Couples in Conflict: Bridging the Systemic Divide

Dr. Nathan Hardy was given a grant from Mental Research Institute Grant to develop and then test a systemic relationship education program against the traditional behavioral-based method of relationship education. With a graduate assistant, hired for this project, they developed a systemic curriculum that could be delivered to couples in-person and they trained themselves as facilitators in PREP 8.0. They planned on using PREP’s units on the Speaker-Listener technique as the “treatment as usual” for couples in education to compare against their new systemic curriculum. Due to a very poor response in recruitment of couples for this project, they reimagined what they could do with their developing curriculum. In Dr. Hardy’s estimation, people are now turning to the internet for informal education with a plethora of online courses and informal learning communities on any number of topics people are interested in. Therefore, he requested a one-semester extension to develop the curriculum into an online format. Although relationship education programs have begun to proliferate this arena with demonstrated efficacy (Spencer & Anderson, 2021), they still remain, in his view, based primarily on traditional reductionistic assumptions behind the theories and research about intimate relationships, which typically simplify complex interactions into individual motivations and behaviors. Dr. Hardy states that “some programs have picked up a few systemic ideas here or there, but none have fully embraced the systemic paradigm nor its latest developments”. With his graduate assistant and a team of student contributors, he developed a first draft for an online systemic curriculum (please follow the link here to go through the course: https://tyjulian80.wixsite.com/systems).

The process of developing the systemic curriculum drew upon systems concepts from the family therapy field supplemented with ideas from Karl Tomm’s interactional patterns (Tomm, 2014). Along the way, however, Dr. Hardy discovered and concluded that the field’s understanding of systems theory was also outdated—many later advancements launched systems theory into a new scientific paradigm. He now aims to revise his curriculum even further to fully integrate “complexity science”, which today represents the latest developments of systems thinking and theory in the broader scientific community. Thus, although Dr. Hardy was unable to run a comparative analysis between the two types of curriculum during the grant period, developing a stronger curriculum rooted in the cutting-edge advancements of complex systems theory will lead to better empirical testing in the future and ultimately better help couples on the cusp of dealing with their most complex problems.

Dr. Hardy is convinced that relationship education and even “systemic family therapy” still remains largely influenced, unknowingly, by the reductionistic paradigm of science. But we are now living in the century of complexity (Stephen Hawking, 2000) where science is evolving into a revolutionary and more sophisticated paradigm rooted in complex systems. It is this way of thinking about and addressing our interconnected world problems and relationship fragmentations that is desperately needed to transform human relationships and solve the social polarizations of our time—in and out of the family. In spite of our potential to contribute, our field seemingly remains behind. Family therapist Bill Doherty pointed out our lack of systemic sophistication this way: "In recent years I've become more aware of the gap between the gold standard models and the everyday practice of therapists who think individualistically and not systemically… Unfortunately, I see this even in therapists who have done serious training in one of the major models. The result is that I am less sanguine about this field of practice than I was a decade ago" (September 2020).