Gathering Information Through Action: Asking the Family to Enact the Problem

We know that a family enters the room with a story they have told many times. This story identifies who is the victim, who is the villain, and who is the person who needs to change. If you spend the first hour listening to this story, you validate their version of the problem. We prefer to ignore the story and watch the behavior. Jay Haley argued that the structure of the family reveals itself only through interaction. You must force that interaction to happen in front of you. When a mother says her son is disrespectful, you do not ask for examples from last week. You ask the mother to tell the son right now that he cannot have his phone for the rest of the evening. This directive moves the session from a report of the past into a live demonstration of the present.

I once saw a family where the parents complained about their seven year old daughter’s refusal to eat dinner. They spent twenty minutes describing her tantrums and their own exhaustion. I interrupted their description and produced a small container of yogurt and a spoon from my desk. I told the parents that it was dinner time and they needed to get their daughter to eat the yogurt. The father immediately became the playful entertainer while the mother became the stern enforcer. Within three minutes, the daughter was screaming and the parents were arguing with each other about whose method was worse. This enactment showed me more about their hierarchical confusion than two hours of questioning could have provided.

You must observe the sequence of the interaction with clinical detachment. We look for who initiates the conflict and who attempts to solve it. We look for who sides with whom when the tension rises. If you are part of the conversation, you cannot see the structure. You must physically move your chair away from the family circle. You lean back and stop making eye contact with the speakers. When you withdraw your presence, the family members must turn toward each other. This is the moment when the real clinical data appears. If the father looks at you for help when his daughter refuses a bite, you must point your finger back at the daughter. You do not speak. You use a gesture to tell him to continue the task.

We understand that the family’s problem is a functional part of their organization. The problem is not inside the child: it is in the way the people in the room are organized around that child. Milton Erickson often remarked that people come to us because they are stuck in a repetitive cycle of behavior. Our job is to break that cycle by introducing a new element or by making the cycle so obvious that it can no longer be ignored. You use enactment to make the invisible visible. When you see a wife interrupt her husband every time he tries to speak, you do not tell her to stop. You ask her to explain to her husband why she thinks he is unable to speak for himself. This instruction forces the latent power struggle into the open.

I worked with a couple who had not had an intimate conversation in three years. They sat on opposite ends of my couch and spoke only to me. They were using me as a buffer to avoid the pain of their distance. I stood up and moved my chair to the corner of the room. I told them they had fifteen minutes to decide together what they wanted for their marriage. For the first five minutes, they sat in a heavy atmosphere of avoidant behavior. Then the wife began to cry, and the husband remained frozen. He did not move to comfort her. He did not look at her. By creating this enactment, I learned that the husband’s primary defense was total emotional withdrawal when faced with his wife’s distress. If I had stayed in the circle and facilitated a polite conversation, I would have missed the severity of his detachment.

You must be careful not to intervene too early in an enactment. We often feel the urge to rescue the family from their discomfort. If the child starts to cry or the parents start to yell, you might feel a desire to calm the room. You must resist this urge. The data you need is in the peak of the conflict. You are looking for the point where their current solutions fail. We watch for the repetitive sequence. A mother asks a son to sit down. The son ignores her. The father sighs and looks at the ceiling. The mother asks again, but her voice is now a plea. The son stands up and walks to the window. The mother looks at the father for help. The father tells the mother she is too soft. This is a complete sequence. It tells us that the mother has no authority and the father uses the mother’s failure to prove his own superiority.

We use these observations to design our interventions. If you do not see the sequence, you are shooting in the dark. You might give a directive that the family is structurally unable to follow. For example, if you tell that mother to be more firm without addressing the father’s undermining behavior, you are setting her up for a failure. You must first reorganize the parents. You might do this by telling the father he is forbidden from helping the mother for the next ten minutes. He must sit with his hands under his legs while she gets the son to sit down. This creates a different enactment that tests the father’s ability to restrain himself and the mother’s ability to find her own power.

I once treated a man who brought his elderly father to the session. The son complained that the father was becoming increasingly confused and difficult to manage. During the session, the son spoke for the father, finished his sentences, and even adjusted the father’s glasses without asking. I asked the son to sit in the waiting room for ten minutes while I spoke to the father. The father’s confusion vanished the moment the son left the room. He spoke clearly about his frustration with his son’s overbearing nature. The confusion was not a medical condition: it was a response to a son who had usurped the father’s position. I then brought the son back in and asked the father to tell the son exactly how he wanted his glasses adjusted. This enactment gave the father his voice back in the presence of the person who had taken it.

