More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As people work on differentiation, however, it is interesting and encouraging to see symptoms drop away. As people work on getting to a better level, they carry less anxiety, which is at the base of most symptoms. They make better decisions, often at issue in human difficulties. They are more effective in relationships and relationship systems.
two-person system may be stable as long as it is calm, but when anxiety increases, it immediately involves the most vulnerable other person to become a triangle. When tension in the triangle is too great for the threesome, it involves others to become a series of interlocking triangles.”
Triangles – another extremely important concept. In fact, triangles are so important that they appear in Bowen theory five times! (They are ubiquitous not only in life but also in theory.) Not only do triangles come up over and over again when we think about families – or organizations – but they, being the smallest stable unit of an emotional system, are the building blocks upon which all of society itself is built.
Triangles are ubiquitous. They are not good. They are not bad. Like other patterns of human relatedness, they just are. They are automatic, a part of the picture.
It is not a matter of whether we are in triangles. We always are in them, if the anxiety is up even a little. When the system is calm, they are still there, in the shadows, waiting to come out of hiding when anxiety increases again.
In any emotionally intense situation it is useful to ask “Where’s the triangle?” Upon reflection, one will usually become obvious.
Put them together in your thinking and talk – “I know the two of you can solve this.” Remembering that in intense situations, the outside position is the preferable one. Asking questions about additional facts can be a good way of keeping that calm, “outside” position.
staying emotionally neutral in triangles, while finding a way to communicate, based on one’s principles, what one thinks to each. When the calm third (coach, parent or leader of the organization) can remain in contact with the other two, they gradually begin to de-escalate.
Cutoff is a “process of separation, isolation, withdrawal, running away, or denying the importance of the parental family.”
Cutoff is one of the ways people attempt to resolve the relationship tension that results from that unresolved attachment (fusion or undifferentiation) and the anxiety it engenders.
The more intense the cutoff with the past the more likely the individual to have an exaggerated version of his parental family problem in his own marriage, and the more likely his own children to do a more intense cutoff with him in the next generation.
One who cuts off from parents is vulnerable to impulsively getting into an emotionally intense marriage that ends in the cutoff of divorce.32
The same is true of our children. If one cuts off, it can become a family pattern. The children will be likely to cut off and then all will show the effects of that cutoff – an increase in anxiety and various symptoms as a result.
While it feels so good initially to be rid of that troublesome family, over time, cutoff, like all the other relationship patterns, creates anxiety. Anxiety, as we have seen, leads to symptoms. In the long term anxiety sets in, in the form of depression or other symptoms. It will not be seen as related to the cutoff from family. In the first place, the cutoff felt so good. Secondly, the symptom’s onset is often far removed in time from the beginning of the cutoff, so the logical connection is not made.
But, exactly how does it happen that children of the same parents vary so widely in their ability to cope with life, realize potential and reach goals – their levels of differentiation? Bowen theory answers the question by means of the “child focus” – the triangle that makes all the difference. Remember how anxiety, and thus, sometimes, symptoms end up in a child? (Figure 16)
We as parents worry about (or neglect or unrealistically “adore”) some of our children more than others. Parents say that some children “draw” more focus than others. The focus may be over-negative, (angry or worried) neglectful, or over-positive. The valence (positive or negative) doesn’t seem to matter.
In any family, a given child can receive so much focus (anxiety) that other siblings are left a little freer of the family emotional process. They will receive less anxiety. Thus, they are less fused into the family self-amalgam (are less a part of the family emotional process). At the same time, they do not cut off from it. They are in communication with it. They recognize the problems, and they, too, carry some of the spillover anxiety, just not as much. With less anxiety to deal with, they develop more basic self to go out and do whatever their talents call for in the world.
What magnetizes parents’ anxiety more toward one child than another? It may be that at the time of birth, because of special circumstances, anxiety is very high. As we know, anxiety is not always dealt with in logical ways. Sometimes it is diverted around the system. This is not a thought-through process, enacted by a family in order to “do in” one of its children. Rather, it is entirely out of awareness. It is automatic. If the anxiety is high at the time of the birth of a child, however, it can circuit around the emotional unit, triggering an over-focus on the child. Once it gets started,
...more
Or, a parent may have grown up with a sibling with a problem and then fear illogically, but intensely, that his or her own child in that same position (the oldest, the third, the middle, etc.) might develop the problem. That fear can turn into an over focus.
The good news is that: “A child who grows up relatively outside the family projection process can emerge with a higher basic level of differentiation than the parents”39
The family projection process is not intentional, it is entirely automatic. Parents have no idea of their part in the problem. Often, however, when they learn about the concept and that they are contributing unwittingly to the problem, they are able to modify their part to some extent with wonderful results. Not only is the process automatic and out of awareness, it has to do with their connectedness into their generations. They, too, were the recipients of parental anxiety, and their parents before them. The process is too big in all of our families to leave room for blame.
