FEST Writing Group

Hi All,

Laura had asked me about what I had learned in working with parents at the Child Guidance Clinic in Springfield, so I started to write something up, which then changed into something quite different from what Laura had requested!  But it was an interesting exercise for me . . .

It’s too long, but if you have time, any responses would be appreciated.  I divided it into sections, and you can read just part of it.  I look for new perspective.  Also, there have been some interesting suggestions that the ill health associated with low socioeconomic class may be emotional/instinctual (and not just not enough resources): humiliation, feeling one-down, etc.  What do you think?  Also, any suggestions for improved writing, what to leave out, or expand upon.  Also, any questions?

Thank you,

Laurie

Introduction:

In 1991 I completed a Master’s in Social Work to work with families in order to broaden my understanding of family, coming out of intellectual curiosity related to

Bowen theory.  As it turned out, it broadened my view of humanity, and it gave me an opportunity to have meaningful work with direct contributions to people’s lives.

I had trained with Bowen in the postgraduate program, including consultations on functioning in my family from the mid’ 1980s until his death in 1990.  I had known about the theory and had applied it since the mid’ 1970s, but it was learning of Bowen’s interest in viewing the family as a product of evolution that influenced a change in career to work with families.

Northampton State Hospital: 

In the first year-long internship at Smith College, I was placed at the Northampton State Hospital.  After graduation, I was employed there for another year, at a time when the hospital was closing.  Only the chronically mentally ill, who had not been already moved to a less restrictive setting, were left.  Dr. Bowen, who had a partiality for the underdog, told me to go into “the back rooms of the wards” of the hospital to communicate a new theory to people who would not have the opportunity.  The main message I wanted to convey was that the problem was bigger than just the individual, as the patients saw themselves as the problem.

I also kept a promise to myself to be open to working with anyone.  None of the other interns or social workers would work with an elderly pedophile, for instance, and I volunteered.  Later, the Child Guidance Clinic would assign me the most difficult cases that others didn’t want.  It was a different value system that brought me into contact with the broadest community of people: the psychotic, the disfigured, the aggressive, the elderly, as well as families of widely different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures from Africa, the Middle East, South America, Asia, Europe, and even Australia. I think that’s the major ones!

What I learned from the chronically mentally ill:  A major surprise was that many of these people’s families were very involved.  I was able to meet with family members, including parents and siblings, and complete family diagrams.  I was interested in Bowen’s idea that it is the intensity of emotional process, rather than whether the focus is positive or negative, that leads to impairment in offspring.  I found that the patients had become psychotic in an atmosphere of either intense positive focus—seen as the most talented of the children, the most beautiful, the one with the sweetest nature, the one who cared the most for others, etc., or intense negative focus—the rebellious, the trouble maker, a liar, etc.  In looking at the many cases in which families were still involved, it skewed slightly more than 50% intensely positive over intensely negative.  While I regret I didn’t make this a research project, it has had great value to me in my work with clients and with my own family.

The other jaw-dropping experience was working with parents and siblings.  There were often several siblings, most of whom were doing well with work and families of their own.  Parents could be well-respected people in the community, well-groomed and well-spoken, charming with a good sense of humor, appearing on the surface to have a pretty good level of differentiation.  But in talking to them about the family, they would be unable to put attention on the marriage, for instance, for more than a few seconds before bringing in what was wrong with the patient, that she was too fat, or she was acting out.  It was startling to observe the inability of seemingly rational, well-put-together people to address emotionally significant issues without the focus on the patient.

The Child Guidance Clinic:

The second internship I had through the master’s program was with Brightside, a community mental health clinic, and even after I became a licensed independent social worker and developed a private practice, I continued work with parents at the Child Guidance Clinic.  I did stop commuting to Springfield a year ago, after the clinic streamlined its economic functioning, eliminating a few-hours-a-week opportunity with no volunteer program.

The singular value of seeing clients at the Child Guidance Clinic was the opportunity to work with various cultural and class backgrounds.  I think I was open to begin with, and the wide range of challenging cases added something.  Here are some observations from private practice and the community clinic.

