Complementary and Mirrored Connections Explored

Harmonious and Corresponding Interactions

In the 1960s, a groundbreaking team of theorists and psychologists at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California, began studying communication in families using a new approach. This pioneering work, which forms the basis of much of what we do in family therapy today, is known as cybernetic thinking.

The MRI team's work emphasizes that there is no "right" way to set up a relationship, as both symmetrical and complementary patterns can be healthy in significant or married relationships. They identified two types of feedback loops: symmetrical, where people respond to each other in similar ways, and complementary, where one person yields to or supports the other.

In healthy symmetrical relationships, the two parties mirror each other, celebrating and respecting each other's success. An unhealthy example of symmetry would be of two siblings who are brutally competitive with each other. On the other hand, an unhealthy complementarity can be seen in couples where one person dominates, disrespects, and controls the other.

Cybernetic thinking short-circuits the idea that someone started a problem interaction, focusing instead on the circularity of their interaction and helping everyone involved understand it and decide how to change it. This approach puts the couple (or family members) on the same team, making it easier for them to stop fighting with each other and instead to turn their attention to mutually solving the problem.

The goal of treatment, in cybernetic thinking, shifts from fixing an individual to fixing a pattern. Treatment necessarily then moved from treating each individual to treating the communication within the system as a whole. This shift recognizes that self-reinforcing and self-correcting feedback loops occur in many fields, including neurology, evolutionary biology, mechanical and electrical systems, and psychology.

The most gifted psychologists of the time, including Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Richard Fisch, Jules Riskin, Virginia Satir, Salvador Minuchin, R.D. Laing, Irvin D. Yalom, Jay Haley, and Cloe Madanes, were drawn to Palo Alto to engage in this revolutionary research and to learn from each other. Their work at the MRI was a seismic shift in thinking, asking us to stop looking at problematic behaviors of individuals in a family and instead to consider the family as a "system," an organic and ecological whole whose members are in constant communication with and reaction to each other.

Cybernetic thinking encourages a reduction in defensiveness of individuals and makes each more open to working on their particular concerns. It is understood that a person can only be triggered if they have a sensitivity to whatever the other person does, and the person doing the triggering may not have any idea that they are setting off something in the partner.

Describing a pattern of communication that a couple or family has fallen into removes the idea that someone is to blame for the problems. The therapist's role is not to promote what works for them personally but to look for the health or potential for health in a couple's unique pattern of relating and to help them strengthen it.

The work at Palo Alto was a turning point in the field of psychology, offering a new way to understand and treat relationships. Today, the principles of cybernetic thinking continue to guide family therapists as they work to help couples and families find healthier, more harmonious ways of communicating and living together.