- Much of the time in the household is spent with family members engaged in external numbing stimuli – TV, video games, computers, cell-phones, etc. – rather than with each other.
- Deficiency model in place, in which family members readily point out each other’s inadequacies and deficiencies.
- When meager praise or affirmation is offered, it is never delivered with thevigor and emotional charge as with deficiencies and inadequacies.
- Issues of substance (like relationships) are rarely dealt with during episodes of calm and cooperation. Instead, such issues are blurted out during episodes of anger, confrontation, and high emotional intensity.
- Common strategies employed by family members, in order to “win”: The History Channel, The Great Debaters, The Third Party, and Control or Destroy
- Circle of Irritation is normalized and embedded in the family culture, and supported by the belief that it will never change.
- Each family member insists that the others need to change, as responsibility for creating a new family relational pattern is externalized to others. Families are often stuck in preserving rigid rules and roles, even though these are unsatisfying to everyone.
- Males are generally a whole lotta tough and not enough love, while females are often a whole lotta love and not enough tough.
- Family ego mass often dictates a template of expectations, behaviors, rules, role models, gender-infused norms, and values-beliefs that inhibit the emotional development of individual family members.
- Counselor must seek to shift family members away from content, and maintain focus on “process.”
Charles Bauman 
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.