Book Review-Bowen Family Systems Theory in Christian Ministry: Grappling with Theory and its Application Through a Biblical Lens

It’s not always easy to integrate psychological theories into Christian ministry.  Bowen Family Systems Theory in Christian Ministry: Grappling with Theory and its Application Through a Biblical Lens is an attempt to address apparent concerns between Bowen’s theory and biblical principles.

I’ve covered the core of Bowen’s theory in Family Evaluation.  If you’re unfamiliar with the theory, I’d recommend you start there.

No Blame

Fundamental to Bowen’s view is systems thinking, where everything is related to everything else and therefore there’s no one person to blame.  It’s not one thing but the interaction of several that leads to the outcomes.

Finding people to blame is a way to escape accountability.  If it’s their fault, then it’s not our fault.  But in an interrelated systems approach, it’s not as simple as that.  It’s not blame or fault that is important.  Instead, the focus shifts to how the interactions lead to negative outcomes and what can be done to get better outcomes.

Everyone Can Change the System

The systems approach means that any component of the system can change and potentially have very large effects on the outcomes.  (See Thinking in Systems for how.)  Edward Lorenz’s 1972 paper, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” was a wakeup call to systems complexity and sensitivity to initial conditions.  (See Superforecasting for more.)  Generally, we think in terms of cause and effect.  We expect that the results we receive will be proportional to the amount of effort expended.  This perspective is what most of us experience in our day-to-day lives.

However, systems aren’t always like that.  Lorenz exposed that it’s possible for very small changes to lead to very large changes in the output if the system is sufficiently unstable.  When we live in a world identified as VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous – we’re in a system with inherent characteristics of instability.  We can, from our position – no matter what that is – impact the entire system.

No one expected that Twitter would cause radical change in the Arab world – but the First Arab Spring proved that social media can change governments, as it did in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen.  Certainly, the change required thousands of protestors and sustained effort – but someone was the first person to stand up and to get the ball rolling.

Simultaneously, we can only guarantee that we’ll be able to change our own behaviors.  We can’t insist that someone else will do something to support our change in the system.  We get in trouble when we expect that our desires are the desires of everyone.

Hopelessly Entangled in Subjectivity

In any place where openness and honesty are valued, there is the opportunity for learning.  However, that learning comes far less frequently than all of us would hope.  Instead, we find Cass Sunstein’s concern that we’re Going to Extremes.  We find that we can’t seem to listen to other people’s data, facts, and opinions.  Thomas Gilovich in How We Know What Isn’t So explains that we ask different questions about data depending on whether it aligns with or contradicts with our worldviews.  Congruent ideas are asked if they can be believable.  Incongruent ideas are subjected to the must harder standard of must we believe them.

Genogram

Bowen didn’t use the term “genogram,” which was coined by others, but he started counseling with a visual diagram of the family.  The basic notation uses squares for men and circles for women.  Lines connect couples and their children, which are drawn beneath the couple, creating a form of family tree.

The basic approach has been used for dozens of purposes, including in healthcare to track the genetic progression of risk factors for disease between generations.  In Bowen’s use, he was looking for patterns of family relationships that might have been transmitted.

Like all forms of visual representation, the goal is to make it easier to understand where the person is today based on their history and current reality.

Lifelong Quest for Maturity

Bowen’s perspective was that individuals could elevate their differentiation and overall maturity, but that this was a slow and lifelong effort.  He viewed the work of family diagraming as one step for creating self-awareness.  This exposes a dialectical aspect of Bowen’s work.

On the one hand, he believes that it’s the relationships and interactions that drive the function or dysfunction; on the other, individuals have the capacity to bend the arc of outcomes in a positive direction by better understanding themselves and responding from places of better differentiation of self.  While Bowen’s not prescriptive of the kinds of activities that can improve self-awareness, he does encourage it.

Functional Style

Quoting Richardson, there is reference to a functional style set of quadrants with continuum of togetherness and isolation in contrast to differentiation and fusion – see below.

The core of the diagram is navigating the space between individuality and togetherness.  I am concerned about the graphic, because it is expressed as a stable system, but the system itself is inherently unstable.  People don’t occupy an individual side or a togetherness side.  In some aspects of their life and at some times in their lives, they’re more moved towards individuality; in other times, more towards togetherness.

Let’s take, for a moment, Erikson’s stages of development.  The idea of individuality appears in several stages.  (See Childhood and Society.)  One could argue that individuality is a plague upon our current times, but Robert Putnam’s research both in The Upswing and the older Bowling Alone don’t bear this hypothesis out.  Francis Fukuyama in Trust talks about how individuality impacts (and is impacted by) trust.  I mentioned in my review that even the relatively closed-community Amish expect a period of individuality and separation from the community called Rumspringa.

