I spend a fair amount of time in traffic.

Not the cinematic kind with windows down and music blasting—the kind where you’re somehow both late and completely stationary, inching forward just enough to keep hope alive. The kind where someone cuts across three lanes like they’ve received a personal invitation from destiny, and you find yourself having a surprisingly theological internal dialogue about justice, mercy… and turn signals.

And somewhere in the middle of that—usually when I realize I’ve been gripping the steering wheel like it personally offended me—I’m reminded of something I tell clients fairly often:

You’re not the only car on the road.

It’s obvious when you say it like that. Almost annoyingly obvious. But it’s much harder to live like it’s true—especially when you’re stressed, hurt, or convinced that your situation is uniquely frustrating.

That tension—between what we know intellectually and how we actually live—is where systemic therapy tends to do its best work.

The Comfortable Fiction of “It’s Just Me”

Most people don’t walk into therapy saying, “I think I’m part of a larger relational system that influences my behavior.” They say things like, “I’m overwhelmed,” or “I can’t stop thinking this way,” or “Why does this keep happening?”And underneath those questions is usually a quieter assumption: Something is wrong with me.

Now, to be fair, personal responsibility matters. Therapy is not about outsourcing your agency. But one of the first shifts that happens in systemic work is this:

We stop pretending that your struggles exist in isolation. Because they don’t.

You don’t just feel anxious. You feel anxious in conversations, in relationships, in environments that either amplify or soothe that anxiety. You don’t just shut down. You shut down in response to something—or someone. You don’t just get angry. You get angry within a pattern that has a history.

And once you start to see that, things get more complicated—but also more hopeful.

Traffic Is a System (Even When It Feels Personal)

Let’s go back to traffic, because it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You’re driving along, everything’s fine, and then suddenly—brake lights. A slowdown. No clear cause. You inch forward for a while, mildly irritated, maybe a little self-righteous. And eventually, the road opens up again… with no visible explanation. No accident. No construction. Just… nothing. What you experienced was a ripple effect. Someone, somewhere, tapped their brakes. The next person reacted a little more strongly. The next person overcorrected. And within seconds, you had a wave of slowdown moving backward and creating traffic.

Here’s the key: by the time it reached you, the original cause was invisible and that’s how most relational problems work.

By the time someone shows up in therapy saying, “This is the problem,” what they’re actually experiencing is the end of a much longer chain of interactions.

• A partner withdraws → the other pursues.
• The pursuit intensifies → the withdrawal deepens.
• The cycle repeats until both people feel misunderstood.

No one woke up and decided, “Today I will create a dysfunctional pattern.” But here we are.

Systems Don’t Care Who Started It

This is usually the moment in therapy where things get… delicate. Because once we start talking about patterns, someone inevitably wants to know: So whose fault is it? It’s a fair question. It’s also the wrong one.

Systemic therapy isn’t particularly interested in assigning blame; it’s interested in understanding the loop. If traffic backs up, it’s not especially helpful to track down the exact driver who tapped their brakes three miles ago and hold a tribunal...though that would be nice sometimes. What’s more helpful is understanding how the pattern formed—and how it keeps going.

In families and couples, that often looks like this:

• The more one person criticizes, the more the other withdraws.
• The more the other withdraws, the more intense the criticism becomes.

Both people feel justified. Both people feel stuck.

And both are participating in something larger than either of them intended.

The Slightly Uncomfortable Truth: You Affect the System

Here’s where systemic therapy becomes both challenging and empowering. If you are part of the system, then you are influencing it though not controlling it entirely. While you’re not responsible for everything, you’re influencing it in ways that matter.

This is often where I’ll say something that clients don’t always love initially:

“You may not have created this pattern… but you are participating in it.”

And to their credit, most people sit with that. Sometimes with a raised eyebrow. Sometimes with a deep sigh. Sometimes with a scoff.

Because it means two things at once:

1. You’re not the sole problem.
2. You’re also not completely off the hook.
3. 
   

Which, as it turns out, is actually good news.

Small Changes, Real Impact

One of the things I appreciate most about systemic work is that it doesn’t require everyone to change at once. In fact, that almost never happens. Usually, one person starts doing something slightly different.

