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 When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my parents owned a store in West
Yellowstone, Montana. During the summer, the stores in West Yellowstone opened
at eight in the morning and closed at ten at night. In the evenings, a relative
who lived with us and helped take care of me would often drive us over to the
store where she would watch tourists walk the sidewalks of West Yellowstone.
Being a typical young boy, I thought this was quite a boring activity, so I
spent my time flitting back and forth between the car and the store, where I
could watch what my parents were doing. But while I was in the car, my relative
would point out to me different characteristics of different people and comment
about their families, their children, their marriages, and such. At the time, I
found it difficult to understand why she liked to watch people so much. As the
years passed, though, I also became an observer of the social interactions of
human beings.
One of the observations I have made-both personally and professionally-has
been that marriage and family relationships are much like a dance, and that if
we think of patterns in family relationships as a dance, we might see the need
to change a few of our steps-which, in turn, will improve relationships and the
patterns of interaction within our families.
What happens when we dance? Dances require that partners follow patterns and
attend to each other. The dancers give and receive feedback and engage in verbal
and nonverbal behavior. Physiological linkages between dancers contribute to
rhythm and synchrony as partners move together or complement each other as the
dance progresses. All the while, you need to monitor yourself and your dance
partner in order to have good rhythm and good synchrony.
What happens during the family dance? Again, you have exchanges of verbal and
nonverbal behavior. You have physiological changes and linkages between family
members. Some of the patterns in family life involve time cycles, or rhythms. On
weekends, for example, family behavior is often different than it is during the
week. Patterns of conflict often recur, as do patterns of kindness. Children may
tend to argue more during a long drive in the car, but then show compassion when
a family member is sick.
Like dancers, family members monitor distance between themselves and other
family members. As adults, we tend to be comfortable with the amount of
emotional and physical distance we learned as children, and so we continue to
regulate distance according to our comfort. When you ask families about their
patterns of fighting, you find there is often some rhythm to them: they recur
and they involve the regulation of distance.
Families, like dancers, have reciprocity, meaning they exchange similar
behaviors. In a dance, reciprocity can be a problem if both partners put their
feet forward at the same time. Likewise, in families, two people will sometimes
trade anger for anger or criticism for criticism. Reciprocity is not necessarily
a good pattern when bad is exchanged for bad, but when good is exchanged for
good, like eye-gazing or comforting, it can be a positive part of a family
pattern.
Interactional synchrony is usually a better pattern than reciprocity in
families, and it occurs when each family member learns the rhythms of the others
and modifies his or her behavior to fit those rhythms. A teenage daughter who
knows her mother doesn't like to drive may offer to do the shopping with her or
go to a movie together, and then do the driving. A mother who knows her toddler
is difficult in the late afternoon may offer the child a healthy snack to combat
low blood sugar.
The dance between infants and their parents begins at birth; in fact,
children are neurologically wired to start this dance almost immediately.
Research on cycles of attention/nonattention in infants shows that during the
first 24 hours, newborns are in an attention cycle. They gather information from
the world and try to make sense and meaning from it. Their ability to bond with
their parents is especially enhanced during these attention cycles. When infants
go into a period of nonattention, they assimilate information they have gathered
during the attention phase and self-regulate; they learn to monitor and change
their own behavior. Babies' attention cycles affect mothers' behavior. When
babies are in a nonattention cycle, they are looking away; they are not
particularly alert to gathering information from their world. If the
relationship is synchronous, parents allow the baby to influence them by
learning the baby's nonverbal language. They synchronize their own states of
attention or nonattention to those of the baby, and these cycles help infants
organize cognitive and emotional experience.1
Mothers and fathers who aren't in a synchronous rhythm with their babies try
to get their babies' attention. They may be trying to get their babies to look
at them. Parents should try to synchronize their attention cycles with the
baby's attention cycles and let the baby have nonattention cycles when the
baby's nonverbal cues indicate that is what it wants to do. Then the infant
learns to regulate its internal state-physiology and emotions. All of this leads
to self-regulation in the infant and greater understanding by the parents. A
baby who cries even when the problem that triggered the crying (cold, for
example) is no longer present (because the baby is now wrapped in a blanket) has
not learned to self-regulate. A baby who allows itself to be comforted when its
needs are met (and change from tears to satisfaction or sleep when it is no
longer cold) is self-regulating-monitoring and changing ongoing behavior
(crying).
