ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to employ ideas from a variety of constructivist approaches to offer a model of family dynamics and the evolution of problems. People’s understandings, accounts, and narratives in families are active and serve various purposes in shaping their lives with each other, then this allows to entertain the possibility that family members act strategically. They can be seen to have beliefs about each other, about themselves and about their relationships, have ideas or plans about what they want and need from their relationships, and try in various ways to achieve these. In creating a narrative, which involves describing their own and others' actions, people are inevitably formulating questions about why they, or others, have acted the way they have. Understanding that people in families inevitably engage in explanations—creating narratives that contain positive or negative evaluations—helps to elucidate more clearly the power of positive connotation developed by the Milan team.
