For the Love of Facts
For the Love of Facts is a podcast where two therapists, Dr. Zamzam Dini and Dr. Kadija Mussa, unpack the truths behind love, relationships, and healing. In a world full of noise and myths, we bring culturally grounded, evidence-based conversations that center faith, connection, and care. No fluff—just facts.
For the Love of Facts
What Changes When We Treat The Family, Not The “Problem”
Ever wonder why the same arguments keep showing up—at home, at work, even with friends? We pull back the lens on family systems and show how patterns, roles, and unspoken rules shape daily life. As licensed marriage and family therapists, we share the moments that led us into MFT and the core idea that changed our practice: treat the system, not just the symptom.
We break down systemic thinking in plain language: feedback loops that keep conflict humming, triangulation that turns problems into campaigns, and the subtle “more of the same” moves that stall growth. You’ll hear why tiny shifts—a curious question instead of a comeback, a boundary stated early, a conversation written before it’s spoken—can reset the emotional climate. We compare approaches across psychology, social work, and MFT, then dive into diverse MFT models, from strategic to experiential, and how they meet families where they are without choosing sides.
A powerful story brings it to life: a daughter who couldn’t face her father finally reaches him through a carefully crafted letter. His response opens the door to hugs, honesty, and, ultimately, couple work that addresses the family’s true fault line. Along the way we talk safety and ethics in the therapy room, why inviting partners and parents changes outcomes, and how one secure attachment can reshape symptoms and expectations. If you’ve felt like therapy just catalogs what others do wrong, this conversation offers a path to change the dance instead of blaming the dancers.
Ready to rethink how you relate? Listen, share with someone who needs a systemic lens, and subscribe for our upcoming deep dive into family dynamics. If it resonates, leave a review and tell us what small shift you’ll try this week.
Follow us on instagram @fortheloveoffacts!
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode for the love of facts. Today we're actually switching gears and we're talking more about families and moving from kind of relationship discussions to like family of origin. But before we get into that, I want to give you all some background about who we are. And as you know, we are married and family therapists, and that has an important role to play when you know we discuss families, but also talk about family therapy. So could you just tell me a little bit about like what led you to pursuing a license in LMFT instead of like maybe psychology or social work?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's thanks, Sam. And I am super excited about this. I think after what I called quarter life crisis, right after I graduated from college, I really didn't know what to do with myself because I thought I was pre-med, and for some reason, uh now thinking back on it, I think I don't know why I thought I would be too old to continue in that path because I was quite young anywho. I was doing a year of uh reading core where you just work, it's like a volunteer service. And I was working with the little kids in school doing reading intervention. And most of my students who struggle in reading, surprisingly to me, it's not that these children were not bright or they had reading difficulty or learning disability. It's just their family life was just chaotic. And that is making it so that they had a hard time at school. Um, and then I that's when I started looking into. I definitely didn't want to be a teacher because that was not my thing. But really, how do you help children? And I've after looking into mental health, yeah, I did look into psychology, clinical counseling, right? And then social work and the thing I accidentally came across, like oh, couples and family therapy. And I was like, this is perfect, because then you can work with couples. My dream was always to work with couples and families to make their life, you know, their relationships better so that the children can thrive. So yeah, that's how I ended up in a program studying couples and family therapy.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's beautiful. I think I also had like an aha moment as well. Like I was I was a psychology major in my undergrad. So I I knew very early, like in high school, that I wanted to be like a clinician. But after finishing my undergrad in psychology, when I was looking at graduate programs, I'm like, okay, what's the next step? Because in psychology, you have to get your PhD in clinical psych to get a license. I was like researching graduate programs and I came across marriage environment therapy. I was like, what is this? And so I looked at the website and I remember just having like this like epic thing of like, oh my god, like you know, marriage-defined therapy is a little bit unique because it focuses on relationships, it focuses on systems, it you know, integrates like context and environment into the person's life. So psychology, if you think about psychology, it's more about like what's happening inside your mind, right? Yeah, and so and social work is more about like can we give you resources? And so major family therapy, I felt like fit with my worldview of like who I wanted to work with, how I saw the world. And I was like, this is exactly what I want to do. Like I don't and and so that's how I kind of you know fell in love with the field. I was like, other people think like me. And a lot of people, even like as a professor now, and like teaching MFTs who are you know wanting to become clinicians, they all have the same story of like MFT found me, right? And not the other way around. And it's really cool to kind of see that be like part of the culture of like, you know, our systemic thinking is what unites us and makes us part of our identity.