Looking at it less temporarily and more relationally, we often want togetherness in places and individuality in others.  There may be people who are lone wolves at work but who surround themselves with friends or family – or both – whenever they’re away from work.

From my perspective, this means that even defining areas of movement in this quadrant system would be difficult to justify.  There are just too many important dimensions that are lost using this framework.

Rescuing or Relational

As a pastor (elder, deacon, or human), do you see your role as rescuing those you come in contact with – or being in a relationship with them?  It’s a subtle but fundamental difference.  From a Christian perspective, it’s Christ that saved us – none of us humans are capable of that.  What Jesus did that we can do – and what we’re called to do – is to be in relationship with others.

It’s the fundamental reframing that Carl Rogers implored us to make.  Instead of presuming expertise over someone’s life, acknowledge that they are the experts in their lives.  While we may bring some things to the table in terms of our experience, knowledge, and even wisdom, we are not experts in someone else’s life.  However, we often believe because of our position, our credentials, or our ego that we should take up position of power over someone.  What we too frequently forget is that we’re with others – not over them.

Unity and Diversity

Organizations naturally prefer unity and rarely achieve it for long.  However, that’s a good thing.  If we are always in unison, we can fall victim to groupthink, Irving Janis’ term for when groups are so unified they make poor decisions – or fail to recognize the need for change.  (See Decision Making.)  Richard Hackman, known for his work on collaboration, explained the “Goldilocks paradox” of having just the right amount of unity.  Scott Page in The Difference and Adam Grant in Originals explain how diversity of thought, history, and perspectives can be essential to good decision making.

If we have too much unity, the organization calcifies.  If there’s not enough unity – if there’s too much diversity – the organization flies apart.  The secret is to live with the tension between these two extremes and find oscillations in the middle that can drive change and allow for the efficiencies of unity.

I think there’s much more that we can learn from Bowen Family Systems Theory in Christian Ministry – beyond the Christian ministry context.

Book Review-Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory

There are countless theories for how people interact in a family.  Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory focuses on eight components of Bowen’s family systems theory, which he renamed to simply Bowen’s theory.  Bowen’s work sits underneath much of family counseling today, though few people have heard Bowen’s name.  We speak of drama triangles without realizing that Bowen was one of the first to speak of how relationships naturally move towards triangulation.

Individuality and Relationship

Underlying Bowen’s theory is an understanding of systems and how there are dynamic relationships.  (See Donella Meadow’s excellent work, Thinking in Systems for more.)  The two major forces that Bowen sees in our internal processing are our need to be individuals and our need to be in relationships with others.  These competing forces sometimes create oscillations in people’s behaviors and conflicts.

There is certainly reason to support this tension, including Jonathan Haidt’s assertion that we became the dominant biomass on the planet through our ability to be in relationship with one another.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The work on attachment theory is substantially better known than Bowen’s work, and it asserts that people can be moved out of their comfort zone.  When they are, they may move towards or away from someone.  (See Platonic, Attached, Attachment Theory in Practice, The Power of Attachment, Attachment in Adulthood, and Attachment in Adults for just a start of the work done on attachment.)

Securely attached people are more likely to be differentiated according to Bowen’s conceptualization.

Emotional Fields

Another observation of Bowen’s is that there’s an emotional field in a family.  This field, like gravity and magnetic fields, cannot be seen, but it exerts a force just the same.  The challenge is that these emotional fields may lead to people becoming fused – or trapped – in a cycle of alternating dysfunction or the opposite reaction of creating cutoff where they are separated from relationship all together.  Consider a black hole that either envelops a star and its planets or flings them away at high speeds.

Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence explains how both overly closed and overly open teams can be problematic.  Healthy teams navigate the fine line around the right degree of openness – the strength of their emotional field.  Families need the right level of closeness and freedom to create a stable and healthy environment.

Extremes

Life has a way of taking us to extremes.  There’s always the car that breaks down, the job lost, the baby born, or any of hundreds of other challenges that bring us to the edge of our coping strategies – and beyond.  It’s these cases where Bowen saw the family system shift.

When a normally sufficient coping strategy is pushed beyond its capacity, it can create havoc in the system.  The person who is normally stable destabilizes – usually taking the entire family system with them.  That’s not to say that new coping strategies can’t be developed or even that there’s not a way to learn how to get better results from an existing coping strategy – it’s just that, in the moment, it stops working.

