Resilience

On numerous occasions over the past several weeks, three things have been confirmed for me. The rather artificial and yet psychologically significant transition from one calendar year to the next seems to be a good time to share them. Actually, if you know Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) you already know these things, and this simply amounts to a reminder.

1. Learning and becoming a more mature individual in relationships is a matter of “being” first of all, and of “doing” only if it is based on being rather than technique. Techniques for dealing with oneself or others may be helpful in some circumstances, but they are superficial and seldom hold up over time. What makes a difference in one’s life and work is becoming a well defined and emotionally well-regulated individual. That is the work of a lifetime, and one in which we benefit greatly from collaboration with others who know BFST.

2. The practice of being well differentiated, especially with one’s family but also with friends and work colleagues, is not focused on short-term gain, and it is not about changing or getting something one needs from others. Sometimes genuinely being oneself (well-defined and emotionally well-regulated) will result in agreeable responses from others. But more often it will elicit reactivity and criticism whether covert or overt. Whenever one’s focus is on the response of the other rather than on one’s own functioning, one’s self-definition is compromised or completely sabotaged. Focusing on the response of others will almost always defeat one’s intentions.

3. Emotional systems (family, work, friendship circles, etc.) will change when even one member of the system is able to become better differentiated and less reactive in system relationships. However, it is good to remember first, that such change is most likely to happen over time, often a long time, which means the one making the self-differentiating effort must persevere. In the meantime, the one becoming better differentiated (at least a little better than others in the system) will find themselves less anxious and so healthier regardless of resistance in the system. Be observant, curious, as calm as possible, and let the system find its way. Your job is to be that better defined and less reactive you.

In her very recent book (May 2017), The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, and in an on-line interview with Poynter, Brooke Gladstone of NPR’s On the Media says, “facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and tradition.” She says that this doesn’t change the role of journalists to fact-check, because facts are key components of truth. But, she continues, there is a difference between the things we can fact-check and the broader context that is largely unseen. We have “facts,” and we have “truth.” Facts are easier, but truth is a bigger story and often more important. Journalists should be concerned with presenting both of them.

While this piece is interesting and cogent as related to the work of journalists and the importance of citizens paying attention to the “contexts” of reported facts, Gladstone’s idea of “reality” and its relationship to “facts” leaves out another very important consideration, which admittedly may be beyond the scope of journalism but which is critical in understanding the current societal malaise in the United States.

A significant factor in a person’s “understanding” reality involves that person’s emotionality, i.e. his/her instinctual emotional orientation, the degree to which one is self-defined rather than defined by others, and the degree of anxiety he/she is experiencing. And to understand the reality of a society we should consider, together with a society’s political and social realities, its collective emotional orientation.

Today we are living in a period of societal regression in which heightened anxiety leads most people toward a reactivity (rather than thoughtfulness) that includes herding (togetherness as the highest value and seeking safety rather than adventure), scapegoating (blame displacement), and a quick-fix mentality (low threshold for pain and seeking quick, simple answers). Simply “contextualizing facts” will not make much difference for people who are unaware of the deep roots of their emotions and the degree to which their inherited and learned instincts influence their thinking and behavior.

And how might we get in touch with those deep roots of our emotional responses? For us as individuals it’s back to family, nuclear and extended, favored or not, and so to the relationships that formed us. It takes time and persistence and, more often than not, a coach or guide. As a society we should seek to understand the emotional heritage of founding leaders and a society’s early social and political influences.

“What is truth?” you ask. It’s even more complicated than you think.

Think about it. How well do you know yourself? How much of your relationships with significant others each day is more or less automatic, without much thoughtfulness and almost beyond your control? Our emotional reactions to our children or spouse, our parents or siblings, our co-workers and friends tend to be pretty routine, almost unconscious. How we respond to political affairs or cultural directions or popular trends comes close to being mechanical and often beyond our control. Over years of experience, we have developed certain emotional reactions; they are “instincts” embedded in who we are, and they are very difficult to change. These instincts determine our responses to significant events and relationships. And they are the roots of our anxieties.

