How Families Work From a Bowen Family Systems Perspective

John R. Mazurek, MSW

We all grew up in families which, along with other relationships, have influenced what we believe about ourselves, the people around us, and our worlds; and, of course, our beliefs influence how we interact with others and our worlds. Therefore, if we want to better understand ourselves, our families, or their various members, if we want to better understand how we react to events in our worlds, we need to know about how our families influenced us.

However, it is not enough to look just at our immediate families: Mom, Dad, and our siblings. Usually, that is too narrow a view to allow us to see the patterns of our families. For most of us, our emotional connections to our immediate families interfere with our abilities to notice the patterns, and if we do notice them, to think objectively and rationally about them. Bowen Family Systems Theory recommends that we look at both our immediate and our extended families, that we learn as much as we can about at least three generations: ourselves, our siblings, and our cousins; Mom, Dad, and our aunts and uncles; and our grandparents, their siblings--our great aunts and uncles—and their children and grandchildren.

While that might sound like a daunting task, in my experience it is not. Few of us will ever come to know every family member in three generations, and certainly what we do learn comes slowly over many years. The process of learning about our families happens both by seeing several family members together at once such as at a family gathering and by talking to individual family members. The first gives us a chance to see and experience the family patterns in action. The second gives us a chance to learn about the details of those patterns. At the family gathering you may observe that everyone listens to Uncle Bill's stories, caters to Grandma, and gossips about Aunt Carol. When you sit alone with a family member you have the opportunity to learn a great deal about how that family member thinks and thus you may learn about some of the beliefs of the family in general which may explain how Uncle Bill, Grandma, and Aunt Carol came to occupy the roles in the family that they do.

It is not a matter of trying to determine who to give credit to or who to blame for the way the family, you, or any other individual in the family turned out. Bowen Family Systems Theory assumes that the family and its individuals work together as a system or unit to preserve itself in the manner that it has come to believe over the generations best takes care of itself. Therefore, Bowen Family Systems Theory is interested in two things: 1) the level of anxiety that the family in general and the individual you are most interested in are experiencing at the moment and 2) how the family and the individual maintains homeostasis or equilibrium--how the system works to keep its anxiety at an acceptable level for the family. Be aware that an acceptable level of anxiety is not the same in every family or family member or in every situation. Some people have learned to tolerate, accept, very high levels of anxiety for extended periods of time while others can only tolerate much lower levels of anxiety or shorter bouts of anxiety. How that came about is something that you can only really understand by learning about what influenced the family.

Anxiety is the automatic reaction one has to the perception of a real or an imagined threat. The key word here is "perception." Imagine that your teenage daughter has just emerged from her room dressed for a date this evening. You look at her and say, "You are not going out of this house dressed like that, Young Lady." Your daughter looks at you as if wondering what planet you're from. Your perception of her attire is probably not the same as hers and your perception of the reactions she may draw from her peers to her attire is also probably not the same as hers. You are experiencing anxiety about what you imagine will happen if your daughter is seen in public dressed as she is. Your statement to her is your effort to reduce your anxiety, to regain homeostasis, as you know it.

The more intense our anxiety is, the more automatic our reactions are, and the less likely we are to think rationally, to use our intellect. Such reactions are not personal or deliberate, though they usually are phrased and experienced as if they were very personal and deliberate. The more stressed we are, the more our emotional system overrides our intellectual system. That override is automatic. Of course, if we perceive ourselves in life threatening danger--a car suddenly swerves into our lane (a very real threat)--we don't want to pause and ponder the situation and our options. We just want to get out of the way, out of the situation. Unfortunately, our emotional systems don't distinguish between life threatening and non-life threatening situations, when we are stressed. Our emotional systems simply take over and work to reestablish homeostasis as quickly as possible whenever we experience any stress. We might slam on our brakes or swerve into another lane or off the road to avoid the anticipated collision without pausing to check the wisdom of such a reaction. Consider someone who is addicted to drugs, alcohol, gambling, food, or whatever. That individual may know the negative effects of his or her addiction on self and on others; yet when his or her anxiety is intense enough, will automatically seek relief through the addictive behavior with no regard for the long term effects of that behavior.

In all three of these cases, (your daughter dressed to go out on a date, a car suddenly swerving into our lane of traffic, and when an addiction is used to relieve stress) the reactions occur automatically. There is no rational forethought. The intention is to reduce the threat or anxiety as quickly as possible. At such times we do what we've done in the past to reduce similar anxieties without regard for how well those efforts have worked for us. What we've done in the past may have been something that someone in one of our relationship systems, most often our families, deliberately taught us or it may be something that we observed, again, most often within our families. Of course, sometimes we have misunderstood what we observed years ago; and, in other cases, we have decided, either consciously or unconsciously, to do the opposite of what we observed. Regardless, as Daniel Papero, an authority on Bowen Family Systems Theory wrote, "Generally the automatic emotional response operates outside of a person's conscious awareness. Like a physical reflex, however, it can be observed and controlled to a degree" (p.42).

One of the best ways to observe our automatic emotional responses is to watch our families in action. Of course, that only works when we are emotionally detached from the family. It is usually easier to slightly and briefly detach from our families if we are observing family members that we are not too emotionally attached to in the first place; thus the value of learning about three generations of our families.

If you are interested in learning how your family and other relationships may have influenced you, the roles that you play in your various relationships, and what to do with that information, contact me for a consultation by calling 847-357-9611 or sending me an e-mail from my "Contact Me" page.

In future additions to this article I will write about the automatic emotional reactivity of families, and how individuals may observe and control some of their own reactivity from the perspective of Bowen Family Systems Theory. I have found that such a perspective can help individuals function more effectively, more rationally, within their various relationship systems, not just their families.

References:

Bowen, Murray. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson.

Kerr, Michael. (1988, September). "Chronic Anxiety and Defining a Self: An Introduction to Murrayt Bowen's Theory of Human Emotional Functioning." The Atlantic Monthly, 262, (3), pp. 35-37, 40-44, 46-48,50-58.

Papero, Daniel. (1990). Bowen Family Systems Theory, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.