What Do You Do When Your Brother Says: “”I am Jesus Christ?”

7
October

What Do You Do When Your Brother Says: “”I am Jesus Christ?”

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Posted by Andrea

(Photographs inclueded at the end)

Caution: I considered myself to be an apprentice to Murray Bowen, MD the originator of the Bowen Family System Theory for fourteen years. (1976-1990) The vulnerability of being an apprentice or of having someone make a profound difference in your life is that you over-estimate them and possibly yourself

Overview: Butch and the puzzle of psychosis, meeting Murray Bowen, MD, family diagrams, and the importance of photographs and family stories.

I had to understand my family to survive.

On a coolish day in April of 1974, Butch, my younger brother, drove to my house, jumped out of his blue surfing van, and told me he was Jesus Christ, come to save all of us. I had no idea what to do or how to think about this.

At the time I was thirty-two, and recently divorced with two young children. Born in 1941, just weeks before WW II, I was the little mother to my two younger brothers. “Butch” Walter Maher Maloney was born in 1943. Then in 1950 our younger brother, “Drew” Andrew J. Maloney was born. My job as the big sister was to rescue, defend and save them and of course, sometimes torture them.

Clearly now that “Butch” was Jesus he was beyond my ability to help. As you read my memories of what happened just remember if Butch were alive today, he would disagree with the way I see him, or our family, or even my use of family photographs, and of course family diagrams.

Butch wanted to be his own man. Do not dare to tell him what to do or how to be. I was a little mother failure. And then I met Murray Bowen, MD, and became more of a trickster. I learned just how the family is an emotional system, but that I could alter my part in it.

All of us are trained by our families, to some degree to go along with others, to cooperate, and to care. That tendency to care about others can also lead to misfortune if one is not sure of their principles and values. I was blind to all the automatic ways that the family manages anxiety. I needed to observe the push and pull in my family, to begin to get a grip on what was happening to me and to others in my family.

I will take you on my adventure to learn about my family and to document my time with Murray Bowen, M.D. using photographs and telling. This is just one person’s memory. Or as Bowen use to say a few facts stirred into a big pot of subjectivity.

You may enjoy seeing how a little bit of change in relationships can make a big difference in both one’s family and in one’s life. Bowen’s theory suggested to me that there was a better way to understand and alter my part in the relationship system that was focusing on what was wrong with Butch.

Consider that Butch was negatively focused on as a child. By the age of fifteen Butch, had joined his mother and father, and many other family members in burying problems by drinking the problems away.

Apparently drinking and smoking and having any number of women around Butch, was not enough to manage what his psychiatrist said were inner turmoil and conflicts. I thought his relationship system was also messed up.

In 1952 our parents were arrested and the three of us went to live with our maternal grandparents. Butch was eight, I was ten, and Drew was two. Twelve years later, in 1974, Butch had his time being Jesus.

In 1974 the first psychiatrist Butch saw, told me, Butch was a danger to himself or others. I was responsible for bringing him back to treatment. These words initiated the fantastical effort to capture Butch.

According to his next psychiatrist, Butch would never recover and would be in and out of hospitals, all his life. Can you see the trap that had been set for me to over-function and annoy Butch? What if I had just said no way? But I could not. I was in it. To his friends, Butch was cool. Drinking was just a way to get loose. But loose from what?

There was a certain bravado that went with drinking, when like Butch, you are a top-notch surfer in Virginia Beach, Virginia. No one thought about his parents, missing in action, or the problems created by our father participating in WW II.

But behind Butch’s need to save us all. Of course, the family anxiety had been quietly rising. Family members were dying off, the war, there were multiple deaths and noises in the night. Fragments of memories, untold stores, all reminding Butch of what should be kept in the dark.

Butch was determined to lift the top off Pandora’s box. At thirty-one, years of age, Butch was saving the family by taking on the mantel of Jesus Christ.

What a paradox. Be crazy to save others.

Two years after Butch’s fun escape from the conventional care of mental health care, I met Bowen. Right away I began to understand the impact of the family system on one’s ability to see and think. Once I was accepted into the post-graduate program, thanks to meeting Bowen. Now I could diagram the three generations of my family and begin to tell a more accurate story about my family. Over time I was better able to observe the relationship system. This led to my taking photographs of Bowen and his group.

In 1976, two years after Butch’s time in the hospital, I was finally able to meet the leading-edge researcher about the human family. Fortunately, over time and with exposure to Dr. Bowen plus learning Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, I was able to develop the ability to change my part in the system.

The key element for me to learn was to manage my reactivity to others. To do that I had to be able to see the relationship system in the family diagram.

The family diagram allows me to see the influence of family events on individuals.