Where did this automatic emotional reactiveness come from? We learn it in our earliest years in our family of origin and/or with primary caregivers. We are the product of generations of such automatic responses. We receive the family emotionality, i.e. “instincts,” from our parents, who received them from theirs, and so on through generations. We learn how to relate to others in interaction with our siblings. It all comes to us without our knowledge or choice—without, that is, until we reach a time of recognition and discernment, and ask ourselves, “Who am I?”

“Know thyself,” or “γνωθι σεαυτόν” (gnothi seauton) in Greek, is a familiar aphorism usually linked to Plato’s Dialogues, in which he puts these words into the mouth of Socrates. It is familiar wisdom likely to have come from ancient Egypt and the lore around the Luxor Temple. Even more widely afield, the same idea can be found in 5^th century B.C.E. Chinese wisdom, viz. from Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, chapter 33: “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” In European and North American contexts people of letters from Thomas Hobbs in the 17^th century to Alexander Pope and Rousseau in the 18^th and Emerson and Coleridge in the 20^th used the phrase in various ways to describe this very human challenge. Carl Linnaeus in his first edition of Systema Naturae described human beings with the same phrase, now in Latin “Nosce te ipsum.”

We know instinctively that it is true. Knowing oneself is vital in the course of the decisions and relationships that mark ones life. It is the antidote to the automatic reactivity that defines so much of daily intercourse. It is only when we begin to know ourselves that we can do anything about the automatic and surprisingly instinctual nature of our response to other people, the world around us, and our own selves.

The best way for us to learn about ourselves is to observe ourselves in the most significant relationships we have, those with our families of origin, and watch how we react. Who we are with our families is who we are. That’s because it was in our earliest years within our families or primary caregivers that we learned our automatic responses. What we learn from watching ourselves—doing careful and honest observation—over a period of time in family interactions will provide an encyclopedia of information and feedback about the emotional undercurrents that drive, or at least influence, our relationships. Without awareness of what we have inherited, how we react, what pushes our buttons, i.e. our emotional inheritance from our family, we have no solid foundation for understanding ourselves or for developing more thoughtful approaches to relationships.

This is what Bowen Family Systems Theory is about. It provides a means for personal understanding that propels us on a journey toward a more thoughtful and less anxious approach to daily life. It helps us to know ourselves and “where the persons we are come from” via an investigation of our interaction with our family. Then, if there are changes we would like to make in how we respond to the people and world around us, it helps us to make them first in our family of origin and then in all the other relationships in our lives.

Know yourself. Then and only then will you be able to begin the journey toward being the person you want to be.

Anxiety was high over the past six months leading up to the November 8 elections. Analysts and academics have offered dozens of commentaries to explain the high anxiety and turmoil in which we find ourselves. Explanations are political, cultural, economic, psychological, you name it. And each field of analysis has something of interest to offer. But I hear very few people talking about our society as an emotional system.

In the 1950s through the 1980s Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist at the National Institutes of Health, developed a natural systems theory of human development and behavior focused on the emotional. By emotion Bowen did not primarily mean feelings, but instinct, that is, the energy that produces and results from the interaction between living things and between them and their environment. When people get together in a group an emotional system is established. Whether they are marriages or families, churches or businesses, clubs or countries, human systems are directed by emotionality as well as by those forces we usually understand as driving group action.

Who we are as emotional/instinctual beings we learn in the first years of our lives within our family or with the primary caregivers in our lives. To become emotionally mature is to be self-defined or self-differentiated (some might say “principled”) within our families rather than only being emotionally tied, whether positively or negatively, to our families, and so defined by them. As we move out from our families into the wider world we bring our emotional being (including our unresolved emotional baggage) into other groups and those groups into societies. Groups and societies are marked by the emotionality of their founding members, and especially by founding leaders and those leaders’ interaction with the group’s context.

Anxiety challenges self-definition and inclines people toward emotional reactivity. The recent presidential campaign and the reactionary participation of large segments of the population are clear evidence of that. We also see the anxiety in society’s reaction to the realities of a changing climate, immigration issues, increasing litigiousness and violence, racial diversity, and the poverty that, despite our wealth, we seem incapable of remedying. We live in a chronically anxious society.

