Hafta 4

● Murray Bowen
● 1913-1990
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Bowen was a psychiatrist
● In 1957, he started his work with a psychoanalytic individual approach.
● He was interested in family therapy beyond the nuclear family, extending his focus
to the extended family.
● He believed that what happens within a family affects our behaviors and questioned the forces that
shape these effects in the past and present.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● His interest in families that started between 1946-54 during the studies conducted
with schizophrenics at the Menninger Clinic.
● To him, the intense emotional sensitivity between schizophrenic patients and their
mothers was surprising.
● Mother-child symbiosis
● This situation was described as an exaggeration of a natural process.
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● According to Bowen, two opposing forces govern human relationships in life:
autonomy and togetherness.
● According to Bowen, the most important unresolved task in our lives is resolving
emotional reactivity towards our parents.
● ANXIETY
● Wherever we go, our family will always be with us.
● Psychoanalytic aspect!
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● 1954: Moved to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland.
● Worked on a project where all family members of a schizophrenic individual
were hospitalized.
● Bowen moved to NIMH, where he developed a program to hospitalize whole
families with schizophrenic members. This project expanded the focus on
mother–child symbiosis to include the role of fathers and led to the concept of
triangles (diverting conflict between two people by involving a third).
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● At the heart of the problem was anxious attachment, a pathological form of
closeness driven by anxiety.
● n these troubled families, people were emotional prisoners of the way the
others behaved.
● The hallmark of these emotionally stuck-together, or fused, relationships was
a lack of personal autonomy
● Emotional fusion – Differentiation
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● Beginning in 1955, when Bowen started bringing family members together to
discuss their problems, he was struck by their emotional reactivity. Feelings
overwhelmed reason. Bowen felt families’ tendency to pull him into the center
of this undifferentiated family ego mass, and he had to make a concerted
effort to remain objective
● Diagnosis: Enmeshed/fused relationships, triangles, anxious attachment, lack
of personal autonomy.
● The ability to remain neutral and focus on the process, rather than content, of
family discussions is what distinguishes a therapist from a participant in a
family’s drama
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● To control the level of emotion, Bowen encouraged family members to talk
to him, not to each other. He found that it was easier for family members to
avoid becoming reactive when they spoke to the therapist instead of to each
other.
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• After moving to Georgetown University, seeing similar problems in other families
surprised Bowen.
• He worked there for 31 years and developed a comprehensive family therapy
theory.
• According to Bowen, the issue was where the family stood on the
fusion/differentiation scale.
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• Bowen approached systems theory as a way of thinking, not as a series of
interventions.
• According to Bowen, our autonomy in our emotional lives is less than we think.
• We are interdependent in our behavior and we react.
• The family is a network of relationships that includes multiple generations.

○ Murray Bowen was a pioneer in the development of family systems theory. He emphasized the
interconnectedness of family members and believed that families are best understood as a unit rather
than as individual members. This perspective is instrumental in addressing familial issues and conflicts.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Differentiation of self
• Ego strength
• Definition: "The ability to think and understand, the capacity to automatically
respond to internal and external emotional pressures, even in situations of anxiety,
having the ability to act flexibly and wisely."
• Undifferentiated individuals are easily influenced emotionally. Their reactions to
those around them shape their lives.
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● Differentiation of self
• An undifferentiated person tends to react immediately to others - either in a
submissive manner or in an immediately confrontational way.
• Undifferentiated individuals have difficulty maintaining their autonomy, especially
on anxiety-inducing topics.
• When asked what they think, they express how they feel.
• Either they agree with everything you say, or they argue about everything.
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• A differentiated person can strike a balance between thought and emotion.
• A differentiated individual, while being open to strong emotions and spontaneity,
can resist the power of emotional impulses and restrain themselves.
• They can think deeply, decide what to believe in, and display their own stance.
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● Emotional triangles
• Anxiety is the primary emotion.
• If two people cannot resolve an issue and find it challenging to communicate, they
may seek closeness with someone else or draw that person into their relationship.