1. I learned that I couldn’t predict who would be open to a new way of thinking, based on class or anything else.  It could be a young Hispanic man from a low economic setting, living on SSI for his Bipolar diagnosis.  It could be a Black man with a white mother with numerous psychiatric admissions who wanted to make a difference to nieces and nephews.  It could be an intellectually challenged young woman who wanted to live life on her own terms.  It could be a woman with health issues barely making it with several children with an intense worry about one of them.  The doctors and lawyers could have as much difficulty in changing thinking and behavior. People in difficult circumstances sometimes showed a lot of courage.
2. I learned about the obstacles to change, as mothers who no longer acted out their anxiety toward that one daughter, and were able to avoid transferring it to a different child, developed concerning physical symptoms.
3. I watched the intricacies of the triangle playing out. More on this another time! (I think this is more what Laura had in mind.  It needs its own article.)
4. I trained myself to tune into each person’s desire for differentiation, to keep bringing my attention back to it, and I could avoid negative reactivity toward anyone.
5. I observed the resistance people had to seeing and acknowledging one’s own part in a problem. It does seem to be automatic for all of us to want to be in the one-up and avoid the one-down, even at the cost of seeing clearly.
6. I learned to keep my attention on the process of change, and to keep thinking toward differentiation, and not to focus on making a good result happen.
7. Besides Bowen theory, I have trained in mindfulness, and letting go, and I learned to accept impermanence, at the same time that I was engaged in a step by step coaching process. Setbacks were just part of the humanity unfolding before me.
8. I learned that action was a necessary step in seeing how the family functions. After a client took a position, an action guided by the coaching, a vista would open up as the family reacted, and it became possible to plot the next step.  I could not give someone an overview of the process ahead of time, except in general terms, because each step was based on the family reaction to the previous one.
9. I behaved in a more and more respectful way toward people, as I worked on my own level of differentiation. I saw each person as my equal as a part of humanity, and I trained myself to see things accurately, without assuming I was better or worse, which a system view makes possible.
10. I saw how a child’s functioning could improve just from work with parents. One of my early cases at Brightside was a mother who said that it was her husband and son who needed the therapy, but they refused to come in, or to be in the same room. I only worked with her on her part of the triangle, and she reported their issues resolved.

Family Influences: Preachers and Teachers

When I was born in 1950, my mother and I were living in Dyersburg, Tennessee, population 10,000, in the house where my mother was born.  My mother, 21, the youngest of four, had the support of her mother in the first months with the new baby, as my father was in graduate school at Vanderbilt Peabody College, only made possible by the GI bill.

Fannie Mclean, my maternal grandmother, probably began her interest in helping others as the daughter of an itinerant preacher in a relatively educated family without money in the Nashville middle class.  Her father, the youngest of several boys, at 15 rode off to join his older brothers in fighting on the South’s side of the Civil War.  Luckily, he was injured instead of killed, and returned home.  His brothers went on to become successful businessmen.  Her mother was from an educated family, and her mother’s family had owned a few slaves.  Although Fannie Mc was the youngest of 8, she functioned as an oldest, growing up as the advocate and defender of her older brother, number 7, who had Downs Syndrome.

She and her future husband met at a lake party.  She had a sense of humor—one photo of her shows her dressed as a man, with her husband and another friend dressed as women.  But after her husband lost his store in the late 1920s, and forced to move to West Tennessee to teach high school math, Fannie Mc had one more child, my mother, then changed her life course.  She made a commitment that all the children of Dyersburg would have shoes and be able to attend school.  In one story, she shoved over a gambling table set up by a traveling fair.  She taught piano in the late 1920s until her death in 1965, teaching black as well as white children, to the chagrin of her neighbors, but well respected by them, too.  She wrote to prisoners, and left behind a mission for adolescents.

As a child, I accompanied her to meet a newborn in a multigenerational family living in a house made of cardboard with a dirt floor.

My mother had been warned not to marry my dad, not from a good family, but Fannie Mc liked him for admitting he didn’t have money for a corsage on the first date to a dance.  As an oldest himself, he was inspired by Fannie Mc’s energy and socialist-leaning values.  He ended up in a career as a vocational counselor, and he integrated the NC Easter Seals camp when he was the state director in the early 1960s.  I worked as a counselor in Easter Seals camps for five years as a teenager, and I later visited sheltered workshops where people made leather bags and belts.

My father’s father grew up on a mostly subsistence family farm, and through the frugality of the mother, who valued education, the children attended a couple of years of elementary school.  Dad’s father’s goal was “to move to town,” where he met my grandmother, a high school graduate from an Irish immigrant family, who had gotten into portrait photography and ended up working for Bell Telephone.  Both my paternal grandmother, a feisty, funny, and angry oldest, and paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had strong democratic views.  There were some problems in functioning.

Dad, as the oldest of two brothers, was the hero of that family.  First by marrying my mother, an intelligent if somewhat foolish youngest from an educated family of a higher social class, and by his upward mobility in career, eventually becoming the state director of vocational rehabilitation in NC and later taking a salary cut to become a graduate school professor, Dad brought us into the middle class.  The required frequent moves were tough on us kids socially, and Dad probably shortened his telomeres in the effort!

Dad could not compete successfully with the socioeconomic success of mom’s older sister who married a brilliant physics engineer in atomic energy.  Aunt Mary had never been reconciled to the move to West Tennessee when she was 13 and the accompanying economic downturn, and she had been against mom marrying dad, too.  Mary was 14 years older than mom, who viewed as her “fairy godmother.”  We were raised to admire the wine-drinking, classical music atmosphere at Aunt Mary’s, around an intimidating, good-posture-required dining room table of sophisticated dishes—a contrast with our loud kitchen-table meals.

The emotional process in my family, including the tendency toward one-up and one-down, has been intertwined with issues of socioeconomic class, and has contributed to my interest in thinking with people of various socioeconomic backgrounds, and to an accepting, non-judgmental viewpoint that has fit well with the broad view of Bowen theory.