The Eight Concepts of Bowen Family Systems Theory
A Broad overview of Murray Bowen’s Main Ideas
Reflection Questions
Am I able to make choices based on conscious consideration of my values, or do I tend to be more emotionally reactive?
Am I able to maintain a firm sense of self while in relationship with others, even if that means disagreeing with them? Are there relationships or contexts where that’s difficult for me?
How have I learned to deal with anxiety (or other uncomfortable feelings) in relationships?
How have certain family patterns, behaviors, or coping mechanisms been passed down through generations?
MURRAY BOWEN, An Overview
Murray Bowen (1913-1990) was a medical doctor, scholar, researcher, clinician, teacher, and writer. While working at the National Institute of Mental Health after WWII, Bowen began conducting research on in-patient schizophrenics and their families. He began formulating a theory of how families operate as a “system” and continued his research at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Bowen was joined in his work by Monica McGoldrick and Betty Carter, who expanded on his work and added a feminist / multicultural perspective. Bowen Family Systems Theory faces a variety of critiques today, namely that it can be simplistic or reductionistic. However, the field remains indebted to a number of Bowen’s insights. And his concepts, such triangles and differentiation, have become indispensable parts of the psychotherapy landscape.
Bowen’s main thesis was that a family operates as a system (i.e. a single organism) and that anxiety (somewhat of a a catch-all term) is passed through the system, often in dysfunctional ways, leading to unhealthy relational patterns and pathologies in the system’s members. Thus, his theory was an attempt to understand common patterns for how anxiety moves through a system and the impact those patterns have on individuals.
KEY IDEAS FOR BOWEn
Anxiety
Bowen defined anxiety as the "response of an organism to a threat, real or imagined” and distinguished between acute and chronic anxiety. Acute anxiety is a response to an immediate, present danger. Chronic anxiety is a response to ongoing, sometimes nebulous or imagined, dangers. Bowen’s main contribution to the theory of anxiety was to analyze the ways it is passed from one person to another in a system.
Togetherness vs Individuality
Bowen saw these two forces always in dynamic relationship to one another. The Togetherness Force motivates people to pursue emotional closeness, connection, agreement, cooperation, and emotional alignment. It creates a sense of safety in attachment. The Individuality Force motivates people to pursue autonomy, independent thinking, self-definition, and principle-based decisions. It creates a sense of vitality through agency. Both can become over-active, creating an imbalance and pathologies.
Emotional System vs. Thinking System
Bowen had a fairly dualistic idea of the relationship between rational and emotional behavior, essentially arguing we can be led by our thoughts or feelings. He, unsurprisingly, aimed to help people avoid overly-emotional reactions, in favor of more conscious responses.
Family as an Emotional Unit
Bowen believed that a family acts as a single organism with interdependent parts and that the functioning of each part is linked to the others. So, like a human body, stress or trauma in one part resonates through the whole and triggers a pattern of reactivity.
BOWEN’S EIGHT CONCEPTS
1 - Differentiation of Self
Bowen spoke of differentiation in two ways: internal (intra-psychic) and external (interpersonal).
Internal differentiation is the degree to which a person can distinguish between their thinking system (rational thougts) and their emotional system (feelings). If a person can become aware of their emotional system taking over, it allows them to create a space between stimulus and response (a Viktor Frankl idea) and make a more thoughtful choice in alignment with their values.
External differentiation is the degree to which a person can maintain a secure sense of self (independent thoughts and feelings) while in relationship to others. A poorly differentiated person will become fused with others, leading to blurred boundaries and merged identities. Systems with poorly differentiated people become enmeshed (not Bowen’s word, but now associated with his theory). In enmeshed systems, the togetherness force has overwhelmed individuality, leading members to feel overly responsible for one another, unable to make decisions without approval, pressured to conform, and guilty when asserting independence.
2 - Triangles
A triangle is a three-person emotional relationship system. They typically form when anxiety builds in a two-person relationship (a dyad) and a third person (or thing) is brought in to diffuse the anxiety and stabilize the system. Bowen referenced the strength of triangles in nature and believed it to be the smallest stable unit of an emotional system.
