What is Systems Therapy?

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us absorbed a very pernicious message: if something is consistently wrong in your life, the problem is probably you. You’re too much, or not enough. You overreacted, or you’re cold. You keep choosing the wrong people, or you keep responding to the right people in the wrong way and driving them away. If you could just think about it differently, or try harder, or heal faster, things would be fine. 

I want to offer you a different starting point. One I didn’t invent, but one I’ve spent nearly two decades building my practice on through dedicated research, graduate study, professional training and mentorship, and-here’s the kicker-doing the work on myself. 

You are not the problem. 

The systems you live in and how they interact are part of the problem.

But what is this psychobabble word “systems”? Keep reading; I promise I’ll explain it in a way that make sense. 

Where this idea actually comes from

Systems therapy did not begin in a therapy room. It began with a biologist. 

In the 1940s, Ludwig von Bertalanffy was frustrated with how science kept breaking living things into smaller and smaller isolated parts to study them, as if an organism were just the sum of its pieces sitting side by side. Think back to biology class, identifying ribosomes and the like. 

Ludwig proposed something radically different at the time, which he eventually named General System Theory: that living things are made of parts in constant interaction, and that you cannot understand the parts without understanding the relationships between them (von Bertalanffy, 1968). A cell doesn’t make sense outside its organism, any more than a ribosome makes sense outside of a cell. A person doesn’t make sense outside their relationships. In plain language, a person is an individual, sure, but they are are also part of a family, small town, island nation, political system, Stardew Valley Discord server, adult kickball league or pickleball team, horror book club… you get it. But it doesn’t make it any less fun to list all the things.  

Mister B’s idea traveled far and wide. In the 1950s and 60s, a group of researchers working with Gregory Bateson at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto started asking what would happen if you applied this same lens to families and communication instead of biology. Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson wrote in their Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) that a person’s behavior can’t be fully understood in isolation, because we are always communicating within a relational context, and that context shapes what’s possible. 

Around the same time, Murray Bowen (one of my favorite therapists of all time!) was mapping how anxiety and patterns move through entire family systems across multiple generations and kin groups, not just within one person or nuclear family unit. He was joined (metaphorically speaking) by Salvador Minuchin, who was studying how families organize themselves into structures, boundaries, and roles that either support or restrict the people inside them. Who amongst us hasn’t understood implicit family rules? 

None of these thinkers was writing about individual pathology. They were writing about webs that connect us all to one another, to things, to concepts, and to systems much larger than individual selves. 

I look at the whole web, not just the person

I ask almost every client to picture a spiderweb at some point. The strands are so thin you can barely see them, and so easily disturbed that a single touch or rupture anywhere sends a vibration through the whole structure. That’s what I mean when I say you are part of a system. Your nervous system, your family of origin, your closest relationships, the culture you were raised in, the institutions you interact with directly and or affected by: none of these are actually separate from you. They are the web you were formed inside of, and they are still moving through you now. Some of them may even interact with one another, which may impact your daily life.

This is why systems therapy never starts with what’s wrong with you. It starts with what happened around you, what patterns you learned to survive inside of, and what your different roles in these systems looks like day-to-day and across the tapestry of your life. A pattern that looks like overfunctioning, shutting down, caretaking past your capacity, or bracing for conflict that hasn’t happened yet almost always made sense somewhere. It was adaptive. It kept something intact or functioning just enough to get you by (i.e., survival).

That doesn’t mean the pattern still serves you now. It means the pattern deserves to be understood before it’s asked to change, so that we’re not just throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. That’s messy. And it leans on luck over intentionality and strategy, with a sprinkle of hope. 

Where Narrative Therapy comes in

Systems thinking tells us we’re shaped by our relationships and context. Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston and laid out in Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990), adds something essential that I think brings this concept home for ordinary people who don’t live their lives theorizing and conducting research: the story you tell about what happened to you actively shapes what feels possible for you.

White and Epston built their approach around a simple but radical premise: you are not the problem. The problem is the problem. When someone has been told, directly or through years of subtle messaging, that they are neurotic, difficult, too sensitive, et cetera, et cetera, that story starts to calcify into identity. Narrative work gently separates the person from the problem so it can be examined, questioned, and, in many cases, rewritten from within your own values, with your knowledge, wisdom, and values at the center, instead of someone else’s diagnosis or dismissal.

“The problem is the problem.”

This is why I don’t just ask what’s happening. I ask what story you’ve been told about what’s happening, and whether that story actually belongs to you.

How neurobiology factors in

You may be thinking that this seems to imply we can just Pollyanna or Anne of Green Gables (elder millennial, reporting for duty!) our way out of this sticky situation. But that’s not the case, and I always tell my clients, you have to be willing to buy whatever narrative you're selling yourself. Toxic positivity, begone!

