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The Single-Parent Family and the Family Therapist:

About Invitations and Positioning

Article  in  Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy · September 2010

DOI: 10.1375/anft.31.3.221

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The Single-Parent Family and the
Family Therapist: About Invitations
and Positioning
Peter
' Context, Center for Marital, Family and Sex Therapy, University Hospital at Leuven University, Belgium
' Institute for Family and Sexuality Studies, K.U. Leuven, Belgium

Single parent families sometimes represent specific challenges to family therapists.

In this article a dialogical frame with important concepts such as voice and
positioning is proposed to reflect on family therapy practice.This frame is used to
reflect on a common invitation in family therapy with single-parent families: the
invitation to take the place of the absent parent. A case of family therapy with a
single-parent family is presented in order to illustrate the importance of flexibility
in the therapist's positioning and the way the therapist's experiencing can be used
as an empathie bridge to create a dialogical space in which the important issues at
stake can be addressed.

Keywords: hmWy therapy, therapist, positioning, single-parent family

While families with two parents remain the societal prototype of normalcy, in
clinical practice family therapists are often confronted with single-parent families
with concerns about children or about parenting. This is understandable given the
vulnerability of single-parent families, especially single parents where the other
parent has left the family through death or divorce, when the single parent will
often call on therapists for help. In these families, ordinary family concerns and
transitions are more complicated through the issues of loss and grief that sharpen
the edges of daily family functioning. Furthermore, the economic burden of
single-parent families, especially of families who became single-parent families
through loss, is much greater than that of two-parent families. This is a particularly
important issue for single mother families because single women typically do not
earn the same income as a single man. This economic struggle also complicates the
balance of work and family duties. Single mothers often must work full-time to

Address for correspondence: Peter Rober, Context, Center for Marital, Family and Sex Therapy,
University Hospital at Leuven University, Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: peter.rober@med.kuleuven.be

THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY 221

Volume 31 Number 3 2010 pp. 221-231
 Peter Rober

compensate for the low salary, thus leaving little time to spend with their children,
especially as they also have to do domestic chores. This results in a child that is
home alone a lot, without adult supervision, or placed in a day care service for
several hours per day.
A lot of studies on single-parent families have stressed the importance of social
support for the wellbeing of these families (e.g., Nestmann & Neipel, 1994;
Gunnarsson & Cochran, 1993). Contrary to expectations some studies point out
that single mothers receive less social support than single fathers, who seem to
receive a broader range of support from a larger social network (Hilton & Kopera-
Frye, 2007). However, it is not only the parent who carries the burden in single-
parent families. The children may be loaded with more worries and concern than in
two-parent families, and studies suggest that children may be important sources of
social support for their parents (Nestmann & Neipel, 1994; Le Goff, 1999).
Economic vulnerability, loss, isolation and parentification; these are some of the
challenges faced by single-parent families. In this article, I want to focus on some of
the ways these challenges are presented by the family in its unspoken invitations to
the therapist to take certain positions in the session.

Some Important Concepts

Before we go into this, however, I first want to set the stage and present some
conceptual tools that can help to better grasp some of the complexity of a family
therapeutic encounter. These tools can help practitioners to notice aspects of the
dialogues that are there but would remain largely unseen were it not for the
concepts, and they offer us a language to talk about these things. In that way, new
areas of the complexity of dialogues become accessible for discussion and reflection.
The basic theoretical frame is dialogical (Rober, 2005b). Family therapy is
conceptualised as a dialogue between a therapist and a family in which the family
members present a story of their life together. In order to talk about therapy as
dialogue there are three main concepts I want to use in this article.
1. Voices
Families who come into therapy have stories to tell. Different family members tell
different stories and each story is connected with a voice. The concept voice refers
to the author of the story told. It also refers to the author's position as it is expressed
in the story (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984). So whatever is said in the session is said by
someone and this someone speaks from a certain position. There is no neutral
position and all speaking is subjective. Interestingly, every person can speak with
different voices reflecting the dialogical nature of the self (Hermans, 2004; 2006).
But there is more. For Bakhtin (1981, 1984) the concept of Voice' refers also to the
concept of 'tone' or 'intonation'. The tone expresses the evaluative stance of the
speaker: each utterance is in some way an evaluation of previous utterances made:
'Whatever else an utterance may do — refer, perform, question, command — it
always evaluates' (Morson &c Emerson, 1990, p. 134). The tone of the voice also
refers to the uniqueness of each story. The same story can never be told in the same
way twice: every story is unique and unrepeatable.

