Thinking about Shaming and Blaming

We live in the age of blame. Blame is king.

All the evidence is in the day-to-day headlines. Selling fear has always been emotionally appealing. All you have to do is polarize people into camps of right and wrong. This is what happens in democracies. Politicians need to energize large groups of people.

Nothing works better than fear and adrenalin to get people moving. Can you imagine if someone tried to ride into office on a platform suggesting, “People just stay calm. We need to think more about these problems.”

Last week, Scott Brown showed us how to win in Massachusetts. His top pick for our national focus is how the US handles terrorists. He posed this question: Should terrorists be declared enemy combatants and turned over to the federal government?

Two advisers to Brown, strategist Eric Fehrnstrom and pollster Neil Newhouse, said yesterday that they believed the terrorism issue actually broke more in Brown’s favor than did his opposition to Obama’s health care reform plan. “National security was a more potent issue than health care, based on the polling we saw, on dealing with terrorists as ordinary criminals versus enemy combatants.”

“On the issue of dealing with accused terrorists, for whom would you vote for U.S. Senate if you knew that Scott Brown believes that accused terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants and face military justice [and] Martha Coakley believes that accused terrorists should be provided constitutional rights and tried in civilian courts?” the Brown camp’s poll asked. Respondents split 61% to 29% in Brown’s favor, Newhouse said. [1]

What would have happened if Scott Brown said we do not understand enough about terrorists and what kind of families and circumstances produce terrorists. Gaining an understanding of this should be a national priority.

You know the answer. Since when are we, the voters, asked as to think carefully or ask good questions?

Under conditions of heightened anxiety people want simple answers. If we dare to question authority, we risk being seen as the enemy or stupid and become marginalized. This happens in many small and large groups. It is simply the way emotional systems are wired. Uncertainty and increasing anxiety go hand in hand promoting polarization [see Brooks’ NY TIMES article for another look at polarization anger and/or defensiveness. ,

During times of increasing strident polarization it becomes harder and harder for one to have a “different” idea or opinion.
OK, so the calm voice of reason may not make the front page. The front page and the popular media reflect the strongest emotions, which are useful to attract attention. But is it possible that if we as a nation saw the benefits of deep understanding, the age of anxiety could become the age of mindfulness?
Questions to consider if we lived in a Mindful Age:
1) What would deep thinking require from the average person?
2) Does the first step in deep thinking just require checking out the basic facts in controversial statements?
3) Is it possible to get facts on who has been able to obtain useful information from terrorists?
4) If as in the case of information gained from terrorists, from either the federal or the local law enforcement agencies, is not available, then how can we make rational decisions?
5) If facts are not available can we make an argument based on logic, principles or person beliefs? Hopefully people can recognize that these kinds of arguments are not as viable in convincing others about the rightness of arguments if we have no facts to base our decision on.
6) How can we know if physically threatening ways of gathering information is useful? For example has water boarding produced useable information?
7) How do we decide how important human rights are when one is at war?
7) If there are no real facts available can we just monitor our feeling responses to see if we are vulnerable to make decision based on emotion rather than factual information?
Can any of us notice if we have feelings of vengeance (and/or relief) when we pick a solution?
9) Does making quick, fact-free decisions, make us feel relief as now we have ended the suspense or the not knowing experience?
10) Perhaps the biggest question is how strong is our tolerance for ambiguity?

Overall, mindful people are able to evaluate whether any important decision, personal or national, is “right” both by evaluating the facts and the feelings that rise up in us as we “listen” to the arguments. It takes being emotionally strong to increase our ability to consider options. If we can consider all the options carefully then mindfulness has worked its magic.

In this hoped for age of Mindfulness more people will easily acknowledge that emotional reactions are informing policy and are used by people seeking election to public office.
I am not sure when newscasters will jump up and demand, “where is the evidence” before they simply amplify fear and reactivity. How probable will we see decreased emotionality in the media and more thinking?

If it seems less than possible that each of us is on our own to figure out what does make rational sense when it comes to terrorism, and most everything else.

We could think about the news media and the talking heads as our nightly entertainment instead of our nightly entrainment. Perhaps then our world will be a better place and each of us more responsible people.
I am clear that we could learn more about terrorism from an effort to understand the families of terrorists. I am fascinated by news stories about the families who are able to convince recruits to come back from the edge of martyrdom to lead more rational lives. Below is an interesting article that looks at terrorists and their families or origin.

Terrorist Dropouts: Family Ties May Deter Violence by Pamela Hess 1/21/10 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/terrorist-dropouts-family_n_430999.html -
WASHINGTON — Since 2001, al-Qaida is believed to have dispatched three men to blow up American airliners. Two of them tried but failed to set off explosions, and the third backed out of his assignment.

What made him different? A new study suggests family ties may have played an important role.

The report to be released this week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy looked at dozens of terrorists in trying to figure out what motivates terror dropouts and how others might be influenced to turn their backs on violent operations.
Michael Jacobson, who wrote the study, said one of the key differences in the case of British student Sajid Badat was his continued connection to his family, which had emigrated from Malawi to Britain before he was born.

Badat, then 21, didn’t go through with a December 2001 shoe-bombing operation. He stashed the bomb under a bed in his family home in Gloucester, England.
British intelligence tracked down Badat two years later using evidence found on shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to bring down a plane in December 2001 and is serving a life sentence in a high-security U.S. prison. More recently, a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas with explosives sewn into his underwear.

Jacobson, who interviewed 10 of the dropouts, said that unlike Reid and Abdulmutallab, Badat returned from militant camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan and eventually moved back in with his family.

Badat told prosecutors he bailed out because he was hoping “to introduce calm into his life.” He is serving a 13-year sentence.

Families can play either a positive or negative role in a terrorist’s plans, something al-Qaida recognizes. Lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta instructed his compatriots to cut off ties to their families. However, the two Sept. 11 conspirators who dropped out were both in touch with their families, against al-Qaida instructions.

At the same time, al-Qaida is known to realize the power that families can exert in keeping a terrorist in the fold. It has paid extra to men with wives, given them additional time off to be with their families and encouraged them to recruit their spouses to the cause, according to the report, which cites captured al-Qaida documents.

In one case, it was al-Qaida’s seeming indifference to the plight of the wife of one of its operatives that ultimately turned him into an American informer.

L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a former member of al-Qaida who was a key witness in the trial of four men accused in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, turned against the organization in part because it rejected his request for $500 to cover the cost of his wife’s Cesarean section. Khertchou saw the slight as part of a larger pattern of stinginess, and he split from the group when it moved from Sudan to Afghanistan.
Another would-be extremist from the United States was intercepted by his sister at a foreign airport en route to Pakistan and persuaded to go home. The intercept was orchestrated by an imam in Texas who was contacted by the family and who has close ties to the FBI, according to the report.

Others have been turned off by the gritty reality of the terrorist life versus the romantic vision that brought them into it in the first place.
Five of six young Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., who pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in 2003 dropped out of their Afghan training camp in 2001 despite pressure from their al-Qaida recruiter. Bad food was one irritant; when one discovered the meals were better in the infirmary, another faked a leg injury and spent the rest of the time in the facility.

An unidentified British official quoted in the report said many young Britons who have traveled to the tribal areas of Pakistan have quickly returned home after being disappointed by their experience.

The disappointment is due in part to the severe changes al-Qaida made in its training camps because of the war in Afghanistan. Before Sept. 11, the camps had not just religious studies but also weapons and physical training.
Camps now are smaller and more ad hoc, and recruits have sometimes been asked to pay for their own equipment and housing, Jacobson writes.

The reasons terrorists and extremists reverse course vary but could point to a way to encourage more dropouts, Jacobson says.
One effective method: puncturing the mystique of terrorist leaders. Jacobson said the 2006 dissemination of a videotape showing slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not knowing how to fix and fire a jammed machine gun was a good example.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of killing civilians and other Muslims in terrorist attacks can also be effective, Jacobson found.

The U.S. government should also publicize the fact that leaving terrorist organizations is possible, Jacobson said. The Lackawanna Five actually received permission from Osama bin Laden himself to leave the camps early.
But Jacobson points out that the government is often the least effective messenger for a counter narrative to terrorists; former terrorists and extremists are in a better position.

Research on Families of Terrorists:

Professor Clive Walker, who has both an LLB and PhD, is a terrorism specialist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Leeds University. He notes that terrorists feel rejection by both their culture and their fathers. They then reject the culture and form a close bond with a small close circle of friends who reinforce their beliefs.

A slightly different finding was presented by Marc Sageman-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2039865.ece

A study of 172 al-Qaeda terrorists conducted four years ago by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer in Pakistan, found that 90 per cent came from a relatively stable, secure background.
Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists. The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26, and three quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children. Only one in a hundred had shown any form of psychotic disorder. Two thirds became drawn towards a terror group while living in a country that was not their homeland.
Dr Sageman’s findings, published in 2004 in Understanding Terrorist Networks, led him to conclude that “most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile”. He wrote: “Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They spoke three, four, five, six languages.”
Unlike the lone serial killer, these men functioned well in groups. Indeed they depended, isolated as they were in a foreign country, on a close circle of friends who reinforced and legitimised their beliefs. “You could almost say that those least likely to cause harm individually are most likely to do so collectively,” Dr Sageman wrote. Yesterday he told The Times that the existence of a terror plot involving foreign doctors should surprise no one.
“When you look at the global Salafi jihad, you have three waves. The first were the companions of bin Laden, the characters in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” he said. “The second, on whom my 2003 research was based, were the best and the brightest from the Middle East. Those are the guys who became radicalised in the West. Many of them are engineers and physicians.
“And the third are what people call the home-grown, these are the guys who are second or third generation in the West, and they are less well-educated. Their average age is about 19 or 20, and there are more criminal elements there.”
Both groups, however, typically experience a sense of dislocation from the society in which they live and work. Clive Walker, a terrorism specialist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Leeds University, says that Mohammad Sidique Khan and his three companions shared a form of “social anomie”.
“It’s a kind of in-between state, a symptom of rejection in many ways. They feel rejected, but equally they reject the available cultures, both of their fathers and of the society they find themselves in,” he said.

Dr. Walker’s is Professor Clive Walker | Staff | School of Law | University of Leeds he obtained his LLB from the University of Leeds in 1975, Leeds and his PhD from the University of Manchester. His research also seems to fit with the research on the families who suffer from intense cut offs over the generations. These kinds of descriptions also fit with how families that produce “terrorists” are portrayed in fiction.

Is Life Stranger than Fiction ?
In Dan Brown’s newest novel The Lost Symbol, he creates a believable look at how a family unit innocently drives a young son into becoming a “terrorist” of sorts by over helping and not holding the son responsible for his actions. This son, like those in the research mentioned above, also rejects his father and his culture. He strikes back at both and attempts to destroy them.
Dan Brown also realizes that the polarization in society and especially polarization around religious groups, leads to extreme dysfunction. His books make us mindful of the role of both families and organizations in setting up one person or one group against another.

I am not going to give away too much of Brown’s novel, just recall a fact, the Catholic Church took it up against Galileo resulting in the bashing of science for three hundred years.

Other kinds of extreme behaviors in families end up with one child being seen as “the problem.”

The child is spoiled and or infantilized and becomes a person who never expects he will or can be held responsible and so indulges in all kinds of activity to pay the family back for seeing them as week, being ambivalent and on and on.

There may be inconvenient facts about how the family influences the behavior of the young. It may be that we set ourselves up as “experts” and get an emotional high by blaming, shaming and posturing rather than thinking through hard questions?

My Interest
Because of the polarization that occurred in my family when my father joined the Air Force during WWII, I have remained interested in how families inadvertently make life more difficult for returning veterans.

Over the years I wondered how much his inability to integrate himself back into society after the war had to do with 1) his reasons for joining the service, and 2) with how little he was able to talk about his experience and 3) to what degree people’s expectations of him made it more difficult to adapt to a new world.

Many say his descent into alcoholism after the war was due to his work during the war. He was one of the intelligence officers responsible for helping plan and coordinating the fire-bombing of Japan.

There are usually many factors that lead to one person’s dysfunction and we need to know what they are in order to aid other returning veterans.

Warriors and Terrorists Different Families or the Same?
We know that in every family children turn out differently. There are many factors, but one of the important ones is a few are: the quality of relationship the parents have with one another and with the extended family during their developmental years.

Others include:
1. The child’s niche in the system,
2. What are the other siblings like, and what is their position with one or both parents?
3. Is the child’s position similar to or different from the position of the parents in their families or origin?
4. Are the parents other focused projecting blame or hope?
5. Are the parents looking at the reality of the child’s talents?
6. What kind of fiends does the child make?
7. How much and what kind of contact is there with the extended family?
8. Have their been unusual stressors in the child’s life?

Osama Bin Laden has many sons. What determines which ones are close to him do you think? Was the “dye cast?” Did it happen before the child was a teenager?
How mindful are the military or any of us about the reasons people become warriors or terrorists? How much do we know about the kinds of families that produce warriors versus those who produce terrorists?

Of course, who’s a warrior and who’s a terrorist may depend on your point of view. One person’s “terrorist” is another’s “warrior”. What difference do the words mean to the health of an individual and a nation? If your family is invested in the military you have a better chance to be a warrior as long as you get along with the family and feel valued.

If the family is full of pacifists you may have a harder time being a well-respected warrior. Words are the vehicle on which emotional energy is loaded up and aimed at a person.

How mindful are any of us about how our family relationships have influenced us to be the people we are? How many of us have had to define ourselves to our family that we were going to be “different,” from their hopes and dreams.

The scale of differentiation may help us understand the influences that create terrorists or warriors, though even the distinctions between the two may only be clear within a particular cultural context.

The scale of differentiation is based on the observation that people who are highly fused with others do not have the backbone to develop a well-developed self. Less differentiated folks are more likely to make decisions to minimize their current discomforts and to sell out their future to get along with others.

It’s a short-term solution to find some kind of love or a bit of approval from others who might use you down the road. Once people have undue influence over you its easy to become a scapegoat or a martyr for them

In reading Bowen’s book, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, you get a different idea of what it takes to be self, especially in your own family. Perhaps this knowledge will one day become useful as we move from the age of anxiety to the age of mindfulness.

”We forget that Family System Theory is a way of life to be lived out in everything we do, and that it is not just another dogma to be preached to gullible disciples. We know with our heads that good things can happen in families when we can maintain a modicum of self control and stay in contact, but we forget the same things applies to us as professionally.”
Murray Bowen in a letter to the faculty and staff in 1982

Many thanks to Judy Ball for her very thoughtful editing help!!!!

Conditioned to Believe Verses Thinking for Self

Stepping into the warm water allows us to feel where we are, but observing how we think and act in relationships is harder by far.

Reading the New York Times this morning I found a very thoughtful piece on how our BELIEFS shape our interactions with others, The Americanization of Mental Illness.

I was fascinated by research showing the destructive ability of the mental health world to spin a story around diagnosing people. The research shows that diagnosing ends up doing more harm than good. You can read the abstracts below or read the whole piece and form your own take away.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

This push to see, believe and act the right way is not just in the world of mental heath. The forces for fusion and/or togetherness work in such subtle ways that we hardly notice them. One manifestation of this is the blame game. Here we can see how the forces for agreement can destroy individual differences by putting others down. This article describes how categorizing others, destroying or belittling differences becomes a part of our destructive urge to “help.”

It is not easy to think for self when we are constantly bombarded with the many ways we should think like others. We can see everywhere, at home, in school, with our friends, at our jobs, -the pressure to believe and act the “right way”.

One of the main problems is perceptual blindness. People cannot see the pressure that is being applied to be the “right way” for others. Some people call this fusion when two people agree and become a one in how they see the world. The DSM is one way to help people think and see the same way.

It requires a disciplined effort to become a better observer. What is it worth to see how often we are agreeing with others rather than thinking for self? It does require an emotional backbone to stick to a different way of seeing the world.

Perhaps eventually mental illness categorizations will begin by first looking at how much any way of diagnosing or even thinking allows us to focus and act negatively towards others. The problem is when we are blaming others we are leaving ourselves blameless.

The difficulty is that the way people function is seamlessly influenced by the ways others function. This is impossible to see without real effort. Few people can see the reciprocal forces of over and under functioning that are clearly present in symptoms like alcoholism.

Nothing will stop the efforts to try to change “them” to act, think and believe “the right way” in order to be in harmony with whoever is in authority or with the social group. The challenge is to constantly consider how we can change ourselves in relationship to others who are suffering.

Just as in kindergarten, we are all participating in diagnosing and being critical of others, putting others down, engaging in the blame game, in the put downs, in being close to some and far removed from others. In its simplest form we are expressing the natural forces deep in human nature to see others as not doing it “right” which gives us a better position in the social groups of which we’re a part.

My take away is this: Be careful what stories you buy into, be careful how you categorize others as “different.” Be careful to think twice (and deeply) when your feelings say the problem is in “the other.” This observing of self will not end the blame game but it might make for a deeper understanding of how we are wired and how we react to being part of a group

Enjoy,
Andrea

New York Times January 10, 2010
The Americanization of Mental Illness
By ETHAN WATTERS
We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.
That is until recently.

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures.

“Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology,” Lee says. “When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize eating disorders, then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick eating-disorder pathology as a way to express that conflict.”

Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed.

“As Western categories for diseases have gained dominance, micro-cultures that shape the illness experiences of individual patients are being discarded,” Lee says. “The current has become too strong.”

THE IDEA THAT our Western conception of mental health and illness might be shaping the expression of illnesses in other cultures is rarely discussed in the professional literature.

Many modern mental-health practitioners and researchers believe that the scientific standing of our drugs, our illness categories and our theories of the mind have put the field beyond the influence of endlessly shifting cultural trends and beliefs. After all, we now have machines that can literally watch the mind at work. We can change the chemistry of the brain in a variety of interesting ways and we can examine DNA sequences for abnormalities. The assumption is that these remarkable scientific advances have allowed modern-day practitioners to avoid the blind spots and cultural biases of their predecessors.
Western mental-health practitioners often prefer to believe that the 844 pages of the DSM-IV prior to the inclusion of culture-bound syndromes describe real disorders of the mind, illnesses with symptomatology and outcomes relatively unaffected by shifting cultural beliefs. And, it logically follows, if these disorders are unaffected by culture, then they are surely universal to humans everywhere. In this view, the DSM is a field guide to the world’s psyche, and applying it around the world represents simply the brave march of scientific knowledge.

Of course, we can become psychologically unhinged for many reasons that are common to all, like personal traumas, social upheavals or biochemical imbalances in our brains. Modern science has begun to reveal these causes. Whatever the trigger, however, the ill individual and those around him invariably rely on cultural beliefs and stories to understand what is happening. Those stories, whether they tell of spirit possession, semen loss or serotonin depletion, predict and shape the course of the illness in dramatic and often counterintuitive ways. In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.

Mental illnesses, it was suggested, should be treated like “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility. This was promoted both as a scientific fact and as a social narrative that would reap great benefits. The logic seemed unassailable: Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma.

This idea has been promoted by mental-health providers, drug companies and patient-advocacy groups like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in the United States and SANE in Britain. In a sometimes fractious field, everyone seemed to agree that this modern way of thinking about mental illness would reduce the social isolation and stigma often experienced by those with mental illness. Trampling on indigenous prescientific superstitions about the cause of mental illness seemed a small price to pay to relieve some of the social suffering of the mentally ill.

But does the “brain disease” belief actually reduce stigma?

In 1997, Prof. Sheila Mehta from Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama decided to find out if the “brain disease” narrative had the intended effect. She suspected that the biomedical explanation for mental illness might be influencing our attitudes toward the mentally ill in ways we weren’t conscious of, so she thought up a clever experiment.

Analyzing the data, Mehta found a difference between the group of subjects given the psychosocial explanation for their partner’s mental-illness history and those given the brain-disease explanation. Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical “disease like any other” increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

“The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms,” Mehta wrote. “We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise.” The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

When asked to name the sources of mental illness, people from a variety of cultures are increasingly likely to mention “chemical imbalance” or “brain disease” or “genetic/inherited” factors.
Unfortunately, at the same time that Western mental-health professionals have been convincing the world to think and talk about mental illnesses in biomedical terms, we have been simultaneously losing the war against stigma at home and abroad.

Trying to unravel this mystery, the anthropologist Juli McGruder from the University of Puget Sound spent years in Zanzibar studying families of schizophrenics. Though the population is predominantly Muslim, Swahili spirit-possession beliefs are still prevalent in the archipelago and commonly evoked to explain the actions of anyone violating social norms — from a sister lashing out at her brother to someone beset by psychotic delusions.

