Families and how to survive them, by Robin Skynner and John Clease.
ISBN 0-19-520466-2

I'm crap at summarising btw.

This book covers:

* Why do people choose a partner?
* Why do they fall in love?
* What roles do they adopt or impose on one another?
* How do they behave towards thier children?
* How does a child grow up into a healthy - or not so healthy - adult?
*Why is good sex so important?

- The walkthough.

Chapter 1. Why did I have to Marry You?
1.1.

In Chapter on John asks Robin why people decide to marry each other.
Robin says that people fall in love with each other who are very like
them - or more importantly have a similarity of thier family
backgrounds. Even when they fall in love across a crowded room, never
having said a word.

The most startling piece of evidence for this is the Family Systems
Exercise. It demonstrates how unconscious attractions work, and what
they're all about. A group of strangers are put together as a group
and asked to choose another person from the group who makes them think
of someone in thier family, or alternatively, gives them a feeling
that they would have filled a 'gap' in thier family.

The participants aren't allowed to speak at all whilst they are
choosing. They stand up and walk around looking at others. When
they've all paired up they're told to talk together for a time to see
if they can find out what made them pick each other. They're
encouraged to compare family backgrounds. Next, the couples are asked
to choose another couple to make a foursome. And then each foursome
is asked to form itself into a family of some kind, agreeing with each
other what role in the family each person will take. Then they talk
together about what it was in thier family backgrounds that led to
thier decisions. And finally, they report to the whole group what
they've discovered.

John: Which is what?

Robin: That they've somehow, each one of them, picked out three people
whose families functioned in very similar ways to their own.

John: How do you mean 'functioned in very similar ways'?

Robin: Well, they'll find that all four of them are from families
where there was difficulty in sharing affection; or perhaps in
expressing anger, or envy; or where there had been a lot of near-
incestuous relationships; or where people had always been expected to
be optimistic and cheerful. Or they might discover that all four of
them had fathers who were away from home during the years when that
mattered a lot to them; or that all their families had suffered some
big loss or change of a similar kind when they were all at similar
ages.

John: Couldn't this just be because they are looking for things they
have in common?

Robin: That's not really a good enough explanation for the number of
connected similarities they always find. I know it may sound
unconvincing to anyone who hasn't actually tried it, but it's quite
uncanny when you experience it for yourself.

John: But what about all the 'wall-flowers'? How do you explain the
ones who don't get chosen?

Robin: Well, funnily enough, it was the 'wall-flowers' that clinched
the argument for me - finally convinced me that there was something
extraordinary going on. The very first time that I was in charge of
putting about twenty trainee family therapists through this exercise,
I suddenly got worried that the ones who came together last would feel
they were all rejects. So, when I asked the groups to report on their
experiences - the family similarities they'd discovered - I put off
asking the 'wall-flower' group till last, as I was rather dreading
what their reaction would be. But they were just as fascinated as the
rest of the trainees. They had discovered that they had all been
fostered, or adopted, or brought up in children's homes. They had all
felt rejected early in their lives, and had somehow, in this exercise,
unerringly picked each other out!

John: So every time this exercise is staged, you find the trainees
choose each other because of the remarkable number of similarities in
their family backgrounds - in their family histories, and in their
families' attitudes.

Robin: Right.

John: So how are the reasons why they choose each other related to the
reasons why we fall in love with each other?

Robin: Fundamentally. You see, there are lots of reasons for a couple
getting together, but most of them are easy to understand. One of the
pioneers of marital therapy in the fifties -Henry Dicks - boiled them
down to three main categories. First, social pressures like class,
religion and money; second, conscious personal reasons like good
looks, shared interests, things you know you're picking someone for;
and third, these unconscious attractions that everybody calls
'chemistry'.

John: So the exercise is demonstrating this third group, the
unconscious attractions; and it tells us that people unconsciously
choose each other because of similarities in the way their families
functioned?

Robin: Right. Remember that our trainees are actually looking for
someone who made them think of a person in their own family, or who
would have filled an important gap in their own family. Yet they are
all strangers - there's no inherited likeness in appearance or
personality. And the astonishing thing is that nevertheless, just by
looking, they choose people who have astonishing similarities in
childhood experiences and specific family problems, too.