You will find that families often resist enactment. They will tell you they are too tired to argue. They will say they came to you so you could talk, not so they could fight. You must be firm. You can say that you cannot help them with a problem you have not seen. You tell them that you are like a mechanic who needs to hear the engine running. This metaphor usually gains their cooperation. Once they begin, you must stay out of it. We do not offer praise during an enactment. We do not offer critiques. We watch. You are looking for the hierarchy. You are looking for the coalitions. You are looking for who has the most influence in the system.

We often see that the person who appears to be the most powerful is actually the most controlled by the symptoms of others. A husband who yells may think he is in charge, but he only yells when his wife goes silent. The wife’s silence is a powerful provocation. In an enactment, you can see this timing. You can see the wife’s subtle smile when the husband loses his temper. You can see the husband’s shoulders drop when the wife finally speaks. These are the details that matter. We do not care about the content of the argument. The argument could be about the dishes or about a twenty year old affair. The structure of the interaction remains the same.

You must remember that you are the director of this play. You decide who speaks to whom. You decide when the enactment starts and when it ends. If you let the family take over, you have lost the session. I once had a family try to include me in their enactment by asking me what I would do in their situation. I told them that my opinion did not matter because I was not going home with them. I told them they had to find a solution that worked for their specific household. This forced them back into the interaction. We maintain the boundary of the observer to ensure the family remains responsible for their own change.

I once worked with two sisters who had not spoken for a year due to a dispute over their mother’s will. They came to the session at the mother’s request. They sat in silence. I did not try to make them feel better about each other. I placed a single pen on the table between them and told them they had to decide who was going to take the pen home. This sounds like a trivial task, but it forced an enactment of their entire history of competition and perceived unfairness. They spent thirty minutes debating the merits of who deserved the pen. I watched as the older sister tried to use guilt and the younger sister used logical arguments. The enactment showed that their conflict was not about money: it was about the recognition of their respective roles in the family.

You use these live demonstrations to prove to the family that their current way of behaving is not working. We do not tell them they are wrong. We let them show themselves that they are stuck. When the parents fail to get the child to eat the yogurt, they do not need me to tell them they have a problem. They can see the yogurt on the floor and hear the child screaming. The failure of their existing organization is now an undeniable fact in the room. This creates the necessary tension for them to accept a directive for change. A family that is comfortable will never change. You use enactment to create the discomfort that leads to a new way of being organized.

We look for the person who is most motivated to change the sequence. This is often the person who is most exhausted by the current structure. In the case of the yogurt, it was the mother. She was the one who had to deal with the child’s hunger and tantrums every night. I focused my next directive on her. I told her that for the next week, she was the only one allowed to provide food. The father was to have no role in feeding. This shifted the hierarchy and forced the mother to find a new way to interact with her daughter without the father’s interference. We change the organization by changing the rules of the enactment.

You will observe that some families have very rigid sequences. They do the same thing every time. Other families are chaotic and have no predictable sequence. Both are signs of a system that is failing. In a rigid system, you use enactment to introduce a small piece of unexpected behavior. In a chaotic system, you use enactment to impose a strict structure. I once told a chaotic family that they could only speak if they were holding a specific heavy book. This enactment slowed down their interaction and forced them to acknowledge one another. They had to physically pass the book to the next speaker. This changed the timing of their communication.

We focus on the present. We do not ask about the parents’ childhoods or their past traumas. We believe that if you change the way they interact today, the past will take care of itself. The enactment is the tool that keeps the focus on the here and now. If a client tries to move into a historical explanation, you bring them back to the person sitting next to them. You tell them to explain that history to their spouse and see how the spouse responds. This keeps the session active and prevents it from becoming a lecture. We are not teachers: we are strategic practitioners who use action to create change.

I once saw a couple where the wife was terrified of the husband’s anger. Instead of talking about his anger, I asked him to stand up and show me how he looked when he was angry. He was reluctant, but I insisted. He stood up and began to shout at an empty chair. The wife began to laugh. She saw that his anger was a performance. It lost its power over her in that moment. This enactment changed the nature of their relationship. The husband could no longer use his anger to control her because the secret of the performance had been revealed. We use the enactment to expose the mechanics of the symptom.

