How to Overcome Multi-Role Conflict in Business Families

Opening and Introductions

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Tom Skotidas: Okay, welcome everyone. I’m sure we’ll have a few more joining us. Thank you for attending this webinar. It’s wonderful to have this intimacy and to have you on camera.

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I’m joined by Emily Hammon, and today is about how to overcome multi-role conflict in business families and family enterprises. Thank you for attending. What I’d like to do first is have my partner Emily introduce herself.

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Emily Hammon: Thank you. For those of you who don’t know me, there are a number of familiar faces on the screen here.

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My name is Emily. I am a third-generation family enterprise member. My family business, our legacy business, is Scenic World in the Blue Mountains, Sydney Harbour BridgeClimb, and more recently, Sydney Zoo. Scenic World is 80 years old this year.

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I have taken my lived experience of growing up in a family business, now a family enterprise, and paired that with a theoretical background. I am now a certified family business adviser with Family Business Australia and also the Family Firm Institute in the US.

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I work with a number of significant families to help them plan, protect and prosper with what they have built. The work I do really comes from the position that everything I do is for generations. It’s for the generations past, the generations present, and in preparation for the generations of the future.

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Tom, you want to tell us about you?

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Tom Skotidas: I’d love to. I’m a psychotherapist, a master’s-qualified therapist, and I own two practices. One is a private practice, which I launched in 2023. I’ve worked with individuals, couples and families.

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It just so happened that about one in ten of my private therapy clients were members of family businesses, either seeing me individually, as a dyad, or as a family. The business kept rising up in the room every time I met with them and became a key systemic factor. I found that work so fulfilling, and I’m so passionate about it, that I decided to launch what I believe is APAC’s first dedicated psychotherapy practice for business families. It’s been running for a few months now since last year, and I love it.

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I love owning two different practices, and I’m grateful to be here with advisers and business families alike, and with you, Emily.

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Emily Hammon: Thanks. It’s interesting that you talk about the family business being so obvious in the room because, from my perspective, it’s almost like it’s another child within the family.

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Why Multi-Role Conflict Is So Common in Family Enterprise

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Emily Hammon: From my perspective, the basics are important here. A lot of the people on screen will be familiar with the three-circle model, which really describes why family business is so unique and why conflict presents itself.

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The family business three-circle model was developed by Davis and Tagiuri back in the 1980s. It is a Venn diagram that explains the crossovers between the family, business and ownership systems that interact within the family business system. It’s the overlaps and the blurred boundaries that really create the conflicts within family business.

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There is also another model that adds a fourth circle, where they discuss the individual, and to me that is really important. However, the original model comes from that three-circle model.

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What about you? How does this show up for you in your therapy work when you’ve got those three circles operating?

The Psychotherapy Lens: Dual Relationships and Meaning-Making

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Tom Skotidas: From a therapy perspective, I’m bottom-up. For me, the key concept that keeps coming up is a healthcare concept known as the dual relationship. It’s also known as multiple relationships.

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The dual relationship in healthcare is a concept that says that if you have more than one relationship with your patient or client, whether you’re their therapist and their business partner, or their GP and also something else in their life, it creates significant role confusion and significant conflict.

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As a therapist, I look at meaning. Humans are meaning-making machines. We are constantly making meaning, ultimately for survival and continuity. So if the therapist is also going into business with the client, or is also their close friend, what meaning are you making at any moment? It becomes very difficult to know whether you’re speaking to your best friend, your business partner, or your therapist.

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The dual relationship in healthcare has been used for years as a way to protect clients. In fact, the impact of dual relationships can be brutal when there is a power imbalance, because then other factors come in as well.

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So when I think about multi-role conflict, from a psychotherapy perspective the genesis of it is that dual relationship dynamic.

Governance, Role Clarity and “Which Hat Are You Wearing?”

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Emily Hammon: I think it’s interesting when you look at it from that perspective, because from the family business perspective the role confusion is so apparent. It’s very hard when you’re having a family meeting or a board meeting to separate which hat you’re wearing, and for the family members to separate which hats they’re wearing.

