Taken from “Families and How To Survive Them” by Robin Skynner & John Cleese.
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Robin Let me explain. I should say this whole idea was perhaps the most startling discovery I encountered in years and years of working with families, and I only gradually came to accept it as true. But the most dramatic piece of evidence for it is called the Family Systems Exercise. The first time I saw this was in 1973, when some visiting American family therapists demonstrated it to us. We’ve now incorporated it into our training methods at the Institute of Family Therapy.

John What’s the exercise for?

Robin its purpose is to show what lies behind the way that couples pick each other out across a crowded room! And it demonstrated to me more clearly than I’d ever realised how unconscious attractions work, and what they’re about.

John You mean it shows how we pick each other without knowing anything about each other?

Robin Yes. The trainees do this exercise very early on - in fact ideally when they’re still complete strangers. They’re put together in a group and asked to choose another person from the group who either makes them think of someone in their famliy or, alternatively, gives them the feeling that they would have filled a `gap’ in their family. And - here’s the interesting bit - they’re not allowed to speak at all while they’re choosing. They just stand up and wander around looking at all the others. When they’ve all chosen someone, that is when they’re in pairs, they are told to talk together for a time, to see if they can find out what made them pick each other. They’re encouraged to compare their family backgrounds. Next, each couple is asked to choose another couple, in order to make foursomes. And then, each foursome is asked to form itself into a family of some kind, agreeing with each other what role in the family each person will take. Then they talk together about what it was in their fanidy backgrounds that led to their decisions. And finally, they report to the whole group what they’ve discovered.

John Which is what?

Robin That they’ve somehow, each one of them, picked out three people whose families functioned in very similar ways to their own.

John How do you mean `functioned in very similar ways’?

Robin Well, they’ll find that all four of them are from families where there was difficulty in sharing affection; or perhaps in expressing anger, or envy; or where there had a lot of near-incestuous relationships; or where people had always been expected to be optimistic and cheerful. Or they might discover that all four of them had fathers who were away from home during the years when that mattered a lot to them; or that their families had suffered some big loss or change of a similar kind when they were all at similar ages.

John Couldn’t this just be because they are looking for things they have in common?

Robin That’s not really a good enough explanation for the number of connected similarities they always find. I know it may sound unconvincing to anyone who hasn’t actually tried it, but it’s quite uncanny when you experience it for yourself.

John But what about all the `wall-flowers’? How do you explain the ones who don’t get chosen?

Robin Well, funnily enough, it was the `wall-flowers’ that clinched the argument for me - finally convinced me that there was something extraordinary going on. The very first time that I was in charge of putting about twenty trainee family therapists through this exercise, I suddenly got worried that the ones who came together last would feel they were all rejects. So, when I asked the groups to report on their experiences - the family similarities the’d discovered - I put off asking the `wall-flower’ group till last, as I was rather dreading what their reaction would be. But they were just as fascinated as the rest of the trainees. They had discovered that they had all been fostered, or adopted, or brought up in children’s homes. They had all felt rejected early in their lives, and had somehow, in this exercise, unerringly picked each other out!

John So every time this exercise is staged, you find the trainees choose each other because of the remarkable number of similarities in their family backgrounds - in their family histories, and in their families’ attitudes.

Robin Right.

John So how are the reasons why they choose each other related to the reasons why we fail in love with each other?

Robin Fundamentally. You see, there are lots of reasons for a couple getting together, but most of them are easy to understand. One of the pioneers of marital therapy in the fifties - Henry Dicks - boiled them down to three main categories. First, social pressures like class, religion and money, second, conscious personal reasons like good looks, shared interests, things you know you’re picking someone for; and third, these unconscious attractions that everybody calls `chemistry’.

John So the exercise is demonstrating this third group, the unconscious attractions; and it tells us that people unconsciously choose each other because of similarities in the way their families functioned?

Robin Right. Remember that our trainees are actually looking for someone who made them think of a person in their own family, or who would have filled an important gap in their own family. Yet they are all strangers - there’s no inherited likeness in appearance or personality. And the astonishing thing is that nevertheless, just by looking, they choose people who have astonishing similarities in childhood experiences and specific family problems, too.

John In other words we’re carrying around our families with us, somewhere inside us, and we’re giving off signals which enable others with similar backgrounds to recognise us?

Robin And by getting together with such people, we’re recreating our own families again, in a sense. It’s a bit startling, isn’t it?