222 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY

 Single-Parent Families and the Family Therapist

2. Words/Actions
Stories are more than mere expressions. Rather, stories complete experiences through
words. Only in actual storytelling are experiences shared and recognised as meaningñil
by others. The actions of the storyteller can be considered as the enactment of the
story; complementing the words and reflecting the story as it is lived. In that sense, as
family therapists have known for decades (Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson, 1967),
nonverbal actions can also be considered as voices and play an important part in the
process of storytelling.
Furthermore, while what is not said may remain unexpressed and incomplete,
sometimes, however, it may be expressed in a nonverbal way (Rober, 2002). Often
aspects of the stories that are difficult to put into words are expressed in nonverbal ways,
like facial expressions, bodily posture or symptoms. However, for therapists in practice,
dealing with nonverbals may not be straightforward. In actual therapeutic conversa-
tions, while nonverbal expressions are oft:en automatically processed and understood by
the therapist, ambiguous and subtle nonverbals sometimes are not responded to.
Because the therapist does not know how to understand them or give meaning to them,
they may be neglected as meaningless or random, and, as a consequence, they are not
validated by a response from others and remain dialogically incomplete.
3. Positioning
No speech is value free. In each utterance, a position is taken up revealing an evalu-
ation of what has been said before. Taking a position, the other is invited to also
take a position by proposing his or her position and waiting for the response of the
initiator: accept or reject the position proposed. In that way dialogue can be seen as
a dance of positioning, in which the participants move continually, tacitly inviting
the other to move in certain directions and responding to invitations being made.
Voices and positions are closely linked, but they are fundamentally different
concepts. While the concept of Voice' refers to the question who is speaking?', the
concept of 'positioning' refers to the question 'from where is one speaking?'
(Hermans, 2004, 2006; Markovà, Linell, Grossen &C Orvig, 2007). The concept
'position' is a spatial metaphor through which a voice is linked to a point of view
from which one observes reality. Each point of view has inherent limitations: from
each point of view some things can be seen, while others remain out of focus, in the
shadows or out of sight. Therapy, like any dialogue, implies the meeting of different
points of view, in which each voice expresses something from its perspective, activat-
ing another voice speaking from another point of view in a continuous process of
agreement/disagreement (content), or identification/differentiation (position).
When talking about storytelling and positioning, a distinction can be made
between representational positioning and interactional positioning (Wortham,
2001). Representational positioning has to do with the content of the story and
refers to the positions of the protagonists in the story. Interactional positioning has
to do with the dialogical process between speaker and addressees. It refers to the
positioning of the participants in the conversation: the speaker, the addressee and
the audience. In family therapy, more than in individual therapies, interactional
positioning — how the family members position themselves in the here-and-now of
the session — is especially important for the therapist. As family members contrast

THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY 223

 Peter Rober

their perspectives to the positions that they attribute to the other family members,
family interactions are very interesting to observe in a family session. However, it is
crucial to realise that the therapist is also part of the dialogue. This means that he or
she is also invited to take certain positions in the family's performance, just as he or
she will invite the family members to take certain positions.
The family's invitation extended to the therapist is usually not overt, nor do the
family members explicitly voice it. Rather, most often the family's invitation is seen
in what their words and actions evoke in the therapist. The invitation often
emerges first subtly in the therapist's emotional experience, in the guise of experi-
ences like images, fantasies or intentions. Indeed, emotions move people (cf., the
Latin emovere, where e or ex means out, and moveré means move), and as action
potentials emotions are invitations to act. They tempt us to take part in emotional
scenarios (Gergen, 1999). It is as if emotions encourage us (sometimes they even
urge us) to act out a culturally scripted part in a dialogical play. This is also true in
therapy: the therapist's experiencing tempts him or her to do something in the
encounter with the family members. It is as if the therapist is tacitly invited to play
a role in the enactment of the family drama (Andolfi, Angelo & De Nicholo,
1989; Wilson, 2007).
However, as will be explained in this article, just acting upon the family's invita-
tion, and taking the position that he/she is invited in, may not be such a good idea.
It might limit the therapist's flexibility to move (which is the essence of the thera-
pist's positioning) and fix the therapist in a position that is ultimately paralysing.
This is really a danger for the therapeutic process, because positioning is not a quest
for the one perfect position, but rather a continuous process of moving between the
family members, as well as moving in and out of the conversation.
The Single Parent Family's Invitation
Like any family contacting a family therapist, the single-parent family invites,
through their words and actions, the therapist to take certain positions in the
dialogue, to look at them from a certain angle and to prepare a response inspired by
that perspective. The words and actions of the family members contain implicit
mandates about what the therapist should or should not be. Ofiien such an implicit
mandate refers to what the family members experience as lacking in their family.
Usually there is some reference to the absent parent (e.g., to the void the absent
parent leaves, or to the resentment towards him or her abandoning the family, or
...), and the therapist is encouraged to fill in the gap and offer relief of certain
tensions in the family. It may be tempting for the therapist to accept such an invita-
tion. Doing so may initially give some instant relief to the family's suffering, but in
the long run it may lead to destructive relational patterns, such as dependency on
the therapist, as well as to disempowerment and loss of self-esteem in the family
members. Accepting the family's implicit invitation may make the therapist crucial
for the survival of the family, thereby disconnecting the family from its own
resources and its own support system.
The danger for the therapist of getting caught in destructive relational patterns
is evident in the case we describe below. In the first session, the therapist becomes
caught up in a destructive interaction with the family. In later sessions, the therapist

224 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY

 Single-Parent Families and the Family Therapist

succeeds in liberating himself from his fixed position. He regains flexibility in

positioning and in that way he creates dialogical space to talk about some of the
family issues at stake.

The Case of the Janssens Family

The Janssens family is a single-parent family consisting of a divorced mother, Joni
(45 years old) and her two sons, Frank (21 years old) and Arnold (19 years old).'
Joni was referred to our centre because she was depressed and disappointed after she
divorced her husband three years before. Her husband was a rich diplomat who
was, on the one hand, very strict with the children, but on the other hand spoiled
them materially. After the divorce he was given a new position in the embassy in an
Asian country. There he had met another woman and, after some time, he married
her and started a new family.
First Session
In the first session with the Janssens family, Joni expressed her worries concerning
her sons. She said that although they were very open and charming towards the
outside world, within the family they did whatever they pleased. Joni recounted
how they refused to help their mother in any way in the house. They took no
responsibility, did whatever caught their momentary fancy, and asked their mother's
financial help whenever they needed something. Joni recounted several instances in
which she did not feel respected by them. Just one example: Frank used Joni's car all
the time. She had to ask his permission when she wanted to use her own car. Also,
as Frank often sped he incurred several speeding tickets. But, since it was Joni's car.

D
Father,
Í
Mother
I

FIGURE 1
Genogram of tfie Janssens family.

THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALANDJOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY 225

 Peter Rober

the speeding tickets were filled out in her name. In order to protect her son, she did
not correct this with the police. One day, she had to go to court because she had
been fined with more than three speeding tickets in one month. The judge
reproached her for reckless driving and took away her driver's licence for several
weeks. All the time, when Joni was telling her story the sons were smiling and
joking as if they couldn't care less.
When I heard the stories about what happened between Joni and her sons, and
when I saw their careless reaction, I felt myself protesting. This was not fair. While
on the surface, it seemed that I continued to explore the issue with Joni, implicitly,
I began to gently push Joni into being more assertive and strict towards her sons.
After a while I invited her to speak firmly with her sons here-and-now in the session
about her wanting to be respected by them and that she expected them to help in
the household. Reluctantly, she tried it and spoke to the boys. The sons reacted by
smiling and answered in a charming way that they had all kinds of good reasons not
to take any responsibility and to do whatever they pleased. Her sons made some
teasing remarks and their charms made Joni's heart melt; she gave in, started to
make jokes too and became softer again. The sons had won.
I talked to the three of them about my observations and then again invited Joni
to try once more to be stronger. Indeed, now she sounded a bit more assertive and
the sons listened silendy, but suddenly Frank started to reproach her for his father
leaving ('Now I understand why my father left you ...' and so on). His voice
sounded threatening and hard; it was no joke anymore. I saw that Joni was hurt by
Frank's words. She reclined in her chair, her shoulders dropping. At once she looked
beaten and depressed. The session ended with the children saying that they would
not come to the next session because they had more important things to do. And
after all, Frank added, it all was their mother's problem because she was oversensi-
tive and couldn't take a joke. 'She needs therapy,' he concluded, 'not us.'
After the First Session
After the session, I felt very bad about how the session had turned out and I took
some time to reflect on what had happened. In my mind's eye I reviewed the session
and I was surprised about my pushing Joni — gently and implicit as it was — into
being more assertive. I explored my own experiencing and realised that in fact I had
been outraged about how the children acted towards their mother, and that this
invited me to be protective towards Joni and to put pressure on the boys. I realised
that I also had been irritated with Joni's resignation and passivity. This all resulted
in my taking a position resembling a resolute father position and urging Joni to act
firmly towards the boys. When this proved useless, I finally felt powerless and
beaten. With the benefit of hindsight, I began to understand what had gone wrong
in the session and I gradually became aware of how pejorative and even rejecting my
own thoughts about this family in the process had become. I understood that I had
to find a more constructive way to look at this family. I focused on Joni and realised
that her resignation was probably the expression of the impotence she felt as a
mother, after all her vain attempts to bring change in her family, and to make her
sons respect her. Luckily, I also realised that my feeling of impotence could be an
empathie bridge towards Joni.

226 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY

 Single-Parent Families and the Family Therapist

Second Session
Joni came alone to the second session. She had tried to convince her sons to join
her to come to the session, but they had refused to come. We talked and I apolo-
gised the previous session went as it did. I also explained that I had misinterpreted
her passivity as resignation, but that I now understood that it was a wise way to deal
with a situation in which she felt powerless. Joni agreed and let out a big sigh. It was
as if she was relieved by my words. I explained that I had not given enough atten-
tion to her worries about the children and to all the efforts she had undertaken to
get them to behave more responsibly and supportively.
I talked about my own feeling of impotence in the previous session and said, 'In
fact we are united here in our impotence'. She agreed. I invited her to talk about
what she had tried to get her family back on the right track. She started to talk
about her commitment to her children and her love for them. She emphasised her
worries about their future, if they kept reftising to take any responsibility. She talked
about the lack of respect from her sons and about her protest that was disregarded
by them. I asked her who else in her context might understand her powerlessness.
She said, 'My sisters.'
We talked about her sisters. In the previous years, they had also tried to help her
to be more assertive and stricter so that her sons would respect her, but to no avail.
At the end of the session, I proposed that she invite her sisters to the next session to
talk about this powerlessness. She agreed that it was a good idea to talk with her
sisters and promised to contact them.
Third Session
The three sisters came to the next session. I reminded them that we were united in
powerlessness and that at least I — maybe they disagreed — did not see how we
could talk some sense into the sons. Everybody agreed and we talked about the
family, their history and their family of origin. The main themes were love and
powerlessness. At the end of the session, I asked the three sisters if this conversation
had been helpful for them. Yes, they replied, and Joni added that she was very grate-
ful towards her sisters for supporting her. Then she addressed me and thanked me
for giving her the opportunity to talk about her difficulties with her sisters.
I had two more such sessions with the three sisters. We talked about how the
boys can sometimes be very threatening, and about how humiliating it is to feel
impotent and small in the face of your own kids. Joni shared her anger towards her
ex-husband who had abandoned her, and she said, if it were not for her children,
she regretted that she had ever met him. Interestingly, at a certain moment an
unexpected new story emerged. One of Joni's sisters talked about the sons' power-
lessness. She told the story that Frank had confided her once in tears that he missed
his father and how he had felt abandoned by him. He told her that, without his
mother knowing it, he had phoned his father several times in Asia to try to
convince him to return to the family. At first his father had said he would think
about it, but a few weeks later father phoned back to announce that he had married
again, and that his young wife was expecting a baby. 'I will never be weak again,'
Frank had confided to his aunt, 'Nobody will ever hurt me again like that.'

THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY 227

 Peter Rober

Discussion
As with all families, when a single-parent family enters therapy, the family members
jointly tell a story about their life together and implicit in the story there is an
invitation to the therapist to take a certain position. As there are differences between
single-parent families, it is not possible to give a specific account of the typical
invitation of single-parent families. Some families may invite the therapist to act in a
strict father-like way, other families may present with sadness and evoke consoling
actions from the therapist, and again other families will be very confused and will
encourage the therapist to offer certainty and stability. Male therapists are especially
vulnerable for these invitations, as the single parent in therapy will often be a
mother and the invitations will probably refer to the absent parent. For male and
female therapists alike such implicit invitations to take a position provide something
to hold on to in the uncertainty of the living therapeutic dialogue (Rober, 2005a).
Accepting the invitation will position a therapist in comfortable and gratifying
professional roles as problem solver, or as protector, or as rescuer and so on.
However, accepting the invitation most likely will lead the therapist to being caught
up in potentially destructive relational scenarios and losing contact with the own
resources of the family and its context. This is what happened in the first session of
the therapy with the Janssens family.
In the first session with the Janssens family, in response to the unspoken invita-
tion of the family, the therapist, rather than remaining flexible in his positioning,
nesded in the position of the absent father. This became first evident as the stories of
the boys outraged the therapist and made him feel protective towards Joni. He
became focused on Joni's passivity and did not acknowledge Joni's past attempts to
bring change, nor the powerlessness that resulted from these attempts. Neither was
the therapist aware of his own impotence. Instead, he felt invited to take a strong
position in the session, modelling what he expected Joni to do. He pushed her to be
stricter with the children, and in that way he again put her through the depressing
experience of being ignored, threatened and humiliated by her sons.
This shows that, although taking a fixed position in response to the family's
invitation may offer some temporary relief for the family (and/or for the therapist),
it diminishes the flexibility of the therapist. Ultimately it paralyses the therapist in
the long run and he or she becomes useless as a helper. Moreover, as happened in
the case of the Janssens family, it will often make the family re-experience hurt and
traumas from the past, such as being ignored or threatened. Instead of impulsively
accepting the invitation of the family and pretending to be what the family is
lacking, it is often better if the therapist creates space to talk about the family's
needs and to try to connect with the family's own resources.
Fortunately, after the first session the therapist took time to reflect on his
experiencing in the session. He realised that he was involved in a destructive
scenario with the family: labelling Joni as the victim, protecting her and blaming
the sons. Gradually he realised he felt more and more powerless. He recognised
the opportunity his experiencing presented and understood that his feelings of
powerlessness could serve as an empathie bridge between himself and Joni. Later,
in the second session, he even saw the opportunity to use the feeling of powerless-
ness to reconnect Joni with her social support system (her sisters). This made it