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As an adviser, when I’m working with families, I will sometimes get them to physically put on a hat so that they realise what meeting they are actually in. That role differentiation causes so much conflict. For me, the basis of a lot of the work I do sits within putting governance frameworks into place so those roles start to become clearly defined.

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I work with families to clarify exactly what it means to be a family member, what it means to be part of the business, and what it means to be a shareholder. How does the family identify those roles, define them, and provide role descriptions and responsibilities that sit with those positions within the three-circle model?

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Tom Skotidas: Yes. And when I work with clients, Emily, they ask me, “Why do we keep having this conflict? Why do we keep having misunderstandings? We care about each other. We’re educated. We’re usually a loving family. Why does this happen?”

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One of the reasons I give them is that the dual relationship is brutal. In a family business, the moment you decide to go into business with one another, that is the genesis of the dual relationship. It is with you permanently from that point on.

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I often wonder how family businesses thrive at all when they are literally competing with a systemic factor like a dual relationship from the very moment they decide to own together and work together. So it is critical, from my psychotherapist’s point of view, that meaning is made properly and regularly.

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Inherited Roles, Historical Scripts and Being Cast in a Play

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Emily Hammon: Yes, and I think it’s interesting because sometimes there isn’t so much a choice, and that’s also one of the factors that comes out of being within a family business. You don’t necessarily choose to become a shareholder of a family business. It may simply be an outcome of something that happened before you were born, even generations before you were thought of.

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So having those roles and being able to identify them and make them clear is not necessarily planned. That is part of the challenge in this space. Families, in particular, default to what is historical, and they are very much reacting to things that have already been put in place.

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A lot of the work I do is about flipping that narrative so families become proactive rather than reactive, and helping them deal with the fact that they have effectively been placed in a position. Sometimes I use the analogy that they’ve been cast in a play. They’re on a stage and performing, but they never auditioned. They don’t have the script. They’re just in the play.

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That is a really challenging position to be in, because now they have to fulfil this role. Often families don’t prepare them. They don’t prepare the actors, in that sense. They don’t prepare the shareholders. They don’t prepare people to be in that position, because it’s not necessarily a choice.

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Why Role Clarity Alone Is Not Enough

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Tom Skotidas: Someone asked me recently, another adviser I was speaking to, “Why can’t they just talk through the different roles? Why can’t they just delineate which role they’re occupying in the moment and keep it all nice and clean?”

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From a therapist’s perspective, I look at meaning-making and I also look at trauma. So the father who is also the CEO, the mother who is also the chair, the sibling who is also the shareholder, they may be saying, “I’m speaking now as a shareholder.” But interestingly, even when they state the role up front, the receiver of that information is still taking in that sibling’s physiology, the tone, the energy, the delivery. They might be picking up anger, because humans sense these things.

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So if there is trauma there, for example if one sibling bullied another as children or adolescents, even though one of them is saying, “I’m wearing my shareholder hat here, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think X, Y and Z,” what the other person may actually be picking up is scrambled meaning. They may be thinking, “My brother is angry. I feel threatened.”

Instead of naming the threat and saying, “Hold on, I’m feeling a lot of fear right now and I want to run out of the room, even though I know you’re not going to physically hurt me, but I’m feeling fear in my stomach,” hardly anyone does that. What happens instead is that, as they try to be professional, they suppress the fear, especially if showing fear was discouraged repeatedly in childhood.

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But once you suppress your core emotion, which is critical to making meaning, how do you make meaning? You go back to old templates. “He’s a bully. He hurt me.” That’s when you find the other sibling suddenly saying, “I’m out of here. I don’t want to talk about this.”

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That’s why so many board meetings end with one sibling or one family member walking out of the room after five or ten minutes. They simply cannot stay in the room.

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How do you explain that when you have two educated, successful people? In my view, it is because of underlying trauma and old relational templates that are part of us whether we like it or not.

