Have you ever had that strange feeling of not being the same person with everyone?
I remember being struck years ago by a striking description of our modern condition. It made me reflect, and to some extent, the effect of a revelation. It was based on the following image, easy to visualize and verify: modern man spends his time locked in boxes
Said like that, it seems crazy, but if you look… Your apartment is a large box with different rooms or rooms that are smaller boxes or subboxes. To get around, you take the elevator to the garage, take the car, the bus, the train or the plane, which are all moving boxes. The stores where you shop, the factories, the offices where you work are more and more boxes. We spend the day, the night and our lives going from boxes to boxes.
Once we visualize the metaphor of moving from one box to another, it is much easier to address the systems that govern our lives. Because to a certain extent The people we find in the different boxes are not the same and our relationship with them is different
For example, we do not behave the same way with co-workers as we do with family members, and within the family, we do not behave the same way with our parents as we do with our children.
The comparison between boxes and systems has its limits, but I think it helps a lot to get an idea of the importance of systems in our lives. Now that we are clear about the difference between the different types of relationships we have with the different people we share time with, we can enter more fully into the topic of systems.
To talk about systems in psychology is to refer to systemic theory which is a mixture of general system theory, cybernetics and communication.
Just as modern man needs his boxes, man needs systems. AND The first system in which we operate is the family
The family, or family system, is the smallest social unit. It gives us life support and covers our first needs. No man develops or survives immersed in nature, but rather through his membership in different social groups that act as intermediaries with the environment. The human baby does not survive without a mother who breastfeeds it, or a caregiver who feeds, protects and instructs it.
This is how the mother-child binomial is the simplest expression of what we can consider a family system. But we quickly realized that that first system could not survive without the support of others. Usually the mother-child binomial is the subsystem of a more extensive family system, or of some suprasystem that provides support (neighborhood, tribe, commune, association, society…).
All the systems in which we participate are open systems, which do not operate in a closed loop but rather they present a dynamic of interaction with the outside, that is, beyond the members of the system itself.
Like the modern man who changed boxes, we change systems when we interact with members of different systems. That is why we can talk about “the” systems that govern our lives, because we are immersed in a multitude of them.
To better understand what a system is, we will refer to the concepts that define them following the general systems theory :
If they affect you too much, things that happen to others.
If you believe that your actions, They are more like reactions
If you think there is another right way to do things.
If you realize that the solutions you use are no longer effective. Or if you have the feeling of finding yourself involved in the same type of dynamics in your relationships over and over again… Despite yourself.
So you are interested discover what systems govern your life and what you can do about it to balance them optimally.
And if you have realized thanks to this article that you spend a lot of time locked up. Get out of your comfort box.
