I have been working on my book Create Your Mindful Compass:Navigating through the Social Jungle,  for the last several years.  This is a peek into the book which starts as it should with gratitude:

I am deeply grateful to Murray Bowen. He believed in me when I was struggling, gave me a hand up, accepted me into postgraduate training at the Georgetown Family Center despite my having only two years of college, and then allowed me to take photos in exchange for tuition to various symposiums. After four years of family systems theory training, he hired me to work at the Georgetown University Family Center as the audio visual (A/V) coordinator, saying it was easier to teach me the A/V role than teach an A/V  expert Bowen theory.

I quickly recognised that what Bowen said was so far from mainstream psychiatry that taping him and re-listening would be the only way to grasp this totally new way of thinking.  A/V coordinator was perfect for me. As a teacher Bowen was at times direct, and challenging.  Using metaphors, paradox, and even slights of hand as a Zen master might, he delivered his out- of-sync, interrupting messages. (Each of us has our way of seeing things, our perceptual blindness, our way of getting along with others, and our beliefs as to how the world is. How does anyone interrupt allowing others to think differently?)

Bowen once took my arm and, pointing to a couple, asked in his Socratic way: “What are these people doing? Who is in charge? How do you know?” The first time I heard him speak to an audience he peppered his talk with unanswerable questions: “How do you de-twitch people? How is what you do with people different from what you might do to calm animals down?  Do you know what you are up against in yourself, and in relating to your multigenerational family? How about the challenges with your friends and loved ones? Are you ready for the kiss of togetherness?”

Bowen challenged me to deal with tricks – his and others.  Like an imp he was watching, smiling, getting upset, and never explaining what he was up to. He explained himself in books, letters and videotapes. Writing about the role of a coach in being outside the emotional system, he explained how such a position allowed one to teach, give suggestions and tell personal stories, without forcing, preaching, or believing he knew the “right way.”

Demonstrating with his own life what it takes to be a lifelong participant-observer, he was quick to challenge and “jam people up.”  “Let’s see what you can do” seemed to be his mantra.  He was constantly putting others into some kind of an alliance, while separating himself out as different.  Bowen would say, “I am listening to you.”  Yes, listening to you but not agreeing with you.  Bowen made people uncomfortable unless they could stand alone and did not need approval for their ideas.  He was challenging people to rise up and stand alone to perhaps say what they would and would not do, to define more of a self.  Who knows what research questions were on his mind as he interacted with you.  But when his blue eyes were twinkling, and he was looking at you, you knew that questions and unusual, what I call “non-linked” behaviour responses, were about to be unleashed in your direction.  

An endlessly curious researcher of human behaviour, Bowen watched me and many others.  We were part of the human parade on a multigenerational train ride. Bowen rode alongside family after family, inserting a question here, a story there, just to see how people would react, if they would grow or get off the train.  Sometimes he might throw a pearl, and other times some coal.  Ready or not, “relationship stuff” was always coming your way.

Toward the end of his life I traveled with him because of his serious physical limitations. Perhaps my family position as an oldest daughter of brothers favored by grandparents, plus luck, allowed me to figure out how to relate well enough, especially to his wife and family. I appreciated this opportunity more than any words can convey.

Bowen would not approve of my explanation of Family Systems theory, of how I have managed myself, coached others or have written this book. Approval was at the bottom of his list as to what was important. Figuring out the right kind of challenge fascinated him, often leading to his noting the creative ways people developed to overcome or wiggle out of intense problems.

Overall watching reading and listening to Bowen I was struck with his ability to observe the human condition and take an action based on his theory to stay interested and connected while separating himself out from the others.  As with us all he had his own issues and peculiarities but his real gift was to point us in a direction to see what we had not seen about the human and the mechanisms of family life under pressure.  His lasting, jarring question, “How come you cannot see what is right in front of you?” is as important and as unanswered today as it was back then.

I designed this book in his memory to do for others what he did for me: To enable motivated individuals be more for Self, to a have a few systems ideas, to grasp a deeper understanding of our link with other social species and to really see how social systems function. The future is uncertain.  But what is certain is that we will always need to understand how to manage ourselves and to see the impact of our very social relationships on each other.

Introduction and Bowen Theory 101

This book is about becoming a more effective, principle-based, mature leader who is less subject to the whims and pressures of the social group. Any of us can become this kind of a leader—either by default or by desire—by designing a Mindful Compass to guide us as we develop and implement our goals. All of us are already equipped with an automatic compass that guides us in how to react to the emotional messages in the social group. Simply because of the way our brain has been built, to be overly sensitivities to changes in the environment, and clues from the social group, we react often without awareness much less thought.

Leaders can increase the ability to develop their own Mindful Compass and thereby lead by self-defined principle and when necessary identify and override their reactive thoughts, feelings and behaviors. A Mindful Compass requires a broad knowledge of  Bowen’s “Systems Thinking” to identify what is authentic and real about one’s Self and how to build up one’s emotional backbone and decrease the part of “self” that is mostly mired in automatic reactivity. There are many ways to grow one’s Self  up. One of them is by having a Mindful Compass,  which allows us to understand our actions in the light of our multigenerational family relationships. The emotional field that connects the generations has an unseen influence on us.  A systems viewpoint offers us a different way to understand and to then alter our sensitivity.  Our emotional backbone connects us to our evolutionary heritage and this grants us greater objectivity.  All of this intellectual work gives us a hand up in managing our reactive nature. Deep knowledge of our reactivity makes much the things that happens to us feel far less harmful and personal.  Objectivity increases our ability to rise above the reactivity and to then change and adapt well to situations.  If one can understand the reasons to decrease reactivity, and to define self to others, then one can take on the work involved. The goal is that,even when under pressure, one can be less reactive and less controlled by the surrounding relationship system, and therefore paradoxically be both separate from, and a real resource to, others in any social system.

http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/to-decide-brain-hedges-its-bets/

A major concept in this systems theory is developed around the notion of fusion between the emotions and the intellect.  The degree of fusion in people is variable and discernible.  The greater the fusion, the more life is governed by automatic emotional forces that operate despite man’s intellectual verbalization to the contrary.  The greater the fusion between the emotions and the intellect, the more the individual is fused into the emotional fusions of the people around him. The greater the fusion, the more man is vulnerable to physical illness emotional illness and social illness and the less he is able to consciously control his own life. It is possible for man to discriminate between the emotions and the intellect and to slowly gain more conscious control of emotional functioning.
Family Therapy In Clinical Practice, Murray Bowen, MD, 1977, Page 305

Review - The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing By Michael J. Mauboussin

Wondering what makes it so hard to make good decisions? Reading or really seriously studying Mauboussin’s new book (http://www.amazon.com/The-Success-Equation-Untangling-Investing/dp/1422184234) is a fascinating education in how the brain misperceives the environment in predictable ways. 

Mauboussin identifies the ways we can be tricked by short cut thinking and rules of thumb decision-making.  He even makes it seem possible, before breakfast, to understand a bit about correlations and decision-making linkages, statistical thinking and reversion to the mean. By carefully explaining the difference between luck and skill and how we often mistake one for the other, Mauboussin helps us enhance our ability to perceive the world.  

For example, it makes sense but still requires untangling luck and skill to acknowledge that luck plays a significant role in which team wins the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowl.  Once skill is evenly matched among the participants, there is some room for luck to make a difference.  There can be interplay between skill and luck when one is very disciplined in acquiring skill.    Often people mix up luck and skill as in a coin toss. The fact that one event is not influencing another is lost when people begin to feel lucky and believe that a hot hand can influence outcomes.

Good luck in coin tosses or other activities where one event is not influencing another, can automatically cause our brains to revert to cause and effect thinking, leading us down a rabbit hole where we can easily misperceive the world around us. For example, it is common to think that because you flipped a coin and got heads seven times you are somehow a bit lucky but mostly skilled and therefore you are willing to bet that heads will come up on your next toss.  We actually have to learn that one coin toss is not influencing another, no matter our feelings or the story we tell ourselves about our hot hands.  A feeling about our hot hand cannot predict the next toss of the coin or the next team that will win or the next great stock, but luck can play a role in our success (or failure).

In the old days we could rely on stories we heard, or even gossip from a neighbor, to predict the future and understand others. But Mauboussin reminds us that serious scientists are careful about sources of evidence and the challenges of prediction.  To overcome habits of believing stories, he suggests we need a disciplined approach. Mauboussin references the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the foremost authorities in the psychology of predictions, to give us well-tested examples.  Mauboussin helps us increase our ability to get beyond automatic ways of sensing how the world works and engage in more challenging ways of perceiving the environment. 

Mauboussin notes that we can, with some effort, break down the function of the brain into two parts, an automatic system (that can be influenced by the higher centers of the brain), and the analytic system.  The latter can analyze and make complex computations that over time may become an automatic response that is skillful. Feedback is an essential part of altering our automatic responses.  Those who want to become a strong and skilled performer can work on:

1)    the analysis of how to do things properly,

2)    the psychology of the effort, and

3)    the influence of the social system that one is a part of.  To learn a new skill may take only 50 hours, but to become more of an expert requires a thousand hours of effort.  

Many of our automatic ways of thinking are based on the way our ancestors managed to survive.  Now days there are dangers that lurk in ignoring a more fact based and mathematical way through the social jungle. We have to learn how stories that mix up luck and skill can lead us astray. Be careful when your friends tell you which stock to buy or when your doctor tells you how his last patient did, without benefit of knowing the base rate of how most patients did.  Calling into question our automatic ways of understanding the world costs our brain a lot of energy. Comprising only 2% of our bodies in weight, the brain requires 20% of our energy so we tend to want to conserve energy and therefore question embracing the mental effort.

One-way around this problem is to makes it fun to look at processes that enhance out ability to predict. Mauboussin does this by using sports examples and creating web-based games that connect to his book.  You can watch one tennis player win a point to see how this influences who will win the match. http://successequation.com/tennis.html  Then just what can we learn from Colonel Blotto about spreading our resources to defeat Goliath? http://success-equation.com/blotto.html My favorite is trying to beat the mind reader. http://success-equation.com/mind_reader.html But I probably should spend more time understanding how the reinforcing property of success works. http://success-equation.com/urn.html

Another challenge Mauboussin discusses is the idea of a continuum for predictions.  Even if we are reasonably good at figuring out the likely outcome in sports, when we move into larger social systems there are more unusual events that can occur and for which we cannot prepare.   Tail events, which are outside our expected range of possibilities, like 9/11 are “black swan” occurrences that by definition not only cannot be predicted but are difficult to prepare for. Think how many people are angry because they believe that someone should have seen “it” coming. There are many possible outcomes Mauboussin shows us to any one event.  History is not destiny.  Moreover, if you do see it coming then you still have to have an emotional backbone in order to hold onto one’s beliefs in the face of intense opposition. Benjamin Graham said, “Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even thought others may hesitate or differ”. (Mauboussin, Page 172)

A few knowledgeable leaders can alter the social system and its habitual way of doing business.  In the book Money Ball, recruiters used insider information to hire the best people.  They talked about how the players looked, hit and fielded, but there was not a fact-based process to look at the link between behaviors and team wins.  By correlating behaviors, like: when do they hit, how often did they get on base, and when did they drop the ball, Billy Bean began to see patterns of behaviors correlate with team wins.  Bean not only identified some links between the talents of individual players and team outcomes, he then altered the way players were selected.  He used facts to show a connection between who gets on base and the team’s ability to win a game, and this was a more successful perception of success than highlighting a player’s batting average.  Billy Bean was able to see the more complex variables using statistics and seeing connections.

Mauboussin notes the importance of understanding reversion to the mean. Reversion to the mean identifies system level properties enabling us to consider an individual’s very good or bad performance outcomes over time.  Put another way, extreme results are unlikely to continue, like the upward trajectory of the price of Apple stock.  Regression analysis allows us to see how individual performance, which in some case may be influenced by luck, smooth out over time.  Out performing may be luck, but in some cases, as in mutual fund success, superior skill can be clearly distinguished. In that case it takes long periods of time to see who can do better than luck alone would predict. You can see some of this in game format on Mauboussin’s web site.   http://success-equation.com/distributions.html

Mauboussin usefully suggests ways for readers to improve skills, such as using checklists, encouraging feedback and/or hiring a good coach to give an outside viewpoint and help manage “magical thinking”. He also suggests writing down the outcome we expect when making decisions. These disciplines enable us to learn from mistakes and exercise humility about our ability to evaluate risk and to predict outcomes,

As Mauboussin points out, we are all in the business of forecasting. Considering the psychological, analytical and procedural barriers to untangling luck and skill, this book gives us clarity on processes involved in decision-making and tips to improve performance. Reading or studying this book helps us to learn about deep processes that are not commonsense or intuitive.  We can develop discipline about decision-making processes that impact our lives and have fun while we are doing it. Or we can also depend on skill and hope for luck.

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I was in the middle of writing a blog about a Canadian PBS radio show hosted by Genevieve Chornenki “When Families Start Talking”, that I took part in, which aired on December 12^th.   The show dealt with family loss and the usefulness of families talking more openly. The next day my cousin’s 31-year-old nephew committed suicide.  The following day, December 14^th, there was a mass murder of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown CT.  The school is 38 miles away from where I live.  It is all very, very close.

Part of my family is in shock at the senseless suicide and much of the world is in shock and in mourning at the senseless murders. Both cry out for understanding.  All of our prayers and thoughts are with the children, friends of those who have died and those who must live on with the emotional scars from these events.  We are left to put together our best understanding to explain to ourselves and most especially to children what happened and how we are going to deal with this world we are living in.

President Obama asked at the memorial service: “Have we done enough?” “ NO”, he said.   I agree. I can make another effort to see and understand how family dynamics is part of the problem, which leads to the expression of intense anger ending in senseless deaths.  Others can turn to answers such as gun control. Some will just hide out and refuse to think broadly. A few will be content to make the shooter into a monster, and call him evil. Labeling itself can be part of the problem.  Someone is sick and we rush to fix them and cut them out of their family and out of society, and in so doing obscure understanding about the interactional nature of problems and how they are manifest in society.

The great suffering of the families is everywhere on TV. This in turns excites people to react.  Our very human reactions to these events can go towards being reactive or towards the discipline of thinking deeply about this kind of problem.

What did the killer want?  My most condensed thought is that a mass killer wants everyone to suffer just as he believed he did.   The fear that was contained for some amount of time, in the killer’s family spilled over into society, which he saw as being just like his mother.  She in some way infuriated him. He killed her in her sleep and then set out to senselessly kill those who reminded him of his childhood.  Often people like this have been blaming others for their suffering for years.  (A person who commits suicide tends to blame him or herself for his suffering.) 

For the killer, there is no differentiation between himself, his mother and others.  His childhood had been taken from him just as he took the childhood of the victims.  The children, the parents, all should suffer as he suffered.  In retrospect, the tension in families where one person has become overtly psychotic has been building up, until the most vulnerable one snaps and becomes psychotic.  Something triggers the psychotic episode, usually a perceived rejection or a confrontation.  In this case, it may have been the mother deciding to send the boy to a school in Washington State (reported in the Washington Post 12/18/12) that might have triggered him into this psychotic episode.

The other thing to consider is that a psychotic person is completely open to the anxiety in the environment and is not sure where the ideas for action begin. So yes the media, and video games and all of that play some part but they pale in comparison to the killer’s obsession with the behavior of the mother.  For example, the killer may have been caught up in his mother’s obsession with guns or he may have turned his mother onto guns.

In families that have this level of problem and who get very isolated, any “no” can trigger a temper tantrum and the mother can live in extreme fear, not knowing which way to go.  The son can be angry at the mother for not knowing what she’s doing.  I would think of this as a two-person craziness, which has been intensified by the isolation.  No one can be steady because of the intense fear in this two-person system and no one wants to enter the system.  The other people in the family, even the father, are on the far outside of this fear but they feel it too. That’s one factor in the family distancing.   Often other family members don’t want to be “involved”.  They don’t want to come and visit.  And the fear in the home is another reason the mother doesn’t want to invite people to her house. The killer’s brother brother hadn’t seen him for two years and an uncle hadn’t seen him in eight years.  These people may very well have felt threatened when they were near the killer and didn’t know what to do about it.   No one knows where this anxiety starts.  It can start because the child has a genetic issue.  But once it starts, and the family gets isolated, that’s when the real problems begin.

People can be angry with self or with others and it becomes a festering wound.   In the case of most killings, whether suicide or homicide, an individual makes plans to take action to “right a wrong”, or to get rid of self, who they see as a burden to others.   It is during this planning stage when people around the person may find a way to interrupt the intensity of that individual’s thinking.   That is not easy to do.  People not “infected” with suicidal or homicidal thoughts are often afraid of what the “disturbed” family member might do and/or are not sure how to talk openly with their “disturbed” family member in a rational way to interrupt the intensity of the disturbance.   There is no quick fix for someone who is deeply disturbed.   It takes persistence, patience and compassion over time if such “interruptions” are to defuse the intensity that inhabits the “identified patient”.

The challenge is that in many of these tragedies there is often plenty of evidence that something sinister is going to happen.  But people are afraid to take it on, to being the fear out in the open and to bring in help. And often the available help does not help as people, even mental health professionals, have no idea how to help in these intense situations.

We see over and over again that there are no simple solutions.  A parent can have a child committed to an institution, under very stringent rules.  But the laws don’t permit a spouse to commit a spouse without consent of the committed.  Many people seek help that doesn’t really help because it is on their insurance plan, or it’s what the authorities say is the only way to handle this or that.

Both short and long-term hospitalizations and even the highly valued drug treatments are hit and miss.  And living 24/7 as a parent or spouse with a “disturbed individual” creates a situation where the anxiety and the fear are infectious.  It flows from one to the other. One begins to question what is real and what is not?

It takes a herculean effort on the part of a parent or a spouse to walk alongside the “identified patient” without suffering an erosion of one’s own self.  Too often the parent or spouse becomes as compromised in their functioning as the “identified patient”.  It is this fusion, the confusion, between the two, that escalates the intensity of rising anxiety so that both the parent and child or spouse and spouse become overly responsive and connected to one another in all kinds of ways. This intense fusion between the two is what endangers both of their lives and those of others.