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So like I think we should give people background when we say systemic thinking, it's really looking beyond the individual and the individual's pathology and thinking about how does how do the families contribute right to individu uh dysfunction within the family, and also even taking it a little bit further and looking at societal influence on the family and you know the interactions really. I think we think about feedback loops, right? Of uh that keep a family sick or an individual sick or that keep make things better, right? And then thinking about everything as being in a relationship together, right? And as a system, the system tries to find a new homeostasis, right? So we think about in family therapy of making a difference or a change that makes a difference and not doing more of the same. I I mean that language of like more doing more of the same isn't uh I say I would say like everyday language, but people really don't understand what it means to make a difference, right? And we don't think of like uh just like grand things of like let us buy a new house or move away, change up. No, we're thinking about little things that make a huge difference. For example, showing up differently to arguments, right? If you used to rebuttal, maybe now you take the stance of just like taking things in and see how that makes sense, right? In a relationship. So yeah, family therapists try to work on relationships, not with just relationship individuals have with themselves or with their family in their community and with society at large.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So what does family therapy even look like when people say, like, oh, I'm doing family therapy?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I think the misconception is that there is blaming of, I mean, you always hear it, right? Like all my problems come from my parents. Right? Family therapy isn't really about like blaming of any one individual. When people come, we recognize they are in a relationship. It takes two to tangle, right? Or it takes a whole family to create dysfunction in a family because everybody has their roles and what they do. Um it's not about families are systems, right? And it's not about shaming because we recognize that all families go through hardships and all individuals go through a difficult time, and really we try to normalize those experiences because they are universal.
SPEAKER_01:I've never met a family that did not have any problems.
SPEAKER_00:That's the myth. The the myth of the perfect family. And then then that's their problem. Yeah, keeping up with the don't is that's the problem. That's the problem. And it's it's definitely not about choosing sides, right? Um, so as family therapists, we understand that people try to what we call like triangulate. And there are individuals that are professional triangulators, meaning they get they create coalitions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. They're really good at getting people on their side.
SPEAKER_00:On their side, right? They put people on their side and then they have those people that are against them.
SPEAKER_01:So they feel like that happens even outside of family, right? So, like you were out of work and Carrie is over here, you know, like asking, hey, yeah, like, hey, can you help me with this report? And you're like, sorry, I have my own work to do. And then Carrie goes to Molly, and they're like, Molly, you know, them is not being a team player. And and now it's like Molly's upset for for Carrie, and now you're like stuck in between them. Like that's a triangle.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, they're the professional triangulators. I'm sure others have ran into those individuals who are always campaigning, and their world view is it's either you are with me or against me. Like there's no neutral space. So we we just try to give people like a bird's eye view of like, see how you're behaving. Like, how are you showing up in these different spaces? And then the patterns that people create in relationships, and then we try to extrapolate that out of like, okay, how does your pattern that you created in your family show up in your work life, just like the example you gave in your romantic relationship, like your friendships? Your friendships. So how do those because if people your group projects at school, at school, exactly? If you have uh relational issues and you don't know how to do relationships well, um, it it will show up in almost all relationships.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Yeah, relationships are the building blocks, right? Of like how you connect to the outside world. And your first model or your first kind of blueprint of what it is to be a person or human is your own family, right? Your parents, your siblings are examples of what of what you think is a human. And unfortunately, right, people some people don't have the luxury of having a healthy environment where they can learn how to problem solve or critical things or challenge or racefully or emotionally regulate. And as you grow older, like you notice these skills are lacking because there's always dysfunction in your relationships with either in the work or school or wherever. And so we call these things family of origin issues, where you're kind of essentially, you know, the issues that you're presenting with now or are struggling with now stem from your childhood because of missed opportunity. And there's a lot of reasons why we're not saying families are bad, right? Some people experience trauma and then it gets passed down and it becomes intergenerational. Yes, there are parents that are just evil, right? And they just do horrible things to just their children. Then there are other parents that maybe haven't had much opportunity to learn themselves about how to be a parent because of that, you know, intergenerational pattern. And so we see the nuance in all of this. So we're not blaming families for not being, you know, perfect, quote unquote. But it's important to know that like you can also change these things, right? You can you can learn the skills that you didn't have the opportunity to learn in childhood. It does not mean you're in a permanent state of like helplessness or you're always perpetually emotionally dysregulated. Like you could always learn how to build these skills in adulthood with other healthy relationships as well.