Triangles are not inherently negative and can even be functional (like a couple and a therapist). Triangles become negative when they prevent anxiety in the dyad from being addressed, or when the third party intensifies the already existing anxiety. Consider a married couple that is having issues where the husband, unable to handle the anxiety of the dyad, triangulates his mother and begins venting to her about his wife. The mother then starts acting passive aggressive toward the wife, creating a dysfunctional, unhelpful triangle.
In some cases, triangles solidify, members develop roles, and may begin to take on symptoms.
3 - Nuclear Family Emotional Process
This describes the patterns of emotional functioning in a nuclear family (parents and children) and the way anxiety is processed. Bowen named four patterns in particular that emerge under high stress. 1) Emotional Distancing is when one or both spouses “pull away”, literally or figuratively to get away from the source of anxiety. This can manifest in everything from relational coldness to scheduling more business trips. 2) Spousal Dysfunction is when an imbalance emerges in the relationship when one party moves into a controlling, domineering, over-functioning role and the other moves into a passive, dependent, under-functioning role. 3) Marital Conflict focuses the anxiety in the spousal dyad, containing it and often creating a predictable pattern or dance, which can feel more manageable than uncontained, ambiguous anxiety. And finally, 4) Problem Projection Onto a Child channels the parental anxiety onto a particular kid in the system. This can look like overbearing parenting, over-focusing, or neglect. Either way, it impairs the child’s functioning and development.
4 - Family Projection Process
This is the broader, systemic expression of Problem Projection Onto a Child. It speaks to a pattern of parents "off-loading”, passing on, or projecting their anxiety directly onto a child by way of overly intense focus or neglect. An important thing to recognize is the way this creates greater fusion with the parents and lower differentiation of self in the child, impairing other relationships.
"The process through which parental undifferentiation impairs one or more children operates within the father-mother-child triangle ... The process is so universal it is present to some degree in all families." - Bowen
5 - Multigenerational Transmission Process
This builds on the Family Projection Process and speaks to the way emotional patterns, levels of differentiation, and unresolved issues pass through generations. Genograms are a helpful tool to map out and analyze what this looks like in one’s own family tree.
"The Family Projection Process continues through multiple generations. In any nuclear family, there is one child who is the primary object of the family projection process. This child emerges with a lower level of differentiation than the parents and does less well in life. Other children, who are minimally involved with the parents, emerge with about the same levels of differentiation as the parents. Those who grow up relatively outside the family emotional process develop better levels of differentiation than the parents." - Bowen
6 - Emotional Cutoff
This is an attempt to manage anxiety by reducing or totally cutting off emotional interaction with family members. It’s important to note this is not necessarily a path to differentiation. In fact, people will sometimes resort to cutoff because they remain fused (i.e. emotionall affected) by family members. Cutoff can relieve some anxiety in the short term, but leaves underlying issues unresolved. People may then look to develop "replacement families" to meet their needs, and be at risk of low differentiation in relation to the new system.
7 - Sibling Position
Bowen incorporated the work of psychologist Walter Toman (Family Constellation) to suggest that sibling position leads to some predictably common characteristics. It's not meant to suggest that one position is "better" than the others. Rather, their characteristics tend to be complementary. For example, oldest children tend to be more comfortable in leadership positions and youngest children often prefer to be followers. Gender also factors heavily into this theory.
8 - Societal Emotional Process
Bowen extended his systems thinking beyond the family to society: he argued that societies also go through emotional life, with forces very similar to those in family systems (anxiety, regression, fusion). He observed that periods of societal regression (high anxiety) lead people to act from emotional reactivity rather than long-term principles.
"When a family is subjected to chronic, sustained anxiety, the family begins to lose contact with its intellectually determined principles and to resort more and more to emotionally determined decisions to allay the anxiety of the moment. The results of this process are symptoms and eventually regression to a lower level of functioning ... the same process is evolving in society." - Bowen