Emotional illness is a tragedy of the commons, the area we share.  Many people suffer due to long standing intractable problems that finally break out from the family and into society.  What can we do to break the cycle?  One way is to value all lives and to consider each person worthy of our deepest compassion.  The killer can make us turn our back on other troubled families, or he can make us hate the family of the killer.  But we can thwart this kind of “infection”.

No matter how people die it is important that their life be recognized.  The funerals, and the preparation for them, allow us to pay tribute to the lives of those who have died, however it happened and to prepare all of us for the shifts and changes as the family system readjusts.  After the funeral it is up to each of us to keep strong in all our relationships as a testimony to those who have died.  From each of you I learned to cherish others.  This is the simplest explanation of the good of forgiveness.

Now let us return to my time with Genevieve Chornenki.  She was curious about Bowen theory and what light it might shed on family dynamics when people have a loss in their families.  In surfing the web she found the two eulogies I had written, one for Mrs. Murray Bowen and the other for Mrs. Jacque Mauboussin.   http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/the-family-adjustment-to-death/#comment-35484.  These blogs are a very unusual way to look at a person’s life and how over time we learn from one another.   From her professional work, she observed that when families were able to talk there were fewer problems. (Chornenki, Genevieve A. and Christine E. Hart. Bypass Court: A Dispute Resolution Handbook, 4th ed. LexisNexis, 2011)

In preparation for the radio show Genevieve and I had a few laughs about the challenge of being one’s self in the middle of a stressed social system that may be hoping for peace and no meaningful talk.  But meaningful talk is one of the only ways we have to alter the path that people may have slid down.

Our conversation centered on how the family is a connected unit and even when people are not in contact with one another, how they still impact one another.  (And of course, the discussion above is a classic example of this.)

There is a wide range of how people think about a death in the family.  The more people can be knowledgeable and open about the problems in the family’s past the better family members will do.  As I’ve walked alongside families over the years, I have seen people struggle to say something meaningful to one another, to stay connected despite differences and not overreact (negatively) to each other.  There is nothing harder.

In the most vulnerable families there is intense divisiveness, negativity and cut off.  One can be easily pulled into the swirl of emotionality, anxiety and worry and in so doing, lose self.  But there are people who are resistant to the emotional pulls, who recover form the anxiety, and who are then able to address fearful problems. These are the people who can separate out self.  They find the way forward. They become aware of the importance of relationships and the challenges of staying in good emotional contact, even with those who are not sane. Did I say it was hard? Did I say sometimes all great efforts fail but the principle remains?

Nuclear and Multigenerational History

The survivors, the people under the stress of the death of a family member, often have a difficult time trying to understand one another. It is not unusual because most families have conflicts that have remained unresolved over generations.  Under stress then, family anxiety can run high and people can lose a broad perspective and become very intense, sensitive and reactive to one another.  The result of this is that the family emotional process, in which each individual has inherited sensitivities and beliefs about the way things should be, cause various individuals in the family to become aggravated, easily leading to splintering rather than working together to solve problems.

Most individuals do not know about their families’ past history or for example, the way the grandparent generation handled problems around deaths or inheritances.  The consequences of disputes in past generations that resulted in cut off (from one family member or another) and the resulting anger, are alive and well in the relationships of the current generation. If people are aware and see the past and it’s influence on them, the greater the ability for possible problem solving.

Reactivity

Whether we’re aware of it or not, we inherit the relationship pressures: of triangles, (the two against one), the tendency to cut off and of course the automatic effort to protect “the vulnerable” one/s and the anger that arises when they (the vulnerable one/s) won’t go along with the helper’s plan.  The helper ends up taking over the ego of the vulnerable one and the vulnerable one resents that.  The helper feels anxious, helpless and angry and the vulnerable one feels helpless, anxious and angry. Bowen advises people to rise up out of this predictable predicament called fusion and separate out a self.

The way out of these intense fusions is to focus more on self than on the other.  It’s a long, hard and rocky road to disentangle yourself from those with whom you are intensely fused.  You can get a gauge on your level of fusion with others by how sensitive you are to them, how much you worry about them or how much you blame yourself or them about problems in the relationship.

If you can be objective enough to see that this is a natural process, that as anxiety increases, people get more and more focused on a smaller group of people, then you can go in the opposite direction towards more openness.    Again this isn’t simple and at times it can be impossible.  But at least if you can be a tiny bit objective, you know what you’re up against and what you’re trying to do.

Think of openness as a way to first learn about your extended family so that you can decrease your sensitivity to family “hot topics” and those people in your family you may be negative about.   (You know when topics in the family are “hot” because of the way people react to one another.   And those reactions are based on things that you heard about others way back when.)

Each of us carries with us into our current lives, tendencies to play out certain roles. For example, it may be that on both sides of your family in your grandmother’s generation, family members stopped talking to each other (and so did their descendants) because of arguments over the care of an elderly (and important) relative or had disputes over an inheritance.  If you don’t know this history, the current generation’s “upset with others” is easy to see as “personal” and “new”.

It is difficult to see clearly how people automatically react to one another based on very few facts.  It is hard not to take sides when those you like or love are upset.  It is hard to be a more separate individual in a family.  It is hard to see that the way people feel about family members is often a function of the multigenerational past, to which they are blind.  And of course it’s hard because even if you see it, you cannot free them or explain how the past comes to live in the present.

Emotional Pressure

Often around a death an individual can get very emotional and upset and want others to help them or to do things they think important. A great deal of pressure can be put on people to do something for others.

In addition individuals can tell others about upsets inside themselves in the hope of changing the other.   But that is counterproductive.  Trying to force others to come around to your point of view (change the way others think or behave), due to your suffering or hurt, is blackmail in its most blatant form.  People can get focused on “My Mom never did this or that and she favored brother and now its my turn to inherit and for me to be paid back so you must…..” (Fill in the blank).

When the emotional intensity increases enough, action will be taken by people who are under intense pressure and who are often not able to talk rationally about the problems they are facing.  The main point is that the emotional pressure on those who kill self and those who kill others has been enormous, (both from self and from others). After such an event, a great deal of time and energy can go into trying to understand what went wrong.  The main effort is to avoid more people assigning blame to self or others. It is of course possible that we can learn from such events, but not if blame is assigned because blame allows people to walk away as if the problem is solved.  So it’s useful to ask what might have been done differently as long as no blame is assigned.   This is tremendously difficult.  How can any of us seek to understand a problem and the many variables involved and not let the brain short cut thinking with its automatic mechanisms leading to blame and guilt?  The deeper question is how much time and energy will go into this examination and how will that impact the future generations.

In general the more people can let go of blame and guilt and acknowledge the other’s “ability” and responsibility to take such an action such as killing self or others, the better able people are to separate from the intense fusion that led to the killing (of self or others) in the first place.

Working on Self

Openness implies that one is working on self to be less reactive to sensitive topics, to be able to speak to a problem and them have zero expectations as to the outcome.  It is rather like putting a gift on the table. It is not you on the table, and it is not a gun pointed at someone’s head to make them do “it” your way. It is an offering from your more thoughtful self that you put on the table and for which you are prepared to see how people react without having to over explain and defend.

The overall goal is to provide an opportunity for individuals to see how others “feel” or “think” about the past and to appreciate each person’s ability to make some effort to speak.  It is an effort to solve the complex problems that inevitably arise when there has been a death in the family.   All of this movement towards openness and being one’s best self with others requires each individual to develop and sustain his or her unique perspective and emotional backbone in the social group.

The Big Picture

In some ways people are like the planets in the solar system or magnets on a board, drawn to one another in ever increasing intensity, especially after the death of an important member of that system.  But if one person can see the system, and refuse to be drawn in to old reactive ways, then there is hope that the family as a unit will be stronger and more capable of resiliency in the face of increasing stress and anxiety.

As one or two people are less reactive and more open, problems begin to fade away or are solved in a thoughtful way.  We can see this as more mature behavior that is a result of people being in better contact with each other and less reactive to the past.

Holidays, Triggers, Reoccurring Patterns and Resiliency

Unknowingly, like the butterfly to the flame, any of us can be vulnerable to acting out our feelings following a death, or an anniversary of a loss or really any increase in anxiety and stress.  We can see and feel increasing anxiety during holidays as family members come into contact with one another and automatically begin to act out old dramas and hurt feelings.   Under stress people are less and less unaware of the impact they have on one another.  People can bury their feelings or begin to slowly solve the issues by beginning to be a tiny bit more open, thoughtful and less reactive.

The fact that financial issues may be up in the air after a death can contribute to the “family anxiety”.  People simply may be struggling to survive and lack the ability to be better defined and in better contact with one another.  It takes time for people to recover from losses in which one person was very dependent on another (and may not be aware of that dependency). Especially in families where there is a transfer of wealth and some are functioning at lower levels and are therefore more dependent, there can be intense feelings of unfairness in the distribution of resources.

The great healers of family loss are time and knowledge.  The goal of talking is for individuals to be aware of the big picture of how families function and to take nothing that is said personally.  The profound question is how to understand our own nature and manage ourselves as best we can during family transitions.

The link below takes you to this well-done radio show, featuring many voices.   I think it is useful for families to think through many different angles as they prepare for the transition before, during and after the death of a loved one or even a confused one.

Many thanks to Genevieve Chornenki for having the courage to bring us more open discussion about family emotional process and legal entanglements.

Please past the part two below into your web browser and do give some feedback if you can.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/12/05/when-families-start-talking-part-2/

Below is a description of the program:

Even the best of families can run into trouble when grappling with the needs of aging parents, the demands of care-giving and the shifting dynamics between siblings over money and inheritance. Estates mediator Genevieve Chornenkilooks at these hot button issues and explores if families can talk about them without wanting to kill each other.
Genevieve A. Chornenki is a dispute resolution practitioner who conducts estate mediation.

Series Participants

The Honourable David M. Brown, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Toronto Region, experienced in managing and deciding estates and incapacity litigation.

Samantha Caravan, an Anglican priest and the rector of St. John’s Anglican Church West Toronto.

Resa Eisen, a social worker and mediator who provides mediation services focusing on families-in-transition.

Ian M. Hull, a founding partner of Hull and Hull LLP and a certified legal specialist in estates and trusts.

Cinnie Noble, a conflict management coach with a background in social work, conflict management and law.

Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist in private practice with an interest in “taboo topics” including sibling rivalry.

Andrea Schara, a family therapist with an interest and experience in family systems theory.

Personal Stories by:

“Donna”: has first hand experience with family issues after the death of her mother.

Michael Lobraico has first hand experience in family business issues.

Janine MacDonald, has first hand experience as an Attorney for Personal Care.

Reading List

Becker, Ernest.  The Denial of Death. Free Press Paperbacks, 1973.

Butler, Lynn. Estate Planning through Family Meetings (without breaking up the family). Self-Counsel Press, 2010.

Chornenki, Genevieve A. and Christine E. Hart. Bypass Court: A Dispute Resolution Handbook, 4th ed. LexisNexis, 2011.

Hull, Ian M. Advising Families on Succession Planning: The High Price of Not Talking. LexisNexis, 2005.

Lobraico Michael A., Jonathan Isaacs and Mitchell Singer Succession Planning for Family Businesses: Preparing for the next generation. PBS Books, 2011.

Lindahl, Kay. The Sacred Art of Listening. Skylight Paths Publishing, 2008.

Noble, Cinnie. Conflict Management Coaching. CYNERGYTM Coaching 2012.

Patterson, Kerry, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler. Crucial Conversations. McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Pitts, Gordon. In The Blood: Battles to Succeed in Canada’s Family Businesses. Doubleday Canada, 2000.

Safer, Jeanne. Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy and Regret. Basic Books, 2012.

Safer, Jeanne. Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult’s Life – For the Better. Basic Books, 2008.

Stone, Douglas, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. Difficult Conversations. Penguin Books, 1999.

Teresi, Dick. The Undead. Pantheon Books, 2012.

Zeldin, Theodore. Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life. The Harvill Press, 199p.

Greetings from IDEAS on CBC Radio One.

Even the best of families can run into trouble when grappling with the needs of aging parents, the demands of care-giving and the shifting dynamics between siblings over money and inheritance. Estates mediator Genevieve Chornenki looks at these hot button issues and explores if families can talk about them without wanting to kill each other.  Part 2 airs Wednesday, December 5.

Part one can be listened to on the web now.

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/11/27/when-families-start-talking-part-1/

Please feel free to share the link on Facebook or Twitter,

or on your website.

You can also download it as a podcast from our site.

Do let us know what you think of the show!

Next week, I’ll send you a reminder for the episode that you are in:  When Families Start Talking, Part Two.

With thanks and best wishes,

Sara Wolch

Producer IDEAS

CBC RADIO ONE

Box 500

Station A

Toronto, Ontario

M5W 1E6

sara.wolch@cbc.ca

416-205-6020

Murray Bowen  Photo by Andrea Maloney Schara 1979

What Does it Take to be a Self in any Social System?

Just as no one ant can build an ant colony, no one person can create for him or herself all that is needed for survival. We are dependent on the work of others for our food, water, clothes, education and protection, among other things.  By cooperating we benefit. Therefore the pressure to fit in and cooperate is enormous and can intrude on our equally deep urges to become our unique selves.

Murray Bowen, in collecting the facts of family functioning, observed how this tension between the two forces, to be for self (individuality) and to be for others (togetherness), resulted in what he called one’s level of differentiation of self. Evolutionary theory and Bowen theory both consider how these two forces have formed the bedrock for life itself.

The emotional system consists of instincts. It is an automatic guidance system. Many of its ancient mechanisms no longer function as well in the modern world.  The tigers in the social jungle have been replaced by traffic jams.

Without a Mindful Compass, individuals find it difficult to cooperate, instead responding automatically to the reactive emotional system’s dictates. These basic urges of the individual emotional system can be observed just like we observe the movements of the planets. The greatest challenge for any observer is to get outside the system in order to see it.   Instead of planets, we see our parents and siblings pressuring us to conform or reacting to our commitment to our own forward progress. Of course it is hard to be neutral about our mothers and others. And without neutrality it is hard to be an observer.

Understanding the two forces, togetherness and individuality, may help explain some of our sensitivities, our prejudices and even what seems to be the capricious or nasty side of human nature.

In order to see how relationship systems impact the individuals in them, Bowen described the patterns of the tugs, pushes and pulls (or the sensitivity and reactivity) within relationship systems, leading to some able to develop more independence than others.  In 1967 he published his description of his own efforts to redirect the anxiety in his family and to step outside the system itself.  This effort required him to be less reactive to others and more aware of the tendency of relationships to form in predictable coalitions.

Bowen observed how the family unit determines the actions of individuals.  He saw that when people did not behave as they should, social pressure was put on them to act the way that was expected or even needed by the group (family). Since we are often not aware of the nature of the system’s influences (togetherness) on us, we take things personally and are reactive.

Bowen understood the primitive nature of the emotional system and by preparing himself to deal with the family force field he was better able to stand aside from the pushes and pulls of the system. He called this ability to respond to the social system in a more thoughtful way, differentiation of self.

The ability to be relatively free from the “commands” of the emotional system arise naturally in us and also require a disciplined effort by us to understand both emotional process and our own early family experiences.

Bowen postulated that a relationship system operates with the emotional processes found in all social species.  Therefore he assumed, and gathered evidence to show, that natural selection operates on both the individuals and the social groups to which they belong.  Under social pressure individual organisms react by: 1) distance – emotional cut off,  2) conflict – posturing or aggressive fighting, 3) triangles – passing on the problems by involving others, 4) reciprocal relationships and forming hierarchies – giving up self to others, 5) differentiation of self – redirecting the flow of anxiety through the social group through the more mature functioning of one individual.

Below Bowen explains the primal nature of and the challenge we face in our ordinary efforts to fit in with the group and at the same time, to be more of our unique selves.

The emotional system operates with predictable, knowable stimuli that govern the instinctual life behavior in all forms of life. The more a life is governed by the emotional system the more it follows the course of all instinctual behavior, in spite of intellectualization to the contrary.  A well-differentiated person is one whose intellect can function separately from the emotional system.  P 363

A more differentiated person can participate freely in the emotional sphere without fear of becoming too fused with others.  P 364

It is the pseudo self that is involved in fusion and the many ways of giving, receiving, lending, borrowing trading and exchange of self…  The borrowing and trading of selves can end up with one employee one down, while the other gains self… The exchanges can be brief – for instance criticism that makes one feel bad for a couple of days or it can be a long term process in which a spouse becomes so de-selfed, he or she is no longer able to make decisions and collapses in selfless dysfunction, psychosis or chronic physical illness.  The process of people losing and gaining self in an emotional network is so complex and the degree of shifts so great that it is impossible to estimate functional levels of differentiation except from following a life pattern over long periods.  P366

Every emotional unit, whether it be the family or the total of society, exerts pressure on group members to conform to the ideals and principles of the group.  P365

The overall goal is to help individual family members rise up out of the emotional togetherness that binds us all. The instinctual force towards differentiation is built into the organism, just as are the emotional forces that oppose it.  The togetherness forces are so strong in maintaining the status quo that any small step towards differentiation is met with vigorous disapproval of the group. Without help, the differentiating one will fall back into the togetherness to get emotional harmony for the moment. P371 

Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, Murray Bowen, MD

The Advantages to “Thinking Systems”

Many people with family or work problems continue to believe in the commonly accepted analysis, which has been part of medicine for decades: turn the problem over to professionals.  The professionals will reassure us that indeed one person is serious troubled, symptomatic or to blame and should be diagnosed, medicated, helped or fired.   Extruding troublesome individuals from organizations or medicating symptomatic family members are seen as the answers for most severe relationship issues in the workplace or in families.

Instead of focusing on a symptomatic individual, Bowen outlined a process to develop the capacity to neutrally observe and understand family, and by extension work and even larger social systems.  (It is clear that it takes an intellectual and disciplined effort to be able to remain outside the commands of the emotional system although it is not clear whether this capacity lies in the intellect and/or emotional system.) This effort to stand outside the system, but stay connected to it, gives people a way to look more objectively or even neutrally at how anxiety is absorbed, often in one or a few individuals in the group. A broader view, where one is not participating in the families’ ongoing conflicts can reduces the focus on “fixing” the symptomatic one.

Work and social groups, while often less intense than family groups, contain the same reactivity and relationship patterns as do families. The people Bowen coached could tell him how problems in one generation were transmitted to another and begin the process of being more objective.  The more he learned from them the more they learned from him. This was his research design: to check the facts of each family’s functioning against his theoretical concepts about relationship systems.

