“Am I joining with the family—or am I joining in on the pattern?”
One of the most essential—and most misunderstood—skills in Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT) is the art of joining.
Joining is not simply about being warm, agreeable, or likable. It is not about aligning with one person’s perspective or “taking sides.” In fact, when joining slips into blind agreement, secret keeping, or following the maladaptive rules of the family system, it stops being joining altogether.
It becomes collusion.
And in systemic work, collusion can quietly undermine the very change we are trying to create.
What Is Joining in ESFT?
In ESFT, joining is a deliberate clinical stance. It is the process of entering into the family system in a way that communicates:
- I see you
- I understand your experience
- The client’s/caregiver’s behavior makes sense in context
This is only accomplished through the use of family assessment tools. Joining allows the therapist to build responses to the narrow, negative narrative, creating relational safety. This is necessary for any meaningful intervention. Without it, families cannot tolerate the discomfort required for change.
Colluding
“oh I don’t think we can talk about that with the children…” claims the caregiver as the therapist suggests the presence of addiction has taken over everyone in the family. The therapist has a decision to make. Do they say, “okay…I don’t want to do anything without your permission…” Or, do they say, “I hear you, it makes sense that you are terrified about saying this out loud, and I have to tell you that everyone has talked about it to me, just not to each other… How we are managing the impact of addiction has literally almost killed your child. They tried to kill themselves. I think this lagging skills of talking about emotional pain means everyone is suffering alone…”
Collusion happens when the therapist:
- Aligns too strongly with one family member’s perspective
- Reinforces a problem-saturated narrative
- Avoids challenging harmful, abusive, and coercive ways of relating
- Over-identifies with a client’s emotional experience and doesn’t seek supervision to develop an intention plan to use this insight in service of the family.
For example, a therapist might believe they are joining with a caregiver’s frustration by saying:
“It makes sense that you’re overwhelmed—your child is completely out of control.”
While this may feel validating, it will unintentionally:
- Solidify blame toward the child
- Reduce curiosity about the system
- Strengthen the very pattern maintaining the problem
In this moment, the therapist has moved from joining the experience to colluding with the narrative.
Joining around the “interaction between people”
In ESFT, we are not joining the content of what is being said—we are speaking to the interaction between family members. Because we believe the referral behaviors are a family based challenge, not an individual based challenge.
This is a critical distinction. Instead of agreeing with the single narrative, we look deeper:
- How did they get here?
- What are the strengths?
- How does the way people relate organize in the family?
- How does this structure maintain the current pattern?
A more systemic response might sound like:
“It makes sense that you’re feeling overwhelmed—and I wonder if your child’s behavior might also be a way of signaling how hard things have been for them lately…I don’t think anything has felt the same since your mother passed away…She was such an important member of this family and meant so much to all of you…”
Now, the therapist is:
- Validating the caregiver
- Expanding the meaning of the child’s behavior
- Opening space for a new interaction
This is joining without colluding.
Why This Balance Matters
Families often come to therapy with rigid, polarized narratives that are points of induction for the therapist:
- “The child is the problem”
- “The parent doesn’t care”
- “Nothing ever changes”
If the therapist joins one side of the narrative, the system becomes more entrenched. But if the therapist avoids joining altogether, the family experiences the therapist as distant or invalidating.
The work, then, is to hold both connection and clinical direction at the same time.
Joining without colluding allows the therapist to:
- Maintain simplicity in the face of complexity
- Preserve curiosity and complexity
- Create space for new patterns to emerge
Final Thought
Joining is not passive. It is an active, moment-to-moment clinical decision.
It requires therapists to stay grounded, curious, and aware of their own pull towards. It asks us to tolerate complexity, and remain connected to every member of the system—especially when the system itself is asking us to choose a side.
Because in ESFT, healing happens through connection, clarity, and the courage to see the system differently.