You must be prepared for the family to try and pull you into their struggle. They will look at you for approval or for a judgment on who is right. You must remain a neutral observer of the process. Your only interest is the sequence. When you stay neutral, you force the family to look at each other for the solution. This is where the power of the strategic approach lies. We do not provide the answer. We provide the conditions under which the family must find a new answer. The enactment is the container for this process.

I worked with a man who was obsessed with his wife’s perceived infidelities. He would interrogate her for hours. In the session, I told him to interrogate her for ten minutes while I watched. He began his usual routine of questioning. I noticed that the wife provided very vague answers which only fueled his suspicion. I told the wife to give him even more vague answers. I told her to answer every question with a question. This changed the enactment. The husband became frustrated and then finally stopped. He realized that his interrogation was a game that required her participation. When she changed her role, his role became impossible to maintain.

You must keep the enactment going until the pattern is clear to everyone in the room. We do not stop just because people are uncomfortable. We stop when the sequence has reached its logical conclusion. This usually happens when the family members run out of their usual tactics. At that point, they are open to your intervention. You have shown them their own wall. Now you can show them a way over it. We use the enactment to build the bridge to the next phase of the treatment.

We know that a family’s organization is held together by invisible rules. These rules dictate who can speak, who can lead, and who can be sick. You use enactment to challenge these rules. When you ask a child to give a command to a parent, you are breaking a fundamental rule of that family’s hierarchy. You watch how the parent reacts. Does the parent laugh? Does the parent get angry? Does the parent obey? This reaction tells you everything you need to know about the flexibility of the system. A flexible system can handle a role reversal. A rigid system will fight it.

I once had a mother and daughter who were so close they finished each other’s sentences. They sat together on the couch, leaning into each other. I asked them to sit in chairs at opposite ends of the room. This was an enactment of separation. They both became visibly anxious. The mother kept leaning toward the daughter even though the daughter was ten feet away. This simple physical change revealed the intensity of their enmeshment. I then asked them to have a conversation without looking at each other. This enactment forced them to rely on their own individual voices rather than their shared physical presence.

You must pay attention to the non-verbal cues during an enactment. We look at the feet, the hands, and the direction of the gaze. If a husband says he is listening to his wife but his feet are pointed toward the door, he is not listening. He is preparing to leave. You can point this out to the wife. You can ask her what she thinks about his feet. This brings a non-verbal behavior into the conscious interaction. We use every piece of information the family gives us in the enactment. Nothing is irrelevant. Every movement is a communication about the structure of the system. Your client’s body speaks more truth than her words.

You begin the enactment by providing a specific, limited directive that targets the presenting problem. You do not ask the family to describe their conflict. You tell them to have the conflict in your presence. I once worked with a couple where the wife complained that the husband was never home. I told them to spend ten minutes deciding on a schedule for the following week that would satisfy them both. I sat in the corner of the room. We observe the physical arrangement first. If the couple turns their chairs toward you instead of each other, you must instruct them to face one another. You might say: Please turn your chairs so you are looking at your wife while you speak. This physical orientation is the first step in removing yourself as the focal point of the family system.

When you issue the directive, you must watch for the person who attempts to speak for the others. We call this individual the gatekeeper. I once saw a family with a fifteen-year-old son who had stopped attending school. When I told the father to ask the son why he stayed in bed, the mother immediately interrupted to explain that the son was tired and overwhelmed. You must stop this interruption immediately. You tell the mother: I understand you have an opinion on this, but right now I want the father to find out from the son himself. You are not being rude. You are enforcing a hierarchical structure where the father is allowed to have a direct relationship with his child without the mother’s mediation.

We use the enactment to identify the sequence of behaviors that maintains the problem. You are looking for the exact moment the interaction fails. I worked with a husband and wife who argued about finances. During the enactment, the husband would propose a budget. The wife would look at the floor and sigh. The husband would then apologize and retract his proposal. This sequence took exactly forty-five seconds. The sigh was the most powerful move in the room. It effectively neutralized the husband’s attempt to lead. You must identify these small, non-verbal cues because they are the levers of power in the family.

If the family attempts to pull you back into the conversation, you must refuse the invitation. A common tactic is for a parent to ask you: Do you think he should be allowed to stay out until midnight? You do not answer this question. If you answer, you become the judge and the family remains helpless. You say: That is exactly what you two need to decide together right now. You then look away or pick up your clipboard. We remain professionally distant to force the family to rely on their own resources. This distance creates a tension that is necessary for a new solution to emerge. I once sat through twelve minutes of heavy quiet while a mother and father refused to speak to each other after I gave them a directive. I did not break that quiet. Eventually, the father spoke, and for the first time in years, he expressed a preference rather than a complaint.