SPEAKER_00:And people, there is like this prevailing notion that they will tell you that you are repeating your patterns that you learned in your families of origin in almost all of your relationships to try to work out those issues. And then some people will try to blame you, saying you sought out a dysfunctional relationship.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Well, that is not very systemic, right? That's very individual, where you're individual based boiling down everything to this person, this one individual and their choice, and it's like, no, that's not true at all.
SPEAKER_00:That's that's not true because when you found yourself in a relationship with somebody, that somebody behaved, yes, granted, there is projections that can happen, but they behaved in a way that your family members behaved, and then which made you go back to what you've learned, how to behave in your dynamics have shifted because of that. Yeah, your dynamics. So it's always, I say, two people in a relationship create their own way of interacting that granted can be informed by families of origin, and it's heavily, right, especially with their attachment and things like that, influenced. At the same time, there is literature showing that you know, individuals who have like borderline personality disorder, which I think is one of those attachment injury type personality disorders. It's their first, their very first relationship is a healthy relationship. They learn their manage their symptoms better, right? They behave better and are better people in relationships following that relationship. So, and I think every relationship brings its own nuance to you, and you in response behave a di uh in a different way. Um, so yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Richard knows that all you need is one secure attachment, just one.
SPEAKER_00:Attachment, one, exactly. So, and in family therapy, of course, we try to give a voice to people. Obviously, you can use choose, you know, different ways of doing therapy. I, for one, I make sure to involve everybody. You know, I'm very strategic and I will try to on purpose make alliances and then break just so people can get an insight and get a different look. Um, and we treat the symptom, right? Yeah, we have a patient that that comes in seeking therapy, but that's just like the patient on paper, but we treat the symptom. Uh, which is the family, yeah. The family, not the individual. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:There's always like a black sheep in the family, right? All our problems stem from this one person. And if they just got their you know stuff together, we would be very happy and functional family. And usually that's not the case, right? The black sheep, quote unquote, is the one that is the most sane, that sees the dysfunction and it's like, hey, we need to call this out, or I need I need to do something different so that my family seeks help. And sometimes that this doesn't happen on like conscious level, and usually children are the ones that you know tend to like behave in a way that pushes the family to get help. And and and yeah, it's like Kudia just said, we you we can approach family therapy very differently because families are unique and nuanced and complex. So, one unique thing about marriage and family therapy is that we have a lot of theories, we have a lot of frameworks and approaches on how to treat treat our families that we work with that I think is unique to our field. There's like, you know, very, very different ways of working with families versus like psychology. And I'm not just picking on psychology, but like as an example, there's good you know, there's hey, I I wanted to be psychologists, you know, back then, but like they have like CBT, right? Cognitive behavior therapy, or they have you know, one or two other interventions. And so it's very limited. Whereas merger family therapy has very well established and are still growing, right, frameworks that we use to approach family therapy. The way I do family therapy is not the way Khadija does, and it depends on what theory or what model that we're working from. So for me, my my my family therapy is more experiential. We do role plays, you know, we do talk to each other, we talk, we focus more on emotions, right? Right. And so like we even do exercises, and so it really depends on like the person's like preference on how they how they want to uh approach the family and and how they want to do family therapy.
SPEAKER_00:But at the same time, I think the hallmark is to stay systemic, and I think you do have to be very thoughtful of that and interview potential therapists and see what their worldview is and how they do therapy. Because I mean, though Zam has been picking on psychologists and social workers, family therapists, respectfully, so many so many of those as colleagues, they be they start looking like them. That's that's always my criticism of the field.
SPEAKER_01:They start looking like other professionals, like it's very easy to focus on the individual and not be systemic and relational, it's very easy, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's very easy, and that's harder to do.
