Family therapists can spend a lifetime studying theories about family patterns, intergenerational communication, recursive loops, and the dance between closeness and separateness, to name a few. During our training, we are taught to map triangles, track emotional processes across decades, and listen for the stories that shape a person’s sense of personhood. And yet, family therapists are not granted immunity from old relational dynamics, especially within the culturally situated contexts of our own families, where roles, expectations, and historical narratives remain alive and well.
This tension is not new. When Murray Bowen developed his theory, he brought forward his own family material in a multigenerational fashion (Bowen, 1978). In 1967, at a Family Research Conference in Philadelphia, later closely associated with the American Family Therapy Association (AFTA), Bowen did something rare: he spoke openly about his family’s conflicts, anxieties, emotional cut-offs, and predictable patterns. This level of self-disclosure unsettled many therapists who were present at the conference. However, at the same time, this disclosure set the stage to highlight the main concepts of family therapy that still remain part of our clinical vocabulary (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).
From Bowen’s early genograms, the idea of drawing family connections to visually map the stories, anxieties, and tensions across generations is the bedrock of marriage and family therapy (MFT) clinical practice. However, throughout the past three decades, as I learned about families, I noticed that even the most experienced family therapist is not immune to the pull of the old emotional system.
Recently, I was reminded of this in my own life. On a visit to my family and my partner’s family, I noticed the familiar pull of old pressures. The tension arrived before I even left the house in its own quiet rehearsal. I caught myself preparing for conversations that I knew would be taxing, imagining who I needed to be, who I should avoid becoming, and what might unfold when I stepped outside those long-standing expectations. Some family theorists and pop-psychologists on social media would have recommended ‘setting boundaries’ as the cure to any of these statements. But what happens when theory ignores ethics, context, and the values that hold families together? What happens when the go-to interventions of our field rely on individualistic notions of protecting personal space as if we live on private islands?
To this day, when I visit my family, I still have to ‘pedir a benção,’ which is literally translated to ‘ask for the blessing,’ a tradition that involves kissing the hand of an elder upon greeting as a sign of respect.
To understand why these universal family theories felt incomplete to me, I have to begin with the land and lineage that shaped my earliest understandings of family and belonging. I was born in Brazil. My mother has ten siblings, and my father has nine. My country was colonized by the Portuguese, a fiercely Catholic empire whose expansion was tied to evangelization and to one of the most brutal slave systems in the Atlantic world (Miller & D’Angelis, 2011). Brazil received an estimated 5 to 5.5 million enslaved Africans, nearly 40% of all Africans trafficked to the Americas, and it was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888 (Araujo, 2012; Bergad, 2007). The economy and social order were built for centuries on the exploitation of enslaved Indigenous and African peoples. The afterlife of that history remains visible in Brazil’s racial hierarchy, patterns of poverty, and disproportionate violence against Black communities (McLucas, 2005; Telles, 2004). To this day, when I visit my family, I still have to ‘pedir a benção,’ which is literally translated to ‘ask for the blessing,’ a tradition that involves kissing the hand of an elder upon greeting as a sign of respect.
In similar ways, my partner grew up in India, where cultural expectations were not so different as I would have imagined. His country, too, carries the long shadow of colonization; British rule left India with intergenerational poverty or wealth, fractured economic structures, and social hierarchies that shaped daily life long after independence (Metcalf & Metcalf, 2012; Roy, 2019). These histories can live quietly inside families, influencing everything from how children are taught to ‘behave’ to how respect is expressed across generations. And, much like my own traditions, my partner still observes rituals of deference when he returns home. To this day, he is expected to perform charan sparsh, touching the feet of his parents or elders to ask for their blessing, a gesture of reverence that mirrors my own Brazilian heritage.
Rules of living in both our families were shaped by tradition, hierarchy, and a deep sense of collective identity. When we share these stories through conversations, we often find ourselves laughing at how similar our childhoods were, even though we had different parents. When we plan for family visits, we already know what kind of questions we might be asked. We are always prepared to answer the questions that subtly assess our ‘success’ as professionals and as couples, as if family gatherings double as informal yearly performance reviews. However, I find it important to remember that although we are shaped by culture, we are also shapers of culture. That has been one of the most significant lessons I’ve learned across three decades of working with families, a lesson that often gets overlooked when our field becomes absorbed in analyzing family patterns where people are often positioned as a passive recipient of forces presumed to be fixed, rather than active creators of relational possibilities.
Over the years, with all the knowledge I accumulated through my studies and experience, I learned not to leave these family visits to chance. So, I’ve developed a few small practices that, in my view, have been generative of moments that feel less culturally scripted by history and more open to who we can become in the present moment. These practices are not interventions in the traditional sense; they are small invitations to be with one another differently, with a bit more openness and a bit less pressure to perform the familiar. Below are a few of my preferred practices, grounded in personal research and years of autoethnographic data collection, shared just in time for the end-of-year gatherings.
Develop a family book club
New parents often read to their children, and they develop their own rituals of story time right before their children go to bed. However, adult children reading to their parents is something that is rarely explored as a legitimate ritual. In my own experience, good stories can bring a sense of newness and difference into a family system; what Gregory Bateson described in his work on cybernetics as the introduction of ‘a difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson, 1972).