You must pay attention to how the family uses the child to manage the tension between the parents. We call this triangulation. I once worked with a couple who were on the verge of divorce. Whenever the conversation between the parents became too intense, their seven-year-old daughter would begin to kick the legs of her chair or make loud noises. The parents would immediately stop their argument to discipline the child. The child’s behavior was a functional way to keep the parents together, even if they were only together in their frustration with her. You must instruct the parents to ignore the child’s behavior and continue their discussion. You might say: I will watch your daughter, you two keep talking about the divorce. By taking responsibility for the child, you remove the parents’ excuse to avoid their own conflict.

The timing of your intervention is essential. You do not stop the enactment as soon as it becomes uncomfortable. You wait until the family has reached an impasse. I once watched a mother and son argue about the son’s drug use for twenty minutes. The mother pleaded, and the son mocked her. I waited until the mother was visibly exhausted and about to give up. Only then did I intervene to suggest a new directive. We wait for this moment because the family is more likely to accept a radical suggestion when their old patterns have clearly failed. You might then tell the mother to stop pleading and instead tell the son he is no longer allowed to eat dinner at the family table until he provides a clean drug test.

We also look for the peripheral members of the system. I once worked with a family where the grandmother lived in the home. During the enactment between the parents, the grandmother sat in the back of the room and shook her head. Though she said nothing, the parents kept looking at her for approval. You must recognize that the grandmother is the true head of that hierarchy. You might invite her into the circle and tell her: Since you clearly disagree with this plan, please tell the parents what they should do instead. This move forces the hidden leader to take overt responsibility for the outcome.

You must be prepared for the family to escalate their behavior when you challenge their structure. I once told a father to take charge of the discipline for his acting-out daughter. The mother, who had always handled the discipline, began to cry and said she felt like she was being pushed out of the family. This was a tactical maneuver to regain her position of power. You must acknowledge the feeling without changing the directive. You say: It is difficult to change how things are done, but I want the father to continue. You are prioritizing the structural change over the immediate comfort of the family members.

We use enactments to test the flexibility of the family’s perimeters. I once asked a family to plan a vacation together. The father and daughter quickly agreed on a location, while the mother sat in the corner. When I suggested the mother join them, the daughter moved her chair to block the mother’s way. This physical blocking revealed a coalition between the father and daughter that excluded the mother. You must note these physical barriers. You might tell the father to move his chair next to his wife and tell the daughter to sit on the other side of the room. You are physically breaking the coalition to see how the family reacts to a new arrangement.

Every directive you give must be clear and impossible to misunderstand. You do not say: Try to talk more. You say: Spend the next five minutes deciding which one of you will call the school on Monday morning. We provide specific tasks because specific tasks produce specific data. I once worked with a man who claimed he was depressed and could not function. I told his wife to give him a list of five household chores to complete before the next session. During the enactment of making this list, the husband became very active and began negotiating which chores he would do. This revealed that his depression was at least partially a response to his wife’s over-functioning. The wife’s face becomes a mask of concern when her husband succeeds.

When you see that mask of concern, you are seeing the homeostatic mechanism in operation. The wife’s worried expression functions as a signal to the husband that he is fragile, which in turn justifies his continued withdrawal from the demands of their shared life. I once worked with a couple where the wife complained of her husband’s chronic depression and his refusal to look for work. During a session, I directed him to describe his last job interview to her. As he began to speak with a trace of confidence, his wife interrupted to remind him that he had forgotten to mention how tired he felt that afternoon. She was not being cruel: she was performing her role in their shared organization. By emphasizing his frailty, she maintained her position as the competent protector. If he becomes well, her role as the savior vanishes. We call this a benevolent sabotage. You must intervene not by asking her why she does this, but by directing her to do it more explicitly. You might tell her that for the next three mornings, she must list three reasons why her husband is too fragile to leave the house before he even gets out of bed. This directive makes the covert sequence overt and therefore impossible to maintain without the husband realizing the nature of the transaction.

