The systemic approach in psychotherapy views the behavior of the identified patient as an expression of failed attempts to adapt to a dysfunctional family system. It challenges the conventional criterion of “adapting to reality” as an indicator of mental health or illness.
“We are talking about a seemingly self-evident assumption that there exists an actual, i.e., objective and human-independent reality, of which normal people are more aware than the so-called mentally ill. The idea of such a reality has been philosophically untenable, at least since the time of Kant. Scientifically, it has also been untenable since the view prevailed that the task of science cannot be the finding of final truths… as far as I am aware, this assumption of ‘real reality’ has persisted only in psychiatry.” — Paul Watzlawick, Münchhausen’s Pigtail or Psychotherapy and Reality
To avoid descending entirely into the depths of relativity and relativism, systemic therapists make a crucial distinction: there is a first-order reality and a second-order reality.
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First-order reality encompasses the world of physical facts and their properties—color, shape, weight, texture.
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Second-order reality encompasses the meaning, significance, and value we attribute to these objects.
In the latter, there are no objective criteria because it is the result of complex communication processes that lead to a “majority consensus” on a given issue. However, just because the majority has agreed that this is the “real reality” does not mean it is truly so. It is merely a social construct—an expression of the dominant consensus of the moment. If time and social attitudes change, this consensus changes with them.
“We are born inside this reality and naively assume it is the actual reality until an encounter with another culture, for example, detaches us from this assumption.” — Paul Watzlawick
The example Watzlawick gives is homosexual love between men, which in Ancient Greece was perceived as the highest form of love. Today, in many contexts, this is not the case. The social consensus on love has shifted, sometimes even turning in the opposite direction. But for the Ancient Greeks, that was the reality. Human history is full of examples where what is socially acceptable for one group is unacceptable for another. These examples make it clear that when we speak of social or psychological facts, there is no such thing as “real reality.” There are only mental constructs that, to a greater or lesser degree, help people interact and understand one another.
The Practical Consequences of Our Constructs
These abstract reflections on reality have very real consequences for how a person “heals” or solves their problems.
“At the end of a successful short-term treatment, a young female patient described the fundamental change in her conflicting relationship with her mother in these words: ‘The way I saw things, there was a problem; now I see things differently, and there is no problem.’ The situation as such has not changed, but the attribution of meaning and significance to the givens of the relationship with the mother has changed.” — Paul Watzlawick
Attributing meaning and significance are the bricks with which we construct our second-order reality. It is our “Lego” set, with which we build our world and live within it. It is an expression of our creative power and inner uniqueness. The importance lies in acknowledging its subjective nature. When this happens, we do not just adapt to the outside world; we can change it.
“We always feel in harmony with life, fate, etc., as long as our constructed second-order reality ‘fits’—that is, as long as we do not collide painfully with it. As long as we have this feeling, we are able to handle great difficulties. If this sense of ‘fitting’ is missing, we fall into doubt, fear, psychosis, or suicidal thoughts. The delusion we are all stuck in is the assumption that there exists some appropriately ‘correct’ construction of reality that provides security—that the world is ‘actually’ like this and that final clarity and certainty can be achieved. The consequences of this delusion are serious. They lead us to declare all other constructions of reality as wrong and make it impossible to consider alternative realities when our world-view becomes anachronistic and starts to ‘fit’ less and less.” — Paul Watzlawick
The Maturity of Uncertainty
I am reminded of a TED talk by Kathryn Schulz on being wrong. The most characteristic thing about making a mistake is the certainty of our own rightness while we are making it. This is also the hallmark of most communicative errors—the total lack of doubt that the “correct movie” is our movie.
Paul Watzlawick links human maturity with the ability to realize the limitations of our own perspective and to bear the frustration of our need for certainty and clarity. This is a characteristic of higher levels on the mental health scale. Another is the openness to feedback from the environment, which helps us change and grow. In other words, being open, unbiased, and aware that “your movie” is neither the only one nor the most correct one is a fundamental criterion for mental health.
Systemic psychotherapy helps define the kind of second-order reality that best fits our inner reality. Epictetus’s thought that “it is not things themselves that disturb us, but the opinions we have about those things” was, for Watzlawick, the lever with which Archimedes could move the Earth. The power to change our perception contains such immense transformative strength that it recalls the story of Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.
“He who suffers mentally does not suffer from ‘real reality,’ but from his picture of reality. For him, however, this picture is reality, and his is the true meaning of life… Sufferers are caught in their own world-view. They play what we call in communication research ‘games without end’… Whether spontaneously or through therapy—if the sufferer succeeds in leaving the seemingly all-encompassing frameworks of his reality, it is the consequence of a remarkable and hard-to-describe shock outside those frameworks, a self-pulling upward that is in no way inferior to the adventure of Baron von Munchausen.” — Paul Watzlawick
If this post is reaching you right now, ask yourself: how convinced are you in the rightness of your perspective regarding what troubles you? How certain are you that what you think about others is actually “correct” for them?
If you connect with the sense of the relativity of perspectives—the fragile fabric of what we perceive as “real reality”—you might, in that same moment, feel an opening toward the viewpoints of others, toward their stories and their “movies.” This opening leads to the pleasure of getting to know and participating in a world so rich and different from yourself.
This is power—the power of authentic communication, characterized by maximum openness to others’ perspectives, accompanied by a healthy sense of connection to oneself and trust in one’s own senses, feelings, perceptions, and values.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
