Where this fascination first led me to fix my gaze on individual beings, almost blind to the rest through attentional focus, I learned to see the whole relational weave on which the individual story is written, the social canvas on which each person’s personality is woven. And what a fascinating discovery!

Simply opening my mind to the full impact of the environment on the individuals who make it up opened new horizons for me to explore, and above all new avenues of understanding and intervention. After all, when a flower is not growing properly in our garden, do we intervene on the flower or on the environment? Exposure to sun, wind or frost, proximity to other plants, flowers, trees — all of these are elements which, if not taken into account, can lead us to spend endless time trying to heal that poor flower, like a never-ending story whose script repeats itself over and over.

Discovering the field of family therapies, and notably the systemic approach, thus opened new horizons of thought for me. I am setting out to draw you a postcard of it: not to offer you an exhaustive photograph, but rather to give you a foretaste of what awaits you if you decide to set sail for this surprising destination.

The concept I invite you to discover today, or to re-explore — today’s postcard —, is a theorisation I discovered during my training in Lyon: the family life cycle. This theorisation starts from the principle that all families go through certain stages in their construction and evolution, and that moving from one stage to another demands great adaptive energy. It then becomes possible to interpret a family crisis, or a marital crisis, as an expected and “normal” event, tied to the passage from one stage of the family life cycle to another. You cannot imagine how this theorisation can have an almost immediate calming effect on families who recognise themselves in this interpretation, nor its positive impact on the constructive solutions that then emerge. The moment of crisis is seen as an opportunity for change, in which all the creative resources of each family member are important, valid and valued; a useful concept in our professional life as much as, perhaps… in the private sphere.

Without further ado, I will let you discover this systemic postcard in the video — in French — below.