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I don’t know how that lands with you, Emily, in your work.

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Artificial Harmony, Healthy Conflict, and the Middle Ground

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Emily Hammon: Yes. For me, it speaks to the need for very clear boundaries and very clear times and spaces for particular conversations.

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It’s interesting that you talk about people pushing emotion down, because in this world of conflict within family business, that often presents as artificial harmony. You’re sitting in a meeting and everyone is saying, “Yes, I agree with that. I’m going to vote for this.” But on the inside they may be fuming.

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From my perspective, when you’re dealing with conflict in that space, you don’t want artificial harmony at one end of the conflict spectrum, and you don’t want mean-spirited, ugly conflict where people are storming out of family council meetings. You want to find the healthier middle ground.

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That is where family governance comes into play, because conflict is allowed. We know that conflict is inevitable in this family business space, especially within family governance frameworks. Whether you’re in a board meeting or a family council meeting, conflict can be healthy because you’ve got different people in the room playing different roles, bringing different experiences and different levels of knowledge.

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You want to be able to leverage that, because from my perspective that is what makes a really powerful team. That is part of family business’s competitive advantage. If you bring everybody into that family governance space, so in that family council meeting for example, where people are allowed to express how they are feeling, explain what is going on, move forward, make decisions, and go through a fair process where everybody’s voice is heard, then I think it helps mitigate the challenges that come from those different roles.

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I know you and I have talked before about how you get people to sit in different chairs, and I’ll let you explain how you work through that.

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Tom’s Therapeutic Model: Individuals, Dyads, and the Whole Family

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Tom Skotidas: When I work with business families, it is almost always through three different formats that together create a comprehensive view of the system. That is: individual work, dyadic work with key pairs, and family work with three or more people.

It is close to critical for me to work with individuals first, so I can help them work through the trauma they may be carrying, which in many cases is a blind spot. They may not know it is there, or they may have hints of it, but it remains a blind spot.

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Dyadic therapy is also critical, although for various reasons it cannot always be done. But we know from clinical research that in a family of four, five, six or even ten people, very often one or two dyads are disproportionately responsible for disruption across the entire family system.

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And when a dyad is responsible, I am also looking at those who are being affected by that conflict and their individual patterns of dealing with conflict. So it always becomes a systemic approach.

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But the ideal approach is individual work, dyadic work, and then family work, meaning everyone, or at least the majority, coming together in one setting. That is very hard to work across because of the complexity, but I’m bottom-up. I’m never top-down. For me, it’s: let’s start with the basics.

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Chairwork, Perspective-Taking and Reclaiming Clarity

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Tom Skotidas: In individual work, I want to understand whether trauma is coming through and what relational templates exist that are blind spots to the person. One of the interventions I use, not the only one but one of my favourites, is chairwork.

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I will pull up three empty chairs, and across from those three I’ll place a fourth chair. In that fourth chair sits the family member, or the family itself, depending on what my client chooses.

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Then I have my client sit in one chair. Let’s say that chair is family member, shareholder or business leader, and I interview that role. I ask my client to assume that role and speak from that part. If I notice they are deviating from that part, I bring them back and say, “Did you notice that pattern? You just shifted. Let’s come back here.”

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I ask questions about anger, fear, shame and the whole emotional spectrum. After each chair, I get them to sit in the opposite chair and become the other key figure they are in conflict with, whether that is one person, two people, or the family.

Then I have them speak from that perspective.

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Ninety per cent of my clients say, “How do I do that? I’m not them.” But in almost every case, they manage to do it. What they share is often surprisingly clear, even to them. You can see it in their faces: “Oh wow, I’m actually doing this.”

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Then I get them to sit in the next chair, and so there is a constant movement of perspective-taking. By the end of it, they have a wealth of insight into how they show up in each role, the patterns they follow, because I call those patterns out as they move, and they also begin to understand in an experiential way the impact they have on the other person with whom they are in conflict.

