Families develop their own communication patterns within a framework of shared cultural norms. Family members become caught in predictable life patterns through their interactions, but each family also develops unique communication codes based on members' experiences. Communication serves to create a family's social reality by establishing shared meanings and negotiating relationships. Dialectical tensions exist between autonomy and connection, openness and closeness, and other polarities that are managed through family communication. Cohesion and adaptability are also shaped by communication, determining the closeness of family bonds and the family's flexibility in leadership, roles and rules.

1. Framework for Family
Communication
COM 3013
Tami Davis

2. Framework for Family
 Familiesrepeat themselves within and across
generations.
Tami Davis

3. Framework for Family
 Family members become caught up in
predictable and often unexamined life
patterns that are created, in part, through
their interactions with others.
Tami Davis

4. Framework for Family
Within the framework of shared
cultural communication patterns,
each family has the capacity to
develop its own communication
codes based on the experiences of
individual members as well as
collective family experience.
Tami Davis

5. Framework for Family
 Individuals develop their communication skills
within the family context, learning both the
general cultural language and the specific
familial communication patterns.
Tami Davis

6. Framework for Family
 Families are defined primarily through their
interaction rather than their structure.
(Whitechurch & Dickson, 1999)
Tami Davis

7. The communication process
 Communication may be viewed as a
symbolic, transactional process of
creating and sharing meanings.
 Words
or verbal behavior are the most
commonly used symbols.
Tami Davis

8. The communication process
 The whole range of nonverbal behavior-
including facial expressions, eye
contact, gestures, movement, posture,
appearance, and spatial distance are
also used symbolically.
Tami Davis

9. The communication process
 Symbols must be
mutually understood for
the meaning to be
shared.
 If meanings are not
mutually shared,
messages may not be
understood.
Tami Davis

10. The communication process
 Communication is transactional.
 That
means when people communicate they
have a mutual impact on each other.
Tami Davis

11. The communication process
 The transactional view of communication and a
systems perspective of the family complement each
other, because both focus on relationships.
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12. The communication process
 One’s perception of another and one’s subsequent
behavior can actually change the behavior of the
other person.
Tami Davis

13. The communication process
 In relationships, each person
1. Creates a context for the other
2. Simultaneously creates and interprets messages
and therefore,
3. Simultaneously affects and is affected by the
other
Tami Davis

14. The communication process
 Communication is continually changing.
 Communication is not: static.
 Communication develops over time.
 Relationships, no matter how committed,
change continuously, and communication
both affects and reflects these changes.
Tami Davis

15. The communication process
 Aseach day passes, family members subtly
renegotiate their relationships.
 Over time families change as they pass
through stages of growth; members are born,
age, leave, and die, and their communication
patterns impact and reflect these
developments.
Tami Davis

16. The communication process
 Communication serves to create a families
social reality.
 Successful
communication depends on the
members shared reality, or sets of meanings
(Bochner & Eisenberg, 1987).
Tami Davis

17. Meanings and Messages
Meanings
 Visions of the nature of social and physical reality
as well as values, beliefs, and attitudes.
 Communication involves the negotiation of shared
meanings.
 Without shared meanings, confusion and
misunderstanding is likely to occur.
Tami Davis

18. Meanings and Messages
 A primary task for families is “meaning making,” or
“co creation of meanings.”
 Communication is central to the process of creating
a family’s social reality.
 The meaning-making tasks of family members serve
to create a relational or worldview that characterizes
the family system.
Tami Davis

19. Development of Meanings
 Yourviews of the world result from your
perceptual filter systems.
 Someone’s view of reality will be affected by
sibling position and family history with its
myths, party lines, and traditions across
generations
(Lerner,1989).
Tami Davis

20. The Filter System
 Thefirst set of filters includes: human
sensory systems- sight, hearing, touch, taste,
and smell.
 Another filter is the social system or the way
a person uses language, a person’s accepted
ways of viewing things, family’s cultural and
class status, and all the socially agreed upon
conventions.
Tami Davis

21. Filtering the world
 Social experiences frame your world.
 The language you speak limits and shapes your
meanings.
Tami Davis

22. Development of Meanings
 Overallculture affects perceptions and
meaning, but the immediate groups to which
one belongs exert a strong influence on the
individual’s perceptual set.
 Thefamily group provides contextual
meaning and influences the way meaning is
given to sensory data.
Tami Davis

23. Development of Meanings
 Although physical and social systems provide
the basic general filters, specific constraints
and experiences influence an individual’s
meanings.
 Individualconstraints are the interpretations
you create for your meanings based on your
own personal histories.
Tami Davis

24. Development of Meanings
 Relational pairs
develop their own
interpretation of
symbols.
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25. Metacommunication
 Metacommunication occurs when people
communicate about their communication.
 When verbal and nonverbal instructions are
given about how their messages are to be
understood.
Tami Davis

26. Metacommunication
 Servesan important function within families
because it allows members to state their
needs, clarify confusion, and plan new and
more constructive ways of relating to one
another.
Tami Davis

27. Dialectal Tensions
 Most long-term, intimate relationships are
built on a history of struggle, as well as
pleasure, and a continued interplay between
opposing tendencies.
Tami Davis

28. Dialectal Tensions
 Dialecticimplies opposition, polarity, and
interconnection.
 Relational dialectics refers to the “both/and”
quality of relationships or the need for
partners to simultaneously experience
independence and connection or openness
and privacy.
Tami Davis

29. Dialectal Tensions
 Dialectal tensions are managed through
communication.
 Possible interactional dialectal tensions:
 Autonomy-connection
 Openness-closeness
 Predictability-novelty
 Independent-freedom to be independent
 Affection-instrumentality
 Judgment-acceptance
 Expressiveness-protectiveness
Tami Davis

30. Dialectal Tensions
 The ways in which people exchange
messages influence the form and content of
their relationships.
 Communication among family members
shapes the structure of the family system and
provides a family with its own set of
meanings.
Tami Davis

31. Communication Patterns &
Family Functions
 Each family's unique message system
provides the means of dealing with the major
functions that give shape to family life.
 Communication provides form and content to
a family’s life.
Tami Davis

32. Primary Functions
Circumplex Model of Marital and
Family Systems
 Two central dimensions of family behavior at
the core of the model:
 Family cohesion
 Family adaptability
Tami Davis

33. Cohesion
 Every family attempts to deal with the extent to
which closeness is encouraged or discouraged.
Cohesion
 The emotional bonding that family members have
toward each other.
 Includes: emotional bonding, boundaries, coalitions,
time space, friends, decision-making, interests, and
recreation.
Tami Davis

34. Cohesion
Levels of cohesion:
 Disengaged- family members maintain extreme
separateness and little family belonging or loyalty.
 Separated- Family members experience
emotional independence with some joint
involvement and belonging.
Tami Davis

35. Cohesion
Levels of cohesion (continued):
 Connected- Family members strive for emotional
closeness, loyalty, and joint involvement with
some individuality.
 Enmeshed- Family members experience extreme
closeness, loyalty, and almost no individuality.
Tami Davis

36. Cohesion
 It is through communication that family members are
able to develop and maintain or change their
patterns of cohesion.
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37. Cohesion
 There are widely varying cultural norms for
moderate or extremes of cohesion.
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38. Adaptability
Flexibility
 The amount of change in a family’s
leadership, role relationships, and relations
by rules.
Family Flexibility
 Also referred to as Adaptability
 How family systems manage stability and
change
Tami Davis

39. Levels of Adaptability
Rigid
 Family members operate under autocratic
decision-making styles and strict roles and
rules
Structured
 Family members experience authoritarian
and some equalitarian leadership and stable
roles and rules.
Tami Davis

40. Levels of Adaptability
Flexible
 Family members experience negotiation and
decision making and easily changed rules
and roles.
Chaotic
 Family members have nonexistent
leadership, confused decision making, and
varied rules and roles.
Tami Davis

41. Levels of Adaptability
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42. Adaptability
 Familysystems constantly restructure
themselves as they pass through predictable
developmental stages.
 Family systems must adapt both structurally
and functionally to the demands of other
social institutions and the needs of their own
members.
Tami Davis

43. Adaptability
 Through communication, families make it
clear to their members how much adaptation
is allowed while regulating the adaptive
behaviors of their members and the system
as a whole.
Tami Davis

44. Adaptability & Cohesion
 Cohesion and adaptability combine to create major
functions family members continuously manage.
Tami Davis

45. Adaptability & Cohesion
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46. Dialectal Interplay
 Cohesion and adaptability may be viewed as
both family functions and dialectal tensions.
 Most families struggle over time with the
issues of closeness and distance between
members and between the family system and
outside persons or groups.
Tami Davis

47. Supporting Functions
 Inconjunction with cohesion and adaptability
supporting family functions include:
 Establishing a satisfactory congruence of images
 Evolving modes of interaction into central family
themes
 Establishing boundaries of the families world of
experience
 Dealing with significant biosocial issues like
gender, age, power, and roles
Tami Davis

48. Family Images
 Relationship patterns
can be viewed as
metaphors.
 Metaphors allow people
to understand one
element in terms of
another.
Tami Davis

49. Root Metaphors
 Root metaphors assume a connection
between a way of talking about the world and
a major analogy or metaphor
 If
you had to create a mental image or
metaphor for your family, what would it be?
Tami Davis

50. Family Images & Metaphors
My family is like a Navy fleet. In the center are my
parents, both upon the carrier. My mother is the
executive officer (XO). The XO is the bad guy who
runs The ship, keeps things in order, and intercepts
messes before they reach the commanding officer.
My father is the commanding office (CO). He
decides the direction the family heads but is more
concerned with navigating than maintaining
everyday life on board. My siblings and I are the
small ships in the group. We can go off but must
return to refuel. I am the cruiser and have more
responsibilities and provide services, such as
information.
Tami Davis

51. Family Images & Metaphors
Jan and Stephanie are both destroyers, who are
freer to range around, Michael is the airplane who
sits on top of the mother ship. He has a short range
and en-durance away from the carrier. The
destroyers like to intimidate him but would never
really fire on him. We all know our places and
positions and defend each other from any threat We
are close, but not too close. We all follow orders
from the CO but spend much of our lives interacting
more easily with the XO.
Tami Davis

52. Family Images & Metaphors
A less complex example:
 My family is a team, with my dad as a player-
coach. We all work together for the survival of
our team, and we all contribute. Each one of
us has strengths and weaknesses, yet there
is always that force driving us to achieve
more to-gether. As the player-coach, my dad
has the responsibility of overseeing our
performances.
Tami Davis

53. Family Images
A family’s conception of itself affects its
orientation. It also affects communication.
Tami Davis

54. Family Images
 Females often report female metaphors for
their family-of-origin that emphasize
team/group, nature, and healing/nourishment.
 Male metaphors often emphasize nature,
particularly animals and foundational things
such as brick walls or concrete structures.
Tami Davis

55. Family Images
 The family metaphor acts as a perceptual
filter, an indicator of a family’s collective
identity, and serves as an impetus for future
thought and action.
Tami Davis

56. Family Themes
 Each family shares themes or takes positions
in relationship to the outer world.
Theme
 A pattern of feelings, motives, fantasies, and
conventionalized understandings grouped
around a particular locus of concern.
Tami Davis

57. Family Themes
 Themes represent a fundamental view of
reality and a way of dealing with this view.
 Themes may represent a family’s attempt to
deal with dialectal tensions by “taking a
stand.”
Tami Davis

58. Family Themes
 Themes relate directly to family actions.
 Living according to a theme necessitates the
development of various patterns of behavior,
which affect how members interact with the
outside world, how they interact with each
other and how they develop personally.
Tami Davis

59. Family Themes
 Family themes may be complex and subtle,
involving worldviews that are not immediately
obvious.
 Itis important to identify a family’s main
theme(s) in order to fully understand the
meanings and communication behavior of its
members.
Tami Davis

60. Activity: Family Themes
 Ina small group generate 5-6 sample
themes.
 Brainstorm ways these theme’s may play out
in an individual’s life outside the family.

61. Boundaries
 Families create boundaries.
 Allfamilies establish some boundaries as
they restrict their members from encountering
certain physical and psychological forces.
 Family boundaries regulate access to people,
places, ideas, and values.
Tami Davis

62. Boundaries
 Some family boundaries are highly
permeable, or flexible, and allow movement
across them.
 These open boundaries allow resources such
as information or energy to enter.
 Others resist movement and are rigid and
inflexible.
Tami Davis

63. Boundaries
 External
boundaries distinguish family
members from the rest of the world.
 Internalboundaries help keep family
members appropriately placed in relationship
to each other.
Tami Davis

64. Boundaries
 Families
are not always able to control their
own boundaries.
 Familyboundaries will vary according to the
personalities of the members, the types of
experiences members are exposed, and the
freedom each member has to create his or
her own identity.
Tami Davis

65. Boundaries
A patterned “family dance” occurs when
members maneuver around the internal
boundaries surrounding individual or
subgroup secrets.
Tami Davis

66. Boundaries
 Mostfamilies experience boundaries
between generations which establish
subsystems of generational hierarchy.
 Generationsestablish their boundaries based
on behaviors appropriate for that subsystem.
Tami Davis

67. Boundaries
 Conflict
can arise if boundaries are too
permeable.
 Internal boundary inclusion may differ across
cultural groups.
 Testingor forcing boundaries may involve
deep, emotional conflicts.
Tami Davis

68. Boundaries
 The physical and psychological boundaries
set by each family strongly influence the
kinds of interpersonal communication that
can occur.
Tami Davis

69. Biosocial Issues
 Male and female identity
 Authority and power
 Shaping and influencing children
 Children’s rights
Tami Davis

70. Journal
 Discuss the role of family patterns in family
relationships and how you believe they are
formed and to what extent they can be
changed.
 Tryto come up with 2-3 examples of what
you have witnessed as family interaction
patterns.