It Takes an Aweful Lot of People in a Room to Outnumber Me
Hello, everyone!
Earlier this month I got a great ask on my Tumblr, asking how my training as a therapist shows up in my writing, and whether I think of that as a help or a hindrance. I gave a short answer there, but am so enamored of the question that I’m going to share more about the subject in this, and subsequent, letters.
Firstly, let me just say- I would never, ever, EVER use my client’s experiences in my work. That would be unethical and illegal. I have, in fact, changed things I have already written when a client later disclosed something too similar to me. I make an allowance that if I have an experience described to me over and over by many people it stops being “a thing that happened to that client” and becomes instead “a thing that happens to people sometimes.”
Ok, carrying on, I absolutely use my therapy training in my writing and think it’s incredibly helpful.
In fact, it was my therapy training that got me into writing, years ago, back when I was in graduate training. At the time I was up to my eyebrows in studying for one of my family therapy courses when I got a bad flu, and was stuck on the couch; heavily medicated, exhausted and loopy. I put on a terrible made for tv movie about the children of the Avengers. In the movie, all the Avengers except IronMan had been dead for years due to one of those villainous cataclysms that these genres are prone to. All their children had been raised to adolescence, on an isolated island, by Ironman.
The kids all acted like school acquaintances, with no apparent impact of having known only each other for something like 14 years.
I was as incensed as someone severely impacted by NyQuil could be, and my wife came home to find me ranting about genograms, birth order, triangulation and a host of other vocabulary words I’d been studying.
She indulgently challenged me to do it better.
You might see where this is going. I eventually decided I was fed up with Marvel’s characters and worldbuilding and decided to ditch everything Marvel-specific and explore my interests on my own terms. This, of course, led to Secondhand Origin Stories and the rest of the series. So, the entire project started off with me wanting to use my training to really explore the psychological and family implications of superheroing, and to use that to explore real-world analogs.
So, not only does my therapist training inform my writing- it was the catalyst that started me writing in the first place, and it’s the reason I started with family dynamics and structure- a subject I still think YA is currently severely lacking.
Let me share just a few concepts from family therapy specifically that I use to organize my writing on a regular basis.
Relationship to power structures - This is sort of the measure and texture of authority and hierarchy in a family. It’s tempting to just say “this is an authoritarian family” or “this is a permissive family” but that is only the most basic starting point. In the vast majority of families there are topics that get hard rules, and topics with softer or even absent expectations.
For example, a household might have rigid expectations about how everyone appears in public, with much more lax rules about private life. Or, maybe the cleanliness of the household is sacrosanct but how people actually treat each other is a free for all. Or, it could simply be “here’s a bunch of rules that apply to everybody except the main rule enforcer, who has no rules.” The possibilities are endless, and when you look around you can start to see the variations all around you.
So, to understated how a family functions you need to know not only what the rules are, but who sets the rules, who and how rules are enforced, when and how exceptions are made, and who the rules apply to. Once you have that down, you know a lot about how everybody in the family actually functions in that group.
Alliances - The most obvious version of this is the siblings as a coalition and a married pair of parents as a coalition. And that’s a reasonable starting place, if the family has that structure. But it gets so much more complicated than that.
So, for example, in my Second Sentinels book, there’s an Issac-Jamie-Yael coalition of the three siblings, but that’s also a subgroup of the Issac-Jamie-Yael-Opal coalition comprised of the teens. There’s also the Sentinels as a team. There’s a tech-focused triad of Issac-Melissa-Jenna.
There’s an old diad of Jamie and Neil based on Neil and Jamie having seen a lot of similarities in their respective temperaments. The disruption of that diad motivates Jamie in Secondhand Origin Stories just like the disrupted diad between Issac and Jenna is central to Issac’s motivations in Names in Their Blood.
So when subjects like superheroing or generational issues or tech comes up, these sub-alliances get activated and set in motion. This is when habits formed over years fall into grooves that behavior rolls right along into.
Communication pathways - This is one of the ways you show the alliances and power structures from above. So for example, in the Encanto movie, we get told “We don’t talk about Bruno” (the rule) we see the alliances (the older two generations who remember all the family secrets, vs the kids who don’t) and sub aliances (Married-in Uncle Felix having particular motivation to help out the other non-magical members of the family), and it all comes down to who is allowed to talk about Bruno after all, who can they discuss it with, and what can they say?
You might assume this will just follow the power structures and alliances, but it gets more textured and nuanced than that. For example, I’ve often seen a parent ban their grown children from coming out to a family matriarch or patriarch. Grandma might be the highest power in the family, but sometimes that means that she gets secrets withheld from her, rather than giving her authority to know everything.
This also shows up in the mundane daily workings of a family. For example, if my mom can’t reach my sister, she calls me and tells me to contact my sister. My sister, correspondingly, is annoyed that my mom won’t text except under extreme duress, so may ask me to call mom if we’re texting and mom needs to get looped in. It’s so tiny and everyday but we recognize these interactions and they give a depth to family depiction.
When I was first considering studying family therapy I asked one of my professors why he’d chosen family therapy specifically. I don’t know what I was expecting, but his answer was “Because now it takes an awful lot of people in a room to outnumber me.”
I remember thinking “Oooh. I don’t know what that means, but I want it.”
Now I knew what he meant. Drop me in a room with a bunch of people interacting, and I can use principles like these to understand all the interactions going on around me. I can observe them with calm clarity that truly does give me a bigger slice of influence in that system than you’d otherwise expect.
And when I am actually in control- when the characters are mine to command- I can build a family that feels like a system you could have walked right into.
Before we go, please let me share this month’s fast and free action item! The current administration’s gutting of the FDA’s budget has led to staff cuts that in turn mean the FDA is planning to cut routine food safety inspections. If you like eating food that will not kill you, I encourage you to contact your reps to express your dismay. This administration is trying to do a lot of evil stuff, but they are also susceptible to public opinion. This is actually the third action item I’ve drafted for this very month because the other two terrible proposals have already been walked back. We can and we do make a difference!
Thank you, as always, for joining me. I truly appreciate you letting me into your inbox in this era of chaotic information saturation.
Till next month,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop. And don’t forget, as a subscriber to Shed Letters, you have exclusive access to my free novelette, Doll’s Eye View, the Martin focused story that takes place between Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood.