Has anyone ever invited you to the church, or was it the temple or the masque of the emotional cut off? Or perhaps you automatically knew it was for the best to get rid of annoying people in your family? Perhaps you grew up with this belief. But there was no religious reason behind the urge to get away from the jerks in your family. In fact there may be religious principles and ideals that recommend that you learn to respect your parents and to love your brothers and sisters. But principles like these are hard to follow when there is just this little emotional voice inside you that creates some tightness in your chest, or your jaw or goose bumps on your arm that say – these people are jerks and you should have nothing to do with them. This is the demanding voice of instinct, of survival, of hope for an imaginary but blissful future.
Can it be possible that people can see the emotional cut off between generations for what it is? Short terms relief that creates deep problems in the future what are the principles that might allow you to avoid the temptation of comfort in a world of maddening turmoil?
Sometimes people will go to family meeting with the jerks as there is money and power and position involved. Some advisors warn of the cut off as there is money and property involved so that the instinct to cut off can cost people dearly. Family members may then hesitate. They may seek to understand the system and they may find a principle to to enable the family unit to reach a higher level of emotional maturity.
Those who are in family businesses or who advisors to those in family businesses have a strong motivation to get beyond the urge to cut off from people they find annoying. Lawsuits are motivating factors. Loss can also be motivating. Sometimes when people have lost a parent or a child to a cut off they are motivated to go beyond the feeling response to slowly begin the difficult process of reconnecting to those we use to call family.
What makes it important that family members learn to respect and care for one another despite conflict and real differences? What makes you stronger to be able to deal with people who say or do upsetting things. What makes it possible for us to not react automatically to differences?
Cutoff is a primitive response that is tribal in nature. Those who don’t believe the way we believe, or act the way we want or need them to act, should or must be extruded.
In the old days if strangers believed differently that you did. These outsiders were dangerous. Therefore they should be extruded or killed. In our early hunter gather days there were about 12 adults and 18 children in the tribe and this is what we are physiologically use to. We had to rely on one another for our life, for our food and for the survival of our children. If people ae going to chat well we react to them like any monkey would, with anger and perhaps with cut off. Our very identity must be with one another for us to survive. The dominance hierarchy is reinforced by relations beliefs. Obey your parents. Individuals are more fused with one another in the tribal world and there is less freedom to express our differences.
In 1976 when my supervisor looked at my family diagram he said casually: who do you have left to hang onto when your grandfather dies. Good grief I looked up and yes both my parent were dead and all of my grandparents except Walter Maher, my maternal grandfather who was 86 at the time and not well. I squinted at the map and said, yes there were a few circles and squares I did not know up there. They were people, great aunts that I knew nothing about. Hope for the future said my supervisor. That was not a good day for me or perhaps it was the best day of all days for me. I woke up.
Now when I take a family history and hear about the jerks in the family, I know that the family system is getting up tight and someone is very likely to have a very big problem in the not too distant future. Cut off is a way to solve problems in the moment but it makes people way more vulnerable in the future. It is easy to just have a temper tantrum and say get out and its done. But now your weaker and have no idea you just created a terrible problem for the generations to come and perhaps other problem will manifest in your life time and you will say. “Why did I cut off?” If so then that day you will have woken up to possibilities.
What can possibly counter the urge to cut off and get rid of the jerks? Are there principle that guide behavior? If not then your feelings will tell you what to do. If you’re willing to think about the way your family system has guided your behavior in a more or less instinctual way well then there is lots to learn from your getting to know the people in your family without judgment and with some clarity as to who is responsible for what? Is it possible hat in getting to know others we can we improve our own and others functioning? Is it important to consider how we interact with others?
I ask these questions as I look back on what motivated me to want to know everything there was to know about families? At that precise moment, 1974, my brother had an interesting psychotic episode, and then my mother, who had been cut off from her family, died three days later. I was terrified by my own ignorance and the unpredictable nature of my brother’s symptom. I had no idea that the family was an emotional unit with its own ancient, instinctual rules.
Have you found that your family can terrify you? It happens to people, both rich and poor, when symptoms appear and someone might die, or did die, or when someone you love and needs is really super mad at you. Or when an authority figure, your boss at work get furious and wants to or does fire you.
All of us are dependent on others. How can we be more aware of our level of dependency on others?
Murray Bowen tried to do this by developing his scale of differentiation of self, which describes out way of relating to others based on our ability to manage anxiety and to integrate feelings and thinking.
Communication styles differ in each family but there are some common patterns in families depending on the symptoms.
My family has a tendency or genetic vulnerability to abuse drugs. One does not talk about upsetting things and please do walk on the nice egg shells. Every family has rules as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. f you’re the only one in your family who believes in putting cards on the table, well your very vulnerable to being the odd person out and being focused on as the problem person. Small price to pay for a little forward progress.
The rules of the emotional systems in work and at home are often unspoken. That’s part of what makes them terrifying. What is this thing, this feeling that I should not talk or do X, Y or Z? How can any of us sole problems if we cannot talk about them? Are you living by the dictates of others? The emotional system is just trying to train you to “fit in.”
Ata that time I was working in psychiatric hospital trying to learn all I could so I could figure out how to manage myself with my brother. Well, it happened that one night I found and read Dr. Bowen chapter on The differentiation of self. Here he was able to define himself in both his family and his professional emotional systems. It was strange the way eh did it, even backwards the way he talked to his family but there was a deep truth to the message, I knew that. But it showed me that there was more to this than my brother had a problem. The whole family was confused. Later I read about the way he observed his family and his work system. I saw that there were principles he was using to guide his actions.
One example: I noticed that when I was away on trips I was much clearer and more objective about work relationships, and that the objectivity was lost on returning to work. It was as if the emotional system “closed in” as I entered the building. This is the emotional phenomenon I later came to call the “undifferentiated family ego mass.” I wondered what it would take to keep emotional objectivity in the midst of the emotional system. A “differentiated self” is one who can maintain emotional objectivity while in the midst of an emotional system in turmoil, yet at the same time actively relate to key people in the system.
Bowen, Murray (1993-12-01). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice ( p 485) Jason Aronson, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
In 1976 despite only having two years of college Bowen accepted me into the post graduate program at Georgetown University. During the latter part of his life I traveled with him and videotaped his out of town conferences. His papers video and audio recording have been donated to the National Library of Medicine organized by The Murray Bowen Archives Project. (TMBAP) They now represent a unique contribution to the growing world of knowledge about human behavior.
Bowen seemed to be a man who perceived the world very differently from the way others saw it. And this did not bother him. He just stayed on his own track while respecting others but never agreeing with them. He would say thing like “I hear you, or I am listening to you…” but there was no agreement. There seemed always to be the respected space for the other to hold his or beliefs or observations. Yet, consider this he was a man with a theory of human behavior training others to deal with schizophrenia, a little bit of which is probably in all of us. So that meant he was always testing us
A man from the know past, seeing the present moment and its impact on the future generations, Bowen was out of step with mental health’s focus on diagnosing individuals. Just to give you an idea of how Dr. Bowen beinga self in an emotional system here are some quotes for you to pounder. They are taken from a videotape I did with the Syracuse Six.
Last year Ona Bergman contacted me as the group were aware of the TMBAP efforts to find letters and tapes of Dr. Bowen. They wanted to make sure the tapes were safe guarded and given to The National Library of Medicine. In these tapes Dr. Bowen offers various ideas to the questions from to this small group pf people known as the Syracuse Six
Just to give you an idea of the principals involved in the way Bowen communicated here are samples of how Bowen thought. Noting that there was increased anxiety which appeared to be eroding the individuals ability to stand up for self Bowen predicted the societal regression that we see around us today.
