Recently a good friend from San Francisco came to visit me in NYC. We decided to have a quintessential New York City day: we dressed up and went to see Wicked on Broadway.

If you’re not a former theater kid or otherwise familiar with this musical, it tells the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West. You know her: the green meanie from the classic children’s story, The Wizard of Oz.

In the original Wizard of Oz film, the Wicked Witch is clearly the baddie. The imagery of her green skin, pointy hat, and ear-piercing cackle has become the archetype for every evil witch Halloween costume since.

But:

This musical is going to help us understand our second basic principle of family systems therapy: Context.

In family therapy, we’re always looking at the broader dynamics, patterns, and roles in the family. This is context. All individual problems exist within a context: a family, a relationship, social roles, cultural expectations, etc.

Context is everything in family therapy. As a family therapist, I’m shifting from looking at the individual as the baddie to, instead, looking at the patterns of relating that shape, influence, or uphold that behavior.

How does this differ from individual therapy? I’m going to be reductive here but in individual therapy, the lens is more like: The Wicked Witch behaves the way she does due to an internal badness. In family therapy, the lens is more like: Perhaps the Wicked Witch behaves the way she does because of the context she is in. And if we shift that context, her behavior will shift, as well. 

Make sense?

Indeed, (spoiler alert!) this is what the musical Wicked seems to highlight so well. It gives the context for the Witch’s behavior. It turns out, she’s not actually bad! Her behavior is a result of the role she’s had to play in her family, at school, and in the broader society. Her behavior makes sense when we look at it in context. 

So, is Wicked the family therapy of musicals? Kind of, yes.

Like in family therapy, Wicked shifts the locus of blame from the individual as the baddie to instead look at how the larger context creates, impacts, and upholds the problem.

(PS! We aren’t trying to let your family member off the hook for bad behavior. But we’re taking a different view of how to address the issue: by changing the context, we’re more likely to change the behavior).