Families as Complex Systems

This book presents an innovative framework for conceptualising families as complex systems and for understanding and supporting positive change, adaptation and resilience. The development of this framework was based on a qualitative and abductive research process targeting change and resilience processes in multi-challenged families. The theoretical novelty of this book is mostly expressed in the notion of Love-Force: a relational force emerging from the coupling processes between individuals with potential transformative effects on them, their interactions and environments. This book introduces a new vocabulary for understanding the complexity of families as complex systems and their change and resilience processes. Love-Force is presented as a supreme expression of the complexity of families and human bonds. It elaborates on the complexity of the family bonds, on the relation of Love-Force to change and resilience and its contributions to the conceptualisation of the Potential for Family Change. Raising important theoretical and methodological challenges and questions, it presents a guide for future interdisciplinary research in the domains of complexity and family sciences and advances in practice. As such, it will be of interest to anyone interested in the complexity of human relations and to complexity scientists as much as family theorists, researchers and practitioners.

Ana Teixeira de Melo is a psychologist and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She has been tracing a highly interdisciplinary research pathway working at the crossroads of different domains and in close contact with contexts of professional practice. She has been exploring contributions of complexity-informed frameworks to understanding change processes in human systems and to guide the management of change and interventions in complex human systems. She is the author of Performing Complexity: Building Foundations for the Practice of Complex Thinking (2020) and of family programs such as the Integrated Family Assessment and Intervention Model (2011), Travelling Through Lands of Parenthood (2014) and Searching Family Treasure (2009).

PART I 1. Introduction 2. Methodological notes PART II 3. The complexity in the definition of families 4. Perspectives on families as systems: Multidimensional complexity PART III 5. Systems and complexity: Contributions to understanding family complexity 6. A framework for understanding Love-Force and families as a Complex Systems (FACS): An overview 7. Coupling processes and patterns: the self-organisation of families 8. General features of the complexity of family bonds 9. Properties and potentials of the the bonds as emergent coupling patterns 10. Love-Force: Transformative bonds and the families- internal potential for change 11. Individual capacity for Love-Force and contributions to the coupling process 12. Loving interactions: The coordination of individual contributions through reciprocal coupling 13. Loving environments across the Family Life Coupling Space: From bonds to networks and family environments 14. Boundaries and configurations of the family network of bonds PART IV 15. Family change processes: the complexity of positive family change and resilience 16. Positive pathways of change, adaptation and resilience through Love-Force: Individual, reciprocal and bond level strategies 17. Positive pathways of change, adaptation and resilience through Love-Force: Network level strategies, external processes and contributions from the functional and specific potential for change 18. Tailoring assessments and interventions to the complexity of a family case and the potential for family change PART V 19. Final reflections: Future challenges for research and practice

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