Looking at the diagram I saw, in a new way, a cluster of deaths in the later sixties and seventies. To understand my parents dying in their mid-fifties I needed to track back to see and understand the stressful event that alter their lives and mine. Eventually it was clear was that my father, Andrew J. Maloney had suffered from “shell shock,” after WW II.

The background: My father’s decision to volunteer for the army rocked his marriage to my mother, Ann Maloney. My grandmother Anna Maher’s husband, Walther Maher had left his wife to fight in WW I. His assignment was loading and unloading ships in France. But he was instrumental in encouraging my father to volunteer to fight in WW II.

At the time my grandmother was pregnant. Now my mother was pregnant with Butch, just before her husband left for the war.

Fortunately for me I was born in November 1941 just before Pearl Harbor. As you can see in the photographs below my maternal family was still in good spirits. Then came the war.

Below you can see the wedding party of my parents. Here you can see my grandmother, father, and grandfather, and my mother. Below those photographs are my father’s photographs of the bombing of Hiroshima and Toyoko.

s an intelligence officer, he was stationed in Saipan. His job designing the firebombing of Japan. During the war, over three million people in Japan were killed.

As an intelligence officer, my father was not allowed to talk about the war effort. In addition, there was concern from the FBI that the Japanese were hunting down those who participated in the bombing.

When I was older, he told me that if we had lost the war, he would be found guilty of war crimes.

One way to cope with his mental state was to drink. Many more variables can be considered when one tries to understand the kind of pressure on my father. Initially, he seemed to have a lot going for him. Before the war, he was the general manager of the Washington Gas and Light company.

After the war, my grandfather bought my father a Pyrex gas company in Miami, Florida. I do not have many photographs of my time in Florida, so I must rely on the memory of what I experienced. These were two years were my family was slowly falling apart. (1950-1952)

With the pregnancy of their third child, their drinking increased to the point where Drew was later diagnosed with the fetal alcohol syndrome. No one knew that drinking could harm the fetus. This was the fifties. As you will see later, our family could not self-correct. My brothers and I had to wait until laws were broken and the legal system stepped in and took the family over.

As children, we spent two years in Florida in a very stressful environment. But was that enough that Butch would fall apart?

When Butch began heavy drinking at 15, I wondered what happened that Butch could not learn from his parent’s mistakes and go the opposite way? Stop drinking I shouted, under my breath. Could all the confusion and the negativity have melted his brain? Butch had no answer for me.

In the photograph below you might be able to see, as I remember, that the three of us were trying very hard to save the family, by being in dad’s army. When he was well, he would get us up, ask us to drink some warm lemon juice, and then go for a march. The rest of the time we were free.

Once my maternal grandparents adopted us, we lead a different life. There were lot more rules. And slowly Butch rebelled more than I did. In one way Butch did more and more of his own thing and made a name for himself in his surfing community. But his relationship with his grandparents was full of conflict and negativity.

The three siblings:

left to right: Punkin, Butch, and Drew, are in dads army in Miami Beach, Florida.

Next Butch catches an award-winning fish off his surfboard. 1962.

Butch surfing the pipeline in Hawaii. 1966

The family way of interacting had ended up with Butch becoming the absorber of the family problem, or the white knight on the white horse coming to save us all.

Butch forced us all to change as he had undergone such a radical change in his life. It was like he dragged us into looking at our lives.

Considering the family history, what was I going to do now? People died. Butch went crazy, and so the pressure was on me to figure out what to do next?

While Butch was in the psychiatric hospital, for being our savior, I realized two things.

1) No one knew what to do. His psychiatrist said I needed a friend and to forget about my brother, as he would be in and out of hospitals all his life. His condition: manic depressive with psychotic symptoms or schizophrenic, both of which meant he would never be normal.

2) I needed to get a job in the psychiatric hospital. I needed to learn all they knew. I could at least learn what they knew about treating this symptom.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but the hospital where I worked for six months invited Dr. Bowen to speak on alcoholism.

This was the beginning of my relationship with Bowen: the teacher, the researcher, the man who saw the family as a system, and how it functioned as an emotional unit.

After I met Bowen and was accepted into the Georgetown University Family Center Postgraduate program where deeper learning began. Emotionally, I was learning how to make the switch from doing what others wanted me to do, to thinking about better ways to relate to Butch and to the rest of my family.

Then there were all the deaths. When I drew my family diagram, it only includes the people I knew best at the time. I did notice that family members were telling each other and me that everything will be all right. Not so easy to believe, considering the circumstances. The family diagram forced me to look at how the family had changed. I had no idea of the cost of all these deaths.

Ten family members are gone. The clusters of deaths that occurred from 1964 to 1978, left me as the oldest person in my family. I was thirty-six, and my parents and grandparents had all died.