Consider the behavior he observed being errored and the principles that he tried to allow people to see and to sue to take action if they decided to do it: As a greater number of people have problems so too will the professionals who want to tell others what they must do.
If reciprocity increase (winners get up on by climbing up on others backs, and then blaming the so called losers).
Society becomes directed by the dictators and the dictated to follow along. There will be less curiosity about how to relate to each individual as unique individuals, more avoidance as more and more people are treated as the same.
How do any of us act responsibly in an increasingly polarized and seemingly irresponsible age? Irresponsible people are those who have no skin in the game. There is an increase in the numbers of people who are able to do harm to others without real consequences. School shooters are at the top of my list. Who is on your list?
One of the messages that stood out to me was Bowne’s equating differentiation with leadership.
“Leadership is equivalent to being a responsible person who is trustworthy.”
The question I would ask of you, dear reader, is what are the ideas that you hold dear, that you think might offer you some guidelines, as to how you can relate to others who are difficult and challenging.
Notes from Dr. Bowen’s talk with The Syracuse Six, videotaped disk 3:
Respecting the others ego till they demonstrate that they cannot do it (be responsible).
If they cannot be responsible then I tell them – “I will take over and make the rules till you can get reliable.”
At NIH I told the people it is more important to keep peace with the place then with you. You have to get along with the place and give me some kind of reason that I can respect that you will do it. You have to respect people or I have to take over. I am not going to trust you, if you disappoint me and refuse to comply with the rules.
A lot of (increasing maturity) depends on your relationships with the person. If they trust you they will go along with you. How far can you trust people? You can ask a person: Are you all talk?
Leadership is equivalent to being a responsible person.
Alcoholics are out of relationship with people. They are not responsible people.
And if they want to stay that way then I quite messing with them. A person who can hold others responsible rather than do for them is more mature.
The person on welfare thinks what can I get out of them…? If you could leave the problem over there instead of seeing it in them?
Can you be more realistic about the problem? My dad had been driving his car all his life then he got into fender benders. Insurance said no more driving the car. My sister said, I can take the car and insure it and then he can drive and after that he had no more accidents. People can respected others and hold them responsible.
Elderly people get anxious and they have memory problems and they need someone to check in on them.. but if you take over for them then they will die on you. Elderly people can accept you telling them what reality is and they don’t mind you checking up on the reality – is the stove lit or not? It has to do with your ability to be with older people but if you move in on them and tell them what to do they collapse and they will die sooner.
If you want to keep your family out of your ego then you have to tell them how much you can be responsible for and stick to it. Like – I can respect you as long as you’re reliable but when you’re not reliable then that’s when the problem starts.
If the person fails to do it three times then I take over and I tell him this is what you Gotta do, or you have to leave.
M.r B I’m still the same person as I was before but I need to keep peace with the place (the hospital) and that’s more important than you are and I can get another patient, so you have to get along with the staff if you want to stay here. If you’re not reliable then I can’t trust you. And I’m not going to give you any more permission to (leave the hospital) until you become more reliable.
If the person can trust you they will go along with you. If it’s all talk and no action then I don’t trust you. I tell them that. And a person can accept that because they know they been unreliable.
If the government can hold the line about what they have available and that’s it, then people do better. When the government is responsible for irresponsible people then the numbers increase.
Who are the ones that are trying to do the best that they can do? What is your mean average level of responsibility or of leadership? You have to look at differentiation over time. People’s functioning can go up and down in a day. People get married and their functional level changes from day to day.
People depend more on what the therapist is than what that person says.
I put the idea out there – there is something about the problem they have that they can do something about and if they don’t want to take it on OK – I can drop them off. You relate to the person as far as you can but if they are not reliable you get out of it.
Welfare workers can get so caught up in the system that they just want people to do what they’re supposed to do. Society doesn’t determine the attitude of the people, they determine how society functions! If you can be more realistic then they can be more realistic?
The more society regresses the more there are helpless people and other, professionals who want to tell them what to do..
How do you move it to a place where each person is responsible for self?