SPEAKER_01:So, why why do why why should people even do family therapy? Like, why do we think it's important?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, goodness gracious, for everything, for everything. I think if always if I see one person come to see me, and I'm always like, Oh, are you married? They'd be like, Yes, and I'm like, it would be lovely if your husband or wife can come. They're like, What? You bring in your family, yes, bring them in, they need to be here, right? And and if the whole family is open to it and I'm like, bring the whole family, um, because that's that's how you disrupt patterns, right?
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that's where the real change happens.
SPEAKER_00:The real change happens because sometimes one individual, like we've seen it, right? Um, would go to treatment or whatever, say they have substance use issues and they will be there for three months working on themselves and they come back to the same dysfunctional family. Like things have not changed. And also that's why I love working with kids. When I work with kids, I tell people I don't do drive-by therapy. You don't get to just drop on your kids.
SPEAKER_01:I love that and disappear.
SPEAKER_00:Um and you want me to fix them. I'm like, no, this is not how this works. So you need to come in, you need to be in the therapy room because your environment needs to change. The child did not show up this way out of nowhere. Out of nowhere, exactly. Like I can be super healthy unless I plan on cutting off all my relationships, right? If they're not actively working on it, it makes no difference. That's why most of the time when a person is in individual therapy, especially like a couple, and what they're bringing in is relational issues, that will lead to breakup in the relationship, right? Because you're here ruminating week after week on the things your partner is not doing well, and they're not poor self-because the partner is not part of the treatment, so nothing is changing for the individual, they're just having more awareness of everything their partner is doing wrong. Wrong, exactly. So there's and and it does not make sense. Always, I would say, if you are and you can and you're able to do family therapy.
SPEAKER_01:Or, like, you know, if you're in therapy and you're noticing a lot of your issues are with other people, right? Or you're bringing up childhood or parent stuff, maybe try to see a marriage and family therapist, right? Because we we still see people individually, we just still have that systemic and relational lens.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I had um once um a young girl who was, you know, Mexican and Catholic, and her father was super opposed to, she had a lot of father issues, you know, super opposed to coming to therapy. Um and because we have invited him, I wrote letter and everything, and just not coming. And she felt like she was the black sheep, not loved, whatever. Um, and then you know, we said, I was like, are you comfortable saying those things? Right. I'm trying to coach her and practice how to talk to him when she gets home. Um, she's like, no, I can never do that. So and I was like, well, write it in a letter, right? We wrote it in session, and I would like have her delete sentences and make a rewrite because just so they can be super expressive and respectful at the same time. And she sent that letter. And when he got the letter, he read it and he wrote a letter back. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, and she was so happy she was crying in session. Like he wrote this to me, and every point she addressed, he like addressed it and he wrote five pages.
SPEAKER_01:Aw, I know. And even if we think about it from a therapeutic perspective, right? Like, imagine if she brought that up via like a conversation, right? Everyone is getting emotionally overwhelmed, right? They're not listening to each other, their defense mechanisms are up, and so there's a lot of miscommunication. But her taking the time out to write it down, she's processing, right? Dad is able to hear everything she wants to hear to say because he's reading it, they're in their own space, and dad gets to contemplate and then be very thoughtful of what he wants to say, and so there's a lot that's happening behind just writing letters to each other.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is one of the most powerful, I think, family experience for me as a clinician, because after he wrote that again, we wrote back, right? And he wrote the letter, but this time he dropped it off in person. And he, you know, said, My daughter, I had to see you and I have to give you a hug. And she said he has not hugged her in so long, and then she said he wouldn't let me go. We hugged for so long, right? And then he was like, I'll come to therapy.
SPEAKER_01:But Kalita, that's a good example of like you being a systemic therapist, even though dad was not in the room, you're still doing family therapy, right? And you eventually got him to come and see the value in it. But like, if you know, if you were if there's your client was not working with a systemic therapist, this would have never happened, or happened, never is a strong word, but like we wouldn't be tipping outside of the box trying to like you know, integrate that into the treatment, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then of course, that's beautiful. And we did a lot of couples work. Couples uh well, between him and uh her his uh wife, like right like his wife got brought into this the whole thing, the the hush bang is like the sun case that's how you do it, you go fishing. The they just they kept buying in and right, and they're and of course, as the whole family showed up, I can see a major problem is the couple relationship, right?