Dr. Edwin Friedman was an ordained Jewish rabbi, a Bowen Systems family therapist, and a leadership consultant in the Washington D.C. area. His work with government, military, and religious leaders in the 1960s into the 1990s led him to think that U.S. society is “leadership toxic.” That is, he thought that the emotional climate of our society sabotaged good leadership.

Friedman contended, with others who worked with the family emotional system concepts of Dr. Bowen, that the key to excellence and health in leaders is self-differentiation and emotional self-regulation. That is, leaders must be self-differentiated, rather than allowing themselves to be defined by others, whether family, friends, or colleagues, or by the issues and pressures current in society or their system within society. Leadership and self-differentiation are synonymous.

A well-defined leader will also be emotionally self-regulated. He or she will be thoughtful rather than reactive in the face of opposition and anxiety. Such a leader will resist the pressure to follow the crowd or to blame others for problems. A leader will let problems and challenges “mature” rather than seeking or offering a quick-fix to allay present anxiety.

Chronically anxious societies are incapable of selecting the good leaders they need, but they usually have a sizable number of emotionally reactive people who are happy to offer themselves as leaders. Friedman said that in a chronically anxious and leadership toxic society “the toddler is in charge,” and emotional immaturity rules.  When a genuinely capable leader does arise, one who stands on principle, allows issues to mature, and keeps his/her goals in mind—one who is well-defined and not satisfied with quick-fixes that inevitably are simply part of a recycling of problems—then an anxious society will work to sabotage that leader. In such a society good leaders, the ones it needs, tend to avoid societal leadership positions. A good leader recognizes the impossible nature of the leadership task in such a society. And those willing to be leaders are not likely to have the self-differentiation and emotionally well-regulated character that is required in a leader.

So what do we require today as a nation, i.e. in this highly anxious societal emotional system? We need people in whatever smaller systems they find themselves (families, churches and charitable organizations, community and political organizations, agencies of government, etc.) to stand on principle and thoughtfulness rather than emotional reactivity. That is, we all need to work at defining/managing ourselves clearly and consistently in terms of what we stand for rather than for what we oppose. We need leaders who promote evolutionary and sustainable goals of diversity and wholeness, goals with an orientation toward challenge rather than comfort, strength rather than weakness, and goals that recognize our place as part of rather than over the natural world. We need leaders who will take responsibility and persevere in their values regardless of the sabotage of reactionary forces. And we need citizens who support such leadership.

Then as we grow in such maturity in all the smaller system sites in our society, perhaps we will be able to choose national leaders who are mature, well-defined, emotionally self-regulated … essentially something other than we witness in the emotionally reactive President- and Vice President-elect.

Recently I ran across a quote often attributed to organizational guru Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Actually, one can find many versions of it from many different sources: “Culture beats (or trumps) strategy.” “… culture determines and limits strategy” (Edgar Schein). It is a maxim that has been going around “change management”circles for a long time.

The point, of course, is not that strategy is unimportant, but that “culture” frequently sabotages strategy in organizations … and families. In organizational literature culture is all the invisible stuff that holds things together, things like mission, values, traditional ways of doing things. These are things that are hard to measure and evaluate, and they defy managing. While strategy can be improved and taught, culture is very difficult to change. Culture is caught day by day and week by week. Culture is built over time by the daily functioning of an organization.

I think we can go this management meme one better. While culture is important and certainly deeper than strategy, the nature of an organization’s emotional system is deeper than culture. An organization’s emotional system is its guidance system. By “emotional” I mean the instinctive (or automatic) responses a system has to the challenges and vagaries of everyday life, i.e. not only its response to its mission, but the very shape of the mission itself. We are not just, or even primarily, talking about feelings here. We are talking about an organization’s DNA, the hereditary way it responds to its life within society.