It was Dr. Bowen’s powerful observational skills that allowed him to see similar patterns of behavior in all families, from those with schizophrenia to the neurotic. In developing the “differentiation of self scale”, Bowen noted that for those individuals with the most severe symptoms, their intellectual and emotional centers were fused, making it more and more challenging to make logical or principle-based decisions. The more anxious people are, the more con-fusion they experience in relationship to others close to them.  Those without the ability to know the difference between their thinking and their feelings are the ones who initially became symptomatic. However, as he noted people can also develop symptoms in an effort to pull up their functioning.

However once people see the system and the automatic pressure throughout the family, the cost of giving into this kind of social pressure is usually too high a price to pay.  Being able to be more separate gives people a small glimpse being loose and free. They also see the people they care about being able to grow more independently once they refuse to take the emotional bait. Once someone experiences being more separate yet connected in a social system, they are hooked. Then it is hard to get people to stop the effort.  Here is an emotional process that has been going on for generations and finally “you” get a view of actions that you can take to alter “the predictable “ future for you and your near and dear. Your choice!

One of the hallmarks of Bowen theory is that if the differentiating person is less reactive, and in better contact with a broad variety of people, then fewer individuals will absorb anxiety “for the group”.  It may be that anxiety can also be absorbed in the effort to manage self, not just in symptoms.  For example, if one is stressed he/she might collapse, go to bed, get mad at someone else, or get “reorganized”.  By “reorganizing”, an individual can find a more mature way to deal with the increasing anxiety.   This takes integrating their intellect and emotions.

One might take a really deep breath and then call up people in the family with whom he or she has had little contact.  Of course you had been meaning to talk to your mother’s sister but that would upset your mother and dealing with your mother and your aunt requires energy. How do you speak to your family members in a neutral way about this kind of “emotional programming”? If you can say things like, “Mom, I asked your sister what has led to so much distance in the family?” You’re not taking sides with anyone. Your stance is simply to take an action to describe the emotional glue that holds families together.

Over time in coaching family members, Bowen saw that individuals could increase their emotional and cognitive functioning.  While gathering information on their own family history, people began to tell more coherent stories about their life experiences. They became more aware, observant and less reactive towards spouses and other family members. Their efforts to understand self in their relationship system often increased the opportunity to form new relationships with extended family members.   These individuals diagramed their family relationship system and could see how anxiety flowed and infected the whole group.  Eventually these motivated individuals achieved a new level of functioning, and others in their families became less reactive and better defined.  Individuals were able to interrupt the automatic clues pressuring them to react in the old ways and could then engage in new relationship patterns.

By studying families over many years, Bowen saw that a percentage of people do have the ability to see the family as a system and to do something about the part they play in maintaining the anxiety-driven status quo. Some individuals can describe beautifully the pull of the intense reactivity to others and are capable of almost immediately inhibiting their own reactive responses.  Other take a long time to see that reactivity is an emotional yank from the system, which dumps them into con-fusion, and makes them more sensitive and vulnerable

It takes time to see how a system functions.   During the early years of Bowen’s work with families, he noted that only about 25% of psychiatric residents were willing to work on their extended family relationships.  Getting to know people in one’s extended three or four-generation family can seem like a waste of time or even nonsense to those in the middle of an intense marital crisis or in the intensity of an expansion of one’s business.

Most people, in the face of rising external anxiety or intense opposition at work, will retreat, hoping to find comfort in their nuclear family.  But this automatic reaction only increases the pressure on each family member to manage the increasing anxiety, with fewer and fewer places for the anxiety to go.

The overall goal for motivated individuals is to discipline self, and not react to ongoing issues by taking sides or being pulled into the togetherness. The effort requires focus on observing patterns, resisting the lure of status quo thinking and defining one’s differences with others in as playful and loose (not uptight) way as possible.  People in relationship with a good Bowen coach can slowly change their thinking from content thinking, (”It is his fault!”) to seeing the anxiety and figuring out how to respond thoughtfully.

People have more of a choice about how to function once they know something about the system they are living in. A systems view avoids blame and an automatic focus on the “other” and gives people choices in the management of anxiety.  Once one is able to think more objectively about the ongoing nature of the relationships system and one’s part in it, new options appear.  People can see some way to stay in an “I” position and allow others to have choices too.   If the symptoms are intense and the anxiety is high it can take years for people to begin to get surer of being a more contained and separate self.

It is difficult to stay on this higher ground when it can be washed away during family storms.  But if people have experience developing their emotional backbone and sticking to their self defined principles, they are more likely to avoid becoming caught up in the con-fusion with others.   It is a relief to know there is a way to manage self rather than thrashing about in the confusion of blaming and focusing on others.

Increasing your knowledge of your relationship system by getting to know members of your extended family requires that you see the advantage of having more information about family emotional process and more opportunity to define and separate a self.  Sometimes I coach people to get to know individuals in their extended family by using this analogy.  Observe a tree with shallow or cut off roots.  Such a tree is not able to withstand storms, while the ones with deep roots have greater strength and resiliency in the face of stormy problems.

 Other Living System: What Can We Learn from Them?

As mentioned earlier, if there are general laws organizing emotional systems, we should see evidence for this in other forms of life.  No one can be an expert in all the areas of the natural sciences, so with gratitude we turn to experts to learn more about how living things manage to live and work together.

Deborah Gordon, among others, has demonstrated that if you remove ants from one job like searching for food, the colony automatically compensates for this by decreasing the rate at which ants are assigned to the tasks of removing garbage or defending the nest.  The functioning of one ant is communicated and impacts others but the individual ants need no “awareness” of this.  The mechanisms for guiding the behaviors of ants in the colony are present and nothing has to be learned.  Body scents and touching antennas are all the signals needed to provide functional role assignments.

Without much of a brain, ants know what the others in the colony are up to.[1]  But of course ants cannot say to one another, “I am making this decision to alter my functioning based on the numbers needed for the various jobs.”  Neither we humans nor ants need much of a brain to pick up signals about the needs of the group or colony and what we need to do now.

Ants also build complex cities, go to war with other colonies, take slaves (which they care for rather than eat), and raise and keep other insects for food, just like humans raise cattle. They are the only other species besides humans that cultivate food.  They may be the most well known for cooperating and team work resulting in each individual becoming part of an organism called an ant colony.[2]

Humans, like ants, don’t act as one colony but are able to cooperate because they have an automatic sensing capability attuned to changes in the relationship system. Our highly emotional interactions are coded into memory, and perhaps like the ants we read and react to one another’s functioning states in ways that are out of our awareness.   We humans are more capable than ants of independent thinking and are aware of the cost of social control.  Humans understand that the group does not always know the right way to go.

Sensitive and reactive individuals are more prone to respond to pressure from others by rebelling or adapting and conforming until the social pressure creates symptoms in vulnerable individuals.  The most common family problem is parent’s pressure on children to do well in school.   The children rebel by staying out late, having parties and using drugs. Sometimes harder to see is a husband who comes home and “demands” that his wife listen to his problems and she begins to drink.   In the best of times social pressure results in-group members “cooperating” well enough to enhance survival. The children do well in school and the wife actually helps the husband deal with his problems.

We can also see how the impulse to help others can happen on a societal level.   When there is a tremendous crisis, as in the hurricane in Haiti or the nuclear plant meltdown in Japan, people do all kinds of amazing things for one another without question or the hope of being paid back for the effort.  But as social pressures increase to solve impossible problems, the cost of “helping/cooperating” becomes higher then people can bear. They may seek distance, blame the government or become symptomatic themselves at which point the initial impulse to “cooperate” breaks down.  The cost for some individuals becomes too great. Individuals who increase their awareness of the pushes and pulls of the relationship system have a better chance to define, in some reasoned way, the limits of what they can and cannot do.   A deeply emotional impulse to help others often has no limits.

Ants, unlike humans, may not have the flexibility to turn down the urge to cooperate and go along with the group. But then ants and bees that form social colonies are not operating under the guidance of fear states generating cortisol because they have no adrenal glands.  Instead ants and bees operate under a kind of democracy. “Bees operate with a quorum set high enough to guarantee that swarms make highly accurate decisions rather that just super speedy ones.”[3]  They wait for the crowd to decide which direction to go and that turns out to be the best strategy when organisms need to choose accurately not rapidly. Ants and bees have little reason to develop individuality beyond role specific functions. What is amazing is that these little organisms have the same basic genetic heritage, and yet so many physical and physiological differences emerge in the colony.

Up the Evolutionary Ladder to Awareness and Fear States

Humans are sensitized by states of fear that they are not aware of.  They bump into one another and exchange information about the state of the social group.   These encounters between individual humans can change their chemistry but not necessarily their awareness. People say, “My parents died when I way young but that did not bother me.”   Yet when you look at the brains of these people you find the “chemistry of depression”.[4]  The biochemical pathways tell us what the mind cannot.  These people are unaware of the impact of the social group on them and cannot perceive the environment accurately.  Drugs used to alter their brain chemistry, give these individuals a greater chance to integrate the reality of their situation and to promote a better adaptation to the changed environment. Depression is a symptom that can inform people that their view of reality is skewed.  Drugs may alleviate some of the suffering but don’t necessarily increase cognitive functioning or increase awareness.

Our automatic compass is built on automatic signaling processes enabling us to fit in with the social group. This can result in making decisions, like ants and bees, that spring from the importance of the group to decide where to build the hive and where to find food.   Individual ants do not have to decide what to do.   They are dependent on the group’s perception of the environment.  Even with our complex brain we are often unaware that stress can result in our being overly sensitive and dependent on social relationships.  Perhaps we become more like ants under stress.

It is safe to say, however, that sometimes we all live in psychic darkness, with many emotional states unavailable to us for reflection or introspection.  But that is not the end of the story. We know we can form hypotheses and look for facts to support our viewpoint.  To check out our hypotheses, we can talk with others about our ideas. This is often part of a therapeutic experience: to talk about our ideas and to be challenged by a good coach to see things differently and call into question our most cherished beliefs.

The Brain Lights up The Relationship Pathways

For many years we had only clinical descriptions to explain how relationships influence people’s functioning.  But now we can see the impact of relationships reflected in brain chemistry. We can ask people to think about different scenarios, from winning at tennis or looking at a love object, to frightening scenes, while we examine their brain chemistry through machines like MRI’s.  This research verifies that different areas of the brain “light up” with different types of subjects.  Investigators have even tried to understand the “chemistry” of love. 

A handful of researchers, armed with MRIs, have begun to sift out the chemical mix that makes up love. “Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural,” says Helen Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers who is one of the world’s leading researchers on brain chemistry and sexual relationships and half of the team of scientists poking through my cranium. “We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love.  I love thee with serotonin produced by my raphe Nuclei. I love thee with testosterone receptors deep in my hypothalamus. I love thee with dopamine that floods my primitive lizard brain.[5]

The brain is multilayered, evolutionarily designed and connects us with other mammalian and reptilian species.  Because of the “design” of the brain, it is very difficult to become aware of deep emotional states in one’s own brain or self.  We have in common with reptiles, the most primitive instincts like mating, defense of territory and giving in to the dominant ones.   These behaviors reside at the top of the spine and in the center of the brain. These areas lack the ability to be in direct communication with the more cognitive part of the brain. Instead the newer part of the brain, the neo cortex or “slower” part of the brain, has to inhibit the older faster parts of the brain (the limbic and reptilian complex) when necessary. The three parts of the brain reflecting our evolutionary heritage (reptile, mammalian and the cortex) are inter-connected but one is never sure which part is in charge of actions and reactions.

[6]

Take the fear response, for example.  It can only be inhibited once it has begun and by then the chemical cascade has been released into the body.  Fear in the reptilian complex does not say to the higher cognitive center, the neo cortex: “So do you think it is reasonable that I react to that stick?”  Instead we do react and then the memory of all things pertaining to sticks kicks in. The limbic system contains the memory of the past and is able to remind us that usually sticks are inert and not dreaded snakes. It can take a long time for the different parts of the brain to send signals to inhibit the initial reactivity to the “stick/snake” and there are physiological consequences for the one who experiences the fear.

The basic biological values of all mammalian brains were built upon the same basic plan, laid out in consciousness-creating affective circuits that are concentrated in subcortial regions, far below the neocortical “thinking cap” that is so highly developed in humans.[7]  Jaak Panksepp

Perhaps as neuroscience advances we will discover general laws regulating the primary emotional states of humans, mammals and reptiles.  For example, we know that species are linked to others species because of the biochemistry and structure of our brains. This is the reason we can be relatively sure that if drugs work on mice they just might work on men. We also know that there are instinctual structures in very ancient parts of our brain. Their job is to provide us with some very old directions about the value of specific sets of behaviors like reproduction, defending territory, and the urge to be altruistic and to survival.  As a complex evolutionary tool for living, our brain also has a cognitive capacity to interpret or explain the social world we inhabit.

We have been able to explore the biochemistry of both the “fear” and “care pathways in the brain.  Since our brain chemistry is similar to that of mice and chickens researchers can experiment on these animals to show that the biochemistry of care, and feelings of safety, produce opiates in the brain.^[8]  The chemicals that can inhibit fear or promote caring are disrupted when people are fearful. Those with disrupted relationships early in life show markers of disturbance and over connection in the brain. When this happens we see humans with these kinds of markers have been repeating negative stories about their life experiences.  These stories reinforce the over connected pathways in the brain.[9] These are the people who are vulnerable to drug use later in life. In various forms of cognitive therapy people are trying to correct the deficits from increasing stress, a loss of caring relationships, etc. by having healthier relationships and having better stores to tell.

Most mammals and invertebrates like ants have no need for a sophisticated apparatus like the human brain to become aware of how their actions impact others.  They are simply influenced by the interactions and the needs of the colony and their body chemistry reflects the cumulative and current state of relationships in the colony.

Darwin’s Life as an Example of the Force to be an Individual

Charles Darwin’s life is a fantastic example of one individual who had to figure out his way around the togetherness forces in his family and society.  Early on, Darwin had to triangle in his uncle to get his father’s permission to take the voyage on the Beagle. [10]  This is a good example of people naturally knowing about triangles and what it takes to become a more differentiated self.  No one had written down the methods, but somehow Darwin knew and overcame the emotional forces to give up and go along with the group (his family to name just one).

Charles Darwin was concerned about how his theory, which he finally articulated in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species,would be received by his peers and his family, most especially his wife, Emma.^[11]  Darwin’s wife was a particularly religious individual and he was concerned about taking a very public position that was different from his wife’s cherished and deeply held beliefs.  Hesitating for more than twenty years to publish his work, Darwin gradually formed a loose association of supporters who were crucial in enabling him to maintain himself despite the threat of disapproval from others.  Darwin himself and his books continue to be controversial today.^[12]

Not only was Darwin’s life and example of an effort to differentiate a self and be less reactive to social control in his family and in society, his ideas about evolution enabled millions of people to understand that humans like other animals are forced to adapt or perish as their environment changes.

Darwin’s Ideas and the Importance of Facts for Thinking Systems

Perhaps Darwin’s most challenging idea was that given enough time, natural selection alone could produce the diversity of the world around us. The idea was heresy to some during Darwin’s lifetime, who believed that God created nature and the world only 10,000 years ago.^[13]  This is an example of how scientific evidence is not very compelling when it challenges long held beliefs.

Darwin suggested that natural selection occurs through random mutations and the selection of what some referred to as the “fittest.”  He observed that differences in traits between animals living on different islands could enable some individuals to have a survival advantage over others. Herbert Spencer’s phrase, “ the survival of the fittest,” described how well animals could contend with and adapt to changes in the local environment.  Darwin noted that some differences (size of beak in a bird) greatly enhance survival, but some differences such as eye color do not add to the survival benefits of an animal.

Darwin was an amazingly accurate observer of the natural world.  His curiosity and detailed accounting of what he saw led to the accumulation of incredible piles of evidence to support his thesis that traits that have enhanced survival in one era are selected for and maintained even in environments where they may no longer function as well.  He coined the term natural selection to distinguish it from artificial selection.   All his life Darwin was fascinated with plants and breeding animals that were artificially “selected” to produce desired and specific outcomes.  But during his trip on the Beagle he saw that natural selection operated on the observable characteristics of an organism. Those animals or plants, which could sustain life, become more prevalent in the population.

Forty some years ago, Peter and Rosemary Grant returned to the very islands where Darwin studied the finches and began to research individual differences in survival among the finches. Unlike Darwin, the Grants were able to return every year for twenty years to follow these birds over twenty generations.  They recognized individual birds and noted the impact of selection on the types of birds that survived.  This allowed them to offer reasons about how the fittest were able to gain predominance.  They proved that, at least for finches, natural selection happens quickly, and not necessarily as slowly as Darwin believed.

Selection follows alterations in the environment. In the case of the finches, the rainy season produced more birds with small beaks because the seeds were plentiful and easy to open.  During dry spells, these small beaked birds diminished in number as the size of their beaks made it difficult to impossible to open the few remaining hard seeds.  The difference between death and survival during the several years of drought was only one-half of a millimeter in the size of a finch’s beak.  The birds with larger, stronger beaks prospered because they could crack open the seeds and survive the harsh conditions.^[14]

Since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, we have learned more about the ability of selection to act on the actual physical characteristics of a population as it adapts to changes in the environment. This may have implications for how selection may be at work today in humans.

Differentiation of Self: A (Selective) Advantage?

Who knows if a similar selection process may be operating on humans now?  We are living in the midst of vast changes in the environment: growing population, diminishing and sometimes unreliable energy and food resources and global warming to name a few.  And these changes may be creating selective pressure on humans.  Perhaps those who are better able to adapt to the changes will be “selected” to survive.

Consider this: We know that under stress people tend to lose their ability to perceive the environment well, to cooperate with others and to adapt.  Could it be then, that an ancient orienting response towards togetherness, to fit in or go along with the group, will dominate as humans face current and future challenges?   Or will the balance tip in the other direction because it is more adaptive to be a more defined individual, capable of cooperating as appropriate, and not just unthinkingly react to the herd? Remember that herds of animals sometimes go off in the wrong direction and fall off cliffs.  (Lemmings are famous for this and lack of food triggers this response.)