Often, as parents become more involved in their own pursuits (especially that of a higher level of differentiation) resolving, instead of projecting anxiety and working on their own relationships – in their own marriages and families of origin – the child will behave like a bird let out of a cage, dropping symptoms and showing better development.
Interestingly, before that happens some children will show an intensifying of the symptom, as if they are trying to “draw” the focus back. That reaction will be shortlived if the parents are warned ahead of time that it may happen, and stay on course with their own efforts to pull up in functioning. Parents understanding how they perceive and react emotionally to different children differently can, with effort, get the focus off the kids and back on to themselves and their own adult relationships.
One way out of the family projection process is to work for a bigger picture of the family emotional process – that is, to look at the preceding generations to see what can be learned. Of course, if cutoffs get bridged in the bargain, that is all to the good.
There is no better way to remove a “block” in life, work on a stubborn personality characteristic or irrational belief, or in general to become a little more objective, than to take a specific question back to one’s generations, to see what can be learned from them.
For instance, the birth of a child can disturb the emotional balance until the family members can realign themselves around the child. A grandparent who...comes to live in a home can change the family emotional balance for a long period. Losses that can disturb the family equilibrium are physical losses, such as a child who goes away to college or an adult child who marries and leaves the home.
Watershed events such as immigration or the holocaust can have an effect for many generations to come and need to be understood as thoroughly as possible.
“We proceed from the assumption that a person’s family represents the most influential context of his life,
Personality theorists have long believed that much of personality is formed in the earliest years, out of experience in the family. It had been less clear what were the important factors in those early years. Toman’s work identified the very order of one’s birth, that of one’s parents and the mix of genders among siblings as major determinants of personality characteristics, “all things being equal.”
He found that there is no sibling position that is better than the others. In fact, they all have their strengths and all have weaknesses.
The different positions make it quite clear that no two children experience the family in the same way. Each position is so different from any other that it is as if no two children have the same family.
Four relationships have a partial sex conflict. That is, one of the pair has had no experience, growing up, with a sibling of the opposite sex. That
Three relationships show a complete rank and sex conflict:
Relationships between people in these positions have less or no sibling experience with the opposite sex growing up, so they do not understand the other easily. Also, their ranks in their sibling configurations were the same. The oldests will be expecting the other to follow and may be shocked when it does not happen. The youngests will be looking for leadership that neither knows how to take. Though they may have a more difficult time of it, they can still have a stable and satisfying relationship though they may have to work at it.
Oldest children seem to be at risk for overfunctioning, just as youngests are for underfunctioning.
Youngests, rather than fight, will give in, so two youngests in a marriage will flounder, all things being equal, from lack of decision-making. By the same token, marriages of a youngest and an oldest will tend towards overfunctioning/underfunctioning reciprocity, with the oldest in the dominant position and the youngest accommodating, of course. Only children may be more distant in their relationships (need more “alone” time) than their mates are comfortable with. They may have to work harder than others to stay connected.
It is differentiation of self that shows us how to work out of the weaknesses of sibling position, family generational history, or any other weakness we may find in ourselves. At the same time it teaches us about maximizing our strengths.
the understanding of sibling positions becomes one more way of taking relationship glitches less personally.
The fact that leadership most often comes easily to oldests and onlies does not mean that people in other sibling positions cannot learn to be high-functioning leaders.
eighty-six percent of unhappily married people who stay together find that five years later their marriages are happier. And three-quarters of people who have characterized their marriages as “very unhappy” but have nevertheless remained together report five years later that the same marriages are either “very happy” or “quite happy,” meaning that permanent marital unhappiness is surprisingly rare among the couples who stick it out.
Kinsey, then, not content with perpetrating false data58 on the profession and the public, went on to promote his particular brand of sex education in the schools – the “education” with an agenda – to legitimize every sexual orientation and behavior no matter how bizarre and unacceptable to emotionally mature, caring parents. Freud and Kinsey together have been, through the sexual revolution, an unbelievably powerful force in changing the sexual behavior and attitudes of Western society.
When the anxiety in a system increases, people tend to do more of what they have always done, (increase their togetherness, with all its patterns and postures) creating a vicious cycle.
For a family caught in the downward whirlpool of a regression, one parent must eventually take a stand for higher and better functioning for self. In Bowen theory this is called an “I position.” It says, “I will no longer support irresponsible (dependent, symptomatic, regressive) behavior. This is what I believe (that everyone here is capable of better functioning). And this is what you can expect from me in the future.” When this happens, others follow and the regression comes to an end.
family systems studies have taught us that people at any level of society have an influence on others around them. Parents influence their children. Friends influence friends. Spouses influence each other.