They pause instead of reacting.

They ask a question instead of making an accusation.

They stay present instead of shutting down.

At first, it feels unnatural, like driving at a different speed than the rest of traffic—slightly awkward, maybe even a little risky.

But systems adjust.

If one person stops escalating, the pattern has to shift. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not cleanly. But it shifts. This is where systemic work overlaps with something I often tell clients: growth is rarely dramatic—it’s usually quiet, repetitive, and a little inconvenient. (If you’ve ever tried to “fix your life” in a week, you already know how that story ends.)

Family Systems: The Road You Learned to Drive On

Of course, none of this starts in adulthood. We learn how to “drive” in relationships long before we realize we’re doing it.

How was conflict handled in your family?

Who expressed emotion—and who didn’t?

What happened when someone needed something?

These early environments shape how we show up later:

• The person who avoids conflict may have grown up in a home where conflict felt dangerous.
• The person who over-explains may have learned that being misunderstood had consequences.
• The person who takes care of everyone else may have been the stabilizer in a chaotic system.

These patterns are not random. They’re adaptive.

Or, as I sometimes say in sessions, “Your brain is not broken—it’s just loyal to an old environment.” The problem is that what worked then doesn’t always work now.

A Quiet Intersection with Faith

Without making this overly theological, systemic thinking fits rather naturally with a Christian understanding of the person. We are not meant to exist as isolated individuals. We are relational by design. From a clinical perspective, that means your emotional life is shaped in connection. From a spiritual perspective, it means something similar: we belong to one another in ways that are not purely symbolic.

When one part of a family system shifts, others feel it.

When one person grows, it rarely stays contained.

This echoes something I’ve written elsewhere—that we don’t heal in theory; we heal in relationship, often slowly and sometimes awkwardly. And that matters, because it reframes healing from a private project into something that has real relational weight.

Not pressure—just weight.

The Courage to See Clearly

Systemic therapy asks something that is simple, but not easy:

“Can you see the whole picture?”

Not just your intentions or your feelings, but the interaction itself.

What do you do when they do that?

And what do they do when you do that?

And how long has that been happening?

It requires a kind of humility—not the self-critical kind, but the honest kind. Because it’s much easier to say, “They’re the problem.” It’s harder—but far more useful—to ask, “What happens between us?”

Why This Actually Works

If therapy stays focused only on the individual, it often misses the very thing that keeps the problem going:

You can gain insight.

You can learn coping strategies.

You can even feel better—for a while.

But if you return to the same relational patterns without understanding them, those patterns tend to… reintroduce themselves just like those orange construction barrels we all love so much. Systemic therapy connects the dots. It helps people understand not just what they feel, but how those feelings get organized in a relationship.

And that’s where lasting change tends to happen.

Back to Traffic (One Last Time)

If every driver understood—really understood—that their behavior affected the flow of traffic, things wouldn’t be perfect. But they might be different. There would be a little more space. A little less overreaction. A slightly greater awareness that we are all participating in something shared.

Relationships work the same way.

You don’t need perfection. You need awareness.

A Final Thought

As a therapist, I’ve become less interested in identifying “the problem person” and more interested in understanding the pattern people are caught in. Because most people aren’t trying to create dysfunction. They’re trying—often sincerely—to navigate relationships with the tools they’ve been given.

Sometimes those tools work. Sometimes they don’t.

And sometimes, as I’ve written before, we end up measuring ourselves—or our relationships—by performance rather than by something deeper and more stable. Systemic therapy offers a different path. It helps people step back, see the system more clearly, and begin making small changes that ripple outward—into marriages, families, and even the next generation.

And yes, occasionally, I think about all of this while sitting in traffic.

Because the lesson holds:

You’re not the only car on the road.

What you do matters.

And even small shifts can change the flow.

If this kind of work resonates with you—if you’re starting to notice patterns in your relationships that feel bigger than just “you”—this is exactly the kind of work we do at www.holyfamilycounselingcenter.com. Not to assign blame, but to help you see more clearly, respond more intentionally, and move toward relationships that actually feel different—not just temporarily better.