FEST Writing Group

In my opinion, one of Bowen’s most important contributions was the concept of automatic emotional reactions.  My first coach instructed our supervision group to start our attempts to improve our level of differentiation by trying to observe our own automatic emotional reacting.  It seemed to me too simple.  I was wrong.  That simple instruction has been a continuous source of new observations of myself and of the functioning of systems I am in.

Of course, Bowen went on to enunciate specific patterns of emotional reacting in human systems.  This was a brilliant beginning.  I believe there is more to discover about automatic reacting.

Bowen, in his theory, described several patterns of automatic emotional reacting.  They include:

1.  Nuclear family emotional process: family projection process, conflictual couple, emotional distancing couple, over/under functioning couple.

2.  anxiety reaction – the automatic reactions to perceived threat

3.  triangle process

4.  Multigenerational transmission process

5.  Sibling position process

Under this broad rubric of automatic emotional reacting, I would add

1. Phil Klever’s observations about convergent couple functioning.
2. Automatic social hierarchy reactions.
3. My defining of reciprocal societal projection process.

To repeat, I believe that all these are just a start and that we have more automatic patterns of emotional reacting to discover.

It can be useful to look beyond human behavior to find patterns of automatic reacting.  An example would be from the work of Eve Marder, a neurophysiologist at Brandeis University.  For much of her 40 odd year career, she has been studying the functioning of the central pattern generator in the nervous system of lobster stomach muscles.  This pattern generator creates rhythmic movements in those muscles.(Nassim 2018).

References

Charlotte Nassim. Lessons from the Lobster:  Eve Marder’s work in Neuroscience.  Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2018.