"With families, I stopped creating encyclopedias of data about all their issues and began to search instead for the member with the greatest capacity to be a leader as I have defined it [a well-differentiated leader]. That person generally turned out to be the one who could express himself or herself with the least amount of blaming and the one who had the greatest capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny. I began to coach the 'leader' alone, letting the rest of the family drop out and stay home. I stopped trying to get people to 'communicate' or find better ways of managing their issues. Instead, I began to concentrate on helping the leader become better defined and to learn how to deal adroitly with the sabotage that almost invariably followed any success in this endeavor. Soon I found that the rest of the family was 'in therapy' whether or not they came into my office. For it is the integrity of the leader that promotes the integrity or prevents the 'dis-integr-ation' of the system he or she is leading."
-Edwin Friedman in A Failure of Nerve
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