We recognize that families do not change through insight or through a verbal understanding of their history. They change through the exhaustion of their current patterns. When you have successfully provoked an enactment, you have moved the problem from the past into the present. It is no longer a story they tell: it is a set of behaviors they are performing in front of you. Once the sequence is visible, your task is to introduce a small, manageable complication that makes the old way of relating more burdensome than the change itself. We use the term ordeal to describe this technique. If a client insists on a symptomatic behavior, you attach a task to that behavior that is more difficult than the symptom. I worked with a man who suffered from severe insomnia. Every night he would pace and wake his wife, who would then make him tea and listen to his worries. This sequence maintained his distress and her role as the primary caregiver. I directed the man that every night he could not sleep, he was required to get out of bed, go to the garage, and polish his shoes and his wife’s shoes for two hours in the cold. If he returned to bed before the two hours were up, he had to wake his wife and apologize for his failure. He found the task so tedious and the cold so uncomfortable that his body began to choose sleep over the ordeal.

You must be prepared for the family to turn to you for the answer once the enactment reaches its peak. They will look to you as a judge or a mediator. We resist this role because it reinforces the family’s helplessness. Instead of providing a solution, you provide a directive that forces them to rely on one another in a new configuration. If a mother and father are arguing about a daughter’s curfew, and they turn to you to decide who is right, you must refuse. You might say: I am not sure which of you has the better plan, but I am certain that the daughter will only listen if you both agree on the time. I will wait while you come to a single number. Then, you look at your notes or look at the floor. Your refusal to enter the triangle forces the parents to deal with each other directly. You are not being cold: you are being strategic. You are forcing the hierarchy to correct itself.

We observe that when one person in a family changes, the others will immediately attempt to pull them back into the old sequence. This is why you must give directives that involve the entire group. If you only tell the husband to be more assertive, the wife will subconsciously undermine him to restore the balance she understands. If you instead tell the wife that she is responsible for helping the husband practice his assertiveness by disagreeing with him twice a day, you have incorporated her into the change. You have given her a new role that supports the husband’s growth rather than one that prevents it. I once instructed a mother who was over-involved in her son’s schoolwork to spend one hour every evening deliberately giving him the wrong answers to his math problems. This forced the son to correct her and rely on his own knowledge, while it satisfied the mother’s need to be involved in his studies. It broke the sequence of her doing the work for him because her involvement became a hindrance rather than a help.

You must watch for the moment when the tension in the room is high enough that the family is willing to try something different. This is the point of maximum leverage. If you intervene too early, they will ignore your directive. If you wait too long, they will become discouraged and retreat into silence. When the father is shouting and the son is stonewalling and the mother is weeping, that is the moment to act. You might stand up and tell the father and son to trade chairs. This physical movement breaks the kinetic flow of the argument. You then direct the mother to move her chair to the corner of the room and watch without speaking. By changing the physical arrangement, you have changed the possibilities for interaction. The father cannot loom over the son in the same way, and the mother cannot interrupt the conflict to soothe the son.

We use silence as a tool to provoke action. When a family sits in a heavy silence after a failed enactment, you must resist the urge to fill that space with your own voice. The discomfort they feel is the energy they need to find a new way of speaking. If you speak, you relieve that tension and allow them to remain as they are. You might wait two full minutes before saying: It seems you have run out of ways to talk about this. I want you to try again, but this time, the father must keep his hands in his pockets and the son must look him in the eye. You provide the structure, but they must provide the content. I once sat in silence for five minutes with a family that refused to speak. Eventually, the youngest child began to laugh, which broke the tension and allowed the parents to address the absurdity of their refusal to communicate.

Your authority as a practitioner comes from your ability to remain outside the family’s emotional system. You are a consultant on their organization, not a member of their family. This requires you to be comfortable with being disliked or being seen as confusing. If the family likes you too much, you are likely being pulled into their existing sequences. We are not there to be friends with our clients: we are there to help them reorganize. When you assign a directive that seems odd or difficult, do not explain it. If you explain the rationale, the family will argue with the logic. If you simply state the directive with the authority of a physician prescribing medicine, they are more likely to comply. The effectiveness of the task does not depend on their understanding of it. It depends on their performance of it. A father who is told to take his son to the park and say nothing but the word yes to every request for one hour will learn more about his own need for control through that experience than through ten hours of discussion about his parenting style. The physical reality of the enactment is the primary teacher. The way a mother leans away from her husband when he mentions his mother is the only diagnostic evidence you need to begin the next phase of the intervention.