1. Discuss the biblical basis for boundaries. Most sexual abuse happens in families with very tight boundaries. They try to keep all outsiders outside, mainly because they are keeping secrets. They will even seek out churches that have very rigid boundaries. Rigid boundaries actually cut a person off from God, and the person becomes their own god and dictates their own stuff. Their spiritual development dies. Boundaries can be understood from the Bible. Each person of the Trinity has things to do, yet they also interact together as one. They each have their own personalities, attributes, and ways to do things.

2. Discuss common boundary problems for Christians. In churches, people can lose themselves and their family by being too open, or they can stifle themselves and die from having too rigid boundaries.

3. Discuss Genograms. Genograms are ways that Marriage and Family Counselors graph boundaries. They are like flow charts and show how things relate and progress. The genogram shows how the family progresses in life. Men are boxes and women are circles. A line is drawn between the two if they are married. Lines are drawn vertically from them for each of their children. Second marriages are shown on the same horizontal plane as the original marriage. Some counselors fill in a circle for an abortion, miscarriage, or stillborn child, but it might be better to not fill them in because they are people, too. This diagram was created by Murray Bowen to help him remember the names of his client family members. Enmeshed means being too close in one's relationships, either at the individual, family, or subsystem level. Disengaged means being too far away in one's relationships. These conditions can also be shown on a genogram. Both extremes are unhealthy.

4. Discuss the early leaders. Carl Jung was a protege of Sigmund Freud until Freud dropped him. Alfred Adler was a researcher and writer. Both thought that Freud underemphasized the importance of social elements in pathology. Adler believed that the environment played a big part in the pathology, while Jung thought that it was mostly the family and ancestry (some from the environment). Erik Fromm and Harry Stacks Sullivan believed that the environment played a big part in the development of pathology, too. They researched how people knew about themselves. The Looking Glass Shelf was like looking in a mirror at oneself. Reflected Appraisal is seeing how one is treated by others. In other words, I can know myself based on how I am treated by family and other different groups. How one is treated affects how that person sees himself or herself.

Gregory Bateson and Don Jackson both started out at Palo Alto and helped create it. Both started their careers by working with schizophrenics. Both came up with the term "double bind" and also "homeostasis," which is a safe comfortable place that the family has grown or developed to. Every family needs to find a homeostasis kind of balance. Otherwise, they try to find it. The identified patient or scapegoat tries to balance out the family's problems to achieve homeostasis. It can almost be a type of counterbalancing. Marital quid pro quo refers to unspoken rules that might develop in a family over years. Nobody speaks them, but everyone knows them. They can be very bad to the family and very difficult to deal with, since they are not spoken. Bateson and Jackson also symmetry which is complementing each other in family and sharing responsibilities. In schizophrenic families, many times, they were asymmetrical. Their lack of working together was the source of their tension. There was too much rigidity.

				Tom of Bethany

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