Likewise, if dancers aren't in sync or don't know the signals that allow the
man to lead, the results may be trod-upon feet, stumbling, and collisions with
other dancers. If the cycles are out of rhythm between parents and child, it's
likely the child will have difficulty organizing how he or she belongs in the
family and what sense to make out of emotional, physiological, and informational
experiences. Synchronous cycles maintain regularity in an infant's heartbeat,
respiration, and temperature. There are physiological linkages between family
members, even on the first day of life. These physiological links involve one or
more family members sensing the physiology of a family member-increased heart
rate, temperature, breathing rate, and the like-and reacting with his or her own
similar physiological response. This physiological reactivity can be part of a
positive or a negative family pattern.
Touching is another interesting family pattern. It is a message system
between parents and child for quieting and for alerting and arousing. Slow
patting motions are soothing to children as well as adults. Rapid patting is an
alerting stimulus. When a distressed infant is picked up, a parent in synchrony
can readily soothe the baby's physiological arousal with the baby. As young
parents, many of us were told to let fussy babies cry. The baby would learn that
no one would come, we were told, and learn to self-comfort and stop
"manipulating" the exhausted parents, rather like the style of dancing where
partners don't touch (a glance at MTV indicates that dancing can be a solitary
pursuit without synchrony or togetherness between partners).
More recent research suggests that when babies are picked up, it helps them
soothe their physiological systems. Holding them, rather than ignoring them,
trains them to dampen their internal arousal of negative as well as intense
emotions.2 Touch is important and is even related to developing a good, accurate
body concept, with studies showing that parents who touch their children have
children who have more accurate perceptions of their bodies.
Sight and touch are not the only senses involved in the family dance.
Mothers' voice patterns are synchronized with babies' movements, an interesting
phenomenon that has been documented for years. Although a baby moves in rhythm
to its mother's voice patterns, when the mother uses nonsense syllables instead
of language, there is no such rhythm and synchrony. And children who later
develop autism or schizophrenia or both show differences in this response to
their mothers' voices. They don't have the same kinds of early rhythms.
Developmental psychologist Jay Belsky writes that parents who are synchronous
with infants soothe distress and influence how the child will respond to
stressful situations.3 This contributes to the infant's "emotional IQ," or
ability to understand its own emotional experience and later in life to be able
to identify and express emotional experiences. Parents' responsiveness to
children in distress, providing stimulation and intimacy in the context of a
warm, close relationship, contributes to the development of what we would call a
"secure attachment style" in infants.
Researchers have identified three attachment styles. In a secure attachment
style, the parent, father or mother, responds promptly to the baby's stress.
These parents provide moderate stimulation for the baby; they have warm
involvement that's synchronous. In a child who develops the second, avoidant
attachment style, the parent's behavior is such that he or she is controlling
the interaction; there is excessive stimulation. For example, a parent with a
baby in a nonattention state would work hard to get the baby to attend, trying
to make eye contact when the baby isn't ready. The parent intrudes into the
child's world; the child is not allowed to explore openly; the parent tries to
control the child. The result is that they are asynchronous in rhythms. In the
third, ambivalent attachment style, the parent responds slowly to the baby's
stress, provides low stimulation, and is fairly distant rather than involved
with the baby.4
 Adults tend to exhibit the attachment styles of their parents. So as
adults, if we have a secure style, we can be warm and affectionate, desire
closeness, acknowledge stress, and modulate negative emotion. If we're avoidant
as adults, we're cold or rejecting, we limit closeness and suppress emotion. If
we're ambivalent adults, we're cautious around others; we want extreme
closeness; we're always trying to be close; we drive other people crazy because
of it; and we dump anger and stress on other people rather than monitoring our
own emotions.
These findings seem to be related to clinical psychologist John Gottman's
research about parenting and children's responses.5 He identified two types of
parents in relation to their children's emotions. One type is the emotionally
coaching parent. That parent helps children learn to dampen emotions when
they're aroused, helps children understand their experiences, and supplies words
to label emotions. The emotionally coaching parent is not threatened by
expression of emotion in the family, but encourages it. Children with
emotionally coaching parents are better able to soothe themselves and restore
their baseline physiology more quickly; they are less physiologically reactive
to other family members.
The other type of parent is emotionally dismissive. He or she has difficulty
helping children learn to soothe their emotions. In fact, the parent often does
things that escalate the child's emotions. Generally, they don't understand
emotions themselves. They often don't help their children understand their
experiences, and they rarely give them labels for their emotions.