• If the third person becomes permanent, they become a part of the relationship.
• Anxiety is shared with a third person.
• Example: Turning to the child because one cannot get close to their spouse, using
the child as a mediator in problems, pulling the spouse towards the child.
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● Emotional triangles
• When triangulation becomes a habit, it disrupts the original relationship!
• Triangulation provides relief, but it doesn't resolve conflicts; the problem remains
the same.
• Family issues might not be fully resolved unless the triangle is resolved.
• Example: Learning new discipline techniques would be ineffective for a mother who
has formed a triangle with her child.
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● Emotional triangles
● A husband who can’t stand his wife’s habitual lateness but is afraid to say so
may start complaining to his children. His complaining may let off steam, but
the very process of complaining to a third party makes him less likely to
address the problem at its source. We all complain about other people from
time to time, but what Bowen realized was that this triangling process is
destructive when it becomes a regular feature of a relationship
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● Emotional triangles: Case study
● One Sunday morning “Mrs. McNeil,” who was anxious to get the family to
church on time, yelled at her nine-year-old son to hurry up. When he told her
to “quit bitching,” she slapped him. At that point her fourteen-year-old
daughter, Megan, grabbed her, and the two of them started wrestling. Then
Megan ran next door to her friend’s house. When the friend’s parents noticed
that she had a cut lip and Megan told them what had happened, they called
the police.
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● Emotional triangles: Case study
● One thing led to another, and by the time the family came to therapy, the
following triangles were in place: Mrs. McNeil, who’d been ordered out of the
house by the family court judge, was allied with her lawyer against the judge;
she also had an individual therapist who joined her in thinking she was being
harassed by the child-protective workers.
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● Emotional triangles: Case study
● The nine-year-old was still mad at his mother, and his father supported him in
blaming her for flying off the handle. Mr. McNeil, who was a recovering
alcoholic, formed an alliance with his sponsor, who felt that Mr. McNeil was
on his way to a breakdown unless his wife started being more supportive.
Meanwhile Megan had formed a triangle with the neighbors, who thought her
parents shouldn’t be allowed to have children. In short, everyone had an
advocate—everyone, that is, except the family unit.
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● Multigenerational Emotional Processes
● Differentiated family ego mass or Fusion terms The parents are either overly
emotionally attached to the child, or there is emotional detachment.
● Example: "The more a mother focuses her anxiety on a child, the more stunted the
child's functioning becomes. This lack of development further encourages the
mother to hover over the child, diverting her attention from her worries at the
expense of the child's emotional harm."
● The child most involved in fusion is the least able to differentiate.
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● Sibling order
● First-borns tend to identify with power and authority: They use their seniority and
strength to protect their status and try to reduce the cost of having siblings by
exerting pressure on them.
● Later-borns identify with the oppressed and question the status quo. They are open
to new experiences.
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● Emotional cut-off
● As an adult, Bowen, the oldest of five children from a tightly knit rural family,
kept his distance from his parents and the rest of his extended family. Like
many of us, he mistook avoidance for emancipation. But as he later realized,
unfinished emotional business stays with us, making us vulnerable to repeat
conflicts we never worked out with our families.
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● Emotional cut-off
● The more the fusion, the higher the likelihood of separation.
● Effort to distance oneself by moving away and not talking.
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● Societal emotional process
● Bowen anticipated the contemporary concern about social influence on how
families function.
● Kerr and Bowen (1988) cite the example of the high crime rate that results in
communities with great social pressure.
● Bowen agreed that sexism and class and ethnic prejudice are toxic social
emotional processes, but he believed that families with higher levels of
differentiation were better able to resist these destructive social influences.
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● Normal Family Functioning
● Through his efforts in his own family Bowen discovered that differentiation of
self is best accomplished by developing personal relationships with as many
members of the family as possible.
● If visiting is difficult, letters and phone calls can help reestablish relationships,
particularly if they’re personal and intimate.