John: In other words, we're carrying around our families with us,
somewhere inside us, and we're giving off signals which enable others
with similar backgrounds to recognise us?

Robin: And by getting together with such people, we're recreating our
own families again, in a sense. It's a bit startling, isn't it?

Robin explains how people send of signals through body language,
posture and dress to others.

John: All right, but I don't see how these signals can indicate the
person's family background.

Robin: We can all guess how people are feeling at any given moment,
can't we? We can tell that they're friendly or hostile, cheerful or
miserable, and so on. Well, over and above these constantly changing
emotions that we're experiencing all the time, everyone tends to have
certain habitual emotions or attitudes.

John: Which come from their basic personality, you mean? They're
usually gloomy, or skittish, or a bit of a martyr, or whatever.

Robin: Right. And these habitual emotions will show themselves in
posture, facial expressions and the typical way they move. Take a
depressive person. He'll tend to slump and slouch and move
apathetically. And by virtue of having his face in a depressed
expression over the years, he'll develop certain facial lines which we
recognise immediately. The same applies to a cheerful fellow who
smiles a lot - he'll get laugh lines, and will usually move in a more
positive, eager, upright kind of way; somebody a bit manic will move
jerkily and seem tense and tend to have rather staring eyes.

John: Well, I'm very aware of that look. It's exactly how I get when
I'm under pressure, and it's also something I consciously use a lot in
my acting. The eyes bulge slightly, and the muscles round the temple
and forehead and jaws get rather tight.

Robin: Have you noticed my eyes often look like that?

John: ... I never have. Do you know, I'd never realised that.

Robin: Well the funny thing is, when I did the Family Systems
Exercise, I paired up with someone, and then we chose another
couple ... before any of us realised that all four of us had eyes like
this!

John: Do you think the two of us get on well because our staring eyes
indicate we've got similar family backgrounds?

Robin: It's very likely. We'll keep an eye open for similarities as we
go along.

John: Come to think of it, I now remember that a few years ago I
noticed I was often attracted to girls with eyes like this -though
oddly enough, once I was aware of it, the attraction didn't operate so
strongly any more. And certainly one person in my family had eyes like
this. Actually that brings me to the next point I don't understand.
You're saying that a person's personality, or habitual emotions as you
put it, will indicate what his family was like. Why? What's the
connection?

Robin: Well you see, each family tends to have a particular way of
handling emotions. They'll all tend to think some emotions are 'good'
and some 'bad'. So they'll be open about expressing the 'good' ones
and very guarded about the 'bad' ones. Or they may keep a stiff upper
lip about emotions in general, or a completely floppy one. The result
is that each family develops a characteristic set of emotional
attitudes, so the members of that family will all share the same
emotional habits.

John: So they'll all tend to give off the same kinds of signals and to
look a bit similar?

Robin: Yes, it's not just heredity that makes families look alike.
Even adopted children will grow to look like others in the family in
some respects.

John: So to sum up ... we signal, by our expressions, postures and
ways of moving, certain habitual emotional attitudes we have, which we
share with other members of our family. And people from similar
families will pick them up and respond to them.

Robin: Exactly. That's what the Family Systems Exercise shows.

John: All right, but there is something I still don't understand. You
said that people who choose each other in the exercise often find
they've experienced, at the same kind of age, the same kind of event -
you instanced an absent father, or a death in the family. How does
that fit in to what you're saying?

Robin: Well, let's express what we learn from the Family Systems
Exercise another way. Let's say that someone who's had trouble coping
with a certain stage in their development will be attracted to a
person who's also had trouble at that stage.

John: That doesn't sound like another way of looking at it so much as
a completely new and unrelated idea.

Robin: No, it's closely connected with what I've been saying. Just
trust me for a few minutes and I'll show you how.

John: What did you say about 'trouble at a certain stage of
development'?

Robin: Well, if someone missed out on a stage in their development,
then a person that they're attracted to, with a similar family
history, will probably have missed out on that same stage too.

John: I'm trying not to panic ... perhaps you could start by
explaining what you mean by 'a stage of development'. Then I might be
able to understand how you could miss it out.

[Next - 1.2 stages of development...]