If better-defined people who cooperate “appropriately” are to be “selected” for, could the balance be altered in the general population between the forces for togetherness and for self?  Though this is highly speculative, it is possible that just as a family crisis can produce a family leader, so too may societal challenges produce more differentiated and more mature leaders. Without this urge to be come more differentiated, humans may well fall back to making decisions in a more primitive togetherness orientation.

The Down Side of Togetherness

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life

as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation, who is not forced to respond,

with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people,

obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse

overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram, a social scientist, conducted groundbreaking research showing how people’s obedience to authority is automatic, even when it leads to the potential death of innocent people.[15] His goal was to study what conditions are necessary in a social group to lead to an event like the holocaust.  How can good and normal people be so blind to the consequences of their behavior?  His work doesn’t reflect family systems theory but gives us factual evidence about the nature of the togetherness force among groups of unrelated humans.  His research demonstrates that a majority of people will do harm to others based on a command from an authority figure even if that command goes against a value not to harm others.  We are tremendously vulnerable to certain types of social pressure and the more we can know about this the better off we are.

How can we understand this kind of automatic behavior to go along with authority to the detriment of an individual or the social group as a whole?  If behavior in social groups makes no adaptive sense on a “local” level, then we have to move to the larger evolutionary stage to see how selection itself may have led to our species’ sensitivity to the togetherness forces in the group.

The “togetherness” force is a deep part of the life force, an instinct so deep in the brains of animals that no awareness is needed for the behaviors to manifest. Togetherness has advantages and disadvantages. A flock of birds or herd of elk may be able to avoid predators as they keep an eye on one another’s location, while for a group of lemmings the togetherness force has deadly consequences.

For the human, the instinct to cooperate and the tendency to go along with coercive social pressure is also built on these same deep instincts about which we are totally unaware.

It is difficult for us to know how we are being socially controlled and influenced to be “in the service of others”.  It is difficult to know if we are doing or even thinking things about our own individual viewpoints or if our thinking is simply a reflection of our deep connection to instinctive programming as part of a group.  It requires both an awareness of these instinctive forces and the ability to carefully consider one’s reactions and beliefs in order to pull a real self out of the mire of the togetherness forces.

We also know that for both humans and other forms of life under stress, the natural urge to go along with the social group decreases the ability of individuals to accurately gauge the reality of the situation.  Solomon Ashe, a social scientist, has run experiments that show that people will doubt their own perception of reality (a line on a piece of paper in one of his experiments) in order to fit in with the social group.  Reality becomes a “social reality” under pressure.

Here is how Asch’s test went: A student signs up for a psychology experiment, and others arrive whom he assumes are also students, but who in reality are actors. The actors’ behavior has been carefully programmed. Two cards are placed in front of the subjects; the one on the left has one vertical line, while the one on the right has three lines of varying length.

The experimenter then asks each participant, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right-hand card match the length of the line on the left-hand card. This process is repeated several times with different cards.[16]

On some occasions, the other “subjects” unanimously chose the wrong line. When this happened, it was clear to the real student that the others were wrong, even though they had all given the same answer. What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you stick to your guns and trust your own eyes?

To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects went along with the majority at least once, and 14 of them did so on more than six of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the average subject conformed on four of the 12 trials.

Asch was disturbed by these results and said:

“Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of conformity, the social process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends. That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”[17]

Social pressure and a “togetherness” orientation to go along with the group is deeply instinctual and is incorporated into the psychological belief and value system of the human. Togetherness may usurp and hide under a pleasant sounding request like: “Can you please just cooperate with us?”   We are urged to cooperate with others rather than to think carefully about how we can cooperate with others to manifest our individuality. There is no self in going along with others without our individual thought.

These more instinctive urges to go along with or to “cooperate” with others have been acquired over evolutionary time and spring from the more primitive parts of the non-verbal brain. Once verbalized, via our brain stem to our cortex, “cooperation” becomes a positive “value,” forcing others to behave in the “right” way. The difference between one being mature enough to cooperate based on a principled position that values the action, is very different from being forced to cooperate by people using and/or giving into various mechanisms of social control.

There are many numerous beliefs that reflect our more primitive urges to be for others and to give up self or to be for self and to abandon or even harm others.  When instincts are converted into values and beliefs we tend not to question them.  Our beliefs reside in the emotional part of the brain,  “far away” from the brain’s cognitive center.  Bowen believed that thinking (via our cortex or slower part of the brain) could gradually influence feelings but that this would be a slow process because of the way the brain is structured.

Trying to be logical with highly emotional subjects may only intensify emotions, like throwing dry leaves to throw on a forest fire. There is a distinct advantage for humans to become more aware of one another’s different positions and at the same time, to take greater responsibility for self’s decisions.  The challenge is to “allow” others to be free to accept responsibility for their own actions and beliefs.

Bowen’s Road Map

No one before Bowen described a road map allowing us to understand how to be a more separate and defined individual, and at the same time be able to be close to those who are different from us and even oppose our points of view.

Although the steps for defining a self have been mentioned earlier in this book, here they are again:

• ·      Individuals state what they will or will not do.
• ·      The others in the system object to the apparent change represented in the individual saying what he will or will not do and they begin to make demands that the individual change his or her stance.   The demands may turn to threats that the differentiating one must change back “or else”.
• ·      The differentiating one does not react.  He/she may interrupt, be silly, say nothing or keep in contact in a mild mannered way, while the system reorganizes.

The ability of one person to influence a system towards greater maturity by managing and focusing on self is powerful. But so too is the emotional fusion that binds people to one another (togetherness).  When the balance between the two is off kilter we see this as an ineffective and often habitual way of binding anxiety.  When the differentiating one takes a stand, usually the others cannot see the problem.   They say, “Why would this person make such a stink about such a thing?”   There is no pat on the back or love and approval (no “atta” boys or “atta” girls) for the person making the effort.   The differentiating one has to endure loneliness. The hope is that eventually there will be greater awareness and more respect between people, although this is not guaranteed.  Differentiation offers the potential for human growth that nothing else does. By publishing his observations of the family as a unit and his thinking as to how one person can be less reactive and more principle oriented, Bowen highlighted the understanding of this potential in the human.

Bowen did his research effort in his family during a time of relatively low anxiety.    He found that often, unless the family crisis was big enough, few were willing to take on separating a self for the fun of it.   The togetherness force is too strong.  The differentiating one is perceived as cold or even heartless.   Their response to cries for help from the group is with interruptive and challenging comments that confuse the group.   But these kinds of challenges can, over time, result in more independent thought, less blame and often a more profound and mature way of acting in response to a crisis.

Managing Social Relationships is a Skill Based in Our Instinctive Nature

We have inherited the cognitive ability to become better observers of our interactions with others.  We have the ability to question others’ and our own functioning and to question the way we relate to others and how they relate to us. This ability to increase our awareness and self-control is part of our evolutionary heritage.   It conveys specific advantages to the social groups whose members have this ability.[18]  The increasing awareness and self-control of humans is the evolutionary advantage that allows social systems to reorganize and survive.

I believe that evolution itself has applied selective pressure to family groups to promote the ability of individuals to define a better way to be for self and for the group.  Moreover, selective pressure then favors those groups with more independent but appropriately cooperative individuals, who are able to adapt to the reality of situations, not just to social pressures.

There are reasons that social pressure to conform to the group has persisted. One may be that energy is conserved by conforming to the past ways of functioning encoded in the “rules” of the social group.  And this may be useful when there is little change in the environment.  It takes energy to define a more separate self from the group and such efforts disturb the group and increase the cost to the group because each individual has to use energy to adapt to the changing individual.  However, once the environment begins to undergo rapid changes, the group itself needs more individuals who are less sensitive to social pressure and more realistic about the environmental changes.  Such people can, through their own non-anxious presence, enable others to be less reactive and more aware, both of which contribute to the survival of the group.

By increasing awareness through developing one’s Mindful Compass, individuals are more capable of functioning effectively in relationships with others, even when they are under pressure.  The conflict that occurs with the expression of differences in a healthy system allows for the opportunity to decrease sensitivity and emotional reactivity and increase individuals’ capacity to manage increasing anxiety. As a result individuals learn to interrupt the status quo, often by simply describing the ongoing interactions and defining what they will or will not do.  These individuals have capacity to wait, stand their ground without pressuring or impinging on others and allow time for others to think for themselves.

It takes courage and the development of an emotional backbone to define a self in the face of emotional pressure from the group.  As long as more individuals are capable of learning, reflecting, reasoning and correcting errors, the family (and work) system as a whole will have a better chance to adapt to the demands of the environment, not the emotional demands for “comfort” that maintains the status quo.

The Redistribution of Anxiety

Organizing self to deal with increasing threats or anxiety has allowed groups, from bacteria to humans, to survive. Here are strategies that people have found useful in managing anxiety.

1.     Observing how systems function and how one’s family has functioned over generations.

2.     Understanding the mechanisms for absorbing anxiety, which can take the sting out of, or depersonalize our feelings about the way people behave.  Eventually one can be more neutral about how families survive through one or two family members absorbing more anxiety and having more symptoms than the other members of the family.

3.     Developing the ability of one or two people in the family to be less reactive and more thoughtful to interrupt emotional contagions.

4.     Defining one’s self to the family around important events.

5.     Using various methodologies to lower anxiety: neurofeedback, cardio exercise, meditation, etc.

If these efforts cannot be made, then the individual and the family will simply return to the automatic ways of managing anxiety: distance, conflict, physical or emotional problems, reciprocal relationships (the borrowing and lending of self between two) and projection of fear and anxiety onto others. How is it that families do not see problems coming?  It may be the status quo is so seductive that change must wait until 1) a family crisis is large enough and/or 2) one person is willing to alter their part in the relationships system.  It is difficult and confusing to figure out how much energy I devote for self and how much for others, and especially during times of crisis the instinctual urge for individual survival is to cooperate.

Summary: We have considered the general “laws” which impact the way that the forces of individuality and togetherness achieve a balance in emotional systems.   During the development of various species, specific adaptive balances evolved between being for the social group and being for the individual.

The work of a few experts in the natural and social science fields shows how at one end of the spectrum, ants and bees have the ability to be for the colony in ways that are totally instinctual.  Becoming one with the colonies has enabled these amazing creatures to adapt and spread over millions of years.

In contrast, social scientists such as Stanley Milgram and Solomon Ashe show us how problems occur when blind obedience leads humans to (sometimes tragic) errors in judgment.  Some humans have the ability to separate from the togetherness in the social group and this capability over time, can impact the social group. The social group itself may need to become more oriented to developing independence in its members during times of rapid change.  Individuals who become more aware of the past, and less reactive to others can be more responsible for self.  I speculate that if differentiation does confer an adaptive response during times of great change, we should see more of this ability become manifest in social groups.

[1] Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior, by Deborah M. Gordon

[2] http://quotations.hubpages.com/hub/Intelligent_Ants

[3] Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley, page 213

[4] The GABA neurotransmitter and its receptors are critical to how humans think and act, Dr. Levinson adds. “We apply so many conscious and unconscious perceptions and judgments to our actions at every second, without even realizing that we are doing so,” she says. “GABA is part of the brain system that allows us to fine-tune our moods, thoughts, and actions with an incredible level of detail.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301102803.htm

[5] http://www.esquire.com/features/mri-of-love-0609

[6]http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/bcp/brainbasics/brain3.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/bcp/brainbasics/triune.html&h=318&w=510&sz=7&tbnid=kShYg6G0kd34wM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=134&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dtriune%2Bbrain%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=triune+brain&usg=__zPmU7i0uuxmP4UhFChYmBF4po0A=&docid=b_d892HEtInHTM&sa=X&ei=th81UIAvxu7SAaqmgcAD&ved=0CCsQ9QEwAQ&dur=2266

[7] The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (Sep 17, 2012) Page 1

^[8] The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (Sep 17, 2012) pg 330

[9] Like an overwhelmed traffic cop, the depressed brain may transmit signals among regions in a dysfunctional way. Recent brain-imaging studies suggest that areas of the brain involved in mood, concentration and conscious thought are hyperconnected, which scientists believe could lead to the problems with focus, anxiety and memory frequently seen in depression. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-depression-connection

[10] Returning from their geological excursion together in North Wales (August 1831), he found a letter from Henslow urging him to apply for the position of naturalist on the “Beagle,” about to start on a surveying expedition. His father at first disliked the idea, but his uncle, the second Josiah Wedgwood, pleaded with success, and Darwin started on the 27th of December 1831, the voyage lasting until the 2nd of October 1836.http://www.darwin-literature.com/l_biography.html

^[11] Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond, James Moore

^[12] From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin’s Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals) by Charles Darwin and Edward O. Wilson (Nov 7, 2005)

^[13] Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement.  http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/four-americans-believe-strict-creationism.aspx

^[14] The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner (May 30, 1995)

[15] http://www.experiment-resources.com/stanley-milgram-experiment.html

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

[17] http://www.panarchy.org/asch/social.pressure.1955.html -Scientific American, 193, 31-35.

[18] Others by Laurin Lassiter in Ghimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self, Edited by Lynn Margulis,  Celeste Asikainen, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein

http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com
cell 203 274 1069

One question of historical importance is how Dr. Bowen managed himself to influence people to be able to think differently about what is a family emotional system and how do we participate in them?

I have published a few of a series of interviews with those who were influenced by Dr.Bowen.

http://ideastoaction.wordpress.com/audio-files-and-video-files/request-a-cd/

This newest interview is with  Roberta Gilbert, M.D.  I asked her to reflect on how her relationship with Dr. Bowen influenced her life and her understanding of Bowen Theory.

I have known Robbie Gilbert since nineteen eighty when she first came to the Family Center.  In this interview you can hear just how Bowen used himself to provoke her to question how she understood emotional systems.

From a theoretical perspective the greatest challenge is to see one’s self as part in an emotional system and to be able to take actions to become more separate from the pushes and pulls of these systems. Bowen had a unique way of enabling people to step outside their own system and to see it differently.

Dr. Gilbert is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Human Systems and is on the faculty of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family (formerly Georgetown Family Center).  She is a life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.  In addition she is the author of five books that deal with applying Bowen theory to life.

Interview with Roberta Gilbert April 12, 2012

AMS- Thank you for taking some time to reflect on your relationship with Dr. Bowen and the place of Bowen theory in the world of ideas and in particular in psychiatry and mental health.

RG- My interest in family goes back to the mid 1960s.  At that time I read something about research and family in Life Magazine.  I was in my residency and was intrigued by the ideas. At some point I asked my chief psychiatrist, who was a psychoanalyst, about learning family and he said, “Maybe you should learn about group therapy first.  It is less complicated.  Then you can learn about family.  If you can find someone on the faculty to teach group, you may start a group.”

Since my chief was a psychoanalyst, family was very antithetical to his world.  No psychoanalyst would ever talk to family members because that was against the ethics of the times.

However I did find a faculty member, Dr. Larry Behan, MD, who had been trained in group therapy who agreed to be my supervisor and work with me.  He asked that I have a co therapist. A good friend of mine, Bob Goldstein, MD, agreed to be my co therapist and was a resident as well.  This was to become the first group psychotherapy at University of Buffalo medical school in the mid 1960’s.

The next contact I had with the field was probably in the early 1970’s at the

American Psychiatry Association’s Annual Meeting where people from Georgetown were presenting.

I listened to Dr. Bowen and then decided to speak to him. I went up to Dr. Bowen and said to him, “But you don’t understand my family. When I try to tell them about anything or about my problems, they just look at me and say we will pray for you, Robbie.”  Bowen just scratched his head and looked down at the ground and when he finally did speak he said, “I knew a guy like that once… and he never did very well.”  I wondered for a while what he meant by that and then later on in life I figured out that what he had done was put the problem back on me where it belonged.

AMS- I would call that a trick, maybe. Perhaps that was the first trick to make you think.

RG- I understood that no part of Bowen Family Systems theory is more important than another, but some concepts were harder to grasp. I could hear about cut off but of course I wasn’t cut off.  Eventually I could see I was. So in my practice I began to teach about cut off and I was getting these magnificent results from people who were able to understand.

To find out more about the theory I went to the Menninger Clinic for two years to take their family therapy course.  Eventually I met Dr. Don Schulburg, who came to Kansas City as a part of Menninger to teach Bowen theory and open a clinic there.

Then in 1980 I decided to come to Georgetown and study at the Center.

I commuted for five years. I had begun to write Extraordinary Relationships at the insistence of my brother.  As I had told him about what I was learning he said, “Robbie, this would be a wonderful book.”  And he kept on me about it. It took me about six months to write a first draft, and then I read it and realized it was no good.  Even after all the time I had spent at Georgetown I still didn’t really understand family.

Therefore I decided to have a meeting with Dr. Bowen. I talked to him and said, “What would you think about my moving to Georgetown? I’d like to immerse myself in what’s going on here at Georgetown.”

By this time he knew that I had written a first draft of my book.  In addition I was trying to get a one-to-one relationship with each of my siblings and my parents.  I had a one-to-one with my one brother but my father had a tendency to be harsh and critical of me. I needed to know more. So I said to Bowen, “If you don’t think it’s a good idea I’ll stay in Kansas City, and if you do I’m prepared to move here.” Dr. Bowen gave me the green light.  I moved and six years later Extraordinary Relationships was published.

I met with Dr. Bowen about once a month until shortly before his death.  A lot of people have said what a cold personality he had and how cold the theory was. I did not experience him that way.  I experienced him as warm and friendly. He had a big warm smile whenever I came to see him about life’s dilemmas. I would ask him questions about his theory and he quickly told me it was not his personal theory. Bowen told me his goal had been to fashion an impersonal theory and to give the theory to the world.

I read his paper on his own family and did not understand it.  So one day I went to see him and said, “Dr. Bowen I don’t understand this thing of triangles. I understand that the anxiety moves around from person to person in a family. I was curious about how triangles worked in your effort.”  Bowen said when you’re with people you think about the triangles, and put them together with the others in your talking.  I realize that what he had done was to get on the outside by putting the other two family members together. Then, if they could resolve their issues then you would be more on the outside of the fusion.

AMS- So it seems like Bowen starts out sometimes with people perhaps being kind of indirect and eventually he clarifies very directly?

RG- Yes, we started out in a rocky way, scratching our heads at each other and then eventually it was straight and direct.

AMS- It seems like a very useful way to enable people to think for self.  The idea I get is that if you’re going to work on yourself and then if you can ask him honest questions, Bowen is more direct and tells it to you straight.