McGruder found that far from being stigmatizing, these beliefs served certain useful functions. The beliefs prescribed a variety of socially accepted interventions and ministrations that kept the ill person bound to the family and kinship group. “Muslim and Swahili spirits are not exorcised in the Christian sense of casting out demons,” McGruder determined. “Rather they are coaxed with food and goods, feted with song and dance. They are placated, settled, reduced in malfeasance.” McGruder saw this approach in many small acts of kindness. She watched family members use saffron paste to write phrases from the Koran on the rims of drinking bowls so the ill person could literally imbibe the holy words. The spirit-possession beliefs had other unexpected benefits.

Critically, the story allowed the person with schizophrenia a cleaner bill of health when the illness went into remission. An ill individual enjoying a time of relative mental health could, at least temporarily, retake his or her responsibilities in the kinship group. Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity.

For McGruder, the point was not that these practices or beliefs were effective in curing schizophrenia. Rather, she said she believed that they indirectly helped control the course of the illness. Besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

The course of a metastasizing cancer is unlikely to be changed by how we talk about it. With schizophrenia, however, symptoms are inevitably entangled in a person’s complex interactions with those around him or her.

In fact, researchers have long documented how certain emotional reactions from family members correlate with higher relapse rates for people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Collectively referred to as “high expressed emotion,” these reactions include criticism, hostility and emotional overinvolvement (like overprotectiveness or constant intrusiveness in the patient’s life). In one study, 67 percent of white American families with a schizophrenic family member were rated as “high EE.” (Among British families, 48 percent were high EE; among Mexican families the figure was 41 percent and for Indian families 23 percent.)

Does this high level of “expressed emotion” in the United States mean that we lack sympathy or the desire to care for our mentally ill? Quite the opposite. Relatives who were “high EE” were simply expressing a particularly American view of the self. They tended to believe that individuals are the captains of their own destiny and should be able to overcome their problems by force of personal will.

Prof. Jill M. Hooley of Harvard University concluded. “Far from high criticism reflecting something negative about the family members of patients with schizophrenia, high criticism (and hence high EE) was associated with a characteristic that is widely regarded as positive.”

What McGruder found in Zanzibar was that families often drew strength from this more connected and less isolating idea of human nature. Their ability to maintain a low level of expressed emotion relied on these beliefs. And that level of expressed emotion in turn may be key to improving the fortunes of the schizophrenia sufferer.

Of course, to the extent that our modern psychopharmacological drugs can relieve suffering, they should not be denied to the rest of the world. The problem is that our biomedical advances are hard to separate from our particular cultural beliefs. It is difficult to distinguish, for example, the biomedical conception of schizophrenia — the idea that the disease exists within the biochemistry of the brain — from the more inchoate Western assumption that the self resides there as well. “Mental illness is feared and has such a stigma because it represents a reversal of what Western humans . . . have come to value as the essence of human nature,” McGruder concludes. “Because our culture so highly values . . . an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be.”

Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group.

All cultures struggle with intractable mental illnesses with varying degrees of compassion and cruelty, equanimity and fear. Looking at ourselves through the eyes of those living in places where madness and psychological trauma are still embedded in complex religious and cultural narratives, however, we get a glimpse of ourselves as an increasingly insecure and fearful people. Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.

Ethan Watters lives in San Francisco. This essay is adapted from his book “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,” which will be published later this month by Free Press.
An earlier version of this article misstated the publisher of Ethan Watters’s book.

Happy Holidays

‘Tis the season to be jolly, make lists, find time to wonder, and hopefully read a book or two.

In 2009 the highlight was not just decorating the halls but publishing my first book:

The Mindful Compass: Navigating Through the Social Jungle for Success.

What a gift to be able to present my favorite ideas considering just how it comes to be that we are just naturally blind to psychological and relationship processes. I even included a few uplifting ideas on what anyone can do to become a better observer and strategist.

Another of the many fantastic gift from 2009 were the interviews I was able to have with ten well known Mexican leaders. They made the book come to life. I was so fortunate to meet these ten extraordinary people, willing to open up their lives, enabling us to see how family relationships can be so very influential. I easily fell in love with Mexico.

As I had hoped these were inspiring stories reminding us of the importance of leadership, and containing a gentle reminder to be mindful as we move about in the social jungle.

By being mindful who knows what we might discover?

I rediscover every day the beauty of nature, the cherished love of family and friends and the kindness of strangers.
I am forever grateful!

In 2010 my wish is to hear and understand more family stories, hopefully generate fantastic questions, and improve my ways of seeing and understanding the family as an emotional unit.

My holiday gifts for each of you are contained in the following pictures.
Do let me know if they make you think, laugh or enjoy a moment.
Just click the photo if you would like to an even see a larger version come to life.

Joy to One and All,

Andrea

Ordering the the Spanish Edition of Create Your Mindful Compass

If you would like to order the book from the publisher please E mail them at:

ventas@edicionesruz.com

Eventually we hope the book will be available on Amazon.

I received a positive comment on the book from Francesco Piazzesi, which you can read below. It is very useful to see what others think of the book.

Francesco is one of the people I interviewed. He had no idea about the content of the book so it was very important to hear his viewpoint.

After the interview Francesco remarked how aware he became of how his values and goals emerge from telling his story of how knowledge was acquired in relationship with important others over the generations. This overview then allows one to see the importance of persevering thorough the ups and downs of one’s life.

Dear Andrea.

Thank you very much for all your considerations. I have read the book and I am reading it again. Also, I donate 4 copies to the library of the Anahuac University MBA program.
(http://www.anahuac.mx/contenidos/2701.html)

Even though I teach strategic management my students always have a willingness to find their own vision. Well, the “Crea tu brújula interior” has become a marvelous tool and a must reading.

Thank you very much again.

Un abrazo

Francesco Piazzesi

The Spanish Edition of “Create Your Mindful Compass: Navigating through the Social Jungle for Success” or “Crea tu brújula interior; Un divertido recorrido por la jungla social para atraer el éxito”

The book is born! And it is in Spanish!

On October 27th. 2009, Maria Bustos organized a welcoming book event at the Museum of the People’s Art in Mexico City. http://www.museoartepopularmexicano.org/ During this week the museum also displayed many of their larger pieces on the main street of Mexico City. Over one million people were fortunate to see this amazing art work. As you can see the book launching was surrounded by fantastic energy from the world of art.

Maria organized and did all the groundwork She asked people to donate the Museum space, the food, the flowers, chairs, wine, drinks etc. She is both a one-woman army and a midwife. It was five days of fun celebrating, being interviewed and interviewing five fantastic Mexican artists. Maria’s skills made it possible for me to relax and be present with many great people. Clearly I could enjoy the moments or worry about the usual junk: being late, the traffic etc. I deeply appreciate Maria and her deep motivation to bring the ideas of Bowen theory to Mexico.

Heberto Ruz, the publisher deserves deep and special thanks for his complicated work in having the book translated and in making the decision two and half years ago to bring this book to life. One of the best moments was just to hold the book and look through the pages. The baby does not cry though the Mother may have. But the book is fantastic!!!

I was very happy to see the ten people I had interviewed and meet their family and friends. About 125 people came to celebrate the publishing of the book. This newly formed network gathered to celebrate the voices from ten leaders in Mexico, courageous enough to tell how their family experiences enabled them to see and understand relationships and how that impacted their successes. By deeply understanding how relationships worked early on, these leaders could describe the broader forces impacting relationship systems.

AMS, Marie Therese Arango, Anna Zarnecki, Francesco Piazzesi and Jim Walsh

AMS, Marie Therese Arango, Anna Zarnecki, Francesco Piazzesi, Maria Bustos, Victor Lichtinger and Maria de los Angeles

In the book we read about how, in very different ways, each person describes the way their family experience helped them define themselves and learn to remain in contact with a large variety of people.

For any of us seeing systems and forces allows us to move towards a more objective and factual viewpoint. This can enable the formation of stronger relationships out of which we can better manage life’s great challenges and just the plain old differences that we encounter everyday.

My hope is that by hearing others tell of managing self in their family and work relationships, people will have a deeper understanding of family systems. This will enable greater mindfulness about how we have been and still are being influenced by those around us.

There is overwhelming evidence that we humans are always in danger of having our decisions overly influenced by the social group surrounding us. We are vulnerable to being trapped and tricked by others, reacting, getting emotional, being negative, blaming others, all without seeing the system.

It is the system and the multigenerational forces that impact us in ways that are often very hard to see. In an effort to “fit” with the relationships system, people can easily find him or her self slipping into an uncomfortable or way too comfortable position. Nothing is harder than to see oneself and the social system around us in an impersonal way.

The leaders I interviewed often talked about what it is like to be alone, to separate out a self from others in order to bring his or her vision to life. They describe the paradox in being a profound leader. It requires not popularity and charisma but rather the ability to see the long term, plan and maintain the courage to thoughtfully stand-alone rather than overreact to perceptions of the players around us.

If we can see the system we are not stuck in the social jungle.

A few curious people asked me “why” I would go this route (asking people to tell how their family experiences influenced their success) as a way to introduce Bowen Theory to Mexico? Why a party? Why interview the people? Why not highlight just the theory?

One answer is found in the questions Bowen use to ask the post graduates year after year, “How is it that people can not see what is right in front of their eyes?” I know that there is a power to stories that conceptual ideas do not possess. In psychiatry you see this in the telling of “clinical” stories. Stories fit with our brain, enabling the motivated among us to see theory as it is being lived out right before our eyes. People can see that triangles and side taking are everywhere.

Often relationship problems are not personal. Problems are simply systems in action. Those motivated to be mindful of their actions are looking for a useful theory to help us understand deeply what is going on.

By reflecting on the past, we can choose to become more mindful of the way people automatically function with one another. People are often asked to learn the seven principles or the eight concepts but alone they do not enable people to manage self with others. The basic challenge of seeing the overriding influence of relationships is the underlying message of this book.

All of us live in society and in our families. We are also a part of our changing families’ lives. They change us and we change them.

Now people can read these stories in which people are connecting the dots. Hopefully this will make a difference for a few. People can say I am doing it the wrong way and that could be true. But at least it is my way.

The Mindful Compass tells us how inevitable resistance is. First, you take an action that is really important to you. Then, the people in the emotionally connected system react, as they must. But by being mindful and using your knowledge of how systems function, you can stand-alone while the system rebalances. I am not saying any of this is easy but I am saying it’s the way to a bit more emotional freedom.

Words can never do justice to the efforts that so many made. I deeply appreciated and enjoyed my daughter, Michelle, making the effort to be there.

Mara Lalia, Michelle Mauboussin, Alfredo Lalia

She and Jim Walsh were the only Americans to make the journey.