Such “emotional DNA” is established in an organization’s beginnings, largely on the basis of the emotional character of its founding leaders, which character grows from the family emotional systems of those leaders. Once established this guidance system may be refined through succeeding generations, but the DNA remains the same and determines the possibilities and limitations of all future refinement. So if you want to understand the deep and enduring character of an organization, study its founding history and the emotional character of its early leadership. It will tell you what you can expect of an organization in the present.

The emotional DNA of an organization does not change. However, which segments of DNA get expressed is influenced by experience and environment. Strong leadership in a system can influence what segments of an organization’s emotional DNA get expressed. That is, an organization’s emotional guidance system can be influenced for the better. When strong leadership is lacking, or when leadership changes frequently, an organization tends to revert to that of its founding emotional guidance system. For there to be a lasting change in a system’s emotional character, such leadership must continue for many years.

So organizations may do all the strategizing for strength and stability that they want. Without attending to the emotional system, positive results from strategy will be short-term and limited, if they happen at all. On the other hand, for lasting change one must attend to the emotional system, and that will first and foremost mean attending to leadership and engaging well-defined and emotionally self-regulated, i.e. thoughtful, emotionally responsive rather than reactive, leaders. And that “eats everything for breakfast.”

A Bowen Family Systems Theory Seminar

& Clinical Training

This unique, concentrated course of learning and study of Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) offering presentations and case study coaching is open to members of the helping professions and to others who have a working knowledge of BFST. There will be one two-hour session per month from October 2014 through June 2015. This seminar offers participants an alternative to the widely recommended but more expensive option of individual coaching sessions. It is offered by Systems Coaching LLC, W. Thomas Soeldner, coach/consultant.

After a review of the foundations of BFST and the nature of emotional systems in the first session, each session will consist of a theory presentation of one BSFT’s eight concepts followed by a clinical study of work or family case presentations offered by seminar participants. The objectives are to assist individuals in the study and learning of BFST and to encourage the practice of applying systems thinking to the individual’s personal and professional lives. The learning and application of theory usually come with increased self-awareness and more mature, thoughtful functioning that seeks the long term best interest of self as well as of the family and/or organization.

The first session will be on Thursday, October 16, 2014, 1:30 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Church, 1428 W. Broadway Ave, Spokane, WA. Following sessions are scheduled for the third Thursday of each month at 1:30 p.m., although changes to the schedule are possible with the agreement of other participants. Cost for the 9 sessions is $250. The seminar will be limited to eight full participants. Those who only wish to attend some of the sessions may do so at a cost of $60 per session. Contact W. T. Soeldner for interest in the course or for questions either by email waltsoe@allmail.net or by phone (509)270-6995.

Bowen Family Systems Theory describes how families function, and how individuals function in other contexts as a result of their unique family relationships. The family is an emotional unit with patterned ways of interaction involving various degrees of intensity. These repetitive ways of relating throughout an individual’s developmental years result in automatic ways of functioning in later life, especially when one is under pressure.

A Bowen Family Systems Theory Workshop

After “differentiation of self” the concept of the emotional triangle and its applications is widely considered the most important of the eight concepts of Bowen’s theory. This workshop of seven two-hour sessions will study triangles and self-differentiation, their relationship and application for emotional maturity and leadership. This workshop offered by Systems Coaching LLC (W. Thomas Soeldner, coach/consultant) is open to those who have a working knowledge of Bowen Family Systems Theory, and will be limited to the first eight persons who sign up. Sessions will be scheduled every two weeks beginning on Thursday, January 16, 2014, 1:30 p.m., at Salem Lutheran Church, 1428 W Broadway Ave, Spokane, WA, through the first week of April (dates and location for subsequent sessions will be determined by participants at the first session). To express interest in the course or for questions leave a comment below.

The first session will be a thorough review of Bowen’s concept of the emotional triangle, which he called the basic molecule (the smallest basic unit) of any emotional system. The next five sessions will each consist of a short presentation on an aspect of emotional triangles and their relationship to self-differentiation followed by a consideration of case studies brought by participants. The final session will be case study work and a final summary of the triangle and self-differentiation concepts.