RG- Bowen and I addressed many theoretical questions. One of the first tasks I had to do was to reconnect with my family, parents and siblings. My father had a tendency to be critical and harsh with me. I would defend myself and explain things but none of that ever worked.  Finally, I was able to say, and really mean it, “Dad, I know you see it that way but I don’t.”  After that I don’t think he was critical of me like that again.  Before we got to that point I had to see my emotional contribution, and change it.  Overall, it is slow and painstaking work, which we all do to get into better relationship with people.

A few years later I had an opportunity to sit with my mother and just be. Probably this is a familiar idea to those who are working on self.  I had evaluated my relationship with my mother and it seemed kind of distant. I felt closer to my father. Then an opportunity came up for me to be closer to her around my parents deciding to move into a retirement community.  It was going to be near my brother but my mother was up in arms about it and very emotional.  She just did not want to go.  So I decided to go be with them and just be present. I had some principles as guidelines and I spent a few days there with her. I was not going to make any kind of a decision for them.  My brother had stepped up and said he would like for them to move near him but my mother was still reacting.

Finally, they were able to go and see the place that my brother wanted them to live in.  They didn’t want to live with me.  My brother found an ideal place. And as soon as my mother went there and saw it she loved it. They lived there for several years. Mom died at 91 and my dad at 97.

AMS- Bowen noted in his book that when he was teaching psychiatric residents only about 25% of the residents would get interested in the extended family and work on those relationships. I was wondering if he directly talked to you about going to visit your extended family and having person-to-person relationships with your parents and siblings or if he was more indirect about this.

RG- I would ask him questions about theory and then I would figure stuff out for myself.  My parents were such a “oneness” on the phone, it was like talking to one person.  Theory told me to get a one to one. I don’t think Bowen told me to do it. When I went for a family visit, then I could get time with each one separately.

AMS- Did Bowen talk to you directly about the triangle with your parents?

RG- I don’t remember if he did but I think I just figured it out from studying, and asking him questions about the theory.

AMS- I remember in your book, Extraordinary Relationships, you wrote about the transition from thinking Freudian, as an inner psychic theory, to thinking broadly about natural systems. I was wondering if this transition in thinking was a privilege or a burden for you in relationship to the other people you knew in psychiatry?

RG- I put myself right in the middle of the family world by moving to Georgetown and after that it (the conflict with analysis) really wasn’t a problem. I didn’t have that much contact with other psychoanalysts. Family systems were in my thinking and I had to deal with the reactions as part of all that I had to learn.

AMS- Now you’re thinking about writing a book of guidelines for therapists?

RG- People have asked me to write something for therapists. I would like to do that.  As we are speaking we are also attending a conference sponsored by the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. It features both therapists and scientists looking at the brain and family relationships. This morning we heard a talk about a whole family moving to another level of functioning by someone who has also studied the family and worked on self for years. You never see anything like this in psychoanalysis. Here, over the years, I have seen many people present on well thought out efforts to move self to another level of maturity and then the whole family changes.

I saw this with my son.  He was a painter at forty years of age.  Now he wants to get his PhD and be a Bowen therapist.

Today, at the conference, Mark Flinn suggested that we gather all these stories from people whose lives have been changed in such dramatic ways because this is a body of scientific facts. (See foot note on Flinn’s talk at the conference) ]

Bowen said he went to NIH to see if his theory was accurate.  There he could study the family living together in a hospital for years.

The question is how can we bring all these hundreds of people’s stories together to become a body of knowledge?  How could we gather up retrospective studies, in the experiences of these therapists that demonstrate that theory is scientific?

If people know enough theory to better manage self, then they will see a different outcome. There is no other theory that can describe how to manage self, as well as Bowen theory, in my opinion.

I think we have to get the word out not to just therapists but to the public.  Readers contact me with questions and I hope they continue to do so. I know Bowen did not show any harshness. He was supportive and he got whole faculty to read my first book and give me ideas.

AMS- I hear your ideas about the future and the responsibility you have to let people know what you have seen and experienced.  If other things come up we can meet again.  Thank you very much.

Hormones in the Wild: Mother-Child Synchrony to Coalitionary Bonds – Mark Flinn, PhD.
Results from a longitudinal study of family relationships indicate that synchrony of mother-infant hormone profiles is associated with subsequent child health and other developmental outcomes. We are interested in the process of entrainment in family relationships and the ramifications for the coalitionary behaviors of humans. http://www.thebowencenter.org/miva/merchant.mvc?

Dr. Gilbert’s Books and Web Site:

http://www.hsystems.org/

Extraordinary Relationships: A New Way of Thinking About Human Interactions by Roberta M. Gilbert (Dec 6, 2006)

The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory by Roberta M. Gilbert (Feb 28, 2004)

Extraordinary Leadership: Thinking Systems, Making a Difference by Roberta M. Gilbert (Dec 15, 2006)

The Cornerstone Concept by Roberta M. Gilbert (Oct 1, 2008)

Connecting With Our Children: Guiding Principles for Parents in a Troubled World by Roberta M. Gilbert (May 15, 1999)

Priscilla Friesen and Val Brown

Small Differences that Make a Difference

Murray Bowen had a way to made people think differently about the social nature of systems, and the challenges any social systems presents to self.  There are people who knew Dr Bowen well and who had a great deal of contact with him, and many more who had a brief encounter.   Those drawn to Bowen and his theory are often people who are fascinated by systems and believe that problems can be understood by looking at the big picture, and thereby understanding how the smaller parts are functioning.

Val Brown, Ph.D., is one such person.  As the developer of NeurOptimal a form of neurofeedback, he has been involved with a significant number of people in the Bowen network. There is a DVD, Resiliency in the Family & the Brain, available of the last conference that Priscilla Friesen organized with Val Brown.   http://thelearningspacedc.com/pages/store/220/resiliency-in-the-family-and-the-brain.

Many of us have used NeurOptimal to reduce anxiety in the effort to improve functioning in the important relationships.  Bottom line it takes a lot of brain stamina to keep going when you are trying to define a more separate-self in a real life emotional system.  You will hear some of this in the interview below.

I first meet Val back in 1980 when he joined grand rounds in the department of psychiatry at Georgetown University.  I was there to videotape Dr. Bowen with a clinical family.  After Bowen’s interview of the family, the residents and students had time to ask him questions.  Val asked Bowen about his constant use of the words, “I hear you,” to the family members.  He was wondering,  “Why not change your sensory modality, to I see or feel what you are saying?”  Bowen referred to Val as a wiz kid back then.
I wondered what Val had learned about Bowen then and what he thought about Bowen’s very different take on families. There was not much time at the conference but we found an hour over lunch to chat. You can click below on the audio and hear some of his thoughts about Bowen and Val’s own pursuit of understanding of how to learn from the brain itself.  Val’s long-term thesis is that training can strengthen the brain by allowing it to see it’s own function and thereby become more resilient.
I was invited to participate in a meeting on “Research and Innovation in NeurOptimal in February 2012.”   There were over seventy people in Palm Springs, California, who had traveled from many countries, including France, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada. Much of the meeting was devoted to presentations explaining how these clinicians and researchers are using the equipment.

The technology of neurofeedback has been used since the nineteen seventies for peak performance, mental fitness, symptom reduction and increased ability to focus. Participants at the meeting reported on how the training has been associated with a decrease in symptoms and an increase in mindfulness.  One can track improvement in functioning along with a decrease in symptoms such as insomnia, cancer, cognitive deficits, ADHD, autism, developmental delays, trauma attachment and Alzheimer’s.   My presentation, entitled The Observation of Change in One Family, was about the effort to come into better contact with my brother, who had been hospitalized for emotional problems. Many in my family had become cut off from one another. As we reengaged ostensibly to help my brother, the intensity among us increased.   So we all used NeurOptimal to decrease the intensity/anxiety around solving difficult problems of living in the now and the multigenerational relationships tangles inherited from the past that lived not only in my brother with the most severe symptoms, but in all of us.

Val recalled his first memory of seeing Bowen at a clinical conference.  At the time Val was working at Sibley hospital. He heard that Bowen had a new way of understanding the family as a unit.  One of the things that stuck in Val’s mind was that so many of the women in the audience were knitting as they listened to Bowen. I reminded him that the woman of the French revolution also knitted.  But I guessed that the Bowen audience was not very animated and may have left the impression they would not be changing the world.
Val had an attraction to Bowen on several levels. Bowen was similar in appearance to and had a Tennessee accent similar to Val’s grandfather.  I wondered to myself if early family relationships give you clues about who to trust and who to avoid?  The look of Bowen may have made a connection with his grandfather possible and this may have made Bowen’s ideas about the importance of the extended family more relevant to Val.

I will speculate that just as the brain cannot see it’s own functioning, but can be made aware of it, neither are we aware of the automatic way we process information about relationships.  Our conscious mind is very limited and cannot process a great deal of information. A long ago and far away evolutionary process decided what was important to focus on. How we mange anxiety in our relationship systems is very automatic.  How relationships impact our physiology and psychology may not be as important as figuring out whom should we fear and whom we trust.

Our cause and effect brain is “other focused” and therefore we fail to see the system influencing us to remain in our sometimes dis-functional roles. What can enable us to refocus on self and to see that which is right in front of us, but not of interest to our automatic brain?

I see Val’s NeurOptimal training and Bowen’s Family Systems Theory moving in a similar direction.  NeuroOptimal training enables the brain to build resiliency.   Val’s interest in training brain resilience and Bowen’s emphasis on the importance of being more resilient as a function of being more self defined and separate emotionally, is where the two men’s life work intersects.  It appears that brain resilience and working on being more of a self are complimentary efforts, which can reinforce each other.
When I asked Val what he might ask Bowen if he were still alive, he said he would ask him more about his ideas about triangles and interlocking relationships.  In speaking of teachers like Bowen who have made a remarkable difference, Val noted that there are few teachers who really make an impact on your life. Two of his teachers during high school challenged him to read and understand deeply, more for his own self than to please the teacher.  This is an interesting part of the tape with too many details to go into in this brief summary of the interview.

Having a great teacher early on can make the lack of thoughtful challenging teachers in college a great frustration.   Teachers can be great mentors especially if they are willing and able to push students to think beyond a set of answers. What I got from listening to Val was that when education becomes like a factory, pushing out people with the same kind of thinking or in order to get the right “ticket”, then the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is lost.

One of Val’s mentors asked him, “What is the worst scenario that can happen as you risk moving ahead?” It reminded me of the various things that Bowen used to say, which my memory twists into: “We are all born into difficulties and when you think you know the way for you, even if its uphill, pay as little attention as possible to the sticks and stones others throw, just keep going.”

I hope that you have time to listen to the interview and enjoy the many side roads we took in thinking about the importance of being a self, the impact of theories, various teachers and the nature of the controlling and confounding elements within social systems.

val brown part one 2 22 12

The Family Adjustment to Death

In the past four months, two women with whom I was close and admired have died.  One was Leroy Bowen, the wife of Murray Bowen, and the other was Clotilde Mauboussin, the “other grandmother” of my daughter’s children.  Since I was asked to speak at both funerals, I spent time reflecting on the importance of these two individuals in my life and the importance of speaking at funerals. Funerals, and the preparation for them, allow us to pay tribute to the lives of those who have died and also prepare us for the shifts and changes as the family system readjusts.  One can see that when family and friends speak about the person who has died, their relationship to him/her, and how they have impacted their lives, strong memories become available to the greater community.   We are learning machines, so to speak, and each new experience can help us in adjusting to change.

One’s own experience with death and dying, or even dealing with major changes in a family’s structure, e.g. births, marriages, etc., influences how any of us are able to see and mobilize the connections which lead to increasing social support between people.  The death of family members, or even close friends, ranks high on the Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe [1] stress scale. As anxiety rises around the loss of a significant person it can bring into awareness our own fragile and short lives.  People can react negatively under the increasing stress and become more isolated.  However the increasing awareness can also clarify the impact that one person’s life has on us, and can highlight some of the best ways to deal with significant changes in our relationships networks. Our choices about how we participate in relationships networks have long-term consequences and therefore deserve our most profound attention.

It is not automatic for us to see our connections with one another or to take actions that are useful to our family’s future.  Due to the loss of my parents at an early age, I was forced to be more aware of the challenges inherent in such changes.  As an older woman I have seen how family losses often clump together and how people can automatically deny the impact of these shifts and changes in the network. To create a visual picture for myself, I used to say, “How would earth do if Venus jumped out of its orbit?”  Without careful thought people can dismiss the loss.  After the death of an important family member, people may take more risks, get divorced, have more accidents, spend a lot of money or do other “silly” things, claiming that one has nothing to do with another.

One of the first papers I read by Dr. Bowen was “Family Reaction to Death,” in his book, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice.  I was trying to understand the increasing chaos in my family following the deaths of my grandmother and mother within a year of each other.  This was in the early 1970’s and I had little understanding of how a death could be followed by serious symptoms and disruptions throughout the family.  I was stunned by the cascade of events, and had no concept of how this could happen or what I might do about it.  The family fabric had been torn and needed repair. It was these events that led to my interest in learning about family therapy.  When I read Murray Bowen’s early paper mentioned above, the “aha” moment arrived.

Bowen’s observations, from his early multigenerational research, showed how common it is for families, whose members are positively or negatively linked, to display symptoms following a severe disruption in the functioning or loss of one of its members. It seems odd that if people are mad at or very distant from one another that they can still be vulnerable to such relationship disruptions. The information about illness or impending death can spread quickly thought the underground communication system. Those who have unresolved relationship issues with important people in the system are often the most vulnerable to symptoms.  They are the most emotionally invested in others, and therefore have less ability to be more separate and stand-alone.  The family reaction to death is like a chain reaction, cascading through the members of the family as part of an anxiety reaction.  If people are aware of this possibility they can take steps to redirect the anxiety and to prepare for a more rational, less emotional, reaction to events.   Family leaders help set a tone and thereby reorganize the family anxiety.

Bowen used the metaphor that the family was like a football team, playing in the Super Bowl. If one of the linemen started to limp, the others would have to compensate.  And if the line could not hold up, the quarterback would be taken down. If the quarterback is hurt, others are under more pressure to compensate.   We are often involved in relationships systems where people develop dependencies on one another to function in a specific way.

Seeing the family as a team can allow people to be more objective about the function of each of the players, including the head honchos, the water boy, and even the audience.  When one is less objective, everything is personal and often even an illness becomes “someone’s fault”. In families under a great deal of stress people are angry and resentful and feel strongly that someone else is the problem.  A more mature outlook is to see the family as a natural system, and to focus on how people are making an effort to adapt to difficult conditions.

Understanding the nature of emotional process following the death of important people in the family enables one to alter his or her part in the family habits of interacting.   It is almost as if people are programmed to talk to some and avoid others. It is difficult for families to alter their responsiveness to family members. But when there are big changes in a family, there is often a year or two of opportunity to change one’s functioning.

In observing a number of families, Bowen was able to see patterns among families in which people in some families were more closed, had little communication and increased cutoff from one another, and in others people were more open with each other and connected.  Tracking families over several generations allowed Bowen to clarify the best practices in coping with loss and death or other disruptions in families.   In his teachings and clinical practice, he was able to tell stories about these families, communicating the possibility of a more thoughtful response during times of high stress.

At any time one can take a reading of a family’s functional level in terms of broad observations.  Bowen observed that it was important to distinguish between an open and a closed system.  In an open family people are able to talk about the lives and deaths of family members with ease.  After the death of an important family member, more mature families show increased contact with more distant family members and a deep gratitude for the lives of those who have died.  This allows for increasing emotional support throughout the relationship system.  The opposite happens in a closed family system. People begin to withdraw from contact with one another. Death is not discussed.  Important people lives are forgotten, and people shy away and are increasingly critical of one another.

In the more resilient families, people who die are “replaced” by new relationships with other more distant members of the extended family. In an open system, relationship problems are discussed and solved. The emotionality begins to diminish as issues are out on the table and people are free to bring up difficulties and clarify misunderstandings.

A “cut off” is not limited to responses to a death.   It is a multigenerational process that may be exacerbated by death or other stressful events in a family.   Each family has a patterned way of responding.  It is like a belief or a cultural experience that is shared about the importance of solving or avoiding difficult people or problems.

When families get overwhelmed, members begin to shut down.  The energy is focused on what others did wrong and “cut off “becomes the main mechanism for dealing with the disruption in the relationship system.  It is as though one cannot think to solve problems.  All the available energy goes into preserving self from the perceived threat in the relating to others and so “preservation of self” comes at the “cost” of “cutting off” from the “threatening” others in the family.  This can result in extreme isolation, or acting out and/or increasing symptoms in one or more family members, all in an effort to avoid difficulty and increase comfort. When cut off is alive and well, people have fewer options to cope with the reality of situations, or to contemplate the impact on future generations of action taken in the present.

The opportunity to change oneself becomes possible, if for a moment one can be more neutral and see and accept the automatic nature of the system that one is born into.  Being neutral takes a great deal of effort not react to others and thereby be available without judgment.  Following a death or an important birth, among other changes, a window of opportunity opens for those in any emotional system, open or closed, and at that time, greater freedom exists to alter one’s functioning position. If one can do it, the impact will reverberate through the family for years to come.

The main point is that it is initially challenging to go against one’s natural level of comfort and feelings in order to be more open about death and the loss of important people. It takes courage to continue to talk about people who have died in an open and realistic way.  Perhaps only knowledge can enable people to find the deeper reasons to reach out and form new connections with more distant family members after the death of an important family member.  It takes inner strength and backbone to be able to take a risk and alter one’s part in the family dynamics. Deeper wisdom is gained if one is able to risk and alter one’s participation in their family’s automatic “unthinking” and reactive processes.  But the potential gain for the family is significant.  If one can manage oneself,  the family is more likely to settle down and function at a higher level.

The following are a few of Bowen’s ideas that make sense to me and enable me to function more effectively.   This is not to say that my interpretation of Bowen’s ideas is correct, or that my actions taken are anything more than annoying to the people I love most.

