A Book Of Influence In My Life Other Than The Bible...

 A book of influence in my life other than the Bible.

This is a great idea for a story.  I do have a book that has made a difference for me in my life.  I heard of this book when I was 40 years old so I think I qualified as an adult at that time.  Now I just have to remember the exact title of the book.  Fortunately with help from my husband, we have the title.  It is THE FAMILY CRUCIBLE by Carl A. Whitaker and Augustus Y. Napier.  

I had just had my fortieth birthday when my husband was offered a job with the H.E.Butt Foundation which operated a Christian Camp and Conference Center in Texas.  The executive offices were in Kerrville, TX which was sixty-five miles northwest of San Antonio.  The site where the year-round adult retreats and summer children’s camps were conducted was on a 1,900 acre property in a canyon sixty-five miles west of Kerrville near Leakey, TX.  This place is absolutely beautiful and loved by all who work and go there for the retreats and camp experiences that are planned and operated by many dedicated employees.   My husband would be one of those employees for the next and last 29 years of his employed work life.  

This cross country move from Wisconsin to Texas would be our fourth cross country move to the fourth state in which we would live since our marriage in August 1966.  John had pastored three different Evangelical Free Churches following his seminary work at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL.  During those seminary years we lived in Racine, WI where I had a job as a school librarian.  Our first son was born in nearby Kenosha, WI as we prepared to move to NE.  For three years John pastored Loomis Ev. Free Church in Loomis, NE and our second son was born in nearby Holdrege, NE during our years there.  From there we moved to Brooklyn, NY where John pastored First Ev. Free Church for four years and our daughter was born during our years there.  Then we returned to another pastorate in Delafield, WI at the Kettle Moraine Ev. Free Church.  After one year there, John took a position as the Director of Family Camping and Adult Ministries at Camp Timber-lee near East Troy, WI.  We would be there for four years before we moved to TX where John would continue with camping ministry through the HEButt Foundation.  He would have a number of different positions during his long career there and it would be a wonderful place for him to work and for our whole family to live.  As soon as we had had our first interview related to an opportunity in TX, I felt sure we were going to once again, uproot and move to another state and another place far from our families of origin.  With our years back in WI after years in NE and NY, we were finally able for our children to spend time with their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  But now we were going to leave again and make that possibility more difficult.  I had strong feelings in opposite directions.  I was very excited and drawn to the new opportunity in TX but I was saddened by the reality that this would mean moving away from a place and people we loved dearly.  We did decide to move to TX.

For the first five years of our time in TX, we lived during the summer months in a home on the grounds of the Foundation camp.  That allowed our children of elementary and middle school age to roam free, attend age appropriate camps, make friends and have summer employment in the future during their high school and college years.  

For me those summers were amazing.  During our interviews about the job being offered to John, we were told that I would never be an employee of the Foundation.  John would be an executive level employee and spouses of that level were people not considered for job openings.  That policy would eventually be changed to a policy that would allow executive level spouses to be employed if their spouse would not be their boss.  But for my first ten years in TX, I had employment with the Kerrville Independent School District as a sixth grade language arts teacher.  This provided me with freedom during the summer months to live on the camp grounds and not in our Kerrville home.   I would have the luxury of providing care and oversite of our school aged children but I would also have the freedom to attend retreats at Laity Lodge.

It would not take long for me to become an avid, frequent  participant of the retreats at Laity Lodge.  Howard Hovde was the director of Laity Lodge during those years.  Following one of the first sessions that I attended, Mr. Hovde welcomed me with these words, “Linda, you are always welcome at Laity Lodge!”  Those words were balm for my soul and an open door that I embraced enthusiastically.  The first speaker I heard at Laity Lodge was Jeannette Clift George.  She is the actress who played Corrie Ten Boom in "The Hiding Place".  She was a fantastic speaker who shared Biblical truth in winsome and humorous ways.  She came frequently as a retreat speaker so getting to know her personally was one of the high points of my years of attending Laity Lodge retreats.  