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So that is one of my interventions for individual family business leaders. I don’t know how that lands with you, Emily, or what the equivalent interventions are for you when you work with individuals.

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Emily’s Approach: Separate the Rooms, Separate the Roles

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Emily Hammon: From my perspective, what I hear you doing is essentially the three-circle model all in the one room, all at the same time, which is fascinating because part of the work I do is actually taking those roles out of the same room so they are not in the same room at all.

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So a person who is operational in the business, or who is on the board of directors, attends a physical operational meeting and a physical board meeting, which is completely different from a family council meeting on a different day, in a different location, with a different room setup, which is again different from a shareholders’ meeting that may be held on yet another day and in another location.

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I work with my clients by highlighting where everybody sits. As a family business adviser, one of the most important things is understanding who the key stakeholders are within the three-circle model, who sits where, how that impacts their perspective, and also being aware of the power that sits within those circles, and the influence and control that might make someone’s presence bigger within those rooms.

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Part of the work is getting everyone back down, in a sense, to the same level, where everyone has an equal voice in that space. For example, if you are sitting in a family council meeting, the people who work in the business should not necessarily have a bigger voice than the people who do not work in the business, because in that room everybody is a family member. No one is more family than anybody else.

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So yes, it is fascinating to me that you are doing it all in one space, whereas I am working in almost the opposite direction and trying to separate it more clearly.

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I do have a question for you, because you are talking about trauma, and I’d really like to understand how you define trauma. For me, when I think of trauma, I tend to think of really severe trauma, but perhaps on your spectrum the definition is broader.

Tom’s Definition of Trauma and Why It Matters in the Room

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Tom Skotidas: For me, trauma is any event, however small or big, that overwhelms your nervous system.

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I differ from many other clinicians. A lot of clinicians use the phrases big-T trauma and small-t trauma. I just call it trauma. Any event that overwhelms your nervous system in a way that is stored and can be vividly recalled, even if it doesn’t haunt you every day, even if it doesn’t cause classic symptoms, still matters.

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For me, it’s a thousand cuts. Trauma sits on a spectrum. If what some people call small-t trauma happens a thousand times, you are looking at what others might call big-T trauma.

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So I define trauma as stored anchoring. When you hear a song and an emotion comes up, there is an anchoring. Trauma, in a simplified sense, is similar. There is an anchor to an overwhelmed nervous system that gets stored. Then a stimulus occurs and it brings back the physiological sensations and the emotions that accompany it.

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That is why, in my opinion, the anchoring needs to be broken. The trauma needs to become integrated. In a clinical sense, you want full integration in the hippocampus, the memory centre of the brain, rather than the amygdala, the emotional centre.

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I do a lot of that work because, no matter how much skill-building clients do, if they are in a governance meeting and someone acts or speaks in a particular way, I fear they may go into hyperarousal or hypoarousal.

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Hypoarousal is when people become detached. They go quiet. They look away. You think, “Where did you just go?” That detached state is a protective move. Other people go into hyperarousal, where they become agitated or angry.

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I’m looking for those clues with my clients, and that is why the individual sessions are so important.

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Triggers, Trauma and Why “Oversensitive” Is the Wrong Word

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Emily Hammon: Yes, that makes me think of triggers, because within a family dynamic there are always triggers. Family members know how to press each other’s buttons.

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Tom Skotidas: Yes. And on that point, when one family member says to another, “You’re so sensitive. You’re so reactive. Why do you respond that way?”, I provide education to that family member and to all my clients.

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Actually, there is no such thing as a naturally “oversensitive” person in the way people use that phrase. What is happening is that the person you have just labelled as overly sensitive is carrying significant trauma in their nervous system, and at the slightest touch, metaphorically or physically, they react strongly.

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It’s like someone who has survived a landmine and lost their leg, and is later walking through the same field. If they heard a cat meow, they might become hypervigilant. Another person walking with them might say, “Why are you reacting like that to a cat?”

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They are not just overly sensitive. They are carrying trauma.

