The fallacy of diagnosis

Bill over at The Thinklings has a truly excellent post titled “I’ve Identified the Problem and it’s You”, which I strongly encourage you to read, challenging a tendency he’s seen among Christians to broadly blame pretty much all Christians but themselves for whatever problem they happen to be complaining about. (I would note that in my experience, this sort of approach is equally common among non-Christians.)

What particularly struck me here, and where I think Bill has expressed himself with particular aptness, was his use of the word “identified.” In family systems theory—the application of general systems theory to human relational systems, following the work of Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman—this is an important word. When the relationships between a group of people are broken—which is to say, when the system is dysfunctional—the system will tend to blame the problem on one person, to say it’s that person’s fault that things aren’t going right. This is a form of scapegoating as a way of offloading responsibility (“There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine; you just need to fix him!”), and the person on whom the blame is set is referred to as the “identified patient.” The term used for this is “diagnosis”: someone “diagnoses” the “patient” as having the problem, thereby implicitly asserting that everyone else is just fine.

In counseling, the key in responding to this sort of situation is to recognize that the diagnosis is in fact false, and that the problem rests not in one person (even if that person is the one showing the symptoms) but in the relational system as a whole. That’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, even when you can get all the members of the family or group together in one room; what Bill has identified, though, is considerably harder to address, since it’s so much more diffuse. Indeed, I’m not sure how to address it, except that (obviously) we must begin by naming and identifying the problem, as Bill so ably has. Beyond that, I’m not sure what can be done except to gently, patiently, graciously call people back to grace and humility, and to remind them that they, too, are sinners.

In light of that, I particularly like where Bill ends his post:

It breaks my heart because Christ died for the church, His Bride. And if someone is truly saved, they are part of the Bride and part of our family, even if they don’t measure up to your definition of cool, even if they don’t line up with your cultural tastes or ecclesiology, Even if they say things sometimes that embarass you. Even if they disappoint you. There is a way to go, in grace, to specific people in your family and work out your problems. But what Christ never gave us the option of doing was drawing our own lines in the sand to determine which of his children we’ll call “brother” and which we won’t.

This is an important truth, and something we really need to hear.