- Systems Thinking
- People do not exist in a vacuum. When we think about an individual we have to think about the larger family context and community context.
- Family systems therapy helps individuals resolve their problems in the context of their family units, where many issues are likely to begin. Each family member works together with the others to better understand their group dynamic and how their individual actions affect each other and the family unit as a whole. One of the most important premises of family systems therapy is that what happens to one member of a family happens to everyone in the family.
- A psychiatrist and theorician, Murray Bowen, MD dedicated his life to the “human cause” and produced a remarkable new theory of human behavior called Family Systems Theory, or Bowen Theory. Influenced by his wartime experience as a general medical officer in the Army from 1941 – 1945, Dr. Bowen decided to specialize in psychiatry and began his formal training in psychiatry in 1946 at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. After training, he remained there on staff until 1954. While a resident physician at Menninger, Bowen realized that Freudian theory, the predominant theory in psychiatry at that time, was based on human subjectivity – what patients said and what their analysts interpreted it to mean. Bowen came to believe that, despite the complexities and vagaries of human existence, the study of the human behavior could be more objective. From 1954 to 1959, he conducted research on families with a schizophrenic member at the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Maryland. He continued family research and taught at the Georgetown University School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry in Washington, D.C., from 1959 until his death in October of 1990. Dr. Bowen was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Georgetown University Family Center.
4 if the 8 Concepts of Bowen Family Systems Theory:
- 1.) Differentiation
- All living Systems have two life forces
- Life forces: motives them to preserve integrity of both individuality and togetherness
- Togetherness: preserve relational systems
- Separateness and preserve self within relationships
- 2 Threats to viability provoke anxiety
- Symptoms may occur in response to threat:
- Couple’s symptoms of anxiety may cause a threat to viability: Infidelity, environment situations, (loss of child, moving, losing parents), conflict, emotional distance, differences etc.
- Symptoms may also be threats:
- Couples that are symptoms : experiencing emotional distance as a threat to viability might then experience infidelity as means of pushing couples into crisis to deal with viability of individual or of the relationship. Some will come together if viability of relationship is more important to one or both or they will break apart if viability of individual is important.
- Threats and systems are often cyclical over the seasons
- Our level of differentiation determines weather we respond to or react to threats or systems. Poor differentiation leads to emotional reactivity. Some systems handle threats to viability well and others are not.
- Differentiation: ability to maintain ones own autonomy while allowing other components of system to do the same. Poor differentiation leads to emotional reactivity, which is inability to distinguish and choose between cognitive and affective reactions in anxiety provoking situations.
- Thinking system and intellectual system and feeling system and acknowledge what is going on in
- Primary cause of interpersonal anxiety is inability to comfortably manage emotional distance or closeness or to uphold healthy distance regulation
- Distance Regulation (similar to differentiation): ability to be autonomous within the context of a relationship
- We are in dialogue with each other in relationships we fluctuate between closeness and distance. Natural dance that is always happening.
- Healthy Distance regulation: keep system members close but not too close. Individuals retain and hold their own identity while maintaining the identity of the system.
- Fusion: IF they are too close they will become fused to one another and they will become highly reactive to one another
- Cut off: It is another side to the same coin. We cut off from people we are fused with. Extreme reaction to high levels of fusion. We would not cut off from those who we very hurt by. It is one way of dealing with anxiety of fusion.
- Use differentiation is a manifestation of distance regulation
- Healthy Marriage Model
2.)Triangles:
A triangle is a three-person relationship system. It is considered the building block or “molecule” of larger emotional systems because a triangle is the smallest stable relationship system. A two-person system is unstable because it tolerates little tension before involving a third person. A triangle can contain much more tension without involving another person because the tension can shift around three relationships. If the tension is too high for one triangle to contain, it spreads to a series of “interlocking” triangles. Spreading the tension can stabilize a system, but nothing gets resolved.
People’s actions in a triangle reflect their efforts to assure their emotional attachments to important others, their reactions to too much intensity in the attachments, and their taking sides in others’ conflicts. Paradoxically, a triangle is more stable than a dyad, but a triangle creates an odd man out, which is a very difficult position for individuals to tolerate. Anxiety generated by anticipating being or by being the odd man out is a potent force in triangles.
The patterns in a triangle change with increasing tension. In calm periods, two people are comfortably close “insiders” and the third person is an uncomfortable “outsider.” The insiders actively exclude the outsider, and the outsider works to get closer to one of them. Someone is always uncomfortable in a triangle and pushing for change. The insiders solidify their bond by choosing each other in preference to the less desirable outsider. When someone chooses another person over oneself, it arouses particularly intense feelings of rejection.
If mild to moderate tension develops between the insiders, the most uncomfortable one will move closer to the outsider. One of the original insiders now becomes the new outsider and the original outsider is now an insider. The new outsider will make predictable moves to restore closeness with one of the insiders. At moderate tension levels, triangles usually have one side in conflict and two harmonious sides. The conflict is not inherent in the relationship in which it exists, but reflects the overall functioning of the triangle.