During our last visit to Brazil and to my in-laws’ home, I brought a few books I thought everyone might enjoy. We took turns reading passages aloud. At first, it felt unfamiliar, and it definitely didn’t win instant approval. But after a little perseverance, we all understood the assignment. When was the last time you heard your parents or family members read to each other? Hearing my parents’ voices read new ideas softened something between us, introducing a gentler way of being together that didn’t rely on old performances.
Engage in a shared activity
This practice might be my best-kept secret. When I visit family, I usually bring supplies for activities that invite imagination. On our last trip to my in-laws, I brought an animal balloon kit, which is something easily ordered online that can keep people engaged for hours. When I worked as a therapist in a children’s outpatient setting, I learned how to make these balloon animals, a skill anyone can pick up with a simple online tutorial. Again, when I introduce these ideas to family, I’m met with the usual surprised expressions, but I don’t let that get in the way. By the time everyone settles, they become fully absorbed in the shapes, colors, and even the mistakes that are made. Laughter replaces tension, and new stories surface naturally. “Do you remember when we were children…?” someone would start, and suddenly the room was full of gentleness, not buying into old scripts.
Activities like this one can help people be more available for meaningful connections. The activity becomes a bridge, offering a way into each other’s presence to create environments that move away from family rules and patterns. It is an experience-near entry point where family can create with each other through shared doing.
Ask relational questions
As a family, we gather around routines, meals, and the familiar conversations that tend to circle back to the same themes. Who is getting married? Who had children? How well are you doing at work? Did you get a promotion? Who got accepted into college or graduated? These status-oriented questions maintain the rules of the system in our family, but I believe they rarely tell us anything about our life values, passions, or what gives meaning to our lives. So, I dare to introduce relational questions as an offering—an invitation to connect through storytelling. Mom, what is something you’ve learned this year that changed you in a small or meaningful way? Dad, what unique qualities do you see in someone at this table that they may not recognize in themselves? Who taught you how to be the kind of person you are now, and what did they teach you? What did you love doing as a child that you wish you could return to now? What stories about our family do you think we haven’t told enough? and many, many others …
These questions have opened doors we didn’t plan to walk through. In many ways, some of these questions weren’t part of our repertoire, but with a little persistence, they became familiar. There is nothing stopping family therapists from being relational within their families, except the stories we tell ourselves about what can or cannot change.
Returning home as a practice
Returning home is its own kind of experiment. Each visit offers a mix of what is familiar and what is possible. I’ve come to understand these moments not as fixed realities, but as opportunities to develop a family environment that feels less scripted and more responsive to who we are becoming.
I tell my aspiring therapists that being a family therapist doesn’t give us a shield against the pressures of the world. If anything, it often makes those pressures easier to notice. But the good news is that because we are learners of systems, we can choose, moment by moment, to respond to our environments as active participants rather than passive recipients. And that, in many ways, reflects the spirit of relationality.
I firmly believe that our relational life is not predetermined but continually shaped through the joint activity of speaking, listening, and imagining alongside others (Newman,1996). I return to this notion often when I visit my own family. When I offer a question, the invitation to read a book, or engage in a silly activity. I don’t offer these practices to be clever or to apply my training to my family. I’m simply making room for something different to unfold, something we might not have reached if we stayed with our usual conversational habits. To me, it is very important to acknowledge that I’m never trying to “fix” my family, nor should I be. What I am interested in is to invite a different way of being together, one that aims not to replace old patterns with better ones, but to loosen the grip of inevitability.
And maybe, just maybe, returning home can offer brief moments where possibility sits beside the familiar, inviting us to meet one another with a little more generosity.
Danna Abraham, PhD, LMFT, is an assistant professor at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University and is an AAMFT Professional member holding the Approved Supervisor and Clinical Fellow designations. Her work focuses on community-based research and feminist approaches to critical engagement, with a particular focus on language and lived experiences. She is the director of the Research Initiative for Storytelling Engagement (RISE) Lab. www.theriselab.com dr.danna.abraham@icloud.com
References
Araujo, A. L. (2012). Slavery in Brazil. The International History Review, 34(3), 610-612. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2012.718110
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chandler Publishing.
Bergad, L. W. (2007). The comparative histories of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Cambridge University Press.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. W. W. Norton.
McLucas, K. (2005). Brazilians of African descent. Culture, Society & Praxis, 4(1), Article 6. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/csp/vol4/iss1/6
Metcalf, B. D., & Metcalf, T. R. (2012). A concise history of modern India (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Miller, R. J., & D’Angelis, M. (2011). Brazil, Indigenous peoples, and the international law of discovery. Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 37(1), 1-46. https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/bjil/vol37/iss1/1
Newman, F. (1996). Performance of a lifetime: A practical philosophy for living. Routledge.
Roy, T. (2019). A business history of India: Enterprise and the emergence of capitalism from 1700. Cambridge University Press.
Telles, E. E. (2004). Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt6wpzpb
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