I went about the prescribed routines associated with funerals and grieving. I could not understand that these deaths also left me without many recourses.

There was a big hole in how people in my family were functioning. These deaths wiped out my grandparent and parent generations culminating in the death of my mother and Butch being hospitalized, on the same day, May 7, 1974.

I will use a sports analogy, as sports was often the way I could see my value to others and their value to me. As a basketball or hockey player, if I sprained my uncle, usually there was someone on the bench to take over, but now when I turned to look at the family bench, there was no one on the bench. They had died.

Learning about Murray Bowen

Before meeting Dr. Bowen, I read about him. I understood that Bowen had found a way to talk about what was happening in the relationship system by telling stories. In his chapter about his effort to differentiate himself in his family, he used reversals to communicate information to his important family members.

This indirect method, in my view, forced his family and others to have to figure out what he was up to. He understood the family as a reasonably predictable system. When he gave them new or slightly confusing information they would predictably react. But then his long years of training as a psychoanalyst enabled him to listen. Perhaps this training provided him with the magic. Or perhaps it was his curious nature and his ability to predict. Whatever the reasons, Bowen did not react. I believe that from his observation of families, he knew what to do to interrupt the predictable upsetting reactions.

Over the years Bowen had observed many family members react to increased anxiety in the system. I was struck by how Bowen’s letter put new information into the system. He wrote letters with reversals, to family members, giving them information about the state of the family system. According to his plan, Bowen could maintain his views without defending himself, explaining, or pressuring others to change.

Three years after defining himself to his family, in 1970, Bowen decided to give a public presentation on how he managed to define himself to his family. These bits of information about how he managed himself in his family shocked the professional world. They too needed time to understand and integrate.

What was he up to? To me, he could be open and talk about the hidden family relationships that made people uptight. He did it in a way that challenged others to think for self. Nothing harder, but I wanted to be able to do that.

Bowen dared to be open and upset the status quo and never defend himself but just joke with people in his family. I saw how he figured stuff out and went with it if it made theoretical sense to him. He was following his game plan. This guided me in establishing better contact in my conflict-oriented, uptight family system.

I understood at some level the depth of his observation of human behavior. I saw Bowen as someone who had taken it upon himself to understand the family despite the resistance from his professional friends. Bowen learned to be resistant to what he called “togetherness” and what I understood as emotional pressure.

Meeting Bowen: In 1976 he came to present a paper on alcoholism at the psychiatric hospital where I worked. As a curious scientist with twinkling blue eyes, he had an endless set of questions. “What should I say to these people? You are from here. You read my paper.” I said, “These people like AA and are not going to get what you’re saying so why not just say what you want?” And so he did.

People were upset when he talked about getting more interested in learning from mice than from the stories people tell as to “why” they drink. Look at what they do. What made the mouse twitch? Bowen spoke about de-twitching mice to cure alcoholism. People reacted negatively. He was not mad or reactive back. I wanted some of that magic to say what I believe and keep going even if people do not approve. What a skill.

If people felt sorry for him, he would say stuff like: “The next person who asks me, how do I feel, well, I am going to punch them in the nose.” As you will read in the Bowen stories, there are many ways that Bowen was not afraid to call people out or to tell a story about the emotional process that he saw going on between people.

Photography can capture and hold family members still, despite death. Look at a photograph and your memory is awakened. Now you can better understand and even change old stories.

As many families do I had old photographs of my family that helped me to see how things were and cherish those who had died, and keep their memory alive. This prepared me to take pictures of Bowen and his group. I wanted to keep them for the ages, for those who had not been so fortunate to meet them.

I had always been interested in photography. Holding time still was magic. People in my family died early. Therefore, memories captured in photographs could bring people alive again. I might not be able to keep people from dying. I could take their photograph or find old photographs of them that kept all these memories alive.

Photographs also allow me to ask more questions about this or that person, about their relationship or my relationship with them, or even about buildings. My great-aunts had a photograph of an old castle in Ireland. That photograph opened the door to meeting a new branch of the family. Without the photograph, I would have missed many family stories and even a reunion.

Language is a later developed skill found in the brains of mammals, giving them the ability to communicate with others. Our brains are made for stories. Photographs create a mental picture. Easy to remember, they make a point and tell you about what is worth remembering. Maybe they even upgrade your memory.

Photographs can tell you in an instant some story around a moment, allow you to reflect on a time in someone’s life, or even give a hint of what might happen in the future.

You can ask questions of any photograph: Who is this? What is around them? What jumps out at you? Take your time and look closely, what do you see now, upon reflection? Of course, photographs can also tell you nothing, or just capture a moment of joy. It’s just grass, a summer cloud, a rainbow, or is there something there? Is that hate sprawling over a brick wall? Is there a father pushing his child, and is the mother tearful? Many moments are captured in photographs, all of them subject to interpretation. This is what makes for great stories.