Triangles and interlocking triangles are the primary way emotional process is transmitted and stabilized in an emotional system. This concept has particular importance in considering a system’s multi-generational aspects. The triangle concept is usually recognized quickly, even intuitively, by those who study Bowen theory. But real and practical understanding of the concept requires serious study in using this lens for seeing an emotional system and its operation as well as for recognizing one’s own part in a system.

In addition to the core theory of emotional triangles the workshop will consider the regulatory function of triangles, the use of triangles for increasing one’s differentiation of self, multi-generational triangles and unresolved emotional attachment, triangles in marriage and extramarital relationships, the basics of detriangling, and mental construct triangles in society.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010, 2011 W. W. Norton & Co.) by Nicholas Carr is a thoughtful and well-documented study of how the negative side effects of the Internet encourage us to reassess the value of its advantages. Carr acknowledges the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with an array of information as wide as the ocean, but he demonstrates that such access trades intellectual depth and contemplation, those things which most distinguish us as human, for “the shallows.” Carr quotes playwright Richard Foreman, who says we risk turning into “pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” (p. 196).

You may or may not agree with Carr, but the book and its argument are worth your attention and response. Those of you who have been engaged by Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) may have some responses to the book related to your understanding of self-differentiation and emotional health. I will respond to two aspects of Carr’s work with some reflections on them that grow out of my understanding of BFST.

Please understand, what I share here does not cover the range and application of Carr’s argument, nor does it even do full justice to those parts that I address. Therefore, I encourage you to read the book and draw your own conclusions. I invite you to consider two important aspects of his argument that I think offer grist for the BFST mill.

Number one, Carr says that the Internet has returned us to our “natural state of distractedness,” i.e. the state we knew before the development of reading, writing, and books. Our human ancestors had to shift their attention all of the time in order to survive. Carr laments that the Internet presents us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with, seizing our attention “only to scatter it” (p. 118).

Prolonged and solitary thought, Carr suggests, is an aberration in intellectual history that emerged with the technology of the printed page. “To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object….[People] had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater ‘top-down control’ over their attention” (p. 64). A book requires sustained thoughtfulness rather than simply emotional or physical reactivity. In addition, I propose, a book invites a reader to a thoughtful determination of who he/she is in relation to the text; it invites a reflective self-differentiation which then may get exercised beyond the pages of the book. The Internet, on the other hand, is a medium of distractions which invites us to react, and usually without much thought and to be all things to all people. It does not encourage thoughtful self-definition and emotional self-regulation.

At this point, some may suggest that the book-like digital technology of an e-reader would qualify as “book,” and in some regards that is so, at least for those who persevere with the text. But let me suggest that e-readers offer their own forms of distraction, i.e. digital tools that move one easily and enticingly away from the text and the flow of the book’s subject to the tool itself. In addition, e-readers do not provide the physical actions and sensory stimuli of holding and turning the pages of a book or magazine. Ample research has suggested that the cognitive act of reading a book draws on our sense of touch as well as sight. There is a link in our brains between the material sensory-motor experience and the cognitive processing of the text that influences the degree of attention we devote to the text and the degree to which we are immersed in it.

Number two, and in my mind more significant, Carr notes that the depth of our intelligence depends upon “our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas” (p. 124). Typically working memory is able to process just two to four pieces of information at any given time. These information elements vanish from working memory if they are not rehearsed regularly. Information coming into working memory, i.e. cognitive load, is limited for us. And if not transferred into long-term memory information in working memory is lost and not available for drawing connections and new insights.

High cognitive load amplifies distractions, because our ability to maintain attention depends on working memory. When our working memory is overloaded, any distraction becomes more distracting. As we reach the limits of working memory it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from the irrelevant, signal from noise. “We become mindless consumers of data” (p. 125). What determines what we remember and what we forget is attentiveness.

“Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. ‘For a memory to persist,’ writes [biologist Eric Kandel], ‘the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.’ If we’re unable to attend to the information in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it’s gone, leaving little or no trace in the mind” (p. 193).

