Structural Maps in Family Health Management

Structural Maps in Family Health Management

Structural Maps in Family Health Management

Use Structural Maps to Manage Your Family Well

Basic Premises and Examples

By Peter K. Gerlach, MSW Member, NSRC Experts Council colorbar
site intro > course outline, Lesson 5 tasks or links, search, chat, or prior page > here

The Web address of this article is http://sfhelp.org/fam/map.htm

Updated 09-22-2015

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This is one of a series of lesson-5 articles on how to evolve a high-nurturance family. The article introduces a powerful tool for understanding how your family is “built” – “structural mapping.” It may look complicated, but if you experiment with it, you’ll find that it’s easy to use.

The article defines family structure, summarizes some basic premises, shows you how to map the structure of any family, and proposes baseline ‘maps” of healthy biological families.. A related article shows how to map typical multi-home step family structures.

This mapping tool can help you answer questions like…

“Who has the power in our home and family, including dead people and non-relatives?”

“Who’s in charge of each of our homes?”

“Who is aligned and who is conflicted?”

“Is anyone excluded from full family membership? By Whom? Why?”

“Do we have major communication blocks in and between our several homes?”

“How does our family structure react to crises, major conflicts, and membership changes?

This article assumes you’re familiar with…the intro to this Web site and the premises underlying it

self-improvement Lessons 1 thru 4 these Q&A items on families these traits of a high-nurturance family

how to make and use a family genogram.

About Family Structure

Here, a family means a group of people with genetic, legal, and social bonds who depend on each other for inclusion, identity, companionship, support, procreation, security and stability. This can include dead and distant relatives, special friends and professional consultants, a Higher Power, neighbors, teachers, coaches, baby sitters, and perhaps influential mentors and media figures.

Structure describes how something is built, like a house, novel, sailboat, or government. Structures range from stable to unstable and effective to flawed, depending on what they’re designed to do. Family structure refers to:

Who’s included and excluded from the family;

Who’s in charge of each home or group of related homes, if anyone. Whose needs and behaviors cause the main decisions in calm and troubled times?

Relationship bonds and boundaries, or lack of them;

The roles and rules that govern how members’ needs get met – or don’t;

Family-member alliances and antagonisms; and …

Communication blocks in and between people and homes.

Structural mapping is a visual tool. It can help you identify and validate what’s healthy about your family, and illuminate structural problems that lower your nurturance level. The structural mapping scheme outlined here uses some basic ideas about family functioning. See if you agree with each of these beliefs, and add your own:

Premises for Structural Maps in Family Health Management

1) A family’s core purpose is to fill all adults’ and children’s needs. A common key need is for a safe haven, where every member feels consistently accepted, valued, respected, supported, and encouraged to develop and use their unique talents.

Families that don’t fill all their members’ key needs consistently can be called low nurturance or dysfunctional. The more of these factors that exist, the higher the nurturance level. Levels vary over time with structural and environmental changes. 2) The main factors determining a home’s or a family’s nurturance level are…

whether the resident adults are psychologically wounded or not, and…

whether they’re self and mutually aware and knowledgeable;

how healthy the family’s grieving policy is; and…

whether the adults are motivated and able to communicate and problem-solve effectively.

From my clinical experience since 1979, I believe many or most typical adults have survived early-childhood abandonment, neglect, and abuse (trauma), and have inherited significant psychological wounds. Few people – including family-life professionals – are aware of this, and/or they don’t know what it means or what to do about it. Premise 3) All families experience local or chronic stress over surface issues like these:

family membership (inclusion and exclusion)

boundaries (missing, weak, or rigid; violations; and conflicts)

roles (unclear, unstable, inappropriate, and/or conflicting),

relationship rules and consequences (unclear, conflicting, inconsistent, and appropriate or not);

adapting to and stabilizing after systemic and environmental changes.

Premise 4) The key relationship in a family that includes minor kids should be between mates, vs. an adult and a child or other adults (like grandparent-parent) or two ex mates. In resolving family problems, mates should consistently put their integrities and wholistic health first, their relationship second, and all else third – except in emergencies.

5) Family members (like you) can proactively improve their family’s structure and system by taking and applying this online self-improvement course.

Notice your reaction to these premises. If you don’t agree with them, what do you believe?

To use this visual tool, your family adults need some…

Structural-mapping Symbols

Family-structural maps use symbols to show how members relate to each other. In this article, I’ll use the generic letters below. You can use these letters, your family-members’ names or initials, cartoon figures, faces, or any other meaningful symbols.

Be creative: doing these maps can be fun, as well as instructive! Consider using colored markers or pens, too – whatever makes the diagrams clearer for everyone. Try to see the big picture and theme, to minimize getting boggled by all these symbols. Once you try them, they’re surprisingly easy…