Systems resist change

How do you respond when a client’s request differs from what they need?

An Irish man built massive gates at the end of his driveway. When asked why he’d built such big gates, completely out of whack with his small house, he’d explain that in the years to come he would make his fortune and build a grand house to match. He became locally known as ‘Johnny with the gates’. Years passed and no fortune was made. Johnny, fed up with his neighbours mocking, took down the gates, only to become ‘Johnny without the gates’.

Salvador Minuchin would have us believe that systems, even if expressing a desire for change, will likely display resistance to change. This resistance is natural and protective - systems maintain the status quo as, even if the current dynamic does not allow everyone to thrive, it’s one familiar way of navigating the world with a proven degree of success. Some carry more baggage - perhaps not their own - to keep the show on the road.

Physical and mental health symptoms, or poor performance, can be hypothesised to function as one way for an overburdened member to recruit external support¹. This vantage point allows the practitioner one tentative angle from which to view interactions. From here curiosity can be deployed in service of intervening. Without adequate distance from a dilemma even drastic intervention may only serve to perpetuate a dynamic, like in Johnny’s case. His relationship to money, his neighbours, and Irish begrudgery, remained unexplored.

Have you ever seen a friend or colleague take down their gates in the hope of change?