Fifth instalment in the series on third-generation therapies applied to family business. This time: Functional Analytic Psychotherapy.
Series: third-generation therapies in the family business · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6
Thursday afternoon. The family council is tomorrow at ten. The phone rings and it is the youngest brother: “listen, before tomorrow, since you’re an outsider, could you tell my brother that the pay arrangement just doesn’t hold up?”. An hour later the eldest calls, with another request and almost the same words: “since you’re an outsider, could you explain to my brother that this isn’t about money?”. And the middle sister has left a voicemail that simply says “call me when you can”.
Anyone who has advised a business family knows that afternoon. For years I saw nothing in it but a quirk of the job, until I understood that those three calls were the most important piece of information in the whole file, and that what they said about the family mattered less than what they said about me.
That is what today’s instalment is about, and to explain it I rely on a therapy born from an idea that many people find almost offensive: that the therapist does not look at the problem from the outside. He is inside it.
What happens in the room
Robert Kohlenberg and Mavis Tsai, of the University of Washington, published in 1991 the book that gave rise to Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, which everyone has since abbreviated as FAP. They start from a simple observation: a therapist sees the patient for one hour a week. He cannot go home with them to see how they argue with their partner, or to the office to see how they behave with their boss. What he knows about the patient’s life is what the patient tells him, and what people say does not always match what they do.
But there is a shortcut. People do not behave one way at home and another way in the consulting room. Someone who complains that nobody listens to them and then talks for thirty minutes without letting the therapist get a word in is reproducing, live and right in front of him, exactly the pattern they complain about. Someone who says they are always abandoned and cancels the session when the conversation gets close to what hurts is making that very same move right there, with the therapist as a witness.
Kohlenberg and Tsai called these situations clinically relevant behaviours, and divided them into two types: those that are the problem and show up in the session, and those that are an improvement and also show up in the session, such as the patient who for the first time stays with the uncomfortable topic instead of running from it, or who tells the therapist something difficult to say. The therapy consists, to a large extent, of being alert to the first kind, creating the context in which they can be worked on, and responding to the second kind naturally and sincerely. Not with a textbook “well done”, but with the real reaction of a person who has just been told something brave.
The uncomfortable rule
They condensed all of this into five rules.
The first is to observe: to notice when the problem pattern appears in the middle of a session, something that is easy to miss if you are busy following your own script.
The second is to evoke it carefully, that is, to create a situation in which the pattern has a chance to appear and can be worked on, rather than waiting for it to come up by chance.
The third is to reinforce improvements naturally: when the patient does something different and braver, to respond as any sincere person would, without formulas.
The fifth is to help the patient understand what has happened and connect it with their life outside the consulting room, so that what happens in the room does not stay in the room.
I have skipped the fourth on purpose, because it is the uncomfortable one: paying attention to the effect the therapist himself has on the patient.
Put bluntly, the therapist is one of the variables in the experiment. What he does, when he responds, when he stays silent, when he rescues, when he steps back, is not neutral: it reinforces or dampens things. If he does not notice, what happens in the room stops being information and becomes noise that he himself produces.
It is a very simple idea, and in the world of advisory work it is almost never raised.
The adviser inside the pattern
Let’s go back to Thursday afternoon. What were the three siblings doing with their calls? All three were doing the same thing: not saying something to another sibling and looking for someone to say it for them. They have probably been doing it for years, long before I came along, with their mother, with an uncle, with the finance director or with the previous lawyer. It is not a trick they have prepared for me. It is what they do when something is too hard to say.
Now comes the part that matters, which is what I do with it. If I act as messenger, I become the latest link in a pattern that is decades old, and I give it exactly what it is looking for: a comfortable way of not having to say things face to face. Every message I pass on teaches the family that it works, and it works because there is someone to carry the messages. On top of that, I find it pleasant. Having two partners confide in you what they do not say to each other is flattering, and that flattery is the reinforcement that keeps the pattern going. A lawyer with an ego can spend years being, without knowing it, part of the cause.
And it is not only a problem of messages. Some families see the adviser as the judge who will say who is right, others as the ally to be won over before the meeting, others as the authority in front of whom a presentable version of the family is performed. Each of those positions repeats, in miniature, the way that family relates to itself.
My turn
I promised to talk about myself, and this is as close as I will come to a professional confession.
Let me tell you about a case that is a composite of several, with all the details changed so that nobody recognises themselves. I was advising a family in which two cousins shared the management of the company without having divided up their roles properly. One of them started calling me before every board meeting, always with the same formula: “you tell him, he listens to you and not to me”. At first I did, because smoothing the way seemed reasonable and because, to be honest, I liked the role. For months I was the one explaining to the other cousin what the first did not dare to tell him face to face. Until, at a meeting where I had once again conveyed his position, the cousin who was listening fell silent for a moment and said, without addressing anyone in particular: “it’s funny, these things always reach me through someone else”. Nobody answered. I did not know what to say either, and that was the sign that something was off. When I thought about it afterwards, I understood that for months I had been doing exactly what the family needed someone to stop doing: sparing them the difficult conversation. From then on I changed my answer to those calls before meetings: “I can be in the meeting with you, but you are the one who tells him”.
What I found useful in FAP, once I realised what I was doing, was not the technique. It was the permission it gives: to stop treating my own reaction as a private matter and start treating it as information about the family.
What to do with this
The alternative to being the messenger is not to refuse coldly. It is to say what is happening, out loud and tactfully: “you’re asking me to tell him, and I can, but I think it would carry much more weight if you tell him yourself and I’m here with you”. And when someone takes that step, which is the improvement we are looking for, the response does not have to be applause. A genuine reaction is enough: listening without interrupting, not rescuing them when they run out of words, and letting their brother respond.
It is worth knowing that, when the adviser stops carrying messages, the first reaction is almost never relief. The usual thing is for the calls to become more insistent for a while, because what used to work has stopped working and the family tries harder. In behavioural psychology this is called an extinction burst, and it is a sign that change is under way, not that you have done something wrong.
This is uncomfortable for everyone, for the family and for whoever is advising it. But the alternative is to keep feeding the same circuit with a different face.
And if you are part of the family, I leave you with a question that is almost never asked out loud. What would happen to you if your lawyer, your consultant or your mediator refused, starting tomorrow, to carry a single message more? The answer will probably say more about your family than any report.
What remains
In the previous article I told you we had one therapy left to cover. I miscounted: there is one more, the one I left out. It is the one that teaches you to see automatic patterns before they drag everyone along, the one that really asks what a family does when the same old conflict shows up again, on autopilot, and nobody knows how to stop it. It is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and it deserves its own article.
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.