228 THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALANDJOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY

 Single-Parent Families and the Family Therapist

possible for Joni to share with her sisters some of the burdens of her single parent-
hood, as well as her disappointments with her ex-husband.
While we have adopted a dialogical lens in our analysis of the case, probably in
several respects it would make sense to analyse the case with lenses based on tradi-
tional family therapy approaches like a family life cycle perspective (Carter &
McGoldrick, 2005), a structural perspective (Minuchin, 1974) or a cybernetic,
Milanese perspective (Selvini-Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin & Prata, 1980). It could
be said that the Janssens family is a typical single parent family coping with loss,
that the parental role of the mother is dysfunctional, or that the therapist lost his
position of neutrality in the first session.
In this paper however, adopting a dialogical lens (Rober, 2005b) and using the
three concepts presented in the first part of this paper, I wanted to focus on subtle
aspects of the therapeutic relationship that are often overlooked in the family
therapy field: the way a family therapist is sometimes invited to play a part in the
family dance, and how the family therapist can deal with this challenge by being
self-reflexive and by carefully observing his or her own actions in the session. The
analysis of the case illustrates that, if the therapist is sensitive to his or her own
experiencing during the session, and if the therapist is careful to monitor the
implicit invitations to join the family members in potentially destructive relational
scenarios, the therapist can refiect on the possible negative and perpetuating effects
of his or her interactions with the family. This allows the therapist to explore
opportunities to proceed with the session in new and more constructive ways,
creating dialogical space to talk about the needs of the family and to reconnect the
family with its resources. In single-parent families it is especially important to
avoid social isolation of the family and to try to reconnect the family to its social
support system in order for the burden of the daily family functioning to be shared
as much as possible.
Until now we have limited our analysis to the relationship between the
mother and the therapist, focusing on what we described as Joni's implicit invita-
tion to the therapist to be the absent father. The question can be posed: What
about the sons? Didn't they invite the therapist to take a certain position? It
could be argued that by not committing to the therapy and refusing to be part of
it, they did not invite the therapist at all to take a position. They did not give
him a mandate to be their therapist, but rather kept mocking and joking
throughout the first session and refused to show up for the next session. In a
sense, however, exactly this non-commitment may express the evocation of the
absent father in the sons. Their refusal to commit to therapy and to accept this
therapist as their therapist may express something of their resentment towards
their father and their refusal to be put in a vulnerable position towards a father
figure again. Frank voiced this to his aunt when he said 'Nobody will ever hurt
me again like that.'

Conclusion
In this article, we have focused on some of the processes at work in family therapy
sessions with single-parent families. We focused attention on what we would

THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF FAMILY THERAPY 229

 Peter Rober

describe as the family's implicit invitation to the therapist to take a certain position
in the session. This invitation is usually made in a very delicate way, as it is not
openly expressed in words. Rather, it is voiced in the way the family members
jointly tell their story in words and action. We moved in on these unspoken invita-
tions of single-parent families towards therapists to fill in the gap left: by the absent
parent. Relying on the concept of positioning, we have stressed mainly the impor-
tance of three steps in the therapist's dealing with these possible invitations of
single-parent families:
Step 1, The therapist is sensitive to his or her own experiencing during the session.
Step 2. The therapist considers his or her experiencing as implicit invitations to join
the family members in relational scenarios that may offer instant relief for the
pressures the family is experiencing. The therapist reflects on the possible negative
and perpetuating effects of these scenarios.
Step 3. Rather than filling the gap in the family, the therapist uses his or her experi-
encing as an empathie bridge to talk to the family about what it experiences as
lacking and is needed for further development. This discussion then is the first step
towards reconnecting the family with its natural resources and social support system.
Working in this way, the family therapist may succeed in addressing the single-
parent family's vulnerability, as well as its resilience. By refusing to be the helper the
family obviously wants, the therapist can become the helper they need, by talking
with them about their suffering and their desires, and by reconnecting them to their
own resources.

Endnote
1 This case was discussed from a difïerent angle in another paper of mine (Rober, in press).
In order to protect the confidentiality of the clients, these are not their real names.
Furthermore, changes have been made in the case in order to avoid clients being recog-
nised by readers.

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