SPEAKER_01:We're like, okay, we gotta work on that, and then we worked on that, and yeah, and yeah, and some people might have you know like anxiety around well, I don't want my family's business out there, right? I don't want to come in here and complain about like my mom, like that makes me feel ungrateful. Like, how do you talk to clients like that?
SPEAKER_00:Uh you know, I think you normalize that mindset, right? Right, like you say, even I would feel apprehensive going into family therapy, right? And it's it it makes sense, you know, exposing your family secrets, talking about your shame, your guilt, and of course talking to outsiders. Um all of those things are normal at the same time, right? Like I'm also a person in this room, and I have a professional and moral and ethical, right?
SPEAKER_01:People don't shy away from telling their problems to doctors, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:So, like I'm a professional, I am not, and of course, that's when we talk about the confidentiality and all of that stuff. Um beyond talking about that, I think what brings people to really family therapy is seeing its value, right?
SPEAKER_01:Like it's seeing its value, and yeah, you get to learn how to communicate with to your parents right in ways that you've never had the opportunity, and they will hear you out for the first time.
SPEAKER_00:And they will tell you, like that same family, they told me, Oh, we're on the verge of divorce, right? The couple just waiting for their last child to be launched and off to college, right? Yeah. But then talking about, like, oh, I am I feel like I'm married to a new person again, because you have just figured out a way to be in relationship with one another and a way to understand one another's position, right? So we talk about I am a strategic, but uh when I'm working with couples, I do try to get that emotional attunement to build that understanding for couples. Yeah, so yeah, we normalize those and we tell them about you know our professional and ethical and moral responsibility to confidentiality, and you know, they just have to see the value in the work that will be done in sessions, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so when Khadija says I'm strategic, she's talking about a specific family therapy model, right? Not that she's like out there plating, you know, in the background.
SPEAKER_00:That's true. Yes, we have Mr. Burr models of doing family therapy, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And so strategic family therapy is a specific model that you use. Yeah, and I would say, like, you know, like we believe families are systems, and that like you're describing, like, if you know the spirit or the soul of the system is like hurting, you know, it shows up in every single family member in one way or another. And so our focus as MFTs, we our duty is to the relationship and to the family system. And so, like you said, we're not choosing sides, we're not you know picking on one person versus the other. Sure, there may be more dysfunction showing up in one person versus the other, but our commitment is to the relationship.
SPEAKER_00:Uh yeah, we are committed to the relationship, and just because we want to work with the whole family system doesn't mean we allow abuse to go on in our sessions, right? There were times where I have kicked out people out of the therapy. Yeah. That's like you need to go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we definitely are not recreating arguments that you have at home in my session. We're not doing that because you can do that on your own time for free.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we we don't allow people to curse one another to be, you know, how they are. Like if when people are apprehensive, oh, they're gonna come in here and do the same thing. It's really no, it's if the therapist knows what they're doing, you we uh we control the therapy room, right? We're like the expert.
SPEAKER_01:We have a responsibility too. I feel like it's like if you are coming in here and being vulnerable and sharing your worries, we have a duty to protect everybody in the room from you know getting pushed under the bus or getting ganged up on, and that's our responsibility as therapists.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so people should feel comfortable in you know bringing in uh individuals. And I do practice with um my clients, right? Like, oh, they say this to me, and then you know, this is how I would respond. At the same time, I'll tell them this is also how I would push them, right? If somebody's asking them to respond and they're just like blunt and not responding at all, and I'll be like, okay, I would jump in in this situation and say this to the other person, but at the same time, I would still push you to have a reaction, right? Well, yeah, I would be even on purpose like, why aren't you getting mad? I don't mean throw things, but like show that you're getting mad.
SPEAKER_01:Because that person has naturally begun suppressing their emotions, and like they may look on the outside like nonchalant or they don't care, but they maybe have shut down right inside.
SPEAKER_00:So try to get that out. So, you know, healing old wounds, creating better communication patterns, learning to how to regulate their emotion. Of course, at the end of all of that is we hope that families reconnect and they have a better relationship for it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we can talk about this forever, but just wanted to kind of you know, give a shout out to MFT. Obviously, we're biased, but you know, for the next couple of sessions or uh episodes, we'll focus on family dynamics and what that looks like for people and what what we think is is important to highlight. Well, thank you so much for joining us for another episode. See you then.
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