Andrea Schara, Jim Walsh, Maria Bustos

Jim was one of the ten people I interviewed for the English version of the book. He took the ideas to heart and has used them to make further progress. Jim also donated big boxes of chocolate for the ten people I interviewed. Each piece of chocolate is embedded with conscious intention and love for our health and happiness. If you want a taste of the best try it! – http://www.intentionalchocolate.com/

Another person who came to celebrate the book is Fernando Manzanilla who along with Jim Walsh is growing coca in the area of Mexico where it was originally gown. You can read his story http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/2008/07/

Gabby, Fernado and Michelle

Ada Luisa Trillo was also there. She has been in the post-graduate program at the Bowen Center in Washington, D.C. She came down from the Juarez/ El Paso boarder area. Ada has influenced many people in Mexico with her knowledge of Bowen Theory. She along with Louise Rausseo have developed programs serving the people of their area.

Ada Luisa Trillo and Maria Bustos

Two of the ten people I interviewed could not attend the celebration at the museum. But I had the good fortune to catch up with them the following day and personally thank them for being involved in this important project. Sabina Berman has been busy with her weekly TV show and other projects. Her ability to be direct and ask hard questions is a central draw for the one million or so who watch her TV show. Sabina is very aware of the complex problems in Mexico and hopes that by bring issues out into the open, better solutions will be discovered. Her interview can be seen by clicking over to http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/2009/01/

The one person I met and asked if I could interview was Ulises Calatayud Catano. I met him while he was teaching at his Bikram Yoga studio in Mexico City. He is the kind of person who you just know is exceptional just by the way he walks into a room. His energy is warm and accepting, therefore his students are free to be the best they can be without getting all caught up in his personality. For anyone who wants to be a leader or to just do better managing self in any relationship the grounding with one’s body, that yoga offers, is essential to progress. I was so pleased to have a moment with Ulises. I was also happy to see his Mom at the 6:30 AM class practicing yoga too. We had a fun time sweating our way to health! You can read his interview by clicking over to http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/2008/08/

I also wanted to give something back to the museum for sponsoring this event. The museum represents the heart and soul of the people of Mexico through art. The multigenerational history of Mexico can be seen in art whose roots are in the Mayans and the Aztecs cultures. These traditions were intermingled and at times interwoven with the ideas and needs of the Spanish people.

It was a privilege to meet with these five artists whose work has been highlighted by the museum. These individuals were willing to travel up to 14 hours from the southern part of Mexico to get an opportunity to tell their stories and display their art. I videotaped some of it and will write up their stories and put them on my web site as time permits.

Marie Theresa Arango appreciates the artist’s work……

Cecelia Moctezuma, The President of MAP and Maria Bustos

Finally I would just say that the location of this event had great significance because The Museum of the People’s Art (MAP) represents the heart, soul and deep mutigenerational history of the Mexican people.

Now we will see what the people of Mexico think of this new book.
It will be fun to see just how readers perceive the book.

My warmest thanks to all….. Andrea
Many thanks also to Judith Ball for editing help.

Invitation to the Book Launching: The Mindful Compass:Navigating Through the Social Jungle for Success

A special moments will be October 27th, when there will be a party at the Museo de Arte Popular, to celebrate the birth of my book in Spanish:

Create Your Mindful Compass: Navigating Through The Social Jungle for Success

A friendly colorful dragon invites us into the museum.

It is a very happy moment to celebrate!

All of this is happening due to the hard work of Maria Bustos. Her Mom has been helping all the way and even tries to help me with my Spanish. She also really enjoys my daughter Michelle. Here they are all dressed up going to the book party.

Maria recognized the importance of bring this version of Bowen’s Family System ideas to Mexico. She created the network to make it all possible and has coordinated this whole effort. Thankfully, after all the hard work there will now be a special time to enjoy the celebration of the book’s new life among Spanish speaking people.

I want to thank those I interviewed, Francesco Piazzesi, Mario Buzzolini, Victor Lichtinguer, Don Lorenzo Servitje, Ernesto Valenzuela, Fernando Manzanilla, Maria Terersa Arango, Sabina Berman. You can read their stories on this site.

Next the people behind the scenes who made this project possible:
Francisco Gonzales (Director General, Union Social de Empresarios Mexicanos)

Heberto Ruz (Director General, Ediciones Ruz) and Andrea. Heberto is the publisher of this book and many others.

I am deeply appreciative all the people, named and unnamed, who have made it possible for my book to be launched in Mexico City. In particular I am thinking of my family who have stood behind me and supported my effort to write through thick and thin.

Below is the invitation and I would be so very happy to see anyone who can come.

The Wonders of Thinking Twice

What does it take to change the way you think?

In the last blog I wrote about the observations of how people “trick” one another as a response to internal anxiety and or perhaps to maintain a habitual emotional state.

This month I will review a book, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counter Intuition by my son-in-law Michael Mauboussin.  The goal: understanding the challenges in becoming more rational.

This book fits with how Bowen thought about becoming a more integrated individual by integrating the feeling and thinking system.  In addition learning about how we make decisions is crucial to anyone mental health.

Murray Bowen wrote: Man’s ability to think, his intellectual system, is a function of the newly added cerebral cortex, which has developed last in his evolution, and which is the main difference between man and the lower forms of life.  The emotional and the intellectual systems have different functions, but they are interconnected, each influencing the other.[1]

One example of the effort to integrate feelings and thinking is Bowen’s move from psychoanalytical thinking to seeing and describing the family as an interactive system.

Bowen was able to move away from his on going training in psychoanalysis, to focus on the patient, and broaden his observations to the relationships between family members.  He spent 12 years and over 10,00 hours observing families, in his version of family psychotherapy with two or more family members, before he considered he had developed a way of understanding the family and as an emotional system.[2]

Of course Bowen was the first person to develop a theory about the family as a system. It should be easier for the rest of us.

By directly observing families as they relate to each other a whole new world of clinical data came into view.  This information did not fit with the still dominant medical/individual modal.  More fundamentally Bowen’s interest was not confined to the nuclear family.  He wanted to get beyond Freud’s use of Greek plays to explain internal dynamics. By emphasizing the interlocking nature of the family over the generations he saw how families were a part of evolution. As he noted any system is dependent on the functioning of the larger system of which it is a part.  This linked observations of a living system to the biological sciences.

The role of the psychotherapist also underwent enormous change. Bowen regarded himself as a “consultant” in family problems for the initial problems and then as a “supervisors“ of the family effort over the long-term process. This was along way from the method of provoking change through the well-described steps in the individually -focused transference.

You can imagine the difficult in training psychiatrists to become non-participant observers and to regard the family as a phenomenon. This was learning to think twice about the acceptable way of understanding psychotherapy.  This was a fundamental alteration in the way of thinking.

The overall goal became to “help family members become system experts who could know the family system so well that the family could readjust itself without the help of outside experts, if and when the family was again stressed.”[3]

Bowen spent years training people to move from thinking about the individual to thinking about the system of relationships and to mange self in the outside position.  His overview of the problem was that,  “the psychotherapist is trained to hear, understand and identify and to form a therapeutic relationship with the patient.” [4] The transference “cure” is very different from being a consultant to the family.

The challenge is for the “consultant” to learn from the family and to allow the family to learn from the consultant while still the consultant remain free enough to relate to any family member at any time.

This is a formidable task due both to the way our brains work and due to the predictable resistance. Family members can trip up the consultant, especially if he or she is trying to think with the family in a disciplined way, rather than agree with the blame game or heal the family, as in the transference.

Bowen highlighted the overall problem in understanding how we think or how the emotional system functions.  Man has done less well when his intellect is directed at himself. The main problem in learning the secrets of emotional illness lies more in the way man denies, rationalizes and thinks about emotional illness. [5]

Perhaps his words will offer solace to those who are willing, again and again to embrace the beginners mind.  After all being rational is often blocked by emotional system.  By understanding how to be more rational this will enable us to function emotionally. Being rational and seeing how to think well about the future is a skill well worth spending time to develop.

In his new book Think Twice, Michael Mauboussin aims to give investors and business people a clear exposé of how our brains can trick us. I give this useful book 5 stars as it enables any motivated person to be aware of mental traps giving us a bag full of tools to make better decisions. Of course the really big question is how long will it take for any of us to learn to Think Twice?

We all get in the habit of understanding decision making from our own perspective. I am Michael Mauboussin’s fan and his mother-in-law so take what I say as you will.  I have also spent the 34 years of my professional life working as a family therapist and in so doing have learned about the challenges of thinking rationally

Sherlock Holmes was a master of looking at the facts and calculating reasons leading him to solve all kinds of problems.  He could observe and make sense of many clues that most people missed. Emotions and preconceived ideas never hindered his judgment.  Sherlock was a fictional character. His author, Colon Doyle had his own issues with rational thinking.[6] Over the ups and downs of ones life it is harder for our rational thinking to remain clear.

Poor decisions can provide clues about significant hidden biases or hidden emotional pressures either of which can overpower our more rational side. Most of us know that stress contributes to poor decision-making. Of course if the people you love die, or if you get divorced, you might not be at the top of your rational game.  But now we know that it is just not stress or mental illness that creates the conditions for poor decision-making, it’s the way the brain has evolved from ancient humans and their environments which contributes to the way we make decisions.

Now, by pausing to Think Twice, it becomes possible for us to avoid many irrational “slippery slopes” that we simply couldn’t see before we stopped to think twice.

Mauboussin sweeps away worries about being neurotic or stressed-out as the only cause of poor decision-making, and notes that learning to be rational is a challenge for us individually and as a society. We do not value introspection, flexibility or the ability to properly calculate evidence sufficiently to test for these rational abilities in standard IQ tests. The pressure is on for individuals to understand the brain’s vulnerabilities and to see our mistakes without negative judgment.

After reading the book once, I read it twice. My goal: make this information work in my life. Chart the appearance of these mental traps with examples from my life and the news media.

If rational thinking is to increase we have to notice how our brain immediately responds to clues. By looking carefully at these clues and wondering about their impact on us we can often re-think any problem.  Pride goes before the fall if we tend to see each situation as unique and ignore the statistical similarities in problems.  Mauboussin asks what happens when companies merge.  A large percentage of mergers do not work but people still think, “My merger will be different”.

Our brain follows an old path without the practice of seeing our situation compared to many others, or the inside, outside views as Mauboussin calls them.

It requires less energy for the brain to reduce the number of alternatives, or for one’s behavior to be shaped by incentives, or to cling to the words of experts and/or to follow the crowd.  It is difficult for us to see the extraordinary influence of the crowd, family, colleagues and society on us. It is hard for us to see that to be wise we need to maintain our autonomy in the crowd.