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I see that when I work with business families, because they are one of the only structures in the world where you are effectively forced to work every day with people who may have cross-traumatised one another. You keep showing up because of loyalty, financial ties, obligation and many other reasons.

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What Are They Really Fighting For?

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Emily Hammon: Yes, and I think that is exactly the point. Those triggers and those elements of trauma are often always there. Sometimes family members do not even realise what is going on. They don’t realise that they are in a circular pattern of conflict.

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Often when I am speaking with other advisers, I say: think about what they are actually fighting for, not just what they are fighting about. They may be fighting about the fact that someone moved the meeting time. They may be fighting about borrowing someone’s car, or taking ten dollars out of the till, or something else minor on the surface. But what are they actually fighting for?

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That is part of the challenge with conflict within family business in particular. Number one, they may be fighting around trauma they do not even know is there. Number two, they are inherently trying to protect the system.

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From my perspective, family business conflict is very different from other kinds of conflict because the people involved cannot simply walk away. It is not like a landlord and tenant disagreeing and ending the relationship. They are part of the same system. It is within-group conflict.

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So no matter how big the conflict becomes, the family members can’t just walk away. That makes it very difficult. Often both sides are trying, in a collusively defensive way, to protect the whole system without realising it. So the conflict goes around and around in circles until someone comes in, breaks that pattern, and identifies the trauma, because they usually don’t know it is there.

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The other thing that resonated with me before in what you were saying is why this hurts so much and why it is so powerful. I look at it from the perspective that the amount of love you have for the people in that room is often linked to the intensity of the pain and rage that can arise. If the family members didn’t care, didn’t love each other, they wouldn’t care if someone took the ten dollars out of the till or did whatever it was. But because they love each other, it hurts more.

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Complex Trauma and Compressed History

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Tom Skotidas: Yes. And building on that, in my private work I think of trauma as one continuum, but if you want to separate it, there is simple trauma and complex trauma.

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Simple trauma is a single-event trauma: an earthquake, an assault, a one-off event.

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Complex trauma usually includes childhood trauma, where your caregivers, your parents, your siblings, or other authority figures repeatedly hurt you, whether through physical violence, verbal harm or repeated emotional injury that your nervous system cannot process.

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Those who suffer from complex trauma often do not know it. They can go through life not knowing, or only suspecting, but never putting a name to it.

People with complex trauma often carry a distorted view of the world. If you were hurt as a child, you can come to experience the world as unsafe and people as untrustworthy. How can you trust the world when your own caregivers hurt you? So everyone feels potentially dangerous. That can become a silent but almost permanent feature of complex trauma.

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I say almost permanent because it can be treated. Therapy can help a person get to the point where it no longer defines their life or behaviour.

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I think that is why it hurts so much in family business. Dad has just given you a performance review, but it is also Dad. Because you are unable to sit with the emotion of that review and work through it in the moment, you make meaning through an old template: “This is the person who embarrassed me in front of my friends. This is the person who humiliated me. I felt shame.”

It is a brutal compressed history.

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That is why I think a bottom-up psychotherapy approach specialised for business families, working alongside a top-down family business advisory approach, can be so powerful.

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Mapping the Family’s History and Making the Implicit Explicit

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Emily Hammon: Yes, and when you talk about history, there are a couple of things I work with in clients.

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One is the assumptions that grow out of history and potentially traumatic or significant events that have happened in the past. From my perspective, what can happen is that you put everybody in a room and they all assume that it was Aunt Sally or Uncle Jack who caused the trouble back in the 1970s, or whenever it was.

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But when you start to map that out with the family in the room and take them through the history, this happened, then that happened, then we bought this, then we sold the factory, then Uncle Jack bought the truck, or whatever it was, when you begin making those things that have been implicit or assumed into something explicit, it becomes clearer. It gives the family time and space to have those conversations and unpack some of that trauma, whether or not they would call it trauma.

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It is a really important part of getting everybody on the same page.

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Tom Skotidas: Is that like a lifeline, Emily?

