Family therapy’s pioneers were pragmatists, more concerned with action than insight, more interested in technique than theory. Bowen was the exception.
He was always more committed to systems theory as a way of thinking than as a set of interventions.
According to Bowen, we have less autonomy in our emotional lives than we like to think. Most of us are more reactive to one another than we realize. Bowen’s theory describes how the family, as a multigenera-tional network of relationships, shapes the interplay of individuality and togetherness using five interlocking concepts (Bowen, 1966, 1976): differentiation of self, triangles, multigenerational emotional processes, emo-tional cutoff, and societal emoemo-tional process.
■ Differentiation of Self
The cornerstone of Bowen’s theory is both an intrapsy-chic and an interpersonal concept. Roughly analogous to ego strength, differentiation of self is the capacity to think and reflect, to not respond automatically to emo-tional pressures (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). It is the ability to be flexible and act wisely, even in the face of anxiety.
Undifferentiated people are easily moved to emotion-ality. Their lives are ruled by reactivity to those around them. A differentiated person is able to balance thinking and feeling: capable of strong emotion and spontaneity but also possessing the self-restraint that comes with the ability to resist the pull of emotionality.
In contrast, undifferentiated people tend to react impetuously—with submissively or defiantly— toward others. They find it difficult to maintain their own au-tonomy, especially around anxious issues. Asked what they think, they say what they feel; asked what they believe, they repeat what they’ve heard. They agree with whatever you say, or argue with everything. In contrast, differentiated people are able to take stands on issues because they’re able to think things through, decide what they believe, and then act on those beliefs.
■ Emotional Triangles
Take a minute to think about the most troublesome relationship in your life. That relationship almost cer-tainly involves one or more third persons. Virtually all relationships are shadowed by third parties—relatives, friends, even memories.
What drives triangles is anxiety (Guerin, Fogarty, Fay,
& Kautto, 1996). As anxiety increases, people experience Philip Guerin
The innovative ideas of Philip Guerin (a student of Murray Bowen) led to his development of a so-phisticated clinical approach to treating problems of children and adolescents, couples, and individ-ual adults. Guerin’s highly articulated model out-lines several therapeutic goals, which emphasize the multigenerational context of families, working to calm the emotional level of family members, and defining specific patterns of relationships within families. Guerin’s family systems approach is designed to measure the severity of conflict and identify specific areas in need of improvement.
Philip Guerin’s applications of Bowen theory have produced some of the most sophisticated clinical books in family therapy.
a greater need for emotional closeness—or to avoid pres-sure, a greater need for distance. The more people are driven by anxiety, the less tolerant they are of one another and the more they are polarized by differences.
When two people have problems they’re unable to resolve, they get to the point where it’s hard to talk about certain things. Why go through all that aggravation?
Eventually, one or both partners will turn to someone else for sympathy. Or the conflict will draw in a third person trying to help. If the third party’s involvement is only temporary or pushes the two people to work out their differences, the triangle doesn’t become fixed. But if, as often happens, the third person stays involved, the triangle becomes a part of the relationship.
The involvement of a third party decreases anxi-ety in the twosome by spreading it through three re-lationships. Thus, for example, a wife upset with her husband’s distance may increase her involvement with one of her children. What makes this a triangle is diverting energy that might otherwise go into the marriage. The wife’s spending time with her daughter may take pressure off her husband. However, it also decreases the likelihood that husband and wife will develop interests they can share—and it undermines the daughter’s independence.
A group of three isn’t necessarily a triangle. In a healthy threesome, each pair can interact indepen-dently; each person has options for his or her behavior;
and each can take I-positions without trying to change the other two. In a triangle, on the other hand, each pair’s interaction is tied to the behavior of the third per-son; each person is driven by reactive behavior; none of them can take a position without feeling the need to change the other two; and each person is entangled in the relationship between the other two. Picture a rubber band around three people who cannot allow it to drop.
It constrains their movement such that if two people get closer, the third must move farther away.
Some triangles seem so innocent that we hardly notice their destructiveness. Most parents can’t resist complaining to their children once in a while about each other. “Your mother’s always late!” “Your father never lets anyone else drive!” These interchanges may seem harmless, but what makes triangles problematic is that they have a tendency to become habitual.
Triangulation lets off steam but freezes conflict in place. It isn’t that complaining or seeking solace is
wrong, but rather that triangles become chronic diver-sions that undermine relationships.
■ Multigenerational Emotional Processes Emotional forces in families operate over the years in patterns. Bowen originally used the term undif-ferentiated family ego mass to describe an excess of emotional reactivity, or fusion in families. If you know someone who overreacts to what you’re trying to say because he or she is given to emotional outbursts, then you know how frustrating it can be to deal with emo-tionally reactive people.
Lack of differentiation in a family produces reactive children, which may be manifest as emotional overin-volvement or emotional cutoff from the parents, which in turn leads to fusion in new relationships—because people with limited emotional resources tend to proj-ect all their needs onto each other. Because this new fusion is unstable, it is likely to produce one or more of the following: (1) emotional distance; (2) physical or emotional dysfunction in one partner; (3) overt con-flict; or (4) projection of discord onto children. The intensity of these problems is related to the degree of undifferentiation, extent of emotional cutoff from families of origin, and level of stress in the system.