“The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it also makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. … Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stories may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

“The changes in our brains happen automatically, outside the narrow compass of our consciousness, but that doesn’t absolve us from responsibility for the choices we make. One thing that sets us apart from other animals is the command we have been granted over our attention. ‘Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,’ said the novelist David Foster Wallace … ‘It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.’ To give up that control is to be left with ‘the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing’”(p. 194).

Already in the 1950’s and ’60’s Marshall McLuhan observed technology’s numbing effect. Carr suggests we see it already in Psalm 115 of the Hebrew scriptures in terms of a much earlier “technology.”

      “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.  They have             mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.  They have ears, but do not     hear; noses, but do not smell.  They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but         do not walk; they make no sound in their throats.  Those who make them       are like them; so are all who trust in them.”

“The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation” (p. 211). Mechanical clocks compromised our sense of nature’s flow of time. Maps weakened our ability to comprehend a landscape and develop a mental perception of our surroundings, and GPS devices dramatically reduce our geographic knowledge base, not to mention our brains’ capacities. “The toll can be particularly high with intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion” (ibid). Technologies numb the very faculties they amplify, to the point even of “autoamputation” (McLuhan). Technologies change our relationship to the world—almost always alienating us from it.

There is no question that we are being molded by our new information environment and new technologies. Many of these adaptations are good and well-suited to our circumstances. However, we should consider the perils as well. Martin Heidegger warned of the “frenziedness of technology.” Carr wonders if “we are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls” (p. 222) “What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become,” says Carr (ibid). He thinks Stanley Kubrick’s dark prophecy in 2001 Space Odyssey might have been spot on: “… as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (p. 224).

In reading Carr I was reminded of Dr. Edwin Friedman‘s thoughts on how the proliferation of information can paralyze one in making decisions. He suggested that the search for information has become something like an addiction, or “a form of substance abuse.” In A Failure of Nerve (1999, 2007, The Friedman Trust) Friedman said:

“As long as leaders … base their confidence on how much data they have acquired, they are doomed to feeling inadequate, forever. … data gathering in a society oriented toward pathology [rather than strength – WTS] eventually winds up, like the very nature of pathology, as a process that is unable to set limits on itself. In contrast, … the categories of strength are well defined [by EF in this book – WTS], and the pursuit of information in this area promotes the self-differentiation necessary for harnessing the data deluge.

“Developing new criteria for judging the importance of information, therefore, is not a matter of changing one’s ‘database.’ What is required is a fundamental reorientation of our thinking processes, one that allows leaders to evaluate information in the context of emotional variables, along with the leader’s self-differentiation. Ultimately, the capacity of leaders to distinguish what information is important depends less on the development of new techniques for sorting data [or for accumulating more of it – WTS] than on a leader’s ability to avoid being driven by the regressive anxiety that is often the source of the unregulated data proliferation to begin with” (p. 97).

Subsequently Friedman asks,

“Could contemporary American society’s ‘fix’ on data and technique in the denial of emotional process and personal being actually affect the way the pathways of our brains will evolve? And is it too far-fetched to assume that a civilization that teaches its leaders to rely on data rather than maturity would also produce a similar evolutionary change that is transmitted to the next generation? … What will be the effect on the brains or nervous systems of succeeding generations who have been nurtured in a civilization where its leaders have become addicted to data as a way of avoiding the problems of maturing?” (pp. 116-17).

And we might add: What will be the effect on the brains of individuals for whom distraction is the modus operandi for information gathering? And ultimately what will be their effect on their culture and society? New technologies have always shaped our culture both positively and negatively. It is important for us to consider both sides of the changes.

In BFST “differentiation” refers to the ability to be in emotional contact with others and yet maintain ones individuality, i.e. be autonomous in one’s emotional functioning (Kerr and Bowen, “Family Evaluation,” 1988, p. 145n). It is the capacity for a person to be self-defined and emotionally self-regulated in relationship with others and to be thoughtful and calm in the face of anxiety, particularly the anxiety which arises from the demands of close (most often family) relationships. I suggest that the Internet discourages–not prevents, but discourages and undermines–self-differentiation. It promotes and values a flood of information and a glut of the opinions and values of others. It encourages us either to adopt its propositions and values (speed, exposure, self-disclosure) or to react to them without much thought. We tend to become one of a largely mindless crowd or dedicated reactionaries. Both betray a lack of self-differentiation.