At a high level of tension, the outside position becomes the most desirable. If severe conflict erupts between the insiders, one insider opts for the outside position by getting the current outsider fighting with the other insider. If the maneuvering insider is successful, he gains the more comfortable position of watching the other two people fight. When the tension and conflict subside, the outsider will try to regain an inside position.
Triangles contribute significantly to the development of clinical problems. For example, getting pushed from an inside to an outside position can trigger a depression or perhaps even a physical illness, or two parents intensely focusing on what is wrong with a child can trigger serious rebellion in the child.
3.) Nuclear Family Emotional Process
The concept of the nuclear family emotional system describes four basic relationship patterns that govern where problems develop in a family. People’s attitudes and beliefs about relationships play a role in the patterns, but the forces primarily driving them are part of the emotional system. The patterns operate in intact, single-parent, step-parent, and other nuclear family configurations.
Clinical problems or symptoms usually develop during periods of heightened and prolonged family tension. The tension level depends on the stress a family encounters, how a family adapts to stress, and on a family’s connection with extended family and social networks. Tension increases the activity of one or more of the four relationship patterns. Where symptoms develop depends on which patterns are most active. The higher the tension, the more chance that symptoms will be severe and that several people will be symptomatic.
The four basic relationship patterns are:
Marital conflict – As family tension increases and the spouses get more anxious, each spouse externalizes his or her anxiety into the marital relationship. Each focuses on what is wrong with the other, each tries to control the other, and each resists the other’s efforts at control.
Dysfunction in one spouse – One spouse pressures the other to think and act in certain ways and the other yields to the pressure. Both spouses accommodate to preserve harmony, but one does more of it. The interaction is comfortable for both people up to a point, but if family tension rises further, the subordinate spouse may yield so much self-control that his or her anxiety increases significantly. The anxiety fuels, if other necessary factors are present, the development of a psychiatric, medical, or social dysfunction.
Impairment of one or more children – The spouses focus their anxieties on one or more of their children. They worry excessively and usually have an idealized or negative view of him. The more the parents focus on the child the more the child focuses on them. He is more reactive than his siblings to the attitudes, needs, and expectations of the parents. The process undercuts the child’s differentiation from the family and makes him vulnerable to act out or internalize family tensions. The child’s anxiety can impair his school performance, social relationships, and even his health.
Emotional distance – This pattern is consistently associated with the others. People distance from each other to reduce the relationship intensity, but risk becoming too isolated.
The basic relationship patterns result in family tensions coming to rest in certain parts of the family. The more anxiety one person or one relationship absorbs, the less other people must absorb. This means that some family members maintain their functioning at the expense of others. People do not want to hurt each other, but when anxiety chronically dictates behavior, someone usually suffers for it.
4.) Family projection process
The family projection process describes the primary way parents transmit their emotional problems to a child. The projection process can impair the functioning of one or more children and increase their vulnerability to clinical symptoms. Children inherit many types of problems (as well as strengths) through the relationships with their parents, but the problems they inherit that most affect their lives are relationship sensitivities such as heightened needs for attention and approval, difficulty dealing with expectations, the tendency to blame oneself or others, feeling responsible for the happiness of others or that others are responsible for one’s own happiness, and acting impulsively to relieve the anxiety of the moment rather than tolerating anxiety and acting thoughtfully. If the projection process is fairly intense, the child develops stronger relationship sensitivities than his parents. The sensitivities increase a person’s vulnerability to symptoms by fostering behaviors that escalate chronic anxiety in a relationship system.
The projection process follows three steps:
(1) the parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child;
(2) the parent interprets the child’s behavior as confirming the fear; and
(3) the parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with child.
These steps of scanning, diagnosing, and treating begin early in the child’s life and continue. The parents’ fears and perceptions so shape the child’s development and behavior that he grows to embody their fears and perceptions. One reason the projection process is a self-fulfilling prophecy is that parents try to “fix” the problem they have diagnosed in the child; for example, parents perceive their child to have low self-esteem, they repeatedly try to affirm the child, and the child’s self-esteem grows dependent on their affirmation.
Parents often feel they have not given enough love, attention, or support to a child manifesting problems, but they have invested more time, energy, and worry in this child than in his siblings. The siblings less involved in the family projection process have a more mature and reality-based relationship with their parents that fosters the siblings developing into less needy, less reactive, and more goal-directed people. Both parents participate equally in the family projection process, but in different ways. The mother is usually the primary caretaker and more prone than the father to excessive emotional involvement with one or more of the children. The father typically occupies the outside position in the parental triangle, except during periods of heightened tension in the mother-child relationship. Both parents are unsure of themselves in relationship to the child, but commonly one parent acts sure of himself or herself and the other parent goes along. The intensity of projection process is unrelated to the amount of time parents spend with a child.