In my work with families, I carefully use direct words, such as death, die, and bury, and I carefully avoid the use of less direct words, such as passed on, deceased, and expired. A direct word signals to the other that I am comfortable with the subject, and it enables others to also be comfortable…   The use of direct words helps to open a closed emotional system.  I believe it provides a different dimension in helping the family to be comfortable within themselves. Page 329

I have never seen a child hurt by exposure to death. They are “hurt” only by the anxiety of survivors.  I encourage involvement of the largest possible group of extended family members, an open casket, and the most personal contact that is possible between the dead and the living, prompt obituary notices and the notification of relatives and friends, a public funeral with the body present, and the most personal funeral service that is possible. Page 332

I suggested that the ability of children to deal with death depends on the adults, and the future would be best served if the death could be presented in terms the children could understand and they could be realistically involved in the funeral. Page 333

 The “Emotional Shock Wave” is a network of underground “aftershocks” of serious life events that can occur anywhere in the extended family system in the months or years following serious emotional events in a family…..

It operates on an underground network of emotional dependence of family members on each other. The emotional dependence is denied, the serious life events appear to be unrelated, the family attempts to camouflage any connectedness between the events, and there is a vigorous emotional denial reaction, when anyone attempts to relate the events to each other. It occurs most often in families with a significant degree of “fusion”, in which the families have been able to maintain a fair degree of asymptomatic emotional balance in the family system.  Page 325.

The nature of the human phenomenon is such that it reacts vigorously to any such implication of the dependence of one life on another.  Those families, which are less reactive, can be more interested in the phenomenon then reacting to it. Page 327 

All traditional faiths have ways of enabling people to deal with the loss of an important person through rituals and community efforts to support the surviving individuals.   In addition there are disciplines like the Buddhist tradition that sees life as preparation for death.

The Dalai Lama says the following:
It is beneficial to be aware that you will die. Why?  If you are not aware of death, you will not be mindful of your practice, but will just spend your life meaninglessly, not examining what sorts of attitudes and actions perpetuate suffering and which ones bring about happiness. 
His Holiness the Dalai Lama Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life 
 Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.
(Page 46)
 
 

Much of counseling and psychoanalysis is directed at the grief process inside a person.

This does not allow us to see the relationships process and as such, this individual focus can result in people becoming more isolated from one another.  One way to increase the strength and support for people in any emotional system is to collect stories and/or pictures and to talk about those who have died.  If you are thinking ahead you may want to find someone to do an audio or even a video interview of the people who are dear to you. It is best to have people tell his or her version of how they see life and the decisions they made along the way.

In writing the eulogies below, I was able to access audiotapes made by Frank Gregorsky.  (http://www.exactingeditor.com/AudioMenu.html) When an interviewer is brought in from outside the family, he/she may be able to get more of the whole story, since they are not as sensitive to the stories being told.  In addition, the collected memories can often take several days to recount. There may be personal as well as business stories to tell.  Having a recording in a person’s own voice, which you can listen to after their death, is an amazing experience.

It is extremely useful to our personal growth to find ways to talk about our relationships, to clarify differences and to resolve problems if possible.  It is also very useful in creating a more open system if we are able to pay tribute to the positive aspects of our relationship with those who have died.

There is no way to express all that goes into a relationships but it is possible to convey a snapshot of the important experiences and promote more thoughtful conversation about the impact of others’ lives on our own.

I am posting these two eulogies as my way of honoring two important relationships in my life and the impact each of these individuals has had on me.

LeROY ELLIS BOWEN (Age 95)

Passed away on Monday, October 24, 2011, a resident of Chevy Chase, MD , for 57 years, wife of the late L. Murray Bowen, M.D., father of Susan Bowen Manne (Ronald), Cincinnati, OH, Joanne Bowen Moravetz (John), Williamsburg, VA, Kathleen Bowen Noer (Harold), Frederick, MD and Charles Murray Bowen, Seattle, WA; grandmother of Jill Manne Oldham, Andrew J. Manne, Gregory J. Noer and Steven B. Noer; great-grandmother of Benjamin and Margaret Oldham. Friends will be received at Pumphrey’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase Funeral Home, 7557 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 on Saturday, October 29 beginning at 12pm until time of service at 1PM. Interment from the Luff-Bowen Funeral Home, Waverly, TN. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in her name to preserve the archives of Dr. Murray Bowen via Leaders for Tomorrow, C/O Dr. William K. Dwyer, 301 Belvoir Avenue, Chattanooga, TN 37411.

I maintain that people are still resources to you after they die.  Often just by saying their name, the memories appear and they can be useful guides.  Of course the relationship loss also creates a void and that void needs to be filled.  How do we do we go about filling the void in the most functional way?  One way that has been useful to me is to tell the stories and lessons learned from this person whom I hold dear.

Mrs. Bowen had uncommon common sense.  When I first met her we were all in Richmond, 1978, celebrating the end of Dr. Bowen’s tenure at The Medical College of Virginia.  As usual the crowd was focused on Dr. Bowen. She seemed to take it all in with a smile, a kind of Buddha-like smile.   She seemed very at ease with people.  Bowen would smile for the camera and she would smile at the people who approached her.  Bowen would challenge and trick folks and she was just herself.   In professional meetings Dr. Bowen took pride in the fact that she did not want to get mixed up in his professional world, full of disciples.

Cool in public, she had extremely strong viewpoints.  You might fall into an easy conversation and then she would get wound up and back you down or get you to rethink a topic if she had her mind set on some issue or another.  You had to take the time to find out what she thought.   Once we had a long discussion about her dislike for the Department of Education becoming a cabinet position.  Her idea, as I recall was that the further away the responsibility for decision making was from the people who were involved in the tasks of actually educating children, the worst the system would be. 
I never thought about such a thing.

Sometimes I went to their house for lunch, since I took Dr. Bowen to Walter Reed each month for several years.  I learned over those lunches about one of her principles, to save money.  She was very happy and proud of her coupons, showing us how much she saved. After Dr. Bowen died we went to lunch a few times.  She would pick the restaurant and supply the coupons and I would drive.  There was always a balance in the give and take. 
 I think the situation that cemented our relationship occurred after the symposium in 1978.  Florence Kamm, Merrian Merrifield,and Jan Kuhn put on the banquet show. They had planned this with Mrs. Bowen, but no one knew that.

The people in the audience included the president of the American Psychiatric Association. The show started with a number of clowns on stage and one female who began talking about how differentiation of self should be made a lot easier for people.  The clowns said they had a great way to help people become more differentiated not just over a weekend or several years, but in five minutes. They just needed someone from the audience to demonstrate.  Of course they choose Mrs. Bowen who promptly went up on the stage and sat on a stool. The clowns began to put make up on her, chanting about differentiation.   My impression was that the people in the audience were horrified.  The murmuring began about them touching Mrs. Bowen and joking about the very serious ideas of differentiation in front of all the distinguished people in the audience. What would these dignitaries think of the Family Center people? Several days later a letter arrived. Yes, Dr. Bowen said, the whole event had been a debacle and I should tear up all the photos I took of the evening and never let them see the light of day.

I figured that something was wrong, not with the photos, but with this person trying to control me and tell me what to do with my property.  
I thought it over and decided that here was a chance for me to separate from him, and be clear with her about who owns what.   Legally I knew the photos were mine.  Emotionally if the pictures belonged to anyone besides me, they belonged to the people in the photos.  I wrote to Bowen informing him I would take his upset seriously and figure out what to do, but I would not destroy negatives.   Since the faculty was upset, I thought it might be useful to take a vote among the clowns to see what they thought was the right thing to do. 

In addition I decided that I would need to see Mrs. Bowen without her husband there, to get a read on what she thought about these photos.

I made an appointment to meet with her and left the clinical conference early so I knew Dr. Bowen would be preoccupied.  

I was pleased that Mrs. Bowen was very low key and laughed about the photos. I told her some people wanted to protect her from these horrid photos.   She laughed and decided she wanted to keep copies for her self.  As I was starting to enjoy the moment I heard the car pull into the driveway.  She could see I was getting a little panicked but she didn’t flinch or protect me.   She watched as Dr. Bowen walked up the stairs into the room.  

He looked at the two of us.  I said something like “The pictures have come home to roost”.   That was that.

After that I think she knew that I was for her making up her mind as a person in her own right. And she knew I was probably not going to be obedient if it made no sense to me.   And that is how our relationship went.  

She never wanted me to leave the Family Center because she worried about the videos and liked knowing I was there to take care of them.  But time marches on for all of us.  Eventually she started looking at my grandchildren’s pictures and we talked of family and let be the worries about the tapes. 

This is not to say she did not get upset with me now and then.

A year ago I was taping an interview with Joann, Kathy Wiseman and Priscilla Friesen.  The tension was high and not everything was flowing well.  She had her back up about this and that.  While I was taping, Joann was rattling papers and I made the general statement that if people could be quiet it would make the filming go better.   I am sure I was a bit demanding but the papers stopped rattling.  I thought that was a good sign. Wrong.  When it was her turn to be filmed she said “I will rattle these papers if I so choose.”  I laughed and said, “Go ahead, no one is going to stop you.”
 And so it was that we interrupted one another’s anxious moments and in so doing created a most respectful and genuine relationship.

My last trip to see her was this September.  My friend Victoria and I took the beautiful drive out towards the mountains. Mrs. Bowen had left her home in June and moved into a long-term care facility near her daughter Kathleen.  The adjustment at 95 was difficult for her.  But we had a wonderful and upbeat visit.  Her family was worried about her being able to stay centered because she got so confused in her new place.  But that day with her old friends around she perked up.  She told me it would take a year for her to get used to living in this new place.  She did not have that year.

But that day we did have time. It was a fine day, and she took us around this lovely modern place and we sat and ate and gazed out to see the mountains of Virginia, talking of the old days and the challenges of getting someone to bring you a straw for the milk. I did not do very much interrupting.  I took some photos of Kathleen, Hal, Mrs. Bowen and Victoria.  Before I left I was able to give Mrs. Bowen a bit of a manicure.  As we were walking out the door she wanted us to help her move some pots.  Then she wanted to stay outside. There was some tension.  We had promised Kathleen to leave her inside. We walked to the car and waved the tension good-by.  Victoria watched to make sure she would go back in and she did, so we left with a good feeling about her chance to adapt.

There as nothing left unsaid, thankfully.   She was a staunch believer in me, trusting me with her husband, saying I helped him live a couple of extra years.  Who knows?  I did and do what I must and what I can.  I believe Bowen saved me from an awful burden of suffering ignorance about emotional systems and how they work and that helped my family, friends and clients too.   So what ever I did for Mrs. Bowen and Dr. Bowen it was a small enough favor to return.

But most of all, there are few times when I can make a genuine contact with another person and know they are there for me in some deep way no matter what.  Mrs. Bowen was one such very strong willed, unique and important person to me.  I am grateful for knowing her and will carry on her memory and celebrate her influence.

Clotilde Mauboussin (1931 – 2012)

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Mauboussin, Clotilde

Clotilde Mauboussin, 80, of Ithaca passed away peacefully on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at Longview. Mrs. Mauboussin was born May 29, 1931 in Oujda, Morocco, daughter of Antoine and Custodia Cavaco. She immigrated to the United States following her marriage to the late Jacques Mauboussin in 1958. Together, they moved to Ithaca where Clotilde became a homemaker who devoted her life to her family and grandchildren. A strong advocate of education, she volunteered at Immaculate Conception School teaching French for years. She was an active member of Immaculate Conception Parish and was known for always quietly helping those in need. She is survived by her children Marie-Lucile Mauboussin, Claire (Darin) Mauboussin Snyder, Michael (Michelle) Mauboussin and Anne (Robert) Leonhardt as well as her 11 grandchildren, Colette Mauboussin, Megan, Dylan and Jack Snyder, Andrew, Alex, Madeleine, Isabelle and Patrick Mauboussin and Peter and Julian Leonhardt and many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her husband of 48 years, Jacques Mauboussin, who passed on March 11, 2007 and by her sister, Lucile and her brothers, Antoine and Francois. A Mass of the Resurrection will be celebrated by Rev. Leo Reinhardt on Saturday, February 25th at 12:30 p.m. at the Immaculate Conception Church. Friends may call on Friday, February 24th from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Bangs Funeral Home. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in her name to the Immaculate Conception School, 320 West Buffalo Street, Ithaca, NY 14850-4193.

Eulogy  -  Clotilde Mauboussin  (1931-2012) by Andrea Schara

It is an honor to be here as Clotilde’s friend and as she would say, “the other grandmother”.  No words can capture her spirit.  Her life itself is the testimony to all she believed.  Once Michael and Michelle were engaged she wrote, in her beautiful handwriting, inviting me to dinner. They were in Washington for an award for running one of the best Mercedes dealerships in North America.

Perhaps you can imagine our first meeting and the hundred and one questions she had for me.  Her mind was very inquisitive; she was always looking for where our lives would intersect and how she could understand you through her own experience. When I arrived she met me with a welcoming smile and one kiss by the cheek.  I felt at ease and even comforted by her formal ways and European manners, reminding me of my early life with my grandparents where there were rules and expectations and great love was given in handshakes and smiles.

Our lives connected along two lines first the early losses, and second the education provided by the Catholic Church.  Her father died when she was 14, and her sister died when she was in her mid-20s, after suffering from TD and living in a sanitarium for many years.  Both of us were educated and “saved” by nuns who deeply believed in us.  Her grounding in the Catholic faith enabled her to both understand and overcome suffering.

Clotilde hoped that others would take the path she had found, when confronted by difficulty. Clotilde would speak of her mother as a mountain of strength telling of how she would walk 3 miles to stay with her daughter each night in the Sanatorium.  She did this for months.  Clotilde also walked that path.  She kept her father in her mind and spoke of him as having the soul of an artist.  He worked with marble, carving tombstones and baptismal fonts and she remember the look on his face when he touched the marble.

She was born in 1931 in Morocco. Her parents had left Portugal to find a better life, so she grew up as an outsider speaking Portuguese and learning French in the Catholic school. It was here she learned to embroider and found comfort in the highly organized atmosphere at school. If you can imagine life back then, where in her home there were no radios, no TVs, no video games and you went to school to have access to books.  The nuns not only gave her an education, but also helped her find a job. She had a teaching certificate and was able to find work as an assistant in the radiology department at the local hospital, which is where she met Jacques’s sister. It was through this relationship that she began to observe the kind of man Jacques was. She saw how he looked after his family, even noting that he went to get washing soap for his sister.  All of this qualified him as very possibly, a good husband.  Through hard work and some good luck they moved to the United States to begin again and learn a new language and try to understand another new culture.

It is wonderful to listen to both Jacques and Clotilde in their own voices, as they each recorded their own stories. Clotilde knew that life was not fair, but she believed there was a right way to do things. She did not blame or disparage people.  She listened to gossip but did not take sides.

I admired her amazing ability to be focused, be it in the detailed way she cooked gourmet meals or how she did her French crossword puzzles, and the way she drew out in detail nine generations of her family history. Her love shown through in keeping a highly organized home and she would iron anything that did not walk.  She said to me, “I learned to hold myself to high standards from my mother and I hope that will be a gift and not a burden to my children and grandchildren.”

In all the seriousness of a life well lived, she also had her funny sense of humor, whether chiding me about my own seriousness, or taking up the turkey feather from the Thanksgiving table and putting it in her hair, just so, beginning a new family tradition. How very important it is to keep alive her spirit and her memory, to strengthen us in the days and years to come.  I know she will appreciate it if there is less suffering and more joy in her memory and in our relationships with one another.

On my last visit to see her in January she was so pleased to go out to dinner with Marie at her friend’s house.  She made the sign of the cross to give her strength and when we returned to the home she said to me “I know the way from here and she did.”

Clotilde will remain with me encouraging me and teasing me if I get too serious in my faltering efforts to live life.   I can only say thank you Clotilde for all you have done.

Andrea….

 
Just as the strong current of a waterfall cannot be reversed, 
so the movement of the human life 
is also not  reversible. 
Buddha 
 

A Triangular Line Painting  by Anna Zarnecki, Mexico

 FOCUS ON RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN NEUROPTIMAL®, PALM SPRINGS, CA
February 20-22

Changes

Someone dear to you, someone you deeply care about, has fallen through the cracks in the mental health system.  The medical system has not been able to interrupt a downward spiral in the person’s life. If you are interested in how one person in a family might respond differently in a crisis, you may be interested in this story of how an older sister learns to manage self using family systems theory and NeurOptimal. (www.zengar.com) It is a story of learning to be more aware and objective about mental illness and how thoughtful relationships changing, throughout the family, can make a tremendous difference in enabling better functioning (for everyone, not just the symptomatic one). Overall it is a story of how one begins to redirect anxiety in a system.

It was April of 2006, a year after my uncle Jimmy had died at 93.  Jimmy was a wealthy and influential family leader.  My youngest brother, Drew, had worked for Jimmy for many years. He harbored a vague hope that Jimmy would leave him money to relieve severe financial and emotional pressures.  When this did not happen, Drew began to imagine ways out of his problems.  He started to play golf in the parking lot at work and announced that he was Arnold Palmer’s caddy.  People get fearful when others behave in bizarre ways.

Family members called me since this kind of event had happened before. I lived eight hours away.  As I thought about a plan that might work to manage the spreading fears, I began to review the memories of emotional storms in the past and how my family had coped over the generations. The first memory was of my father’s challenges and how the inability to cope with his problems led to my mother’s increasing use of alcohol.

After WW II both he and my mother drank as a way to manage the memories of the war and the suffering. One hot August night in 1952 in Florida, my parents were arrested and I (age ten), along with my two younger brothers Butch and Drew (ages almost two and eight) were placed in an orphanage for three days.  As soon as my maternal grandparents could, they came to Florida and adopted the three of us.

Perhaps as you read this you will keep in mind that this is not just one person’s family story. This story is similar to the stories of many people whose parents were negatively influenced by war or other traumatic events.  Few families are able to manage the transmission of intense anxiety from one generation to the next that comes with the loss of both parents from PTSD or other symptoms. There has been increasing interest and research on the transmission of these kinds of problems from one generation to the next since the Vietnam War. (See references at the end of this article)

But let’s return to the lessons learned in this story.  My maternal grandparents were well off financially but intellectually didn’t have the first idea about how to talk about the downward spiral of my parents. They did what most people do reflexively. They refused to allow our parents to see us.  They supported my mother financially, asking only that she not try to see her children. She then moved to the West Coast.   My father was allowed infrequent visits while he tried to recover his functioning in the middle of his family in a nearby city.  At times he worked for his younger brother, Jimmy.  His functioning was spotty until his death in 1967 at a state hospital.