Professional investors and business people will have an incentive to turn Mauboussin’s book into a disciplined course to increase anyone’s ability to recognize and apply these lessons.  But I would like to see a version of his ideas available for middle – school children. Learning how your brain functions early on would be a wise investment for young minds.

As easy as it is to read the book once, if you put the book down without making the ideas yours, the book will not have done its job.    Some may say, “I read the book now, of course, I will be more aware and rational.”  If only it were that simple.

Mauboussin observes how the wizards of the world have been led astray.  Of course anyone can allow his or her guard down. People can easily trust the wrong doctors, brokers or experts.  As he notes, even highly trained financial experts, the best people at NASA and psychologists like Stephen Greenspan, author of Annals of Gullibility, can be fooled by the brain’s easygoing, automatic ways.  Greenspan lost 30% of his money in the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Word to the overconfident: both smart and ordinary people can be tricked by not thinking twice in a disciplined way.

It would be one thing if just one or two of us were irrational, but since we live in a highly interactive world a lot of people can join an irrational bandwagon.  Societal irrationality has a long history. Mark Twain noted: “History may not repeat itself but it rhymes a lot.” He would have enjoyed the examples in this book of how the brain tricks itself.

Most of us can find stories of not thinking twice in the news everyday.  In the chapter, “Unintended consequences: Feed an Elk, Starve an Ecosystem,” a decision made in 1886 led to complex problems for the entire Yellowstone national park.   Do you think this focus on fixing only a part a system might be a fluke?  Think again.

The New York Times, September 20, 2009, tells us how health officials in Egypt focused on getting rid of pigs to diminish the spread of swine flu. Brains were tricked. The complex system was ignored and this lead to a different health crisis for Egyptians.  Cairo now has tons of garbage in the streets that the pigs use to eat

Fixing one problem and not comprehending the system-wide affect reflects the kind of blindness, which led to the decision to let Lehman go. Those very smart decision makers awoke to finding the financial world about to topple over. By the time they realized how interconnected the system had become it was too late. Seeing the system rather than one or two bad guys is still a stretch for most of us.

Mauboussin, a synthesizing detective, gathers knowledge demonstrating how the brain works its short-cut thinking magic. As a system thinker he points out the difficulty in understanding complexity when one believes in such sacred cows such as:

(1) Seeing problems as unique and not seeking the statistical outside viewpoints.

(2) The way we are programmed by events to have tunnel vision and reduce options.

(3) The inconsistent performance of experts in predicting the future.

(4) The dominant role of cause and effect thinking even in complex systems.

(5) The inability to see the difference between cause and correlations. There are a lot of churches in high crime areas but churches do not cause crimes.

(6) The difference between skill and luck, and harder yet understanding the implications that what goes up will come down, or revision to the mean.

(7) One of my favorites is what Mauboussin calls “the grand Ah-Whooms” or the tipping point in non-linear systems. Water boiling is a phase transition as are traffic jams and stock market crashes.

All of these concepts are hard for people to understand, much less master, without practice.   As Mauboussin notes: “ Our brains are not wired for the process of moving from preparation to recognition. Indeed typical decision makers allocate only 25% of their time to thinking about the problem properly and learning from experience.”

People are more comfortable looking at the outcomes, which can be due to chance, rather than taking time to understand the process of decision-making.  It is more automatic for us to decrease the number of discrepant ideas and to limit the number of people to whom we listen.

The individual and the group march toward a quick consensus. This will remain a formidable intellectual/emotional stumbling block in solving complex issues.  But the bright side is that we will all be together in harmony and happy in the short term.

Mauboussin helps us understand, recognize and even appreciate our vulnerabilities with humorous explanations. He reassures us that we can become more rational by recognizing the traps and applying tools to better cope with the realities of life.  Many of his ideas about being more rational are not such hard medicine. Best of all, those who take his work seriously will become more autonomous in the maddening crowd.

Preparation offers us an early warning system. Mauboussin suggests: 1) keep a decision journal, 2) have a checklist and 3) be aware of the brain’s tendency to take clues from the environment leading us into back alleys.   He explains that there is a clear path through the tangled web of deceit the brain weaves as it tries to interpret how to quickly understand and respond well to its environment.  We may prefer short cuts to the more difficult, time and energy consuming, unfeeling calculations needed to see risk and properly access outcomes. However, now we have a well-written guide to being able engage the process of thinking Twice.

My take away is to understand the ancient roots of irrationality as they surface in my day-to-day life. Perhaps this will help retool my brain, reducing my deep need to feel good and to be right at the expense of long-term solutions to complex problems.

Many thanks to Judy Ball for again, excellent attention to details in her editing.

---

[1] M. Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, (1977) p. 197

[2] M. Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, (1977) p. 152

[3] M. Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, (1977) p. 157

[4] M. Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, (1977) p 157

[5] M. Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, (1977) p. 198

[6] After the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, and the death of his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, the creator of the literary character Raffles), and his two nephews shortly after World War I, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle

The Erosion of the Self and the Beginners Mind

The Erosion of the Self and the Beginners Mind

This blog begins with the theoretical and moves to the particular with an example of one person’s effort to understand options and alter her participation in a stuck marriage.

Bowen family systems theory, a theory of human behavior, views the family as a reasonably knowable, somewhat predictable emotional unit. The family is an emotionally connected system that is not easily changeable. Individuals who understand the broad system are more able to alter the direction of his or her participation in the system, with thoughtful effort.

Many people long for change, mostly in others (not themselves), and chafe at the effort one needs to understand complexity and mange self.

The multigenerational forces, that affect all families seems to have left most families with ancient problems resistant to easy solutions.  Yet people seem more and more eager to try easy sounding solutions for complex problems, or to write off the difficult people in their lives.

Although difficult to change, given the power of these ancient emotional processes, there is evidence to suggest that by understanding the forces around us a bit more, people can decrease their natural desire to fix others and change themselves (self).  In so doing, people can decrease the suffering they experience in important relationships.

Interpersonal problems are as old as humans’ lives on earth.  Bowen believed that the emotional systems that govern human relationships evolved over millions of years.  Animals may not tell stories and complain about others, but they have most all of the symptoms that we humans do, even suicide.[1]

If we can see that we humans are linked to all living species and that our very human emotional symptoms evolved alongside emotional symptoms in other species, we might be able to learn to be more objective about ourselves.  We may be able to pause or just slow down our rush to judgment about the WHY they did this or that and discover WHAT exactly it is that concerns us about other people and their behavior. A beginner’s mind is concerned with understanding deeply first.

Many days I am confronted by people who are sad, hurt, mad and angry that others cannot or will not change and become more grown up, functional or mature or what ever it is the other wishes that person to be in order to make one’s life better.  Often they have good arguments. You know them all: the focused on person indulges in all kinds of problematic behavior, drinks, etc.

It always sounds rational, but the give away is the focus on making others change.  Is this evidence of the erosion of one’s own self?  After all what is the nature of this push for change?  Is it based in habit?  Is it due to the fact that our eyes face to the outside world therefore it is almost impossible to be mindful of what we are doing and saying?

Perhaps this focus on others is a necessary force that will in the end only keep the emotional nature of our relationships in equilibrium.  There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the effort to change others simply keeps the status quo intact and that it erodes our own selves to focus on making others change.

Take a family history and you will see that in almost any three-generational history, the levels of maturity among family members become progressively lower in certain lines or branches of the family.  In the branches of the family where one person is able to pull up, despite objections from others in the system, there is often some kind of anger that lingers in the larger family system.  You can hear that the person who focused on self and made an effort to alter the part he or she played in the interactions is called a jerk, weird, selfish, etc.

This same type of criticism is also aimed at the ones who are stuck and who are unable to alter their functioning.   Criticism is everywhere.  It is not a leading indicator that one is doing well or that one is stuck.

How does this focus on others come to be?   It arises out of our need to get along with others in marriages, with parents, and as participants in any group.

First let’s imagine that two people have left their families of origin and are mature enough to mate.  In the swirl of chemical happiness created by physical attraction, the woman agrees with most things the man suggests. He sees her as extraordinary and wishes to marry her.  She thinks she knows how to make him happy and accepts. In the bliss of romance both have become delusional about who the other is or how to manage self when there are disagreements. They can not see that the way they promised the other to be, will become more difficult over time.  Often both partners have agreed to  make the other happy.

At the extreme people get addicted to people who they believe can make them happy and they are willing to do a great many harmful things things to themselves and or others to maintain their happiness. Without this force soap operas would have no material to entertain us.

This delusion, that the other makes me happy and always will, may be harmless at times. times. However often life intervenes.  There are the pressures of children or financial or other woes.  Life in its various forms makes it clear that any two people will have to cooperate and do far more difficult things than they originally imagined.  The perfectly balanced see saw that the relationship originaly created often begins to tilt.  Sometimes things can stay in balance until the children arrive.  The basic issue is that over time one has to invest more in other relationships than in the marriage itself.  In this continuing adjustment process one of the two people can easily become more “functional” or  more dominant, if you will.

No one really cares who is dominant as long as the relationship is calm and cooperative and no one pays too high a price for going along with the wishes of the other. Bowen used to say about 50% of marriages were female dominated, and 50% male dominated.  But under enough stress all bets are off and a dominance dance takes place. One person becomes the under functioning one and the other the over functioning one. The see saw has tilted and one person often becomes impinged and may become symptomatic.

This kind of one-up and one-down relationship process can also be easily seen in animals. The one-up and one-down interaction occurs when animals meet for the first time. One comes away doing better that the other.  This influences the animal’s next relationship and results in the formation of hierarchies.

All social groups establish hierarchies. This enables groups to function with less anxiety and/or continual fighting over positions in the group.  In research on rats, stress reduction has been identified as the major reason that the memory of the previous interactions establishes and maintains the dominance structure in the interactions.[2]

People can argue about the nature of hierarchies, but let’s assume that if you put two horses together to pull a cart, one of the horses will step out first.  No arguing needed. Unlike birds in a flock who often change positions, the rotation of leadership in a marriage is hard to maintain.

The reasons for this are theoretical. People speculate on the basic nature of the attachment process. Bowen referred to the fusion force in a marriage as the process in which the two people begin to operate as one.  The pressure to go along with the other can be tremendous and the anger or sickness that occurs if one does not capitulate can be enormous. It is as if when the other becomes more separate this challenges the status quo in a way that FEELS as if the world itself might disintegrate.