Laity Lodge retreats had speakers during morning sessions.  Howard Hovde facilitated those sessions.  Before introducing the speakers, Mr. Hovde would step to the podium with a stack of books from the bookstore.  He was an avid reader and believed in the value of books for spiritual, emotional and personal growth and pleasure.  His book talks were legendary and winsome.  On a number of occasions he spoke of an important work of fiction that included wisdom about family systems.  That book was THE FAMILY CRUCIBLE by Carl A. Whitaker and Augustus Y. Napier.

 

At that point in my life, I was just beginning to be introduced to the subject of Family Systems.  I decided to read the book.   It turned out to be very educational and influential in my thinking.

My husband and I had been married for about twenty years.  There were some things related to our differences that had created some feelings within me that I will call "mother-in-law blame".  That book plus speakers and small group discussions during Laity Lodge retreats exposed me to more accurate ways to process family uniqueness based on many different factors created over generations of time.   That book used a fictional family to tell a story that was transformational in my thinking.  It gave me wisdom that brought understanding and acceptance of things that had previously been unknown but annoying to me.   The book was eye-opening and influential in a very positive way for me.  It allowed me to experience a more loving and forgiving relationship with my mother-in-law before she passed away.   I am very grateful for that book as well as Howard Hovde's wisdom as the director of Laity Lodge when I began attending retreats there.    

I do not still have a copy of THE FAMILY CRUCIBLE but found several brief online summaries of the book which capture the essence of why I can say this book was influential in my life.

 

By Thriftbooks.com User, October 10, 2006  "I first read this gem many years ago, long before I became a therapist myself. What an eye opener! Even reading the first Chapter (it's all of 11 pages) is enough to get you thinking in a fresh way about family problems. It certainly worked that way for me.  The book really is about Carl Whitaker, M.D.  Augustus Napier was his understudy.  Whitaker worked within the idea of family-as-a-system without limiting himself too much with theory. This allowed his methods to evolve as he treated more and more families. And it allowed a book like this to be written: lucid because it makes so much sense, dramatic because so much happens in the family whose treatment it describes, hopeful because it shows how much impact family therapy can have.  It wasn't that he didn't know theory. It's that as person he was intuitive, following his gut time and again, and eventually coming out with some guidelines for other family therapists, such as: -The therapist doesn't control the content of a family session, but she or he does control who will be there (this is dramatically dealt with in the first few chapters), -The therapist can cause change by stirring things up and getting family members to look at problems freshly, and -The therapist's job is to re-vision the problem as a communication that is somehow functional.  Typical is Whitaker's view that often the "identified patient" in the family is a stand-in for some other problem that the family cannot face without the help of a therapist.  Since this great book was written family therapy went through a boom time, was very popular. Then it became integrated into what is often called multi-modal therapy, in which family members sometimes come in individually, sometimes in small groups (ie the parents one time, the children another), sometimes as a whole. Still, it is necessary to understand family systems in order to work this way.  People looking into therapy will find this a great explanation of family issues that otherwise may seem baffling. It might also be a motivator to treatment.  Therapists trained individually will find this a fine introduction to working with families. They will also benefit from reading other luminaries in this field."

"The classic groundbreaking book on family therapy by acclaimed experts Augustus Y. Napier, Ph.D., and Carl Whitaker, M.D.  This extraordinary book presents scenarios of one family's therapy experience and explains what underlies each encounter. You will discover the general patterns that are common to all families--stress, polarization and escalation, scapegoating, triangulation, blaming, and the diffusion of identity--and you will gain a vivid understanding of the intriguing field of family therapy."

From Wikipedia:

Carl Alanson Whitaker (1912–1995) was an American physician and psychotherapy pioneer family therapist.
"Carl Whitaker was one of the founding generation of family therapists who broke the rules of the psychotherapeutic orthodoxies of the time, such as that therapy focused on a single client and was totally divorced from family life," said Richard Simon, editor of The Family Therapy Networker, a leading publication in the field. "His idea was that the entire family was the client." Dr. Whitaker, was known for his charm and charismatic manner, was one of the most powerful voices in shaping the practice of family therapy as it began to develop in the 1960s. Often provocative in his teaching, he told one interviewer, "Every marriage is a battle between two families struggling to reproduce themselves."