Bowen Family Therapy: A Personal Genogram Analysis

Introduction to Bowen Family Therapy

Bowen Family Therapy is a systems-based treatment approach. Rather than treating the individual as a completely separate person, Bowen places the person in the context of his or her family. By examining at least three generations of an index person's family, the therapist can develop a strong understanding of the factors that formed and continue to influence the patient or client. The systems-based intervention for treating an issue also helps the individual grasp the underlying factors affecting his or her life and change either his or her individual approach or the entire group dynamic in order to address the problem.

Family Genogram Overview

My family is relatively unremarkable as genograms go. My father's biological parents were Caucasian, Italian, Roman Catholic, working class, lived in New York State, and had one child—my father. My paternal grandfather was a foreman in an aluminum plant, and my paternal grandmother was a housewife. My mother's biological parents were Caucasian, Italian, Roman Catholic, working class, lived in Indiana, and had two children: my mother and my Aunt Elizabeth. My maternal grandfather was a shoemaker, and my maternal grandmother was a factory worker at a shoe plant. My Aunt Elizabeth never married and had no children.

My parents were married only to each other and had four biological children: Julie, Paul, Katherine, and Francis. My father was the traffic and shipping supervisor for the same aluminum plant, and my mother was a housewife. There were no divorces, affairs (that I know of), illegitimate children (that I know of), or mental illnesses (that I know of), and no major physical illnesses until my paternal grandfather's fatal pneumonia, my paternal grandmother's terminal colon cancer, my maternal grandfather's fatal congestive heart failure, my maternal grandmother's terminal cirrhosis of the bile ducts, my father's fatal heart attack, and my mother's terminal colon cancer. There have been no major illnesses among my brothers, sister, or me. Diversity, in the classic sense, is a non-issue in my family.

Core Bowen Concepts Applied to the Family

A triangle is a three-individual relationship structure. It is considered the building block, or "molecule," of larger emotional structures because a triangle is the smallest stable relationship structure. A two-person system is unstable because it tolerates little tension before involving a third person. A triangle can contain tension without drawing in another person because that tension can move among three relationships (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). The closest my family had to a triangle was among my father, my mother, and me. My father was very involved with his work and spent very long hours away or went golfing with his friends, so my mother focused much of her attention on me. We were very close, and there were times when my father seemed to resent it.

Differentiation of the self refers to an individual's developed level of functioning independently versus dependently in relation to the group. The basic elements of a "self" are innate, but family relationships during childhood and adolescence largely define how much of a separate "self" that individual develops. Someone with weak differentiation depends heavily on other people for acceptance, or dictates how others should behave in order to feel accepted. Someone with strong differentiation maintains a healthy reliance on others but is secure enough in his or her sense of self to withstand struggle, disapproval, and rejection (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). Although my mother and I were particularly close, I was always an independent thinker and remember disagreeing with my parents from a very young age without worrying about rejection. I remain that way today with friends and colleagues, so I apparently have a reasonably strong differentiation of self.

The nuclear family emotional system involves four relationship patterns in which problems can develop within the immediate family. Those four patterns are: (1) marital conflict, in which anxious partners externalize their anxiety, focus on what is wrong with the spouse, attempt to control the spouse, and resist being controlled; (2) dysfunction in one spouse, in which one partner pressures the other to think or act in certain ways or gives in to such pressure; (3) impairment of one or more children, in which one spouse focuses his or her anxiety on a child—either negatively or positively—and the child in turn focuses on that parent, reacting more strongly than other children to what that parent needs, wants, and expects; and (4) emotional distance, in which a family member emotionally distances himself or herself from others to reduce the intensity of the relationship, potentially becoming too isolated (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016).

I distanced myself considerably from my father as I grew up because he was a disapproving, frequently yelling person who tended to pit my siblings and me against one another. I could feel my anxiety diminish as I created that distance, and I came to value the peace it gave me so deeply that by the time of my father's death, I had very little to do with him. I was the most emotionally distant of all the children from my father; my siblings sought his approval, while I sought his absence.

Family projection process is the mechanism by which parents transfer their own problems onto their children (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). The clearest example in my family involves my father's treatment of my older brother, Paul. My father decided very early on that Paul was somehow unworthy. He was excessively hard on Paul—constantly yelling at him and criticizing him—from the time Paul was very young. This was ostensibly a father toughening up his son, but it went far beyond that; my father seemed to be trying to crush Paul's self-confidence. I concluded early on that something was wrong with my father in that regard, not with Paul. Oddly, once Paul became a significant professional success, both my father and Paul claimed the harsh treatment had never happened. But I know it did, consistently. My father once said, "I never called Paul stupid." I replied, "Are you kidding? 'Stupid' was the nicest thing you called him." Neither of them responded.