There seems to be an emotional see saw in which one person becomes dominant and strives to retain that dominance despite the casualities which occur: marital problems, conflict, distance, emotional or health symptoms in either partner, or various symptoms in the children.  Of course you can hear many other reasons for dominance behavior in a marriage. I hear people cite various cultural themes for dominance in a marriage such as “the man wears the pants” which reinforce the correctness of a dominance structure in a martial twosome.  The important part to see is that the basic need for dominance rises out of our animal nature; it is not a cultural edifice.

The dominance structure also unfolds as the mother-child relationship unfolds.  The mother early on is responsible for the care and nurturance of the infant. She may turn this job over to others for brief times but she is the responsible one.  How will this responsibility play out over the life of the child?  A few of the markers to understand functioning are: the over and under involvement with the child, the level of intensity in interactions, the emotional maturity that both parents have in managing self, and the quality of each of their relationships with the extended family.

Parents also invest differently in each child. We can see how families inadvertently create skewed outcomes in dominance patterns by looking at how well siblings do from research available in the book The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why by Dalton Conley.[3]

If the marriage is one where there is a working partnership between parents, the child’s chances of growing up with emotional maturity are greatly increased.  If the parents cannot work together with deep respect for differences then the anxiety in the marriage will drift down and settle on children in various ways.  A working partnership between parents has been well researched by John Gottman. http://www.gottman.com/research/ So far Gottman does not connect the nuclear family intensity with the impact of cut off from the extended family.

The best outcome for families is the work on self that involves having to define a self to one’s spouse, children and even friends as they try to retain or enforce the status quo. “Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.” Julia Cameron

The following is taken from a note I wrote to a woman who is seeking to manage herself following the news that her husband will seek a divorce.  The woman comes from a family where the multigenerational emotional forces pressured her to become the mother’s helper. Some might say she was “programmed” to remain single to help the family.  She altered her part in this very old family projection process, married and created a larger more complex family relationship system.

Just as for most of us, she still works on being a thoughtful, non-anxious person to manage the reactivity in the system at times when the pressures mount.  There is no easy path for any of us in the long term effort to separate out from emotional process by understanding relationships pressures as impersonal and to take thoughtful actions representing our best self.  She gave her permission to have this note included on the web site.

As you noted, you saw a future for you carved out clearly by your family.  Your acceptable pathway was to forego marriage. By looking at the forces in your family history you were able to say NO, I would rather take a chance on marriage than remain single. That was a big turn, and now many years later this possible divorce is another point, another moment, where you will decide how to deal with the events and the forces in your family.

Overall if I hear you clearly describe your situation, it seems your marriage led to your husband becoming more of an under-functioner who “used”  you as an antidepressant.  He was calmer as long as you were able to take his temper tantrums. He treated you disrespectfully, which you allowed, and this then promoted a habit of immature dominance oriented interactions with him.

Another way of saying it is that you coddled him and got your self pinned in a one up position as the witch. The marital see saw was tilting as both of you were compensating to manage the relationship, while you were raising your children.

Now the question becomes how to deal with him in a different way than you were able to deal with him during the time you were married.  This is a difficult task, but might be an opportunity for real growth, if you can separate out a self from him and not react to his taunts.

If I were you, which I am not, I would only write to him about paradoxical fun stuff.   Your relationship has become too serious.  He can defeat you at every turn with a loud voice and seriousness about what you did wrong. Therefore it’s time for some Zen-like approaches to the interactions you have with him.

Zen approaches use non-linear paradoxical statements to force the other to think.  There is nothing to argue about, nothing to win.

Since he has focused on your not noticing his taking off his wedding band, I would use that focus of his to provoke him to think differently.

He has already judged you disloyal and acted as thought he hates you when in fact he is probably overly attached and extremely sensitive to you not reacting to him, as you might have done in the past.

1) I would tell him you are looking for a wedding ring for him that intertwines at least 6 bands into one.  This 6-band wedding ring would represent a possible 6 marriages that he could have with various woman but still all the marriages would all be only one marriage.  After all, one woman is as good as another.

As long as he marries a woman this wedding band will always work in a way that guarantees he never has to take the ring off.  He will be constantly reminded that plenty of woman love him. It will give him total freedom to get married as many times as he wants to.

2) Then I would say I am not going to give you a divorce.  It is the least I can do to prove I love you.

3) Further I would tell him, I might like to divorce you for being disrespectful to me but not because you do not love me.  I know you love me.  I see how you treat me like a too-powerful woman that should be less powerful.

4) Maybe I should divorce you for being disrespectful to your children.   But because I love you and have great confidence that they too will see this time period as a needed adjustment for all of us.  I know that as our oldest leaves for college, the possibility of divorce may be that the only way a child can leave home. After all if Dad leaves home it cannot be that hard to do.

I would only do one of these Zen moves at a time and see what happens.  If he gets mad, that’s OK.  It means he heard something.  His mind is twisted by the past and untwisting takes time and courage. Let’s see what he and you make of this junk.

ams

Now I confess, I do reversals and stupid stuff untill people stop complaining and being confused. If they say one straight thing I am straight. If they are talking out of both sides of their mouthes, I take note and question then, and then if there is no chance for rational thought I too engage in the emotional junk.

I am better at thinking of these crazy things than most people.

It is a far superior way to engage in interaction compared to antidepressant treatment for chemical imbalances.  It is all about having a backbone and not trying to change others, but focusing on not participating in the stream of dysfunctions but creating loose associations to deeper themes.

I am always amazed that people, whose job it is to relate well to psychotic people, are not at all interested in the communication patterns of psychotic people when there is so much we can learn from them.

The whole area of indirect and symbolic communication is up for grabs.  I know that understanding and relating well to those who have some form of emotional illness is a big jump for people.  It easy to say they have a chemical imbalance and let the physicians treat them with drugs and wash our hands of the mess. It is hard to look at our part in relationships when we easily see the other is the problem.

It is natural to want to blame the sick one, the one who is not doing it right, and to talk high and mighty about the importance of being genuine and not manipulative.  This is how people talk to me if they know I am coaching people on reversals and Zen like interactions.  I have seen that being genuine in a twisted system ends up with people just going along with the craziness.

Think of the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. People went along with the dominant belief rather than seeing for themselves.  They were afraid to speak up.[1] How individuals in a social group are pressured to go along with false perceptions are documented by Solomon Asch’s experiment where people give into the influence of the group.[2] People go along to get along no matter if the system is “crazy.”  People in groups are asked to play roles and it becomes hard to deviate from others in the social situation to see or say the facts.

We are connected to one another at a deep emotional level. The level of blindness about the influence of the social situation on human functioning is enormous. It is even difficult for people to understand simple feelings, for example how anger connects us as strongly as love.  E.O. Wilson notes that love and hate may be on the same gene.  Overall being driven to act on feelings leaves people with little understanding of the forces that are influencing behavior.

Bowen also called the force where two people function as one, fusion. The anti-fusion force gives us the ability to separate out a self (differentiation). This force to be a self in your own right requires each of us to stand alone.  It works if people have strong principles, important enough to take on the negative reactions from those who love us, but who at a moment of anger want us to behave in the “right” (or their) way.

Imagine a family where people are tied to one another by rubber bands.  If you go too far in thought, words or actions: snap, something happens. The relationship force pulls you back so that you will be in the correct emotional orbit for the system.

Diversity sounds good but it turns out to be very difficult to achieve in social systems.  It takes a beginners mind to expand thinking and make room for differences by inserting self into a tight system.

The beginner’s mind makes it is possible for the individual to look to the self for happiness, while taking responsibility for the roles that are inherited in any family.

The beginner is willing to think of the many ways of participate more thoughtfully in any multigenerational emotional system.

The beginner lives in the moment, managing self, aware of possibilities.

Many thanks to Judy Ball for her editing patience and great questions.

Andrea

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[1] In this review, evidence on suicidal behavior among animals is analyzed to discover analogies with human suicidal behavior. Literature was retrieved by exploring Medline/PubMed and PsychINFO databases (1967-2007) and through manual literature searches. Keyword terms were “suicide or suicidal behavior” and “animal or animal behavior.” Few empirical investigations have been carried out on this topic. Nevertheless, sparse evidence supports some resemblance between the self-endangering behavior observed in the animal kingdom, particularly in animals held in captivity or put under pressure by environmental challenges, and suicidal behavior among humans. Animal models have contributed to the study of both normal and pathological human behaviors: discovering some correlates of suicide among animals could be a valid contribution to the field.

PMID: 18232440 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

[2]

Stress Amplifies Memory for Social Hierarchy,María Isabel Cordero¹ and Carmen Sandi^1*

¹Laboratory of Behavioural Genetics, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Review Editors: Benno Roozendaal, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, USA; Alessandro Bartolomucci, Dipartimento di Biologia Evolutiva e Funzionale, University of Parma, Italy

*Correspondence: Carmen Sandi, Laboratory of Behavioural Genetics, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015, Switzerland. e-mail:carmen.sandi@epfl.ch

Received August 15, 2007; Accepted September 1, 2007.

Individuals differ in their social status and societies in the extent of social status differences among their members. There is great interest in understanding the key factors that contribute to the establishment of social dominance structures. Given that stress can affect behavior and cognition, we hypothesized that, given equal opportunities to become either dominant or submissive, stress experienced by one of the individuals during their first encounter would determine the long-term establishment of a social hierarchy by acting as a two-stage rocket: (1) by influencing the rank achieved after a social encounter and (2) by facilitating and/or promoting a long-term memory for the specific hierarchy. Using a novel model for the assessment of long-term dominance hierarchies in rats, we present here the first evidence supporting such hypothesis. In control conditions, the social rank established through a first interaction and food competition test between two male rats is not maintained when animals are confronted 1 week later. However, if one of the rats is stressed just before their first encounter, the dominance hierarchy developed on day 1 is still clearly observed 1 week later, with the stressed animal becoming submissive (i.e., looser in competition tests) in both social interactions. Our findings also allow us to propose that stress potentiates a hierarchy-linked recognition memory between “specific” individuals through mechanisms that involve de novo protein synthesis. These results implicate stress among the key mechanisms contributing to create social imbalance and highlight memory mechanisms as key mediators of stress-induced long-term establishment of social rank.

[3] Conley made an effort not to simplify the very complex familial data collected by both the United States Census, a long-term study conducted by the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey. What he found was that the differences between siblings outweigh almost every other kind of difference between any two individuals in the United States. Every family has a pecking order independent of birth order, and the differences between siblings are magnified by poverty and disenfranchisement. In these situations, families invest in the sibling most likely to succeed, leading to stark divides, even class differences between family members. Oddly, the choice of successful sibling is made independent of birth order, parental attention, or innate talents, and becomes a tacit agreement among family members.