On the surface, during these early years, all of us functioned without major problems. Then, as my maternal grandmother approached her own death, perhaps not shockingly my two brothers were both diagnosed as manic-depressive. At that time I was married with two young children.  One year later, in 1974, I was divorced and the older of my two brothers, Butch, was hospitalized. It was one year after our maternal grandmother had died and three days before our mother died.

It was the first time I had seen someone who really believed he was Christ.   Butch was admitted to the nearby hospital and promptly escaped. The doctors told me he was a “danger to himself and others” and I must find him and bring him back. Being a good oldest sister I did just that.

Someday I would like to make a movie about this event.   It was ludicrous.  The serious sister (me) tries to return her brother to the hospital, but ends up chasing him around airports and was seen as a stalker by the local police. I would call the movie Seriously Crazy, as the more crazy some get, the more serious everyone else becomes.

The closeness of the family deaths and my brother’s hospitalization, and my inability to manage the situation, really got my attention.  I was ignorant.  I realized that it was not just my brother who had a problem.  It was all of us.  Clearly we were all connected or disconnected and fear ran the show.  People were tied to one another and anxiety was flowing through the group and no one knew what to do or really what the essential problem was.  I could only try to manage the incredible stress and changes in the family until I could learn more.

Having only two years of college and no real career path at the time, I choose to work at a psychiatric hospital to understand what could be going on that leads to such problems. Eventually I met Dr. Murray Bowen, learned about his Family Systems Theory and later became involved in biofeedback and neurofeedback.

Over the following thirty plus years since 1976, I saw that when a family has a crisis, people get fearful and mad, demanding that the other behave their way.  The result is that the downward spiral intensifies.  The frustration and blaming increases until people cut off from one another and all become more isolated and symptomatic.

Anything one person can do to redirect the anxiety away from the person “with the problem” is useful.  To do this requires that one person enter into relationship with the person who is symptomatic and those surrounding him or her.  Of course to do this one has to be prepared to manage a great deal of frustrated and chaotic energy. One has to be willing to be blamed and accept the criticism with a smile about how they’re handling the situation. None of us is perfect and there is little use in defending self. There will be no love and approval for taking a position for self in an anxious family.

Preparing and recovering from relationship disruptions and preparing to mange self with anxious others is how NeurOptimal has been useful to family, my clients and me.   As a result of my family’s effort with my brother Drew (more on that in a minute), eleven people in my extended family have also used neurofeedback and my godson, Dominic Eitt, has even become a trainer.

Now back to 2006 and the effort that many people in the family were able to make in being more thoughtful about relating well to my brother Drew and his wife Margie.

My initial idea was to use my cousin’s farm in Fredericksburg as a central meeting place.  It was two hours away from Drew and six hours from me.  We could meet once a month and have fun and talk about family issues and all of us could do the training with  NeurOptimal. My cousin Liz and her husband Mark generously agreed to my inviting my brother and his wife to her farm (the Zen Farm) every month in order to continue to talk about life’s little problems. Liz is also a polarity therapist and has a studio on the farm and is my closest extended family member. She had also studied Bowen theory and we had made many trips to get to know people in our extended family. Other family members were willing to donate money to the effort to enable Drew and Margie to begin again.  With this family support I was ready to approach Drew and Margie with a deal.

I went to Williamsburg where Drew was living in a very chaotic house with an eviction notice on the door.  Drew told me “the love boat was sinking.” He said that everything he had tried to do for his wife and family had turned to nothing, he had lost his job and the sheriff was coming to evict them.  Drew was ready to make a deal.

I had talked with various members family members about how they could lend Drew a hand if Drew and his wife were willing to take some difficult steps. I offered him a 50-50 deal. “I need you to do some difficult things and in return I will do some difficult things that might just be useful to you.”

The deal involved moving out of their house, putting their things in storage and arranging for Drew to have his teeth fixed, which were in bad shape.  My brother Butch and I arranged for Drew and his wife to buy a trailer and move in.  We were able to offer them limited financial support for six months while they applied for disability payments.  I would return each month and they were asked to travel to our cousins Liz’s farm and spend the night. Liz is the same age as Drew and they were close as youngsters so he and Margie agreed to the deal.

Yes, there was tension in the air and a lot of issues had to be put on the table and clarified. The main issue for me was how to be a more separate self and yet stay connected in order to lend a hand to my brother and his wife, Margie.  This was not an easy time.  From May to August 2006 we met at the Zen Farm and a bit of progress was made. However the drugs he was on had side effects.  Drew began to develop more Parkinson’s like symptoms.

During these four months that we were meeting at the Farm, Drew made three trips to the emergency room and had three short-term hospitalizations.  His condition continued to deteriorate until finally he was unable to eat or bathe. His wife could no longer take care of him and a family member arranged for him to be hospitalized in the same state hospital in which his father had died.

During his six weeks in the state hospital, my brother’s Parkinson’s like symptoms increased and he lost over thirty pounds. When they put him on a suicide prevention watch I talked to his wife about asking the director to release him into an after care program designed by his family.

The letter stated a few of the reasons he was not doing well at the hospital including:  1) his fear of being in the same hospital where his father had died, and 2) his reaction to antipsychotic medication.  We described the treatment program that our family was willing to implement.

The Director agreed to release him and he came back to the Zen Farm for an after care program.  I knew that Drew could die. He was not stable. But I thought it was a better family story that he die at the Zen Farm than in the state hospital.  Despite the decision, I was nervous and did a lot of NeurOptimal training.

I stayed with him at Liz and Mark’s farm for a week. People in the community were also invited to stay with Drew because he required 24-hour care.  Drew was also asked to see a local physician and a local therapist.  After the first week he was to return to his home for a few days and then come back to the Farm for another week.  This was to be followed by monthly meetings with dinner and an overnight stay.

The goals were for each of us were to:

1)    Diminish our fears in relating to my brother;

2)    Put no direct demands on Drew to function in any particular way, other than to take or be given a daily shower;

3)    Provide good food, (which by the way he never refused);

4)    Maintain a focus on not knowing what my brother should be doing but only what we observed him do;

5)    Write down what seemed to work in having more positive interactions and to put any ideas, observations or questions in a journal, which was available for all to see; and

6)    Do neurofeedback training each day.

After Drew’s first neurofeedback session, which lasted about three minutes, my brother stopped shaking.  I was amazed and decided to buy a video camera to tape the interactions and summaries of these family gatherings.

The meetings still continue several times a year.  The intense symptoms in my brother have not returned. His wife has had more physical symptoms but overall the two of them have adjusted well in their new community.  The family has increased their contact with Drew and he has enjoyed being with them.

Part of what I learned and what people can see in the videotapes, is the usefulness of humor and paradox in breaking up old patterns. There were difficult conversations which were needed, and after any intense conversations, all would relax using NeurOptimal.

Changes in Extended Family: Many people in the extended family were able to visit and support my bother.  This was a major change in family patterns.  Five family members offered money to help support him until he qualified for the disability payments. People who had been afraid of him when he was in a manic episode began to have confidence in Drew and be in better contact with him. It is interesting that the families who made contact with Drew have had fewer symptoms than those families who have avoided making contact with him.

There is no doubt that the years of my being in better contact with people in my family helped create an environment in which such relationship changes could occur.  I am grateful for all the people who lent a hand in this family crisis. There have been no further hospitalizations and there is documented improvement in my brother’s cognitive and affective functioning.

Observations and Operating Principles:

1. Being with family members who are able to manage self, and to reduce the blaming of others, allows people who are suffering to increase their functioning.
2. Activating the relationship system around the person can offer more resources to the person. People can be critical but will often settle down and be willing to participate.
3. One has to be able to manage the initial upset in those you contact with your view of the story, because your view probably does not fit with how they have seen the problems.
4. By defining what one will or will not do, others can consider their own participation without as much pressure.
5. Using NeurOptimal provides an opportunity for the brain to increase its resilience during challenging times.
6. Finding ways to break up relationship patterns without controlling others, often requires the ability to think paradoxically and to use psychological reversals.
7. Increasing one’s ability to remain positive, even if people are negative towards you.
8. Continuing to see the big picture while understanding and accepting one’s part in any family problems.

 Implications for Society:

Currently the focus in the helping and therapeutic professions is on treating individuals who have symptoms, blinding the family itself from understanding how to see what constitutes and promotes effective change in the family as a whole.  Does diagnosing people work or does it simply add to the problems?

Diagnosing an individual and then turning the situation over to professionals suggests that families cannot participate and adapt to the illness of a family member. When mental illness or other serious symptoms appear, often family members feel helpless.  People have a hard time understanding how the development of symptoms in one person may be an instinctive way for the family as whole to survive.

If family members understand a systems way of seeing symptoms, cause and effect thinking is put aside.  Those who are able and willing can move towards the person with symptoms, in a disciplined way. When this change happens, more people in the family absorb the overall anxiety and that anxiety is not left to reside in one person with symptoms, the “identified patient”.

As long as people are reacting as they were emotionally programmed that “the problem is in the weak person”, there is less opportunity for the whole group to pull up its’ functioning. Thinking about others as problems, and self as having no part in the problems, leads to further isolation, and increases the family’s blindness to the reality of the way it is acting as a group.  We are mostly blind to the function of putting the blame on the weaker ones.

Blame functions to promote the overall survival of a few well-functioning people but increases the blindness and the suffering of the weaker ones. The long-term problem is that an “other focus” impacts the way we see problems in every aspect of our life as family members and in our communities.

If this one case study has implications for further research, then future pilot programs would be designed that include family members participating in understanding “systems” and the individuals would use NeurOptimal training to focus more on strengthening self.  This would be a new paradigm for family members and a major shift in how mental illness is understood.

New knowledge spreads slowly, but if these ideas are useful then time alone is the biggest factor in changing our current focus on diagnosing and treating one person rather than offering training for the family as a whole.

There are still many questions about how aware people are of the nature of their interactions with others. The brain itself has a great many blind spots and deeply ingrained emotional responses.   But it is possible for families to acquire a deeper understanding of the family as a unit and, at the same time, increase their potential for mind-body integration, strengthening their ability to cope and adapt.

Since 2006, my family’s efforts with my brother and his wife has provided a platform for others to begin such programs. One is now in central Vermont, Hanna’s House and the other is taking place in Fredericksburg, Virginia at the Zen Farm. Many other families are now participating in a version of the program begun for Drew and Margie and their family.  zenfarm.com/Zen_Farm/Zen_Farm.html

References:

1)    Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, 1977

2)    Jordan, B. K., Marmar, C. B., Fairbank, J. A., Schlenger, W. E., Kulka, R. A., Hough, R. L., et al. (1992). Problems in families of male Vietnam veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 60, 916-926.

3)    Cosgrove, L., Brady, M. E., & Peck, P. (1995). PTSD and the family: Secondary traumatization. In D. K. Rhoades, M. R. Leaveck, & J. C. Hudson (Eds.), The legacy of Vietnam veterans and their families: Survivors of war: catalysts for change (pp. 38-49). Washington: Agent Orange Class Assistance Program.

4)    Harkness, L. (1993). Transgenerational transmission of war-related trauma. In J. P. Wilson & B. Raphael (Eds.), International handbook of traumatic stress syndromes (pp. 635-643). New York: Plenum Press.

5)    Parsons, J., Kehle, T. J., & Owen, S. V. (1990). Incidence of behavior problems among children of Vietnam War veterans. School Psychology International, 11, 253-259.

6)    Rosenheck, R., & Fontana, A. (1998). Transgenerational effects of abusive violence on the children of Vietnam combat veterans. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 11, 731-742.

7)    Dansby, V. S., & Marinelli, R. P. (1999). Adolescent children of Vietnam combat veteran fathers: A population at risk. Journal of Adolescence, 22, 329-340.

8)    Kellerman, N. (2001). Psychopathology in children of Holocaust survivors: A review of the research literature. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 38, 36-46.

9)    Ancharoff, M. R., Munroe, J. F., & Fisher, L. M. (1998). The legacy of combat trauma: Clinical implications of intergenerational transmission. In Y. Danieli (Ed.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (pp. 257-275). New York: Plenum Press.

10) Harkness, L. (1991). The effect of combat-related PTSD on children. National Center for PTSD Clinical Quarterly, 2(1).

Happy 99th Birthday to Murray Bowen, MD (1913-1990)

On this anniversary of his birthday, I wanted to acknowledge my gratitude for being able to have a relationship with Dr. Bowen for the last fourteen years of his life.  I had both the opportunity to study Bowen theory and to watch and interact with Dr. Bowen.  Towards the end of his life Dr. Bowen gave his theory to the world to do with as we might. The theory is a gift to us and people are free to interpret it as they choose.  The theory contains as impersonal as possible observations about how Bowen saw human behavior.  (I have added a time line of the development of the theory at the end of this piece.

People read his book, watch his videos and find there is a different way to think about the human condition.  Bowen enabled us to see how it is we are so very sensitive to one another. How we are often being hurt by or hurting the ones we love the most.  Bowen pointed to the difficult ways of becoming more of a self. He would joke about having to give up love and approval. As you will see below I consider my relationship with Dr. Bowen a challenging gift, enabling me to observe and question just how relationships function.

One of Bowen’s fundamental contributions was his understanding of the complexities of relationships that are imbedded in an ancient emotional system. A gift from our primordial ancestors,  the emotional system, among other functions, promotes the shifting of anxiety from one member to another.  Some claim this is the origin of power and scapegoating in social units. Bowen did not use these kinds of words because he preferred biological explanations for human behavior.

Relationship alliances are often beyond words to explain and understand.  Plus there are painful, exasperating limits in communicating any deep understanding of one another, but hopefully that doesn’t stop us from making the effort to tell our more personal “story”. Bowen was a complex man with many different kinds of relationships.  If you read his letters to people you will find a constant and very personal effort to describe relationship binds.  There are probably a thousand different views of the man and perhaps just as many of his theory.

Bowen’s book, Family Therapy In Clinical Practice (FTCP), presents his observations of emotional process in his and others families.   It takes time to deeply understand and appreciate his very different description of the human condition that Bowen offers as contrasted to the “conventional wisdom” of the time.   The following are a few snippets and stories about Bowen that I thought about around his birthday.

Murray Bowen, M.D, was my mentor and I was his apprentice. In an effort to learn all there was to know about families I found a job in a psychiatric hospital, read about and was fortunately able to meet Bowen.  I was intrigued by Bowen’s ideas and motivated to learn more to get myself out of personal problems.” The motivation was to get myself out of personal problems.  My problems were not that different than most people face, including but not limited to the family reaction to death and the surrounding chaos that ensued.  One thing I knew even before meeting Dr. Bowen was that I had been trained from birth on to look after others and that I was not up to the job.

After reading Bowen’s work, meeting him and signing up for his courses, I noticed that he had a strange way of dealing with people. They would speak positively to him and he would push them away.  Once he saw me watching him and came over and pointed out a few couples to me and asked me,  “Who’s in charge?  “What is it costing them to get along with each other?”  I couldn’t answer as to the cost but I could see one person seemed to be more “in charge”.

By observing Bowen I saw a very different way to interact with people. After reading Bowen’s early paper, On the Differentiation of Self, (FTCP: Pages 468- 528), I understood his focus on becoming a better observer which leads to the eventual ability to separate a self while staying connected.   Bowen wrote “I believe that that the family therapist usually has the same problems in his own family that are present in families he sees professionally, and that he has a responsibility to define himself in his own family if he is to function adequately in his professional work.”   (FTCP: Page 468) What could make more common sense?

Bowen’s paper was written three years after he made a professional presentation on his effort to be a more separate individual and relate to each individual in his family.  The family of a family therapist as he noted has many of the same emotional mechanisms that are present in any family: superficial relationships, projection, triangling and cut-off to name just a few.  Therefore his plan was to use his family story as a way to illustrate the differences between actions based on his theoretical understanding of the emotional system vs. that of other theories like psychoanalysis. In essence he was also prepared to separate from the family of family therapists as he had done in his own family. One example of how he did this was when Dr. Carl Whitaker was asked to comment on Bowen’s presentation and he said “… Dr. Bowen, I wish I were your brother!”  Dr. Bowen’s response: “Ackerman is.” (FTCP: Page 524)

Bowen went on to say, “Differentiation begins when one family member begins to more clearly define and openly state his own inner life principles and convictions.” ( FTCP: Page) 437 “An anxious group is one in which members of the group are isolated from each other and communication between members is in underground gossip. Anything that improves communication will reduce the tension, as an initial step to more defined efforts to modify the system.” (FTCP: Page 436 )

Being more defined can take years. It can take a long time to be confident in self’s observations and beliefs when others oppose your actions.   Differentiation is a hard process because people are stuck in relationship habits that sustain distance and conflict.  When one person changes, people object but eventually it helps the system reorganize. With a differentiated head, there is no pressure on others to change but there is internal pressure to stand for your own perceptions and beliefs.  The greatest challenge is to observe others without one’s own bias, preconceived ideas, feelings, and the gossip in the system.  Being objective about others is a work out. It does not come naturally. Reacting to others and to differences comes naturally.

Often people can hear a few things that make sense about separating out a more mature self from the automatic ways we react to one another.  People would say, “Dr. Bowen what you said makes so much sense.”  And Bowen would respond, “Use it if you like, but it could mess up your little old head.”

A southern man, Bowen had a twinkle in his eye and a way of using both thinking and emotion to push and challenge one and all with whom he came in contact.  The paradox, the interruptions, the confusion and the bottom-line: you are responsible for how you use me, and I will be responsible for challenging you. Everyone was fair game, everyone a new research project. That is how I see him still.

Bowen knew how to convey a different viewpoint about the confusion we all have.  He was an advocate of life-long learning. By telling people they were risking it all in falling into pretend thinking, and seeking love and approval, he alienated some.  He used to say  “I go and give a talk and 49% of the people think I am crazy, 49% think its interesting and never give it another thought and 2% want to know more.  Of the 2%, half give up along the way. “

People would say,  “Dr. Bowen I need to take your course so I can get a certificate so I can make it in the world out there.”   He would laugh and say,  “Good luck to you,” and advise they go elsewhere.   He picked up on ways of challenging people to think for self.