What are some other patterns in the family dance? I've been interested for
years in what are called family process rules. These
rules are understood, but not usually talked about. They are not things like who
does the chores or what the curfew is on school nights. These are rules that
develop over time because of redundancy and social interaction. The particular
type of interaction becomes a pattern. For example, a process rule can come from
a couple's dating pattern. When he comes to pick her up, he's 15 minutes late on
the first date. She doesn't say much. Second date, he's 15 minutes late; she
doesn't say much. He continues the pattern several times. Finally about the
seventh time she's fairly upset, and so she confronts him when he arrives and
says you've been late now seven times; what's going on? He becomes angry. Why?
He has indeed been late seven times, but the redundancy in the interaction had
become an unspoken rule. It seemed as if it was okay with her if he was late.
Suddenly she is changing the rules.
If we return to the dance, your regular partner might know that you refuse to
 "dance" the clutch-and-sway two-step that ends up in a close hug for
the duration of the song. Perhaps you've always gone for punch and cookies
during those songs. Suddenly, he or she is leading you toward the dance floor
and she puts both arms around your neck or he takes your right arm and puts it
around his neck. The rules have apparently changed, and you need to talk about
it.
Families operate on such implicit rules. A few years ago, now-retired
marriage and family therapist Margaret Hoopes and I were particularly interested
in negative family rules. Margaret and I brainstormed some of the rules that we
thought would be true for alcoholic family systems. We eventually ended up with
fifteen. Here are some examples:
Don?t feel or talk about feelings.
Rather than be who you are, act good, right, strong, or perfect.
Don't have fun, be silly, or enjoy life.
Don't trust yourself, your feelings, or your conclusions.
We used the rules in a survey, and marriage and family therapist Jeffry
Larson became interested and has also done several studies about implicit family
rules. We've found that adults from alcoholic families reported using the
negative rules to a greater extent than adults in from non-alcoholic families.6
Also, young adults from families with negative rules reported more problems with
cohesion, emotional expressiveness, and overall family functioning.7 We've now
developed a scale that includes positive rules, as well, and we'll begin studies
using that. Some examples of positive rules are:
Encourage others to share their feelings.
Play and have fun together.
Be gentle.
Don't blame others unfairly.
Why would a family therapist be interested in a family's unspoken rules?
Because, if you can change the rules-the steps of the dance-you can sometimes
change the whole dance festival-the family-perhaps for generations.
So how do you change the pattern? Well, you have to somehow get education and
information, and you have to practice. If you desire you can get counseling, but
education will do it for most families. Can I entice you to consider some new
dance steps?
 Self-soothing and self-regulation are fulfilling family dance steps.
You can teach people that when they're aware that they're emotionally aroused,
they can say things in a relationship like "relax, she still loves me. It's not
always like this. We really do love each other." Some of those things can help.
If you teach them to step back from the problem, to deep-breathe, to do
relaxation techniques, they can dampen this problematic emotional arousal in
about 20 minutes. If arguing family members return to the problem before that,
they're often not able to continue in any kind of a productive manner because
they haven't taken care of the self-regulation. The opposite of self-soothing is
emotional or physiological escalation. Family members who have that problem may
work themselves up to a dangerous point, as though each one danced faster as the
other danced even faster, to the point of competing to see who could outlast the
other, watch the other be injured or exhausted first, or "win." If only one
person in the family dance "wins," then no one really wins.
What are some other good dance steps? A soft start is a good one for
families. Parents, don't go to your children and say, "You never take out the
garbage. I've about had it with you!" That's not a soft start. Soft starts are
important in the same way that you wouldn't begin a dance by throwing your
partner in the air and trying to catch her or by jumping off a table and
expecting him to catch you. Take a few moments to synchronize yourselves to the
music and to each other. Take a few moments to discern where you and your parent
or child are, emotionally and physiologically, before you begin to
dance.
Nurturing is also important. Gottman's most recent advice is to nurture
fondness. Think of the good times together. Don't let fondness for your partner
or children become rare. Praise and validate. The opposite of those things would
be demanding, dwelling on bad times, criticizing, or showing resentment. When
women make demands on men, the men usually withdraw. That's what observational
research shows. That's because women tend to make more demands about
relationship issues. There's another piece of research that says if men get mad
and make demands, women also withdraw. It's just that men don't make demands on
relationships as much.9 Demand followed by withdrawal is not a good dance step.
On the dance floor, it's like one partner pulling the other too close and the
other partner pushing away. The partners are sending mixed, opposing signals.
There are more graceful and less exhausting ways to dance.
A third step, good in dancing and for families, is flexibility. It's better
than rigidity. Let me give you an example. I started changing my behavior as a
result of my own research on the negative consequences of rigid thinking in
relationships. I started realizing that there were multiple views of a certain
situation, that my view wasn't necessarily the correct one, and that I could
entertain multiple views. Certainly as a family therapist, I had seen multiple
views of what the damage was all about. The pattern looked similar, but each
person had a different-yet rigid-explanation, usually indicating a highly
distressed family.