Instead, it's important to understand that these narratives, either invented or gifted (ahem, forced), live in our body, in real time, often before conscious thought is even involved in drafting or editing them.

Through neuroception, we are constantly-mostly unconsciously-scanning our environment and relationships, sorting cues into safety or threat, often faster than you can name what you’re responding to. This is an evolutionary hack that was whittled through millennia to help us survive. It has its perks, but it can also be a huge problem. This is why you can know, intellectually, that you’re safe in a conversation and still feel your whole body brace for impact. Your nervous system isn’t being dramatic. You are not being dramatic. Your whole system (brain and body together) is doing exactly what it’s built to do, based on everything it has learned to watch for in your life. And, as research continues to demonstrate, what your biological relatives experienced in their lives before you as well.

Hello, transgenerational transmission of trauma!

Sadly, it's true. Epigenetics research has revealed that the whole nature versus nurture argument extends beyond our immediate, lived experience. It spans across time and extended family systems.

Daniel Siegel’s work in interpersonal neurobiology adds another layer: the mind itself develops at the interface between our relationships and our neurology. We are not separate from the people who raised us or the environments that shaped us. Our brains and nervous systems, from the time of concepts, organize themselves according to this multitude of inputs. Integration, in Siegel’s language, is what happens when different parts of this system-thought, feeling, body, memory, relationship-are allowed to connect in authentic and healthy ways rather than stay walled off from each other. Murray Bowen called this differentiation. 

This is the piece that keeps systems therapy from staying purely conceptual. Your mind and body work in conjunction to experience and express your life, one day at a time, across your entire lifespan, and as a leaf on your family tree. 

Holding all three concepts together

This is what I mean when I say my practice is systems therapy rooted in narrative and neuroscience. It isn’t three separate techniques stacked on top of each other. It’s a way of helping my clients by refusing to isolate any single part of their experience or identify them as the problem. 

Systems theory reveals the web you were formed inside of and the patterns that make up your unique web. The narrative you bring to therapy reveals the story you’ve been carrying about that web and whether it still fits. I help you understand your nervous system and what your body learned to do in response to all of it, often long before you had words to articulate or understand what you’ve been experiencing that feels so overwhelming, daunting, and stifling. 

When I sit with a client, I’m not trying to locate a character flaw. I’m trying to understand the whole person: the relationships, the history, the story, the body’s adaptive responses, all of it moving together. It’s a way of finally being seen as a whole person, rather than a diagnosis or a set of symptoms sitting alone on a page.

What this means for you

If you’ve been in therapy before and left feeling like you were handed an explanation of yourself instead of a conversation, this is part of why. Many therapeutic models were developed to isolate the individual and correct what’s wrong with them. 

Systems therapy asks different questions: 

• What happened to you and your people?
• What is still happening to you and your people? 
• What narrative did that shape about yourself, others, and the world around you?
• Does that story still serve you and your relationships, or does it now burden you? 

You were shaped by a web of relationships, a story you may not have chosen, and a nervous system doing its best to keep you safe and whole. All three of those threads matter, yet none of them is the whole truth on its own.

There is space for all of it here, and for all parts of your experience. At Cultivating Capacity, there is a way forward that feels less like surviving your story and more like thriving within it. 

‍

Systems Therapy, Simplified

Systems Therapy is an approach that looks at a person's individual patterns, relationships, and environment as equally important parts of a greater whole, instead of treating problems as located inside one person or trait alone. It draws on general systems theory, family systems therapy, narrative therapy, neuroscience, and feminist critique.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• What is Systems Therapy? Systems Therapy is an intersectional therapeutic approach that considers the relationships, patterns, and context a person is part of, rather than isolating the individual as the sole source of the problem (or the only one affected by the problem).

• How is Systems Therapy different from traditional individual therapy? Individual therapy often centers on one person's thoughts and behaviors to identify a problem or pathology. Systems therapy looks at the web of relationships, family history, and nervous system responses that shape patterns of relating to yourself and others. It considers how what you do and talk about in therapy also impacts the world around you.

• What is the connection between Narrative Therapy and Systems Therapy? Narrative Therapy adds the idea that the story a person carries about their life is not neutral and it's not always consciously or even intentionally created. Combined with systems thinking, it separates the person from the problem, maps the influence of the contexts they live in, and asks whether their story still fits.

• Does Systems Therapy apply neuroscience research? Yes! Cultivating Capacity grounds systems and narrative work in interpersonal neurobiology, which explains how the nervous system shapes-and is shaped by-our connection to others and our natural and built environments.

Neuroscience, narrative, and systems theory all operate from the idea that everything is connected, and the stories we tell about these connections in our lives deeply matter, deserve respect, and can be rewritten with intention and clarity. Cultivating Capacity was built on this foundation. Together, let's hold what is, and explore what's possible.