven minutes. Then someone says “it’s just that you always…” and they are siblings again, with forty years of history on the table. It is not a lack of discipline. It is that what the sentence asked for cannot be done.
Even though it is impossible to separate the role of family member from that of shareholder, this is the most repeated piece of advice in the field. “You have to separate the family from the business” (it is almost a mantra). I have heard it at conferences, read it in books, heard it from consultants and, to be honest, I recommended it myself for quite a few years.
The curious thing is that this is not what follows from the most cited model of the family business, the one everybody uses.
Renato Tagiuri and John Davis developed at Harvard, in the late seventies, the famous three-circle model (family, ownership and business), which is the diagram that appears on the first slide of any presentation on family business. If you look at the drawing, the circles overlap. That overlap is not a flaw in the model, but the very phenomenon the model sets out to explain. They themselves spoke of the bivalent attributes of the family business: every trait that makes it strong is also the one that makes it fragile, and that is not fixed by picking a side. In other words, the founders of this discipline were thinking in terms of “both at once”. The slogan that came out of their model thinks in terms of “either one or the other”. And that is not right.
That is what today’s instalment is about. What happens when, in a business family, we ask each person to choose whether at that table they are a sibling or a shareholder, and why the way out lies not in choosing, but in accepting that one is both at once and learning to live that way. To explain it I rely on the only one of the five therapies in this series that was born, quite literally, from refusing to choose.
A therapy born from being unable to choose
In 1961 a seventeen-year-old girl was admitted to the Institute of Living, a psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. She spent more than two years there, much of it in a seclusion room, with a diagnostic label that hardly anyone would give her today and a discharge report that described her as one of the most disturbed patients ever to have passed through the hospital. Her name was Marsha Linehan. At some point during that confinement, as she herself recounted many years later, she made herself a promise: to get out of that hell and then come back and get the others out.
She told the story in 2011, in a talk at that very hospital, and she told it then and not before for a reason that has a great deal to do with this article: for decades, a therapist who had been a patient was not credible. You were either one thing or the other.
She kept her promise. She became a psychologist and ended up running, at the University of Washington, a programme for the patients almost nobody wanted to treat: people with chronic suicidal behaviour, who harmed themselves repeatedly, with emotions so intense that any upset overwhelmed them and with relationships that broke down again and again. To put it simply, imagine someone for whom a small criticism lands the way a catastrophe lands for someone else, and who takes much longer to recover. Linehan noticed something that changed the way she worked: many of them had grown up in environments where they were told that what they felt was wrong, that they were exaggerating, that it was no big deal. They had learned that their emotions were a mistake, and that left them not knowing what to do with them.
With those patients she started by trying what was available at the time, classic cognitive behavioural therapy, the kind that focuses on changing what one thinks and what one does. And it failed, though not because it was a bad therapy. For someone who has spent their whole life hearing that something about them is wrong, a therapist who asks them to change sounds exactly like everyone before: one more person telling them the problem is them. Many dropped out.
So she tried the opposite, which is what almost all of us would do. Acceptance, warmth, understanding, no demands. This time the patients stayed and felt supported, and within a few weeks the other problem became visible: nothing changed. They were understood and remained just as unwell, with a life that really was unbearable and needed more than comfort.
What broke the deadlock was an idea Linehan took, in part, from the Zen practice she herself followed: not choosing either path nor settling halfway between them, but practising both fully and at the same time. Complete acceptance and a complete demand for change, in the same sentence if need be. She called this dialectics. The word sounds like philosophy, but the idea fits in one line: two things that seem opposite can be true at the same time, and the way out is not to declare one the winner or to split the difference, but to hold both.
With it she built Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. She published the first clinical trial in 1991, and today it is one of the best-supported treatments for borderline personality disorder, endorsed by the Society of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association.
Her way of working is well summed up in two sentences that, at first sight, are at odds with each other.
The first: the patient is doing the best she can. It means that, given the history she carries and the resources she has, what she does makes sense, even if it harms her. That is acceptance.
The second: the patient has to do better. It means that the best she can do right now is not enough to get her out of where she is, and that change is necessary, not optional. That is demand.
If the therapist only says the first, they keep the patient company while she sinks. If they only say the second, the patient feels judged and leaves. Linehan asked her therapists to say both, whole and together.
Let’s see what that looks like in a business.
The founder who won’t let go
Think of a seventy-eight-year-old founder who still goes to the office every morning. He built the company from nothing, knows every client by name and still signs the payments himself. His two children, now in their early fifties, have spent more than a decade waiting for him to give the signal for the handover. The family council has been discussing it for years and has got nowhere.