● Differentiating one’s self from the family is completed when these
relationships are maintained without becoming emotionally reactive or
taking part in triangles
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● Normal Family Functioning
● When family members differentiate,
● When anxiety levels are low,
● It occurs when spouses have a good emotional connection with their own families.
● "In intense relationships, we carry unresolved sensitivities wherever we go, as
unfinished business with us."
● "Roles in family conflicts re-emerge in new relationships."
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● Normal Family Functioning
● The emotional attachment between spouses begins to resemble the bonds they had
in their families of origin.
● Undifferentiated individuals continue to remain undifferentiated in the new families
they establish.
● According to Bowen's followers Carter and McGoldrick, managing the processes of
the family life cycle is important.
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● Therapy goals
● Bowen's followers do not concern themselves with changing the individual or
solving the problem.
● They view therapy as an opportunity for people to learn more about themselves and
their relationships, and thus take responsibility for their own problems.
● The therapist encourages family members to move beyond blaming each other and
to explore and take responsibility for their roles.
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● Therapy goals
● Process and Structure should be carefully examined.
● Process: Patterns of emotional reactivity.
● Structure: A network of interwoven triangles. Transformation should take place in
the triangle that includes the married spouse.
● For this, the therapist creates a therapy triangle but avoids triangulation.
Differentiation begins as the therapist exits the triangle.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Therapy goals
● Parents should enhance their ability to manage their own anxieties, so they can
better manage their children's behaviors.
● Parents (as a couple) strengthen the couple's emotional functioning by increasing
their ability to act with less anxiety in their original families.
● While Bowen directly worked with the origin (primary) family, his followers
prioritized the nuclear family.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Conditions of behavior change:
● Enhancing the ability to distinguish between thinking and feeling allows one to use
this skill to address relationship issues.
● Healing is not about action, but understanding.
● In sessions, the therapist minimizes emotionalism and asks questions that increase
self-reflection.
● The therapist should control their reactivity and avoid triangulation.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Conditions of behavior change:
● Avoiding triangulation: Refraining from taking sides and encouraging parties to take
responsibility for healing.
● According to Bowen, the presence of the entire family is not necessary for change;
individual therapy can be done (This distinguishes him from other therapists).
● A person participating in therapy needs to have awareness of the entire family.
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● Therapy techniques: It is crucial for the individual to see their role in family issues –
● Process questions, relationship experiments, detriangulation, coaching, role-reversal
stories...
● It is essential to understand how these issues are embedded in the extended
family's past:
● GENOGRAM. Patterns of emotional reactivity are passed down through generations.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Süreç soruları: Bireyin sürece nasıl katkıda bulunduğunu
anlamaya yöneliktir
○ “Erkek arkadaşınız sizi ihmal ettiğinde tepkiniz ne oluyor?”
○ “Karınızın eleştirilerinde sizi en çok sinirlendiren ne oluyor?”
○ “Kızınız bir erkekle çıktığında ne hissediyorsunuz?”
● Süreç soruları insanları sakinleştirir ve tepkisel
kaygıyı azaltır.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● İlişki deneyi:
○ Başkalarına verdiğimiz tepkiler sorunu sürdürür
○ Danışan, duyguların yönlendirdiği tepkilerin tersi yönde davranmanın
nasıl birşey olduğunu deneyimler.
○ Danışan, duygularının tersine davranma yeteneği olduğunu keşfeder.
 Bowen famıly systems therapy
● Yer değiştirme hikayesi:
○ Savunma tepkisini doğurmamak için, soruları başkaları ve başka
örnekler üzerinden sormak
○ Örnek: “Sizce bu kadar üzgün ve öfkeli olduğunda insan bu duyguları
atlatabilir mi?”
○ “Geçen yıl görüştüğüm başka bir çiftin de ………….. Sorunu vardı. Şu
şekilde ilerlemiştik…”
○ “Sizce insanlar bu adımı atmakta neden bu kadar zorlanıyor?
 Bowen famıly systems therapy:genogram
● İlk adı: aile diyagramı
● Amaç, ilişki süreçlerinin ve önemli üçgenlerin izini
sürmektir