There are many good dance steps: be more affectionate, eye-gaze more. Let
your spouse and children influence you. Everyone who's been dancing knows that
it's fun to suggest new dance steps and essential to signal a partner that he or
she is about to collide with other dancers. If you accept family members'
influence on you, it'll make your dance much better.
Learn conflict resolution processes. Most of us solve conflict in the same
ways that our families did. Gottman's research on marriage indicates that if you
don't learn different kinds of conflict resolution, you're going to try to
resolve everything in the same way.11
Learn conflict resolution processes, and get the conflict out of the way.
Happy family members may have intense conflicts, but
they get them over with because they get the issue resolved. It doesn't go on
and on. You wouldn't want to keep dancing if your partner reminded you every
time you missed a step. Practice, take lessons, discuss why it's important; but
don't continue to exchange the same old criticisms unless you want to be left on
an empty dance floor. Get the problems resolved so you can get back to the joy
of dancing together.
Learn skills for nondefensiveness. When you're defensive, you come up with an
excuse for your behavior. Or you just counterattack. The message to your spouse
or child is always, "I'm not to blame for this, you are; don't try to put it on
me." I learned long ago that it was a great strategy just to defer to my wife
when she was saying something about me. Say, "You're right, dear. I really am a
klutz; I probably learned it from my mother." If you can't self-soothe, you
can't be nondefensive. If you can become aware of your physiology rising, if you
have to go away, you deep breathe, you do relaxation exercises, you tell
yourself she really doesn't hate me, she's trying to give me feedback, she's
trying to work on this. It could be a new family dance step and I could become a
better dancer. These are great things to learn.
Last, learn the lost art of listening. Responsive listening is important. The
opposite of that is stonewalling, where somebody just stops listening, turns his
or her head, and looks the other way. Stonewalling causes problems on top of
problems. Responsive listening, where you listen (rather than planning your
defense) and respond with expressions of your feelings, is a better step in the
family dance.
The family dance can be fast or slow, routine or exciting, a dance of
mourning or a dance of happiness-or all those things at different times. Every
family goes through cycles. The families that learn to soothe themselves and
each other, to be nondefensive, and to be flexible will find great rewards. Most
important, the father and mother must learn to bring healthy patterns to their
marriage and family life, leaving unhealthy patterns behind. The family dance is
not a matter of luck or fate; rather, we can learn new steps and then practice
those steps as we join with our families in a dance of joy.
James M. Harper, MFT, Ph.D., is Director of BYU's School of Family Life. This
article is a companion to "The Marriage Dance", Marriage & Families, Jan.
2001. (Visit www.marriageandfamilies.byu.edu for a copy of the earlier
article.)
References
1. T. Berry Brazelton and
Bertrand G. Kramer. The Earliest Relationship: Parents, Infants, and the Drama
of Early Attachment (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1990).
2. T. Berry Brazelton and Kathryn E. Barnard. Touch: The Foundation of
Experience (Madison, CT: International Universities Press,
1990).
3. Jay Belsky. "Interactional and Contextual
Determinants of Attachment Security." In Handbook of Attachment: Theory,
Research, and Clinical Applications, edited by Jude Cassidy and Philips R.
Shaver (New York: Guilford, 1999) 249-264.
4. Jay
Belsky, "Infant-Parent Attachment." In Child Psychology: A Handbook of
Contemporary Issues (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1999)
45-63.
5. John M. Gottman, Lynn F. Katz, and Carole
Hooven. Meta-emotion: How Families Communicate Emotionally (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1996).
6. Jeffry H. Larson, W. Kelly, and
James M. Harper. "Young Adults Perceived Dysfunctional Family of Origin Rules: A
Comparison of Alcoholic and Nonalcoholic Families" (Under
review).
7. Jeffry H. Larson, D. J. Peterson, V. A.
Heath, and P. Birch. "The Relationship Between Perceived Dysfunctional
Family-of-Origin Rules and Intimacy in Young Adult Dating Relationships,"
Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 21: 161-175 (2000).
8. John M. Gottman. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (New
York: Crown, 1999).
9. John M. Gottman. The Marriage
Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999).
10. James M. Harper and Gwenaelle C.
Couillard. "Differences in Marital Adjustment Among Married Couples With Similar
and Dissimilar Levels of Emotional Health in Their Family-of-Origin," American
Journal of Family Therapy (in press).
11. John M.
Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail . . . and How You Can Make Yours Last
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
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