If you had the courage to speak to him then you could expect a million questions from him like how come you function the way you do? Who got you to think this or that way? How much were you “snookered” by your own unexamined beliefs and the people who claimed to love you? How did you know your compass worked? What do you do to get along with your boss? What made you choose those shoes or that dress?

If you could take the heat then you might get to listen to the homespun tales from his life in Waverly, Tennessee, his time in medical school, the Army, and what he saw and learned at Menninger as he slowly discovered he needed a better theory about how humans functioned.   If you stuck around you might get interested in science or physiology or germs or cancer or your own functioning or why you felt the need to save or quit your marriage, your kids or even the world.

Somehow Bowen was able to always see life as a fantastic puzzle.  He would come to meetings saying he was ready to die, and then start telling us about some insight he gained from the shuttle launch or a football game or his fascination with the jumping genes, or the social behavior of chimps.  All  this and more appeared to be ways of both keeping his mind going and keeping his own intellectual space in the group.  If you said stuff he thought was silly he would pound the table. He might dismiss your effort.  He might say you will make it in another lifetime.  He manifested a genuine curiosity in understanding how living systems functioned.  For most of his  life and still today,  Bowen theory is ignored by the dominant “medical model” and psychiatry, therefore professionally he was isolated and marginalized and was “messed with” by his peers, including those who became disciples and those who dismissed him and his theory.

As one who made mistake after mistake but still dared to speak to him I was able to learn a great deal and he learned something as well or so he said.  This is how Bowen was.  He would interrupt my way of thinking and being, challenging and watching to see if I recovered.

Bowen was constantly looking at the part he played in relationships.  Below is a personal communication from Catherin Rakow about her research on Bowen’s original papers at the National Institute of Mental Health.

“Bowen thought he played some part in all problems.   This goes back to his Menninger years.  It was one of the observations of people in a regressed state.   They hear a casual comment as a command or directive, they can get symptomatic in an unpredictable environment, and any thing close to

mothering can set off symptoms.   Bowen’s “A Psychological Formulation of Schizophrenia” article lays this out including how he used these observations to manage himself.”   

One person working to be a bit more separate in a social system is best seen in this observation by Stanley Milgram, who noted the following.   “With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Those, who are in everyday life are responsible and decent, were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts.

It may be that we are puppets—puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”

There are many steps in becoming a more aware person.  One way to grow a stronger self is to see what it takes for any of us to be more separate with those in our own family.  To be more separate implies that each person is a bit more responsible for self.

When there is less blaming and confusion, people are able to be more objective, less reactive, and to see more about how problems come to be over the generations, and how to change one’s part in the system. In this way the system changes.   One person at a time begins to alter the way he/she sees the problem.

It is in our families that we have the opportunity to learn and understand social pressure and take on the challenges of defining a self.   In becoming more objective and aware of how we participate in social systems, we may even be able to see that we are not that different from ants or gibbons.  We all influence others, and are influenced by others.   Dr. Bowen saw how courageous individuals can alter the reactivity in relationships, altering lives and leading to deeper understanding of one another and of the life force itself. These are the gifts he left for all of us to find.

Andrea Schara with Dr. Bowen,  September 1985 Milwaukee

photo by Kathy Mcabe

TIMELINE FOR DEVELOPMENT OF BOWEN THEORY :

Prepared by Catherine M. Rakow, MSW

January 28, 2012

Sept. 1937  Bowen finishes four years of medical school at University of Tennessee.[1]

1946             Menninger School of Psychiatry opens and Bowen begins work at Menninger.

1940′s          “The most important change in the 1940’s was a solitary effort to create a more scientific theory of human adaptation.”[2]

1947             ”In about 1947, a library study was started to discover how each professional discipline had used science in its basic formulations.”[3]

1948-1954     “in addition to the other programs, a form of anaclitic therapy was started for a series of severely impaired patients whose families lived at a distance.  Theoretically, schizophrenia was considered the result of maternal deprivation in infancy and early childhood… From this experience came new psychotherapeutic principles and techniques used in the effort to resolve the symbiotic attachments, and in the other psychotherapy programs.  The difficulty in resolving the symbiotic attachments led to a new approach, the final step in this eight-year evolutionary process.  The final stage was to discourage intense relationships with any family member, to leave the intensity of the process within the family, and to relate peripherally and supportively to various members of the family unit.”[4]

1948             Bowen becomes a candidate in psychoanalysis.[5]

1949-1954 “Beginning in about 1949 I began an informal research study in which I began seeing multiple members of the same family (patient had schizophrenia) in individual psychotherapy.”[6]

1951             “Began Jan 1951-invited mother to come for extended visit-spend all day with patient…Experience led to suggestion that a section of hospital be set aside for mother and other relatives to live in hospital with patient.[7]

By 1952       Bowen had begun to include some fathers in his study but the main focus was on the mother/child symbiosis.

July 1953     NIMH Clinical Center opened.[8]

1954             “In 1954, the hypothesis from the previous work was incorporated into a formal research study in which schizophrenic patients and their mothers lived ‘in residence’ on a psychiatric research ward.  Each patient and each mother had individual psychotherapy.”[9]

Dec. 1954    ‑‑”project to check belief that presence of the mother is beneficial to the treatment of schizophrenia”[10]

1954‑1959 “First important nodal point in the development of the theory…research study…”  “live‑in project source of a wealth of new facts about schizophrenia.[11]

1955             Live-in project–”…led to the development of a method of family therapy.”11

With admission of whole families—parents required to be responsible for patient.

“The effort to investigate the three generation idea began in 1955 with the statement of our consultant, Dr. Lewis Hill that it requires three generations for schizophrenia to develop.”[12]

Feb. 1955    Bowen writes saying he is “itching to try a different kind of ward communication system.  For instance one could begin by never having a meeting between staff members in which patients were not invited or welcome.”

August 1955          “discussing the plans for also including fathers in our ‘mother-daughter’ studies in schizophrenia”.^[13]  By August 9 the patient group meeting is operating.

Sept.  1955 “Beneath the social organization, man is still an animal with basic patterns shared with or evolved from lower forms…“… science, which is really the conversion of the unknown to the known” [14]

Dec. 1955    –”A shift from seeing schizophrenia as a process between mother and patient or as an illness within the patient influenced by the mother to an orientation of seeing schizophrenia as the manifestation of a distraught family that becomes focused in one individual.”[15]

1955‑1956 “…in order to deal with this wealth of new clues, I revived my background thinking from the 1940’s about the use of discrepant thinking models, and also the ‘far out’ hunches about the biological ‘animal in man.’”[16]

January 1956         “The (unit) meetings were adapted to family therapy immediately after admission of the first father, mother, patient family.”  ^[17] After six months there was no doubt but the family therapy would be continued.

June 56         “…we have used the term ‘family psychotherapy’ for this method in which all family members attend all the family meetings together, and which is designed as a method to replace individual psychotherapy.”[18]

1956             “informal outpatient studies of less severe forms of emotional illness”[19]

“It was the comparison of the intense patterns in schizophrenia with the less intense patterns in others that eventually became the basis for the theory.“19

“By 1956, I knew within me, that the theory contained the necessary variables to become an accepted science in the future.”[20]

After 1956  “After 1956, my main effort was to conceptualize the research findings in terms that would be understood by theorists who knew biology and evolution.”[21]

March 1957            “the first national meeting for papers devoted to the family.”[22]  “.In my paper I referred to the ‘family psychotherapy’ used in my research since late 1955.  I believe that may have been the first time the term was used in a national meeting.”^[23]

August1957           Extensive three generation family history on second family admitted to the research compiled into family diagram.

Sept. 1958  “The major work of the section during the year has focused on two main areas.  One is the area of ‘the family as a unit’ and the other is ‘family psychotherapy.’…After working at this problem for three years, we have been going in the direction of some kind of a system that deals with the ‘function’’of a person in the family rather than the static situation implied with our present diagnostic labels.”[24]

June 1959   Family live-in project terminated.

1959             “moved to Georgetown University Medical Center, where the main focus was on less severe emotional problems”.

1959‑1962 “detailed multi‑generational research was carried out with a few families,                                           including one case in considerable detail going back more than 300 years.”[25]

During 1960’s       “there were increasing comments about emotional patterns in society being the same as the emotional patterns we had come to know so well in families…The connecting link came much closer for me in the period.”

After 1961   “..the concept of ‘sibling position’ was used with every family after 1961.”[26]

about 61-62           “…I began to perfect the concept of ‘triangles’ so well that the concept could be used predictably in the clinical situation…People behave the same in a triangle whether they are in the family or outside the             family….Now I could know predictably that emotional patterns in larger social and work systems followed identical patterns as those in the family situation but a trustworthy connecting link with society was still missing.  The use of the term ‘systems’ which began in the early 1960’s was a help in seeing the specific ways that smaller systems fitted into larger and larger systems and the ways the smaller system could influence the larger, and the obverse.”[27]

1960‑1965 “…the six interlocking concepts of Family Systems Theory were developed in detail.”25

Late 1960’s            “In the late 1960’s I began to shift toward the term SYSTEMS THERAPY which is more accurate theoretically than either Family Psychotherapy or Family Therapy, but more inconsistent with the concept ‘therapy.’”[28]

1974             Societal emotional process added as new concept to the total theory.[29]

1974             “…changed the name of this theory to Bowen Family Systems Theory or…Bowen Theory.”29

1975             Emotional cut-off added as a new concept to the theory.

Feedback on Two Days of Neurofeedback (www.Zengar.com), Training at Western Pennsylvania Family Center (www.wpfc.net)

As we start this New Year I wanted to bring you some cheerful news of how neurofeedback training in the context of Bowen theory was introduced, with positive results, to several people in Pittsburgh. I was able to offer these sessions due to the interest, perseverance and work of Catherine Rakow. She was supported by Jim Smith, the current director of WPFC.  People were offered two sessions a day, or even four sessions over two days, so they could experience intensive training. Perhaps it is like increasing the time you spend at the gym or in my case, at hot yoga.  One difference, however, is at this gym you simply calm down to become mentally stronger.  By calming down one is able to better observe the difference between one’s feelings and one’s thinking.

Bowen wrote in the book Family Evaluation – ” The human is the first form of life that has been able to observe the feeling process with his intellect.  Thus far there are definite characteristics of those who can do this readily, and those who are a few years slower. The name of that is differentiation of self.  Everyone can do that when they are more motivated to do it for themselves rather than when they are dependent on others. There is some evidence that the human can determine the functioning of his own emotional system through the control of his own emotionality. It goes in the direction of implying that the human can control his own evolution thought the control of his own emotional system.” (Pages 385-386)

The people in the Pittsburgh group are among my earliest colleagues.  Back in the eighties I drove Dr. Bowen to conferences sponsored by the WPFC.  I’ve constantly found the people there courageous and forward thinking, perhaps influenced by the founder of the Western Pennsylvania Family Center, Paulina G. McCullough.  Among other firsts, Paulina was one of the first people to work with Murray Bowen at Georgetown University back in the sixties, and the first to start a network program in Family Systems Theory, despite Bowen himself being dubious about the chances for the network’s success.

The main goal of the neurofeedback sessions was to give people enough of an experience on the equipment to see if neurofeedback was useful to them. There are many ways to manage self and control anxiety. Neurofeedback is one more tool for people who believe in the mind-body connection. The training allows your brain to find more comfortable electrical pathways through a slight interruption in the old patterns.  When an interruption occurs, the music stops momentarily, alerting us to a change.  The change is noted and we relax, as there is nothing to fear.

Over time the training allows for increasing diversity and coherence to appear in the brain. It’s as though the software is designed to bring an individual “back to the present”, to relax and experience increasing comfort. This neurofeedback system is not diagnostic. Training is the same whether the individual’s focus is on sports performance or just relaxing.

From a family systems perspective, I believe that it is accurate to hypothesize that the brain wave patterns in a family are mutually influencing one another. This keeps the anxiety between family members highly correlated.   So when there is a change in one person that can be sustained over time, this change in one individual allows for slight changes in the way several people in the family relate to one another.

The training can produce slow changes, similar to the way one changes by working out at a gym. When one person in the family increases his or her flexibility, others in the family can be impacted.  The goal is to alter or slow down participation in the automatic way we relate to one another.   Any increase in self-focus can impact the reactivity in one’s important relationships.

After the two days we sent out the following questions to the participants, looking for some feedback about the usefulness of the two days of training. All of the participants in the neurofeedback sessions have been clinicians using Bowen Theory and/or have known about Bowen Theory for years.

QUESTIONS SENT TO PARTICIPANTS

It would be helpful to me as the organizer, and to Andrea as the coach, if you would send along some of your afterthoughts on the experience of this weekend in these areas: 
1) the experience of using neurofeedback, 
2) the lunch time discussions, 
3) any thoughts or interests for the future.  

Highlights from various participants:

1)   One reported experiencing a shifting perception of time;

2)   Another reported reorganizing an office that had been on the “perhaps I will do it later” list;

3)   An individual with PTSD reported being able to have a calm couple of days;

4)    The swelling in the hand of one individual was reduced;

5)   A mother was able to let her son talk about how he would deal with his issues without her getting involved.

6)   And Rebecca Blackwood, another participant, wrote up her experience for a blog and offered to make her thoughts available here.

Personal Blog

The day after the brainwave training, I did write a post for my private blog (for family/friends). I thought I’d pass along what I wrote. Also, I’m wondering if anyone stepped up to purchase the software/technology for Pittsburgh? I would love to do it again!

Yesterday, I had my first brainwave training session.   How many times in our lives do we get to do that on a Sunday afternoon?!?

The sessions took place at the Western Pennsylvania Family Center. Several of the people getting the brainwave training sessions gathered together for lunch yesterday and we were able to discuss questions and get more information.

The brainwave coach was Andrea Schara.   She came up from Washington D.C. for a couple of days.   As an aside, she also keeps an informative and inspirational blog called Ideas to Action: How Understanding Your Family System Can Change Your Life. I immediately felt comfortable around Andrea.  She said that she is 70 years old, she has a loud, contagious laugh and goodness, she knows a lot. She studied at the Georgetown Bowen Center and also worked there for many years. Bowen family systems theory is what I am studying in my supervision with Wendy, as I work toward getting the clinical license of social work.

So, back to the brainwave training. The equipment that Andrea used is the Zengar Neuroptimal Brain-Training Technology and software. From the Zengar website:

“Through a series of sessions with the NeurOptimal® brain training system, your brain reorganizes itself and functions more effectively. When your brain functions efficiently, you feel more integrated and whole and your body functions better. After training with NeurOptimal® many people experience less stress, greater flow, improved academic, athletic, creative and work performance as well as more confidence and joy. Many bodily complaints drop away.”

A helpful comparison that Andrea made is to picture learning how to ride a bike. Our body has a way of figuring out how to balance and keep moving as we ride a bike. It is not like we have to cognitively tell ourselves, lean right, now left, keep moving. Instead, our body knows how to wire itself to be able to ride the bike. Similarly, when our brain is being monitored and we are able to observe what is happening, our brain can begin to automatically reorganize and balance itself.   We don’t have to say, “stop thinking those thoughts, or slow down”.   We can instead utilize the technology to let our brains do this on its own. The steps that occurred in my session (again from the Zengar website):

1. Sit in a comfortable chair;
2. Trainer places sensors on me;
3. Trainer records a baseline of my brain “activity”;
4. Training session starts;
5. I totally relax, listen to music or watch a movie;
6. Training ends and Trainer may record a second baseline;
7. Trainer removes sensors;
8. Discussion.

During the session, there was new-agey kind of music playing and I also had the option to watch visual representations of what was happening in my brain during the session. She and I noticed that my left brain (logical side) was way more dominant at the beginning of the training. Eventually, the right brain became a bit more active and the two sides of my brain began to “dance”, as she called it. Absolutely fascinating.

I had a variety of thoughts while in the session:

“Am I doing this right?”

“Relax”

“I wonder how other people’s brainwaves compare to mine”

“Take a deep breath”

“Am I doing this right?”

Andrea kept pointing out that similar to Bowen theory, the goal is to become an observer, to be neutral, to be aware, not to get answers and to judge. This is difficult to do.

Andrea took a baseline screening before and after the session. My pre-screening indicated that I had almost no alpha and was pretty jagged. My post screening had alpha* present and was much calmer and smoother.

Other interesting information that I’m taking away from this experience:

·                *What is alpha? From Andrea’s Blog: “Alpha states appear to re-tune the mind by calming the body and allowing the mind to be free.” People with drug addiction often do not have alpha available.  This is one reason they are constantly seeking a substance to create a calmer state in their brains.

·                Children with Attention Deficit Disorder have slower brainwaves, which is why they often appear hyper.  They have to quickly interact with the world, to wake up, because their brains are moving too slowly. This is why they are prescribed stimulants, which strangely slows down their interactions with the world because the “drugs” speed up their brains. I hope I’m describing this correctly…I started taking notes after she had already explained this concept.

·                When we spend time with small children, we tend to sync our brainwaves with their slower moving brain waves.  This is one reason we often get tired and drained after spending time with small children.  We are slowing down towards sleep.  Interestingly, television can influence our brainwaves the same way. This may be a reason why when parents stick their kids in front of a television, they slow down.  Interesting, but also a bit scary!

·                The brainwave training session can be compared to meditation. The difference is that you are able to see a visual representation of how the electrical energy in your brain is relaxing by seeing itself.

·                During the session, I asked Andrea how other people’s brainwaves compare to mine and she wondered if I often compare myself to others.  She asked if I have an older sister, who I was always competing with and I told her, “No, but I have a twin and he and I used to compete at different things.” Big mental note on something to be aware of: How often do I compare myself to others?

·                Deep breathing, closing our eyes, and doing other grounding exercises will immediately calm down our brain.

·                I felt warm and relaxed after my hour-long session. Maybe it is my imagination, but my thoughts also seemed to have more clarity. And, I swear I slept better last night.

The brainwave technology is expensive (see Zengar.com). The closest places to get the brainwave training are Cleveland and Carlisle, PA. Currently, the software is not being used in Pittsburgh. Insurance does not covers brainwave training, which is also a downfall.  There are neurofeedback TREATMENTS that are covered by some insurance but this was training the brain not treating the brain.  But, who knows? Maybe this will become a popular form of training in the future and that would bring the cost down. It seemed pretty effective to me and I was pretty skeptical going in. Rebecca Blackwood