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[1] “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Kejserens nye Klæder) is a fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen about an emperor who unwittingly hires two swindlers to create a new suit of clothes for him. The tale was first published in 1837 as part of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children).

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

Has Anyone Seen a Theory to Explain a Family?

I was compelled to write this blog after reading an editorial by David Brooks in the New York Times. I thought it is worthwhile to consider the way people generally understand or are mystified by human behavior, and what if anything Bowen Theory might have to offer. 
In an editorial, May 11, 2009, DAVID BROOKS writes about the Grant Study, which consists of following 268 men picked from those entering the Harvard Class of 1938.[1]

 

As you might predict they were the most promising of young men and were selected partially because they were the most “well adjusted.” John F. Kennedy was one of them. And yes, problems arose in their lives, despite their being the best of the best.

 

Some say these life stories highlight the life of promise and disappointments for mostly unknown reasons. What happed to these men, David Brooks claims, is beyond any theory to explain. 
“Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success.” 
Freud also turned to literature to understand the twisted way that the lives of talented people often turned out. Generations of psychoanalysts have preferred the Greeks to the Russians for their way to highlight repeating dramatic patterns within the individual. 

 

Once anyone begins to look at how the individuals function in a social system, the way of thinking and theorizing is altered significantly. 

 

A new way of observing human behavior, or if you will, a new page was turned, when Murray Bowen placed the human’s vulnerability to emotional problems in biological process instead of in literature which focuses on what is wrong within an individual and often highlights a fatal flaw.  

 

Perhaps Brooks makes the claim that theory cannot explain what happens to people as they mature and develop because he has never heard of Family theory? If so, Brooks is not  alone in not knowing much about family theory or therapy. A focus on what is “wrong” with the individual still dominates heath care. 

 

There is much in our culture today that reverts back to psychoanalysis for explanations.  So Brooks may also have been influenced to give up on a theory because the man who ran the Grant Study for many years, George Vaillant, also gave up on psychoanalysis as a theory which could explain outcomes.[2] 
This search for the missing theory reminds me of the following joke highlighting people who are looking in all the wrong places.  In this story a very drunk man is hanging onto a light post for dear life. A policeman approaches him and asks, “What are you doing here?  The tipsy man answers, “Officer, I am looking for my car keys.”  “Where did you lose them?” “Over by my car.” “Then why are you looking here”  “Officer can’t you see, its dark over there, and the light is here.” 
The light in this case, only shines because a theory, provides a way of understanding.

 

Most of us have personal theories about how things come to be the way they are. A few take the search for a guiding theory seriously.

 

Bowen was so bugged by the holes in psychoanalytic theory that he developed a different way of understanding human behavior, anchoring his observations of the human family inside evolutionary theory.  
Most of us might acknowledge that there are mysteries about how people’s lives turn out while at the same time seeing how the repetitive interactions in a system work to make some more vulnerable than others. 

 

It is not by accident that people seem to make poor choices. There are subtle and blatant forces operating on sensitive people, almost “forcing” them, despite their intelligence to overreact and thereby make less optimal choices.  Over time, patterns of reacting to feel better under pressure can lead people into certain dysfunctional positions in life.

 

For those who are serious explorers of theories to inform us about human behavior, the great unknown, Bowen family theory has reasoned explanations for what happens in families.  We know that people who are more dependent on others are vulnerable to decomposition or dysfunction when the relationship system is stressed.

 

Another point is that even if Bowen family theory has been around for forty years perhaps those of us who know the theory do not know it well enough yet to explain the outcomes found in the Grant Study. Or we may not be able to write well enough to capture the public imagination. 
Those who can write well have an ability to communicate ideas to a broader audience, as in an essay Brooks mentions, “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the recent issue of The Atlantic. It is also available online. [3]

  Brooks notes: “Shenk’s treatment is superb because he weaves in the life of George Vaillant, the man who for 42 years has overseen this work. Vaillant’s overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says in a video.

In his professional life, Vaillant has lived out that creed. He has been an admired and beloved colleague and mentor. But the story is more problematic at home. When he was 10, his father, an apparently happy and accomplished man, went out by the pool of the Main Line home and shot himself. His mother shrouded the episode. They never attended a memorial service nor saw the house again.He has been through three marriages and returned to his second wife. His children tell Shenk of a “civil war” at home and describe long periods when they wouldn’t speak to him. His oldest friend says he has a problem with intimacy.” [4]

Clearly people, even those who have personal problems with intimacy, (a very common issue when 50% of first marriages end in divorce, and second marriages have an even higher failure rate) are still able to make great contributions to society.
I would like to write well enough about family systems so people could see what kinds of interactions produce what kinds of states in a family system.  But each family is so complex it’s very hard to hold all the variables in mind and to see the impacts each individual has on every other individual.  Family stories do make the system come alive and gives people a better understanding of what it is people are up against in dealing with problems in any family. 

 

After all people have a deep hunger to know and understand.  People will tell you their story and feel better about it as long as you are reasonably neutral.  Many people who want answers now follow various authority figures, watch gurus on TV or on the web and buy self-help books to figure out what to do.

 

However there are few if any short cuts to learn how to manage one’s self in intense social systems. There may be general ways of understanding what we are up against in being our best, but the point is it is always a risk to change. The risk increases anytime one takes meaningful action.  Almost every emotional system functions automatically even if there are negative consequences. This is just the way nature is. 

 

 
Accepting the way things are is a big deal in any kind of effort to organize self and not focus on altering others.  I suggested in my book, that people write up their own version of their family history to help him or her get out of the personal focus and think about broader patterns over generations.

 

• Following are a few questions people have found useful in becoming better observers of any emotional system they live or work in?
  • What do you do first when you sense someone is having a problem?
  • Can you slow down to consider other possibilities? 
  • What is it that makes you want to change how you have been interacting with others?
  • Is there a principle involved or do you just want to feel better? 
  • Can you predict who will be upset if you change? 
  • What is the evidence that altering your part in an interaction makes a difference? 
  • How much are your worries and actions like those of the past generations in your family? 
  • How much are your worries, actions and reactions the opposite of the past generations in your family?
  • Do you stay in good contact with three generation of your family?
  • Who are the easy people to contact?
  • Are they easy to contact because they think like you do? 
  • What would it take for you to contact and stay in contact with someone in your family who doesn’t think at all like you do?
  • How do triangles alter your ability to relate one on one to people?  (If your mother/father/husband/wife/boss did not like them can you?)

 

Perhaps one is unable to even consider these types of questions unless one can somehow see that the mechanisms forming a system are impersonal.

 

One explanation of the nuclear family system
One of the main assumptions in Bowen theory is that people are born into a family with a relatively fixed level of emotional maturity.  Then they are subject to the anxiety generated both in relationships and by events. 

1) Every individual is shaped by a mixture of genetic influences, sensitivity to relationships and the importance of principles, which have evolved over the generations in his/her family.

 

2) The generational history of relationships leaves an impression of some kind on each developing person. When people leave home to start their own family/friendship systems, they form new relationships, which are highly influenced by the sensitivity to the old relationships in the family they were born into (their family of origin). 

 

3) Some individuals are freer of relationship sensitivity than others. This leads to diversity of functioning in the nuclear family. 
4) Much of one’s vulnerability to anxiety is determined by one’s position in the nuclear family, sibling position, the degree of cut off of the current generation from the past, and the degree of projection of worries and negativity onto others.

 

5) There are only four mechanisms to handle anxiety and most people in a family use all of them with a stronger preference for two.  The four are:

 

 (1) Distance:  whether geographical or  “psychological”

 (2) Conflict:  whether manifest in high sensitivity upsets or deadly anger. 
 (3) Physical:   emotional or social symptoms can occur as a function of reciprocal relationships in which one begins to function up or down in relationship to the other. This is difficult for people to see. One spouse can have an illness or a drinking problem and somehow that person may be carrying the symptom for the others.  Consider how a mother may feel needed if the child or husband is helpless.  

 

4) Projection:   parental problems are projected onto one or more children. 
 

Bowen used to say two individuals in a marriage fight for the ego strength and one becomes more dominant almost like if you hook up two horses, one steps out first and appears to be dominant. In the case of humans, one can pin the other one into a one- up position so they look dominant.  What’s really happening is that the person acts dominant while giving into to the other’s need to appear less dominant.

 

The back and forth movement results in compromises in order to form a common “we.”  You can think about this as a loss of one’s self to the common self.  (Page 110 in Family Therapy in Clinical Practice by Murray Bowen) 

 

Fighting for “rights” to be “happy,” to think for self, to have an extra treat, etc. creates conflicts.

 

Conflict goes away when one gives into the other and “loses self.” One gives in and becomes a slightly bigger “no -self” in relationship to the other. Over time the one who gives into to the verbal or non-verbal demands of the others is then vulnerable to physical, emotional or social symptoms. 

 

Outside relationships, especially those in the extended  family can help to stabilize a marriage and the mechanisms manifest less intensity. Those who are more invested in each other and have fewer stabilizing relationships in the extended family will have more conflicts or other symptoms.  If people have outside relationships they need fewer mechanisms to handle anxiety.

 

The use of mechanisms to handle anxiety results in people functioning at a less than real self level. It can happen so fast that it is hard to see all that goes into one giving in to the other/s.  It takes a disciplined approach for one to see the system that one is born into and to see the part one plays in the system. 
More objective observers can see people in an emotional system like chess pieces or ants in a colony or people in a Shakespearian drama. 

 

A see saw dynamic comes to live in marriages in which one spouse appears to be functioning better than the other. We often hear and see that one person becomes “done in” by the relationship’s dynamics. One is dominant and is often critical of the other.  Sometimes both are critical of each other and there is a race to the bottom. But when one person accepts the criticism and “gives in” to the other’s perception we can see the fusion between the two people.  People are “borrowing” energy from the other by positioning self as better that the other, or as the others care taker.  Think of two cells where one takes the other’s blood supply as in cancer.  In this case neither person is a well defined self they have simply been caught in an ongoing lending and borrowing of self making them more vulnerable to future stressors.

 

This process of giving up self to enable the other is easier to see in addiction problems. Often we see a dynamic emerge whereby one spouse “allows” the other to drink and “looks after them” in a pattern that has been called enabling behavior.