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Emily Hammon: Yes, I do that together with the family, often multi-generationally. I work with the senior generation, the current generation, and then the junior or next generation, however old they are, and ask them to place significant events on a timeline.

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So yes, I do it from a business perspective, but also individually, depending on the family and what needs to be worked through. I get family members to track the ups and downs of their own lives.

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I think this is particularly important for the older generations in the room, the matriarchs and patriarchs, because first of all it is a great opportunity to share values across generations. That comes through strongly in the history and storytelling process.

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It is also an opportunity to honour the senior generation, who have often done a huge amount of work and lived through difficult things. It gives the younger generations insight into why they behave the way they do.

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I can speak from personal experience with my own grandfather. Putting my family hat on for a moment, I think about my grandfather running a successful business and keeping biscuits in the safe. He was a child of the Depression era. The biscuits were made from leftover cornflakes from the restaurant upstairs. He had the means to buy biscuits from the shop, but he didn’t. He was very economical in that respect. He had the chef make him these special biscuits and he would lock them in the safe.

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I’m still not sure why those biscuits weren’t put on the tea tray for everyone else to enjoy, but you could have one, and the rest stayed in the safe.

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When you go through that story and the history of the business, you understand why he behaved that way. He lived through the Depression. That gives context to behaviour that, on the surface, could look unnecessarily stingy.

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So I completely agree that history has a huge impact on how people show up in the room and how they present themselves.

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I had a question for you around communication. You’ve spoken about individual work and dyads, but how do you work in the family room itself? You can’t do the exact same chairwork intervention with the whole family, so how do you make that shift into the family space?

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Miracle Signs and Building a Positive Behavioural Blueprint

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Tom Skotidas: Yes, thanks Emily. I’ll answer that, and just let everyone know that we will have Q&A shortly.

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There are multiple ways to conduct family therapy in a family business context. One of the interventions I love to use, because it is so hopeful even though it still carries a lot of emotion, is miracle signs. It comes from a psychotherapy model called Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, and I’ve adapted it from individual work into family work.

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What I do is ask each member of the family to tell each other member one miracle sign of behaviour that, if they witnessed it from the other person, would be a miracle to them and would give them hope and joy.

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For example: “Grandpa Joe, it would be a miracle if instead of calling me a young person who doesn’t know anything in the boardroom, you said, ‘Despite your youth, I think you have a lot of knowledge to share.’”

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Then I ask Grandpa Joe whether he can validate that miracle. I don’t ask them to commit, because commitment creates too much pressure and people often object. Instead I ask: can you validate that this miracle falls within your core values as a person? If it doesn’t, then it is not going to work.

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If Grandpa Joe says, “Yes, actually that does fall within my core values,” then that becomes miracle number one, and it is recorded. Then we go around the room and each person asks for specific miracle behaviours from each other. All of this is recorded and becomes a blueprint for positive behaviour going forward rather than negative behaviour.

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It is a hard exercise, because many clients start by saying, “A miracle would be if you stopped calling me a loser.” My response is, “Okay, that is probably the first third of the miracle. If they’re not calling you that any more, what are they saying instead?”

So I am constantly helping clients move from the negative to the positive.

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Another issue is that many clients genuinely do not know what they want to see in the other person. They say, “I don’t know what the miracle would be.” That is where I hold the space, often in silence, until they work it out. That is when identity starts to be reclaimed. People who have lost their identity often do not know who they are or what they want, and I am very big on that question: what do you want?

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I don’t know how that lands with you, Emily, at the family level.

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Unity, Vision and Behavioural Ground Rules

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Emily Hammon: I love the idea of a miracle in the room. You talk about values, and I think part of seeing a miracle in a family business space, in a family council meeting for example, is when there is unity, not necessarily one hundred per cent alignment, because I don’t think that is always possible. Part of what we are talking about today is that conflict is often present.

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So for me it is about unity around a vision and values. When everybody is coming together to pursue that vision and live those values in an evident way, that is incredibly powerful.

