Do you remember the game “Telephone”? A message gets passed from person to person, and everyone laughs at how distorted(曲解) it becomes. As a game, telephone can be fun. In real life, sending messages through third parties fouls things up. It is important for family members who have “business” with other family members to take it up directly. When tension arises in a relationship between two people, a frequent way of dealing with this is to send messages through a third person. Family doctors refer to the process as ‘triangulation”. Following a quarrel, a mother may say to her son, “Tell your father to pass the salt”, which may be answered by, “Tell your mother to get her own salt.” In many long cases of triangulation, the middleman becomes severely disturbed. Two years ago, Ruth and Ralph Gordon brought their 17-year-old daughter for treatment. Lucille was not doing well in school, using drugs heavily. When I began to work with her, she was uncommunicative and aggressive. After some time, however, she opened up and told me her parents rarely talked to each other, but both used her as a middleman. Mrs. Gordon was sexually unsatisfied and suggested to Lucille that she ask her father to go for marriage advice. Mr. Gordon told Lucille that he was seeing another woman, and he urged Lucille to speak to her mother about improving her behaviour. Caught in this confusing situation, Lucille became more and more troubled. It wasn’t until she refused to play middleman that she began to improve. When either parent began to send a message through her, she learned to say, “Tell him/her yourself!” You’ll find that when family members learn to dial each other directly, there’s rarely a busy signal or wrong number. With direct dialing, a sense of freshness is created. 小题1:The underlined words “foul things up” in the 1st paragraph means ________.
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