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Bowen Family Systems Therapy

Alexandra Brown

Therapeutic Techniques

... but Bowen disdained techniques

Displacement Story

explain

Focus on Process

  • A displacement story is about other families with similar problems
  • Use as a device for helping family members achieve distance to see their own roles in the family system
  • Use to frame process questions to avoid provoking defensive responses and denying client's feelings
  • "What do you think it is that makes that step so hard for people?"

Detriangulation

  • Goal to help client lower anxiety to see one's own role in the interpersonal processes
  • "Understanding, not action, is the vehicle of cure"
  • Use process questions to explore what's going on inside people and in between them
  • Process questions are designed to slow people down, diminish reactive anxiety, and help them think
  • Use questions that explore personal progress & how problems affect others in family
  • Must modify the most important triangle in the family--the marital couple
  • Create a new therapeutic triangle by staying in contact with partners while remaining emotionally neutral
  • Fortify couple's emotional functioning by increasing their ability to operate with less anxiety from their families of origin
  • Bowen would focus on family of origin but second generation Bowenians would look at nuclear family

challenge

Minimize

Emotionality

Assessment

confront

  • Atmosphere in therapy room designed to do this
  • Ask questions to foster self-reflection
  • Direct questions at individuals one at a time, rather than encourage family dialogues
  • Therapist must use an optimal level of emotional distance
  • Bowen says this "is the point where a therapist can see both the tragic and comic aspects of a couple's interactions"
  • Use a calm tone of voice and talk about facts rather than feelings
  • Gather information and get a history of presenting problems with exact dates (remember for later)
  • Obtain history of nuclear family - ask when parents met, about their courtship, marriage, moving, childrearing
  • Also important to think about where they lived and moved in relation to family of origin, history of spouses (sibling position, childhood, past/current functioning of parents)
  • Use genograms, which are schematic diagrams listing family members & their relation to one another
  • Include relationship conflicts, cutoffs, and triangles

Relationship

Experiment

  • Designed to help clients experience what it's like to act counter to their usual emotionally driven responses
  • Help people discover their ability to move against the ways their emotions are driving them
  • Show family members that it is not just what other people do, it is how they respond to what other people do that can oftentimes perpetuate the problem

What is Normal?

Members are differentiated, anxiety is low, and partners are in good emotional contact with their own families

Normally, people reduce contact with parents and siblings to avoid the anxiety of dealing with them (but this is not ideal)

Family Life Cycle Stages:

1. Leaving Home

2. Joining of Families Through Marriage

3. Families with Young Children

4. Families with Teenagers

5. Launching of Children and Moving On

6. Families in Later Life

Leading Figures

Development of Dysfunction

Murray Bowen

  • Creator/founder of Bowen's Family Systems Therapy
  • 1946-1954: Psychiatrist in Meninger Clinic
  • 1954-1959: National Institute of Mental Health
  • 1959-1990: Georgetown University

Michael Kerr

Thomas Fogarty

Philip Guerin

Betty Carter & Monica McGoldrick

Theoretical Concepts

Bowen's Framework

Societal Process

  • Anticipated contemporary concern about social influence on how families function
  • Sexism, class, ethnic prejudice are toxic social emotional processes; however,
  • Individuals and families with higher levels of differentiation better able to resist destructive social influence
  • Differences in gender and ethnicity

cornerstone

  • Symptoms result from stress that exceeds a person's ability to manage (function of differentiation)
  • Differentiation is not only a quality of individual (such as maturity) but a quality of relationships
  • According to Bowen, "the underlying factor in the genesis of psychological problems is emotional fusion"
  • Symptoms occur when vertical problems of anxiety & toxic family issues intersect with horizontal stresses (such as family transitions)

Differentiation of Self

Triangles

rubber band activity

  • Capacity to think and reflect, not responding automatically to emotional pressures
  • Differentiated person is able to balance thinking and feeling: capable of strong emotion and spontaneity but also possessing self-restraint
  • Undifferentiated persons are driven by emotional reactivity to those around them, reacting with submissiveness or defiance

Major influence on activity of triangle is anxiety

Multigenerational Transmission Process

Eventually, one or both partners will turn to someone else for sympathy or the conflict will draw in third party for help.

Most family problems are triangular, which is why working on only a twosome may have limited results.

Triangle fixed if third person stays involved ("lets off steam but keeps conflict in place")

  • Emotional forces in families that operate over the years in interconnected patterns
  • Includes fusion, or undifferentiated ego mass that describes an excess of emotional reactivity
  • Fusion is unstable and leads to: emotional distance between partners, physical or emotional dysfunction, marital conflict, or projection

Emotional Cutoff

  • Describes the way people manage anxiety between generations
  • The greater the emotional fusion between parents and children, the greater the chance of emotional cutoff
  • View our families as "radioactive and capable of inflicting great pain"

Sibling Position

  • Personality characteristics based on position in the family
  • Firstborns display power and authority necessary to defend status in family
  • Laterborns identify as oppressed and more inclined to question the status quo
  • Triangle tends to include sibling conflict on one side and mother as the third party (anxiety stems from attempting to treat them exactly alike)
  • Siblings experience the same events in very different ways

choosing a mate

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