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I can hear that what you are doing is helping them make a mindset shift from a negative frame to a positive frame. That is similar for me when I work with families around a code of conduct or ground rules for a family meeting. Those are aspirational. They say: this is how we want to behave. We may not always get it right. Someone may still have a poor moment, but this is what we are aspiring to.

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When I am facilitating and I have a good meeting with a family, you can see that they are aligned in the vision. We may have gone through a process where someone in the corner does not entirely agree, and they are not completely happy with the final decision, but they have been through the process. They understand how the family got there, and they can unite around the final decision because they can see the vision and can see that the family is behaving in line with the values they have defined.

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So yes, those miracles do happen in the family space. It takes a lot of work to get a family there. The conflict is inevitable. It is always there. Every time a family comes together, it is a chance for them to practise negotiating and working through that conflict, no matter how big or how small.

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Q&A: “We Never Have Difficult Conversations”

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Tom Skotidas: Thank you, Emily. Okay, let’s open it up to questions. If you have any, I have questions for you, Emily, and I’m sure you have questions for me.

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Danielle De Amicis: There are no questions in the chat at the moment.

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Emily Hammon: That means we’ve answered everybody’s questions.

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Tom Skotidas: There are no questions at all. Feel free to jump in, team. Anyone with any questions for me or Emily? Yes, Kim.

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Kim Magua: Thank you. We’re a small group, so I thought jumping off mute would be good.

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I don’t know who this is for, but let’s say we have a family aligned on a vision for the future. There is enough overlap in values. But one of the comments from the second generation is that, as a family, they have just never had to have difficult conversations, or never had conflict discussed openly, even though it is clearly underlying within the family system.

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For context, the father patriarch is very dominant and controlling. The children are getting involved but have no real agency and no governance role in this family. Please help.

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Tom Skotidas: I’ll go first. It sounds like this family needs therapy, Kim.

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What comes up for me is that there are patterns here. First, a very direct answer: I get asked a lot whether family therapy can work if there are six, seven or eight family members but only four or five show up. The answer is absolutely yes. If the majority show up, I can help that part of the family break patterns of behaviour, action and inaction, and show up in a way that is more aligned with who they want to be.

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Even if the dominant, controlling patriarch did not show up, if the rest of the family came and changed their own patterns in relation to dominance, that can still change the system. It may not happen as quickly as it would if he came too, but change is still possible.

As long as part of the family shows up and is willing to become aware of blind spots, disrupt old patterns, and demonstrate new patterns, you can still see systemic change.

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That is what came up for me, Kim.

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Emily Hammon: I would say that if somebody says there is no conflict and they have never had difficult conversations, then they are probably living in a space of artificial harmony. That essentially means there is very low trust and that they are just not having the real conversations. At some point, that will break. There will be an explosion. Something will happen. There will be a catalyst.

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In terms of how to manage it, I would say: get the children or next generation in a separate room and start having breakout meetings with them without the father present. Wearing my adviser hat, I think it is really important to have those conversations without the patriarch there.

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If these are the next generation who are going to be stepping in, you want to support them as much as you can. And when I put my personal family hat on, I would say the same thing: this is the reality they will one day be living in. Their parents will not always be there. That group will need to work together and become their own team.

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At the moment, by the sounds of it, he is still in the role of father and they are still in the role of children. What we want to do is bring them up. We didn’t speak a lot about communication today, but a key part of that is moving from adult–child communication into adult–adult communication. The only way you can really help those next-generation members do that is to take the patriarch out of the picture for a time and help them rise.

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Q&A: Personality Disorders, Patterns and the Scapegoat Problem

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Tom Skotidas: We have another question here from Rachel. Rachel, would you like to say it out loud?

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Rachael Holder: Yes. My question is whether you change your process, or whether there is anything specific you would highlight, if one of the family members has a personality disorder. I’m thinking specifically of NPD or BPD. I’m clearly not asking you to go into great depth, but I have come across a few circumstances where this kind of presentation is present, and I don’t know whether you then approach it differently, or whether you would say that the standard process is more or less appropriate.