There are two common ways to get that meeting wrong.
The first is pure respect. The children tell him: “Dad, nobody has done what you have done, take all the time you need”. It is true, it is affectionate, and five more years go by without a date. The good managers, who can see the company has no clear future, start to leave. Everyone has been kind and the company is running out of successors. This is acceptance without change.
The second is pure rigour. The children tell him: “Dad, this can’t go on, next year you retire”. That is true as well, and it also makes sense. But the father hears in that sentence what almost every founder hears, which is “you are no longer any use”. He digs in, or agrees in words and sabotages in deeds, or falls out with one of his children and it all ends in a new will. This is change without acceptance.
The dialectical version is not halfway between the two. It sounds roughly like this: “Dad, we know what you have built and we know that letting go of it is no formality, and from the first of January next year you step down from running the company. Let’s decide together what your role will be”. Both things, whole, said at the same time. It is harder to say and harder to hear. It is also the only one of the three that sometimes works.
Validating is not agreeing
Of everything Dialectical Behaviour Therapy brings, what I miss most in family councils is a distinction that is worked on a great deal in therapy and barely exists in business: the difference between validating and agreeing.
Validating means telling the other person that what they feel makes sense, given their circumstances. It does not say that what they are asking for is fair or that it should be granted. It only says that it is understandable why they experience it that way. A sister believes her branch was left out of the succession. Validating her means saying “it makes sense that you feel that way; for fifteen years you have watched decisions being made by others”. Agreeing with her would mean saying “you are right, it was unfair and it has to be put right”. The first sentence opens a conversation. The second closes it, and on top of that decides the substance of the matter without it ever having been discussed.
There is a psychological reason why this matters. When people feel they are not being heard, they turn up the volume. They repeat the argument, harden it, bring it back from another year, not because they want a fight, but because they believe that if they don’t shout, nobody will notice. When they feel understood, the tension drops on its own and they can finally hear something else. Linehan based a good part of her therapy on that observation, and anyone who has mediated between siblings will recognise it.
In families, validation almost never happens, and I think the reason is that it gets confused with agreeing. Since nobody wants to concede the point, nobody acknowledges the feeling, and the grievance stays alive for twenty years, coming out wherever it can, usually as a vote against on an issue that has nothing to do with it. Validating costs nothing in terms of rights or percentages. What it costs is that it sounds like giving in, and it isn’t.
The “but” and the “and”
And now a tool so small it is almost embarrassing to put in writing, but one that Linehan genuinely teaches in her skills manuals: replacing “but” with “and”.
“I understand that you feel sidelined, but the council has already decided.” “I understand that you feel sidelined, and the council has already decided.” Both sentences give the same information. The first erases everything that comes before the but: the listener knows the opening was a formality and that the real sentence starts afterwards. The second leaves both things standing (your feeling is legitimate and the decision has been taken), which is exactly the real situation.
It is hard to do, I warn you, because “but” is our usual way of signalling that the important part is coming. Try it at the next council. It’s hard, but it works. And sorry about the but.
Siblings who have to vote
If I had to sum up what Dialectical Behaviour Therapy contributes to a family council in a single sentence, it would be this: stop trying to be only shareholders. You can’t, and the effort of pretending is what turns every corporate disagreement into a family offence and every family offence into a corporate deadlock.
Careful, this does not mean the governance bodies are redundant. Separating the forums works: at the general meeting you speak as a shareholder and at the family council, as family. What doesn’t work is asking each person to stop being who they are. Whoever votes at the general meeting is still a sibling.
The dialectical version of that solemn sentence from the beginning is not “here we are business partners”. It is “here we are siblings who have to vote”. It is less elegant, but it is true, and in the long run what is true turns out to be easier to sustain than what sounds good.
We have one therapy left to cover, and it is the one that involves me most personally. Robert Kohlenberg and Mavis Tsai developed Functional Analytic Psychotherapy around an uncomfortable idea: that the relationship with the therapist is not the setting in which the problem is worked on, but the place where the problem shows up live. Translated to a family council, it means that the adviser, the lawyer or the consultant does not observe the pattern from outside. They are part of it. In the next instalment I will have to talk about myself.
This text is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or psychological counselling. The models described here belong to the field of clinical psychology and are presented as a framework applied to family business governance, not as a diagnosis or treatment of any family member.
Do you recognise any of these patterns in your family council?
At Alta Mediación we combine law and applied psychology to work with business families, not just with documents. If in your council every corporate disagreement ends up being experienced as a family offence, let’s talk about how to organise the forums and the conversations so that decisions can be made without breaking the relationship.