Multigenerational transmission process describes the progression by which small differences in differentiation between parents and children become amplified across subsequent generations (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). The clearest example in my family involves Paul. His intense drive to please my disapproving father reflected poor differentiation of self. Paul married a woman who is very dependent on him, and they had four children who now have their own families. All those families have formed such a closed system of approval and disapproval that they are very emotionally distant from the rest of us—an outcome that seems to trace directly back to Paul's early relational experiences with my father.

Emotional cutoff is the management of unresolved issues with one or more family members by reducing or completely severing emotional contact (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). This concept clearly describes my relationship with my father. I removed myself from him emotionally because he was too disapproving, too prone to yelling, and created an atmosphere of strange competitiveness among my siblings and me from a very early age. The downside of emotional cutoff is that unresolved issues remain unresolved; however, I was far more interested in having peace than in resolving issues with someone I found impossible to deal with. So I simply did not deal with him.

Sibling position holds that a child's place in the birth order tends to shape his or her characteristics (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). Older children tend to be leaders, younger children tend to be followers, and siblings close in age tend to share many characteristics. Markowitz's article discusses how siblings fit into our lives and shape us during childhood and into adulthood (Markowitz, 1994). In some respects, this pattern holds true in my family; in others, it does not. My older sister, Julie, has always served as the emotional leader when we siblings act as a unit. However, we do not act as a unit very often. I tend to be my own leader and have been since I was very young, though I will defer to Julie when we function as a group because it matters greatly to her.

Societal emotional process is broadly parallel to the family emotional process; it addresses the way emotional systems influence a society's behavior (Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, 2016). Societies experience periods of progression and regression. Bowen believed we are currently in a period of regression, likely driven by increased population, diminished natural resources, and a sense that our frontiers are shrinking. He also predicted that sometime before the middle of the twenty-first century, society would begin adapting to those realities rather than ignoring them and would move toward living more sustainably. We can see early evidence of this shift now in the growing prominence of environmentalism and increased public focus on the long-term consequences of wasting natural resources.

Conclusion

My family genogram is relatively unremarkable. Through three generations, we have been Caucasian, Italian Roman Catholics, with no divorces, affairs, extramarital children, diagnosed mental illnesses, or major physical illnesses other than the ultimately terminal illnesses of my grandparents and parents. There was some triangulation in my immediate family in that my mother developed an exceptionally close relationship with me in response to my father's focus on his work and outside friendships.

I developed a strongly differentiated self from early childhood because, while I loved my mother and distanced myself from my father, I fundamentally sought and found approval from within myself. At least one element of the nuclear family emotional system was clearly present in my emotional distancing from my father. The family projection process was evident in my father's harsh and critical treatment of my brother Paul; clearly, all that disapproval originated somewhere other than any real failing in Paul, and it was obviously my father's unresolved problem that he imposed on Paul from a very early age.

The multigenerational transmission process was visible in Paul's intense need for my father's approval—stemming from poor differentiation of self—followed by his marriage to a dependent woman and, subsequently, by his children's and grandchildren's very closed system of mutual approval and disapproval that separates that entire group from the rest of my extended family. Emotional cutoff was apparent in my distancing from my father: first emotionally, while I still lived under his roof, and then both physically and emotionally after I moved out. It isolated me in some ways, but I valued peace more than family harmony in that relationship.

Sibling position held true in that the oldest sibling tends to serve as the emotional leader when we act as a unit, but it did not hold true in my own case, since I tend to be my own leader despite being one of the younger children. Finally, Bowen's discussion of Societal Emotional Process appears to account for both the current regression of society and our relatively recent movement toward environmental sustainability.

The systems-based nature of Bowen family therapy is unmistakable. The very use of the genogram and other family-centered frameworks places the individual patient or client within the context of his or her family in order to understand who that person is and how he or she came to be that person. The use of process questions by the therapist further demonstrates this, showing the patient or client that his or her current experiences and emotions are deeply connected to early family life. This systems-based approach would help me address my overreactions to my brother Francis's words and actions. Through process questions, therapists have already helped me recognize that my reactions are triggered by my early experiences with my father. An intervention plan consisting of individual therapy, joint therapy with Francis, and group therapy with all my siblings would shift our family dynamic meaningfully—bringing into the open issues regarding my father and me that have never been discussed, and encouraging all of us to work through a relationship with someone who is now gone but whose presence is still felt.

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Gehart, D. R. (2014). Mastering competencies in family therapy: A practical approach to theory and clinical case documentation (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole CENGAGE Learning.

Markowitz, L. M. (1994). Shared passages. Family Therapy Networker, 18(1), 18.

Western Pennsylvania Family Center. (2016). Bowen family systems theory. Retrieved from