Bowen wanted a science of human behavior. A way to predict what the human might do in this or that circumstance. You can do it if you know some theory and have gathered information about your family. There are a few basic lessons needed.

First lesson: I had to learn not to take things that went wrong personally.

Second Lesson: Families are complex systems with automatic ways to manage anxiety around stressful events. I like to say anxiety is distributed unfairly, just to get people thinking. More accurate to say that anxiety is distributed automatically by four mechanisms. Not as interesting to consider but there it is, the role of distance, conflict, reciprocity, and child focus. Then Bowen came up with the differentiation of self, the fifth way to manage anxiety.

Third Lesson: Once Bowen put Darwin and evolutionary thinking into his theory as a baseline for explaining symptoms it was easier to see how all social systems form hierarchies. Some, (like my brother Butch) are more vulnerable to absorbing anxiety. There is so much that happens once you look at relationships considering evolutionary processes that are inherited.

Bowen was famous for developing a theory of the family. He described the family as an adapting system, a product of evolution. That is evolution has a selection process for all life forms, and those who are more capable of adapting and surviving under changing conditions, survive.

Evolution still is a bridge too far for most people in mental health. Psychiatry is still individually oriented. The focus is on a problem inside an individual. It appeared to me that Bowen was clear that humans had instinctive and automatic behaviors similar to those that all social animals use to manage threats and one another.

The early base of psychoanalysis was Greek plays, useful for demonstrating relationship dynamics. Perhaps biochemistry explains how we humans behaved. But neither focus proved scientific.

In Bowen’s view, humans were vulnerable to mental health issues not because they were unique and special but rather, because they seemed to be guided by the automatic nature of the more instinctual and ancient emotional system.

Consider that some animals give up when their mother dies, just like some humans.

https://www.janegoodall.org.au/2017/03/the-f-family/

Flint died at the age of eight and a half, within one month of losing his mother. Observing the family as an emotional system that was somewhat predictable, first emerged during Bowen’s research on family relationships while he was at The Menninger Institute.

What is it about some stories that make a point that I can remember?

I recall Bowen telling a group in a very shocking but humorous way how he took on the shift from individual to systems thinking. Bowen was the head of clinical research but finally convinced the administration to allow the patients, some of whom had been there for ten years, to finally see their parents.

One day Bowen is walking with a patient to see his parents and halfway there he stops and says, “Dr. Bowen, I have a gift for you.” Slowly he opens his hand to reveal what looked like a turd. Just as slowly Dr. Bowen rolled his hand back up and says: “I think that’s a gift for your parents.”

In this story the focus goes back to the family and the relationship system there, not to be held in transference between the patient and the psychiatrist. In the photograph below you see Bowen drawing the focus between the husband and wife and the therapist is more like a guide or a coach below. Explanations are often more understandable when drawn.

The lines between the two represent an attachment, a fusion-confusion if you will. I look at the way he smudged the lines between the two to convey that each was a bit more of an individual and less guided by the other. This is an example of an emotional process where each one can separate from the system.

Bowen understood the family from his years of research at both the Menninger Institute and at the National Institute of Mental Health. He observed that change could occur when one person in the family was interested in being a more objective observer and in defining his or herself to others.

Throughout this book, you can see and hear how photographs both encourage me to see patterns and to keep memories alive.

Reflecting the way each person’s brain sees and understands, photographs hold a moment still.

Now each of us sees events from a different angle and often each person has a different explanation for what they see.

Some photographs are easy to understand, after all a rose is a rose. However, there are more complex and difficult-to-understand, challenging photographs. When a story is built around a photograph. There is the door to one’s experience, there is memory. The photograph may be saying “Are you curious? If so I will open the door to speculation, concern, wonder, to joy.

Take the photograph above as an example of complexity.

This photograph made me curious.

Bowen and his group on a hot summer day in Richmond, Virginia. Bowen was celebrating receiving an award for his ten-year ground-breaking project of videotaping two clinical families whom he had interviewed once a month for ten years.

This project occurred at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in Richmond Virginia. I had been invited to come by the head of the department of psychiatry Henry Letter. Then spontaneously I decided to take photographs at this gathering. First, I took some color photographs of Bowen and his wife, LeRoy Bowen. Then I pointed the camera at the people gathering around Bowen.

Caution: I considered myself to be an apprentice to Murray Bowen, MD the originator of the Bowen Family System Theory for fourteen years. (1976-1990) The vulnerability of being an apprentice or of having someone make a profound difference in your life is that you over-estimate them and possibly yourself
Overview: Butch and the puzzle of psychosis, meeting Murray Bowen, MD, family diagrams, and the importance of photographs and family stories.