 

There are many explanations for alcoholism and or drug dependency. But if one is focused on the dynamic in the marriage or between an adolescent and parents then one can clearly see that there is tremendous denial or distance and/or cycles of negative blaming.

 

Anyone interested in breaking these kinds of patterns, “inherited” from the past,  can start just by breaking any cycle of thinking and talking negatively about or to the other.

 

Those who are ready to break past patterns have to (1) be prepared to let the other one fall and pick him or herself up and (2) at the same time deal with their own loss of the helping role. 

 

1. Changing self is hard to do and hard to understand. It is also one thing to change your way of dealing with others and then another thing when your near and dear begin to change and challenge you.

 

Coaching 101 
The following are a few ways I try to coach people who are caught in negative cycles on interaction.

 

The tone of family interactions is highly determined by the way one has “learned” to focus on the other. People are born into systems that have ways reinforcing certain  values and each emotional system has expectations for behaviors. If ones behaviors deviates from the norm then that person become a negative focus as attempts are made to get the person back into the fold. 

 

Christopher Buckley described this family emotional process in the last blog.  He understood that what was allowed to be talked about was not necessarily the truth. 

 

There in an automatic negativity which focus on others who do not behave in accepted ways. 

 

1. Feelings that you should go along with the way things are do have a big part in maintaining a  habitual way of interacting.

 

People who can understand this are motivated to observe and take the time to alter automatic behavior with others by acting rather than reacting. 

 
When the issues get hot, try writing both in one’s own journal (to clarify ones feelings) and then to the other person.  In this way one begins to be more objective rather than communicate negative feelings around issues.

 

A few ideas that can guide more neutral interactions are:

1) Don’t put much pressure on others for anything.

2) Stay with “I” statements and throw away the YOU word.

1. 3) Set limits by saying. IF – THEN statements: Like IF you want to do x, y or z   then I cannot stop you, but IF you do it THEN I will have to…

4) John Gottman http://www.gottman.com/research/  has identified a 5 to 1 positive ratio for marital interactions. This may also be needed in one’s own thinking process. 
5)  Can I weed my mental garden by not letting negative thoughts dominate? 

 

6) Can I be happy by to working on personal goals to balance out my need for relationship happiness? 
If any of this was useful to you, you will be ready to analyze the Grant Study families.  And you will even be able to think more clearly about the next story someone tells you about how a talented person fell into an unexpected abyss.  Perhaps Bowen Family Systems Theory can enable you to understand the natural forces operating on individuals.

Hope some of this was useful for you.  

I also wanted to thank Judy Ball for continuing to edit these blogs.

Judy helps me slow down and enlarge on my quick explanations and focus on the details.  

What a gift!  

And of course many thanks to all the grandchildren who are an inspiration for the future of the family.

 

A moment of happiness from Madeline and me!

 

 

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[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1

 

 

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_Vaillant

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1

Family Rules and the Social Atom

Recognizing  Patterns in Social Systems

May 3, 2009 

Recently there were several stories highlighting relationship process in the families of well-known people.  Two individuals, Bill Gates and Christopher Buckley benefit from their family experiences and emerged as stronger individuals while the Astor family is described as repeating destructive family patterns. 

In addition to how family emotional process guides individual behavior we can also take a look at other ways of studying human behavior. Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, in his book The Social Atom points to the many studies where behavior is being tested and modeled.  His thesis is that we are something like social atoms, acting on the basis of simple rules, while also being benefiting from our on-the-fly adaptability to changing circumstances.  Like family emotional processes many of these simple rules are operating out of awareness.

We can ask what differences will it make that we are more aware of how these simple rules and emotional forces operate on all of us?

I would answer that in a world of chaos and confusion it is amazing for any of us to discover a few steps towards clarity to see how we are constrained and what we might become. People can learn about the nature of emotional process from observing ones own story or even others’ family stories. Murray Bowen made many observation of the family but he described togetherness and individuality as the primary forces.

In families and in work systems, togetherness can be identified as the way in which family members are identified as being alike in terms of important beliefs, philosophies, life principles and feelings. [1]   

In considering how togetherness forces play out in a larger unrelated social field Buchanan in his chapter called “Together, Apart”, attempts to explain the larger social dynamic that can lead to ethnic cleansing.  “You are either with us or against us,” and unsaid is “we already know which side you are on and have taken steps to see that you pay or are paid.”  

After every individual had interacted with others for a thousand times the world was stopped.  What they saw was counter intuitive.  The third strategy was the one that almost three-quarters of the individuals had turned to. 

A natural segregation of the world by color emerged. By cooperating with only their color, individuals met with cooperation in almost all of their interactions.

“In a world of bigots only bigots survive.” Prejudice at the most basic level of human activity is effective at promoting protecting the in-group and at making the outsiders the enemies.

How different is this from togetherness pressure in the family?   People are pressuring important others to be the same or like me in behavior and/or values in order to enhance cooperation at a very basic level.  

Computer simulations can help us understand the simple rules that lead to counter intuitive outcomes for large groups.  Hopefully these simulations can also us to see that the pressure in families arise from some of these same basic, perhaps instinctual, rules. 

In families there are many ways to configure the system and to reorganize in order to have greater tolerance for both diversity and dealing with increasing anxiety.  Perhaps families have a specific set point for differences.  If people are too different from the family values these “outsiders” might need to drink in order to tolerate the negativity that can get focused on one individual’s differences.

Is it possible to increase a set point around the ability of a family to better deal with differences?

In order to alter a dynamic first one has to see it.  To be able to observe a set point we need to understand the level of “togetherness” in the family system.

One way is that in this ever more complex world you can just count or observe how people use pronouns: the “we,” the “ you should,” the “everyone believes or does it this way,” the “it is wrong” and the more intense versions as in “you must” and the “YOU are wrong.”

I use to say I did pronoun therapy! I explained it cost a lot to use the word “I” in a meaningful way that creates differences that people will eventually find useful.  

The ability to define a difference and remain in relationship with others is the force Bowen called differentiation.  In this state people try to separate out from the group or the family to state their principled differences as respectfully as possible.  People do this at some cost to self.  It is important to state a principle and leave the other free to make a decision for self from within self.  One example is to say, “This is what I stand for, and what I will do or not do based on “x” which is an important principle of mine.” 

By not putting pressure on others to conform one can assumes greater responsibility for one’s own happiness comfort and well-being.

Bowen defined a scale whereby more mature people could integrate thinking and feeling.  Those who were more emotionally maturity were able to avoid thinking that tends to blame others or make demands on others to make one’s self feel or function better.

In any family story highlighting differentiation or the emergence of the individual you can hear the predictable tension arise as individuals try to be more of a self in relationship to important others. 

One example of this process as it worked its way through the family set point for tolerating differences concerns the pre teenager Bill Gates. 

The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy’s face.

“Thanks for the shower,” the young Mr. Gates snapped. Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family’s story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.’s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur’s character. 

Ms. Gates encouraged her kids to study hard, play sports and take music lessons. (Bill Gates tried the trombone with little success.) And she imparted a discipline that reflected her upbringing in a well-to-do family. She expected her kids to dress neatly, be punctual and socialize with the many adults who visited their home. For the most part, young Bill dutifully abided.

“She was the most engaged parent and she had high expectations of all of us,” says Libby Armintrout, Bill’s younger sister. “Not just grades and that sort of thing, but how we behaved in public, how we would be socially.” Then, at age 11, Bill Sr. says, the son blossomed intellectually, peppering his parents with questions about international affairs, business and the nature of life.

“It was interesting and I thought it was great,” Mr. Gates Sr. says. “Now, I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her.”

The son pushed against his mother’s instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she had expected of him — a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils — suddenly turned into a big source of friction. The two fell into explosive arguments.

Eventually the parents brought their son to a therapist. “I’m at war with my parents over who is in control,” Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him.[2]

 

The way in which family members are aligned with one another is generated by a system of automatic responses to verbal and non-verbal contact.  These mechanisms regulate relationships and are largely out of awareness.

Every family has minor emotional stimuli that can trigger an overly intense response from the other. People wonder, “how come that person got so mad at me, all I did was …”

There are both negative and positive stimuli. So we can innocently drive the other into an angry or distant state, while others are so positive that one family member may spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to elicit a special smile or a kind or interested word. 

In either of the following two stores you will read beautiful descriptions of how people react to one another and how the problems then escalates leaving the people far removed from real contact with one another.

One written by Christopher Buckley is about how his relationships with his parents played out as though it were a symphony just slightly off key. In the new book, Mum and Pup and Me he revisits childhood memories of his parents as he sought a balance of togetherness and individuality to maintain a relationship with his father.

Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith. Our Sturmiest und Drangiest times were over religion. Pup had the most delicious, reliable, wicked, vibrant sense of humor of anyone I knew, yet his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of (to use his term) impiety. Finally exhausted, I adopted — whether hypocritically or cowardly or wisely — a Potemkin stance of being back in the fold. My agnosticism, once defiant, had gone underground. I no longer had the desire to nail my theses to his church door. By now I knew we didn’t have much time left, and I didn’t want to spend it locking theological horns, making him heartsick with my intransigence.

My only consolation now was that I had finally stopped lobbing feckless, well-worded catapult-balls over Mum’s parapets. I didn’t even say anything to her about the Incident of July 2006.

However when he did call to let his father know [know what?] you can watch how the triangle unfolded and see how loyalty (similar colors) influenced the cooperation between the two parents over the reality issues of the moment. 

I breathed into a paper bag for a few days and then called Pup. “Well,” I said, “that sounded like a fun dinner. Sorry to miss it.” He feigned ignorance of the Skakel episode; perhaps he had excused himself early and gone upstairs to short-sheet her ladyship’s bed. He was, anyway, past caring at this, my 500th howl about Mum’s behavior. He tried to wave it away with a spuriously subjunctive, “But why would she say something like that if she weren’t a juror at the trial?” (Pup would have made a superb defense attorney) and changed the subject back to what kind of explosives work best for dislodging aristocratic British houseguests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26buckley-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=review

 

For another look at how the nuclear family emotional process continues to be played out over the generations just read: Fight for Astor Estate Mirrors Battle 50 Years Ago By John Eligon Published April 25, 2009 in The New York Times.

I will not spoil the fun by over interpreting this story. Please do let me know what you think about the emotional process and how togetherness and the “in” and “out” groups might function in this family. These kinds of examples may make it easier for you to identify relationship patters that live below people’s awareness.   

Many thanks to Judy Ball for her editing efforts.

Andrea

 

 

 

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[1] Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, by Murray Bowen, page 218

[2] Raising Bill Gates, by Robert A. Guth