A common case is when a husband who is emo-tionally reactive to his family keeps his distance from his wife. This predisposes her to focus on her children. Kept at arm’s length by her hus-band, she becomes anxiously attached to the chil-dren, usually with greatest intensity toward one child. This might be the oldest son or daughter, the youngest, or perhaps the child most like one of the parents. This connection is different from caring; it’s anxious, enmeshed concern. Because it relieves his own anxiety, the husband may ac-cept his wife’s overinvolvement with the children, reinforcing their entanglement and his distance.
The more the mother focuses her anxiety on a child, the more that child’s functioning is stunted.
This underdevelopment encourages the mother to hover over the child, distracting her from her own anxieties but crippling the child emotionally.
In every generation the child most involved in the family’s fusion moves toward a lower level of differen-tiation (and chronic anxiety), while the least involved child moves toward a higher level of differentiation (and less anxiety).
Parents who anxiously intrude their concerns on their children leave them little choice but to conform or rebel. Instead of learning to think for themselves,
such children function in reaction to others. When these children leave home, they expect to become authors of their own lives. They’re not going to turn out like their parents! Unfortunately, our inheritance usually catches up with us.
■ Emotional Cutoff
Emotional cutoff describes how some people man-age anxiety in relationships. The greater the emotional fusion between parents and children, the greater the likelihood of cutoff. Some people seek distance by moving away; others do so emotionally by avoiding intimacy or insulating themselves with the presence of third parties.
Michael Nichols (1986) describes how some people mistake emotional cutoff for maturity:
We take it as a sign of growth to separate from our parents, and we measure our maturity by independence of family ties. Yet many of us still respond to our families as though they were radioactive. Only one thing robs Superman of his extraordinary power: kryptonite, a piece of his home planet. A surprising number of adult men and women are similarly rendered helpless by even a brief visit from their parents. (p. 190)
■ Societal Emotional Process
Bowen anticipated the contemporary concern about social influence on how families function. Kerr and Bowen (1988) cite the example of the high crime rate in communities with highly stressful environments.
Bowen recognized sexism and class and ethnic preju-dice as examples of toxic social emotional processes, but he believed that families with higher levels of dif-ferentiation were better able to resist these destructive social influences.
• • •
To the theoretical concerns of Bowenian therapists, Monica McGoldrick and Betty Carter added gender and ethnicity. These feminist Bowenians believe that ignoring gender inequalities helps perpetuate the forces that keep men and women trapped in inflexible Betty Carter
An ardent and articulate feminist, Betty Carter was instrumental in popularizing the concept of the family life cycle and its value in assessing families. Carter emphasized the importance of historical antecedents of family problems and the multigenerational aspects of the life cycle that ex-tended beyond the nuclear family. She expanded the family life-cycle concept by considering the stages of divorce and remarriage. Carter served as co-director of the Women’s Project in Family Therapy with Peggy Papp, Olga Silverstein, and Marianne Walters, and she was an outspoken critic of the gender and ethnic inequalities that serve to keep women in inflexible family roles.
Betty Carter was a highly respected Bowenian therapist and a forceful advocate for gender equality.
roles. Moreover, they might point out that the previ-ous sentence is inaccurate in implying that men and women alike are victims of gender bias. Women live with constraining social conditions and with men who profit from them—men who may not feel pow-erful with their wives and mothers but who take for granted social advantages that make it easier for men to get ahead in the world.
McGoldrick has also been a leader in calling atten tion to ethnic differences among families. Her book Ethnicity and Family Therapy (McGoldrick, Pearce, & Giordano, 1982) was a landmark in family therapy’s developing awareness of this issue. Without being sensitive to how cultural values differ from one ethnic group to the next, there is a danger of thera-pists imposing their own ways of looking at things on families whose perspectives aren’t dysfunctional but simply different.
■ Normal Family Development
Optimal development is thought to take place when family members are differentiated, anxiety is low, and partners are in good emotional contact with their own families. Most people leave home in the midst of transforming relationships with their parents from an adolescent to an adult basis. Thus the transformation is usually incomplete, and most of us, even as adults, continue to react with adolescent oversensitivity to our parents—or anyone else who pushes the same buttons.
Normally but not optimally, people reduce contact with their parents and siblings to avoid the anxiety of dealing with them. Once out of the house and on their own, people tend to assume that they’ve put the old difficulties behind them. However, we all carry unfin-ished business in the form of unresolved sensitivities that flare up in intense relationships wherever we go.
Having learned to ignore their role in family conflicts, most people are unable to prevent recurrences in new relationships.
Another heritage from the past is that the emo-tional attachment between intimate partners comes to resemble that which each had in his or her family of origin. People from undifferentiated families con-tinue to be undifferentiated when they form new fam-ilies. Those who handled anxiety by withdrawal tend
to do the same in their marriages. Therefore, Bowen was convinced that differentiation of autonomous personalities, accomplished primarily in the family of origin, was both a description of normal development and a prescription for therapeutic progress.