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Tom Skotidas: For me, I don’t focus too heavily on the label. That’s not because I ignore it, but because I look at patterns of behaviour.

And just in terms of fact, even the DSM-5, the psychiatric manual that describes these conditions, allows for many different manifestations of diagnoses such as NPD or BPD. There isn’t one single agreed expression of those patterns.

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So, Rachel, I approach it through a trauma lens. I ask: what happened in childhood, or adolescence, especially in those early formative years? To me, what often presents as symptoms that fit those diagnoses is rooted in complex trauma.

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So again, I use my trauma approach first. Before we can get into family business therapy as a system, the key part of the system is the individual. If that individual is willing, I will work with them through specific trauma-informed approaches, such as Narrative Exposure Therapy or Schema Therapy, to help them cope with the trauma and those patterns.

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If I can help them break patterns, then whether or not they continue to meet a diagnosis is less important to me than whether those disruptive patterns can be managed.

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That, for me, is the key. So I do not fear those diagnoses at all as a clinician. I approach them through patterns of behaviour.

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Rachael Holder: Yes, that makes sense.

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Emily Hammon: I would just add that, sometimes within a family, people are looking for a scapegoat. It becomes very easy to say, “It’s that person. It’s their fault. They’re the one who isn’t behaving well. They’re the one doing something symptomatic of a psychological condition.”

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So I think, absolutely, to Tom’s point, it is about identifying the pattern of behaviour within the family system.

That leads me to a question I have for you, Tom. What happens when there is a complete communication breakdown and one family member has stopped speaking to everyone? How do you get that person back in the room?

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When One Family Member Won’t Come Back

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Tom Skotidas: The answer is: you can’t, if they don’t want to. There is no forcing it. They have to want it.

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But if a client wants it even five per cent, I can work with that. If they have even a small hope of making a change, I can work with that. If they don’t want to at all, then there is nothing I can do.

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But as I said earlier, I can still work with the other two, three, four or five family members and help them understand their own patterns and how they engage with the person who has excluded themselves. In that way, we can still start making change systemically, even if I am only working with part of the system.

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Emily Hammon: Yes. And when I am working with a family and I get to a point where I think I am reaching the edge of my depth and I need external support, how do you prefer that to happen?

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Do you come into my meeting, or do I send the clients to you? I think this is really important for advisers, because we need to know our own limitations. I’m not going to start giving accounting advice or legal advice. I bring in the lawyer or the accountant. So is it the same with a psychotherapist or psychologist?

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Adviser–Therapist Collaboration

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Tom Skotidas: Yes, that can happen. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve had conversations with other advisers who have asked me that exact question.

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The best way to approach it is usually privately first, where I get to work with individual members, dyads, and the family separately. But there may come a point where, in terms of their regulation and their trauma, they are now able to have difficult conversations in the room.

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That is where I might join you, Emily, in one of your larger facilitated sessions, where you remain the lead adviser and I am there as a support person in case maladaptive behaviours emerge. I might ask the right question in the moment, or take someone out of the room for a quick five-minute conversation and have them rejoin.

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So yes, that is an option, but not usually at the beginning, because there is often preparatory work that needs to be done first at the individual, dyadic and family levels.

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Emily Hammon: Yes, okay. That’s really helpful. I think it is important to remember, from my perspective, that I am always working in the client’s best interests, and no one adviser can fulfil all of the client’s needs. I can’t be a lawyer, accountant, financial adviser and psychotherapist all at once, even though it would be convenient.

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Closing Remarks

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Tom Skotidas: That’s our session. Thank you, everyone, for attending. I’m grateful for your attendance and questions. Emily, thank you for your partnership. Any parting words?

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Emily Hammon: No, just thank you very much for the opportunity. And thank you everybody for coming along and giving us some of your lunch break.

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Tom Skotidas: Thank you again, everyone.