Is Balancing Family and Work a Sustainable Metaphor?

Using personal, clinical, and research experiences, the author explores various challenges families and therapists face in the information society and how new dominant metaphors about personhood and family have the potential of entrapping families and individuals. The author reflects on how to frame therapeutic work with couples and families as they attempt to navigate through a new economic order and its predominant discourses in post-industrialized societies such as the United States. As a political activist in South America and, later, a clinically minded systems clinician, the author's awareness of social ecologies as framing our experiences and agency informs these reflections. This article developed out of an earlier presentation at a meeting of the Council on Contemporary Families Annual Meeting in 19991 and was formulated as a response to the question: What Works for Families?