Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory

There are countless theories for how people interact in a family.  Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory focuses on eight components of Bowen’s family systems theory, which he renamed to simply Bowen’s theory.  Bowen’s work sits underneath much of family counseling today, though few people have heard Bowen’s name.  We speak of drama triangles without realizing that Bowen was one of the first to speak of how relationships naturally move towards triangulation.

Individuality and Relationship

Underlying Bowen’s theory is an understanding of systems and how there are dynamic relationships.  (See Donella Meadow’s excellent work, Thinking in Systems for more.)  The two major forces that Bowen sees in our internal processing are our need to be individuals and our need to be in relationships with others.  These competing forces sometimes create oscillations in people’s behaviors and conflicts.

There is certainly reason to support this tension, including Jonathan Haidt’s assertion that we became the dominant biomass on the planet through our ability to be in relationship with one another.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The work on attachment theory is substantially better known than Bowen’s work, and it asserts that people can be moved out of their comfort zone.  When they are, they may move towards or away from someone.  (See Platonic, Attached, Attachment Theory in Practice, The Power of Attachment, Attachment in Adulthood, and Attachment in Adults for just a start of the work done on attachment.)

Securely attached people are more likely to be differentiated according to Bowen’s conceptualization.

Emotional Fields

Another observation of Bowen’s is that there’s an emotional field in a family.  This field, like gravity and magnetic fields, cannot be seen, but it exerts a force just the same.  The challenge is that these emotional fields may lead to people becoming fused – or trapped – in a cycle of alternating dysfunction or the opposite reaction of creating cutoff where they are separated from relationship all together.  Consider a black hole that either envelops a star and its planets or flings them away at high speeds.

Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence explains how both overly closed and overly open teams can be problematic.  Healthy teams navigate the fine line around the right degree of openness – the strength of their emotional field.  Families need the right level of closeness and freedom to create a stable and healthy environment.

Extremes

Life has a way of taking us to extremes.  There’s always the car that breaks down, the job lost, the baby born, or any of hundreds of other challenges that bring us to the edge of our coping strategies – and beyond.  It’s these cases where Bowen saw the family system shift.

When a normally sufficient coping strategy is pushed beyond its capacity, it can create havoc in the system.  The person who is normally stable destabilizes – usually taking the entire family system with them.  That’s not to say that new coping strategies can’t be developed or even that there’s not a way to learn how to get better results from an existing coping strategy – it’s just that, in the moment, it stops working.

Nassim Taleb’s work, Antifragile, speaks about how growth is possible with appropriate level and timing of challenges.  Tedeschi explains in Posttraumatic Growth how incredible growth can come from even trauma.

Helper Anxiety

It’s important to understand that, in a family system, the degree of reciprocal concern for one another can trigger anxiety or angst in other members when someone is hurting.  It’s a well known phenomenon that sometimes the reactions of help are a coping mechanism used by others to control their own anxiety.  Sometimes help and control are too similar to differentiate – and that can be problematic in every family.

Concepts

Bowen’s theory originally published with six concepts; later, two more were added:

• Differentiation of Self
• Triangles
• Nuclear Family Emotional Process
• Family Projection Process
• Multigenerational Transmission Process
• Sibling Position
• Emotional Cutoff
• Societal Emotional Process

We’ll address some of the most important in this review.

Differentiation of Self

Conceptually, this is the capacity to remain yourself in relationships with others.  I’ve called it stable core or integrated self-image.  (See Braving the Wilderness, Happiness, Beyond Boundaries, and many more.)  Brene Brown calls it “wholeheartedness.”  (See Daring Greatly.)  There are likely dozens of names that we could use for the ability to keep from being drawn into maladaptive relationships with others.

The work of the Arbinger Institute in Leadership and Self-Deception describes the dysfunction as being “in the box” and how the behavior of others can lure us into the box.  There’s an inner strength to resisting the decision to get in the box and thereby operate in dysfunctional ways.

Bowen’s perspective about a range of functionality in someone’s differentiation of self is akin to the approach taken with Enneagrams, where you have core characteristics and different functional levels inside of each of these characteristics.  (See Personality Types.)

Triangles

In my review of The Power of the Other, I explained drama triangles.  Cloud didn’t reference Bowen’s work when he explained triangles in The Power of the Other, but the concept is clearly the same.  It all relates back to the work of Buckminster Fuller and geometric shapes.  (See Amy Edmondson’s A Fuller Explanation for an easier, but not easy, way to understand his work.)  The short form of his work says that triangles are the minimal stable form.  Bowen agrees and says that a paired relationship will pick up a third member or several third members into different, related triangles.  This is particularly the case in families with multiple children where the parents provide a dyad with which each child gets their own triangle.

What makes triangles so important for family system work is that people tend to take up roles in the triangle of the victim, villain, and rescuer.  These dysfunctional patterns can co-manipulate the others and create dynamics that can tear all the people apart.

Nuclear Family Emotional Process

One of Bowen’s key insights was how people in a family system reacted to each other.  As one person would get well or change, another person in the family system would change or develop a problem.  Virginia Satir, who also studied and theorized about family systems, was keen to expose how a destabilizing force, like someone going to counseling would activate everyone in the system.  (See The Satir Model.)

When viewed as triangles, a change in one person would necessitate changes in others – and so on – until the ripples pervaded the entire nuclear family system.

Family Projection Process

One interesting question is how an individual becomes a well differentiated person – or a poorly differentiated person being subject to the moods and actions of others in the family.  As with most attributes, there’s the persistent question about how this happens.  Judith Rich Harris explains in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption how it’s a combination of environmental and genetic factors.  Her work is consistent with growing awareness of epigenetics.

We’ve all learned about genetics, which is how our genes are passed from generation to generation.  However, genes often carry a susceptibility to conditions that are triggered by environmental factors.  Genes are enabled or disabled by environmental factors, and this is called epigenetics.  (See In an Unspoken Voice.)  In Robert Sapolsky’s classic work, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, he shares the research around adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and fetal onset of adult disease (FOAD) indicating how environmental factors in childhood – or even the neonatal period – can lead to negative health outcomes decades later.

Bowen proposed that this process – regardless of the degree to which it was genetic or environment – was one whereby parents passed their relative functioning to their children.

Not Without Flaws

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some concerns about the book (and, apparently, Bowen’s perspectives).  His writing showed some of the stereotypes of the time regarding both women and non-Caucasians.  This was often distracting and disheartening.  It reminds me that Bowen reserved the top of his differentiation scale as theoretical and reminded me that he was a product of his times.

However, his views on schizophrenia were much less tolerable.  They were frustratingly narrow and judgmental.  Given these prevailing views that blamed the family for schizophrenia – or wrote it off as a physical, structural defect of the brain – its not hard to understand why the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) was formed.

He was similarly ill informed and judgmental about those people who live with diabetes or who struggle with substance use disorder.  (See The Globalization of Addiction, Dreamland, and Chasing the Scream for more about SUD.)

Despite the biases and prejudices, Bowen’s Theory provides a solid basis for Family Evaluation.