I understand that to suggest a relationship between Carr’s concerns about the Internet and its relationship to Bowen’s central concept of self-differentiation raises as many questions as it answers. The questions are likely the most valuable contributions for those who use the BFST lens on life and relationships. In what ways does the Internet and its distractions impact ones efforts at self-differentiation? Would the Internet’s use differ for a well-differentiated person as compared with its use by one who was not well-differentiated? Does the Internet’s focus on information facilitate or hamper wise decision-making? Does the Internet make us more, or less, human? What effect should we expect on relationships within families, and ultimately within societies, when the usual mode of communication is tweeting, texting, and Facebook posting?

We have all experienced somebody who regales us with non-stop comment either on their achievements or on their problems. And we would like to, and perhaps do occasionally, have the spunk to say, “You know, it’s not all about you.”

Life, or for that matter any particular situation in it, is not only about you, or about any one person. We are part of endless systems, most clearly the family or caregivers who raised us from birth to adolescence, but also many other human systems consisting of schoolmates or church friends or work colleagues. All have played a role in who we are, how we respond to others, and how we react to stress or success. Many continue to have a role in our response to daily events and challenges throughout our lives.

I am sure that my mother was proud of me and my accomplishments. And yet, if I raised opinions or conclusions from my study or experience which challenged her closely held conservative political or religious views, she would frequently dismiss them, and me, with something like, “O Tom, you don’t know what you are talking about.” For many years I felt anxious around people who would argue with me about matters in which I had a considerable advantage in education and experience. My emotional reaction was not “all about me,” any more than was my mother’s response to me only about her. We are all products of our lives with others, especially our families, and the emotional affects of our past interaction with them is always present. Our past is never really past.

On the other hand, dealing with a past that continues to live in my reactions in the present is “all about me,” as addressing your reactions is “all about you.” The emotional inheritance I have from past relationships, especially those of my family of origin, will continue with me throughout my life and will exert its influence. However, the degree to which that influence is determinative of my emotionality or behavior today depends on my recognition of it, my ability to define myself as I choose, and my persistence in living out that definition.

So I recognize that my mother grew up in the household of very traditional parents in which gender roles were closely circumscribed and with a father who was a conservative Lutheran pastor. My mother and her sister, despite the fact that they were intelligent and made high marks through high school, were required to go to work in order to help pay for the higher education of their four brothers. Even after marriage the two sisters never were completely fulfilled as “homemakers.” They knew as much and were as competent as their brothers … and husbands and sons, by the way … though they did not have the educational advantage of the family males.

I also recognize that I grew up disappointed that my mother seldom acknowledged the intellectual growth I was proud of. So when I run into others who question informed decisions I make or carefully considered positions I take it is up to me to decide whether I allow the emotional residue of the relationship I had with my mother to keep me stuck in reactivity, or whether I will respond to such detractors by being self-defined and self-regulated.

My emotional reactivity is not all about me; it grows most clearly out of the experience of relationships with family during my childhood and adolescence. But how I deal with that emotional inheritance today is all about me and my willingness and ability to develop a well-defined presence that is able to regulate emotional reactivity when it arises. We are an emotional product of our families of origin, but we need not be entirely determined by them. Through the hard work of being present and well-defined with our families and others we can forge our own emotional identity today, and subsequently find ourselves healthier and at peace with ourselves, our loved ones, and the world in general.

Bowen Family System’s Theory (BFST) provides a natural, constructive, and scientific way of seeing our lives and relationships, and it offers a holistic and systematic way both of addressing the relational issues that challenge us and of building on the strengths that support us. BFST is neither technique nor magic. It is a way of seeing, a way of understanding, and so finally a way of growing healthier in our relationships.