Betty Carter and Monica McGoldrick (2011) de-scribe the family life cycle as a process of expansion, contraction, and realignment of the relationship sys-tem to support the entry, exit, and development of family members.
In the leaving-home stage, the primary task for young adults is to separate from their families without cutting off or fleeing to an emotional substitute. This is the time to develop an autonomous self before pair-ing off to form a new union.
In the joining of families through marriage stage, the primary task is commitment to the new couple. This is not simply a joining of two individuals; it is a transfor-mation of two entire systems. Although problems at this stage may seem to be primarily between the part-ners, they often reflect a failure to separate from fami-lies of origin or cutoffs that put too much pressure on a couple. The formation of an intimate partnership requires the partners to shift their primary emotional attachment from their parents and friends to their mates. Making wedding plans, choosing a place to live, buying a car, having a baby, and picking schools are times when this struggle may become explicit.
Families with young children must adjust to make space for the new additions, cooperate in childrear-ing, keep the marriage from being submerged in par-enting, and realign relationships with the extended family. Young mothers and fathers must meet their children’s needs for nurture and control, and they must learn to work together as a team. This is a stress-ful time, especially for new mothers, and it is the stage with the highest divorce rate.
The reward for parents who survive the preceding stages is to have their children turn into adolescents.
Adolescence is a time when children no longer want to be like mommy and daddy; they want to be them-selves. They struggle to become autonomous individu-als and to open family boundaries—and they struggle however hard they must. Parents with satisfying lives of their own welcome (or at least tolerate) the fresh air that blows through the house at this time. Those who insist on controlling their teenagers, as though they
were still little ones, may provoke escalations of the rebelliousness that’s normal for this period.
In the launching of children and moving on stage, parents must let their children go and take hold of their own lives. This can be liberating or a time of midlife crisis (Nichols, 1986). Parents must deal not only with changes in their children’s and their own lives but also with changes in their relationship with aging parents, who may need increasing support or at least don’t want to act like parents anymore.
Families in later life must adjust to retirement, which means not only a loss of vocation but also in-creased proximity. With both partners home all day, the house may seem a lot smaller. Later in life fami-lies must cope with declining health, illness, and then death, the great equalizer.
One variation in the life cycle that can no longer be considered abnormal is divorce. With the divorce rate at 50 percent and the rate of redivorce at 61 percent (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2011), divorce now strikes the majority of American families. The primary tasks of a divorcing couple are to end the marriage but maintain cooperation as parents. Some postdivorce families become single-parent families—consisting in the main of mothers and children—and in the ma-jority of those cases, staggering under the weight of financial strain. The alternative is remarriage and the formation of stepfamilies, in which loneliness often is swapped for conflict.
■ Development of Behavior Disorders Symptoms result from stress that exceeds a person’s ability to manage it. The ability to handle stress is a function of differentiation: The more well-differentiated people are, the more resilient they will be and the more flexible and sustaining their relationships.
In less well-differentiated people, it takes less stress to produce symptoms.
If differentiation were reduced to maturity, this formula wouldn’t add much to the familiar diathesis–
stress model, which says that disease develops when an individual’s vulnerability is overtaxed. The differ-ence is that differentiation isn’t just a quality of indi-viduals but also of relationships. A person’s basic level of differentiation may be determined by the degree
of autonomy achieved in his or her family, but the functional level of differentiation is influenced by the quality of current relationships. Thus, a somewhat immature person who manages to develop healthy relationships is at less risk than an equally immature person who’s alone or in unhealthy relationships.
Symptoms develop when the level of anxiety exceeds the system’s ability to handle it.
According to Bowen, the underlying factor in the genesis of psychological problems is emotional fusion, passed down from one generation to the next. The greater the fusion, the more one is programmed by primitive emotional forces and the more vulnerable to the emotionality of others.
Emotional fusion is based on anxious attachment, which may be manifest as dependency or isolation.
Both the overly dependent and the emotionally iso-lated person respond to stress with emotional reactiv-ity. What follows is marital conflict, dysfunction in one of the spouses, overconcern with one of the chil-dren, or a combination of all three. Whatever the pre-senting problem, however, the dynamics are similar:
Undifferentiation in families of origin is transmitted to marital problems, which are in turn projected onto a symptomatic spouse or child. Thus are the problems of the past visited on the future.
■ How Therapy Works
Bowenians don’t try to change people, nor are they much interested in solving problems. They see therapy as an opportunity for people to learn about themselves and their relationships so that they can assume responsibility for their own problems. This is not to say, however, that therapists sit back and allow families to sort out their own conflicts. On the contrary, Bowenian therapy is a process of active inquiry in which the therapist, guided by the most comprehensive theory in family therapy, helps family members get past blaming
Bowenians don’t try to change people, nor are they much interested in solving problems. They see therapy as an opportunity for people to learn about themselves and their relationships so that they can assume responsibility for their own problems. This is not to say, however, that therapists sit back and allow families to sort out their own conflicts. On the contrary, Bowenian therapy is a process of active inquiry in which the therapist, guided by the most comprehensive theory in family therapy, helps family members get past blaming