Nassim Taleb’s work, Antifragile, speaks about how growth is possible with appropriate level and timing of challenges.  Tedeschi explains in Posttraumatic Growth how incredible growth can come from even trauma.

Helper Anxiety

It’s important to understand that, in a family system, the degree of reciprocal concern for one another can trigger anxiety or angst in other members when someone is hurting.  It’s a well known phenomenon that sometimes the reactions of help are a coping mechanism used by others to control their own anxiety.  Sometimes help and control are too similar to differentiate – and that can be problematic in every family.

Concepts

Bowen’s theory originally published with six concepts; later, two more were added:

• Differentiation of Self
• Triangles
• Nuclear Family Emotional Process
• Family Projection Process
• Multigenerational Transmission Process
• Sibling Position
• Emotional Cutoff
• Societal Emotional Process

We’ll address some of the most important in this review.

Differentiation of Self

Conceptually, this is the capacity to remain yourself in relationships with others.  I’ve called it stable core or integrated self-image.  (See Braving the Wilderness, Happiness, Beyond Boundaries, and many more.)  Brene Brown calls it “wholeheartedness.”  (See Daring Greatly.)  There are likely dozens of names that we could use for the ability to keep from being drawn into maladaptive relationships with others.

The work of the Arbinger Institute in Leadership and Self-Deception describes the dysfunction as being “in the box” and how the behavior of others can lure us into the box.  There’s an inner strength to resisting the decision to get in the box and thereby operate in dysfunctional ways.

Bowen’s perspective about a range of functionality in someone’s differentiation of self is akin to the approach taken with Enneagrams, where you have core characteristics and different functional levels inside of each of these characteristics.  (See Personality Types.)

Triangles

In my review of The Power of the Other, I explained drama triangles.  Cloud didn’t reference Bowen’s work when he explained triangles in The Power of the Other, but the concept is clearly the same.  It all relates back to the work of Buckminster Fuller and geometric shapes.  (See Amy Edmondson’s A Fuller Explanation for an easier, but not easy, way to understand his work.)  The short form of his work says that triangles are the minimal stable form.  Bowen agrees and says that a paired relationship will pick up a third member or several third members into different, related triangles.  This is particularly the case in families with multiple children where the parents provide a dyad with which each child gets their own triangle.

What makes triangles so important for family system work is that people tend to take up roles in the triangle of the victim, villain, and rescuer.  These dysfunctional patterns can co-manipulate the others and create dynamics that can tear all the people apart.

Nuclear Family Emotional Process

One of Bowen’s key insights was how people in a family system reacted to each other.  As one person would get well or change, another person in the family system would change or develop a problem.  Virginia Satir, who also studied and theorized about family systems, was keen to expose how a destabilizing force, like someone going to counseling would activate everyone in the system.  (See The Satir Model.)

When viewed as triangles, a change in one person would necessitate changes in others – and so on – until the ripples pervaded the entire nuclear family system.

Family Projection Process

One interesting question is how an individual becomes a well differentiated person – or a poorly differentiated person being subject to the moods and actions of others in the family.  As with most attributes, there’s the persistent question about how this happens.  Judith Rich Harris explains in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption how it’s a combination of environmental and genetic factors.  Her work is consistent with growing awareness of epigenetics.

We’ve all learned about genetics, which is how our genes are passed from generation to generation.  However, genes often carry a susceptibility to conditions that are triggered by environmental factors.  Genes are enabled or disabled by environmental factors, and this is called epigenetics.  (See In an Unspoken Voice.)  In Robert Sapolsky’s classic work, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, he shares the research around adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and fetal onset of adult disease (FOAD) indicating how environmental factors in childhood – or even the neonatal period – can lead to negative health outcomes decades later.

Bowen proposed that this process – regardless of the degree to which it was genetic or environment – was one whereby parents passed their relative functioning to their children.

Not Without Flaws

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some concerns about the book (and, apparently, Bowen’s perspectives).  His writing showed some of the stereotypes of the time regarding both women and non-Caucasians.  This was often distracting and disheartening.  It reminds me that Bowen reserved the top of his differentiation scale as theoretical and reminded me that he was a product of his times.

However, his views on schizophrenia were much less tolerable.  They were frustratingly narrow and judgmental.  Given these prevailing views that blamed the family for schizophrenia – or wrote it off as a physical, structural defect of the brain – its not hard to understand why the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) was formed.

He was similarly ill informed and judgmental about those people who live with diabetes or who struggle with substance use disorder.  (See The Globalization of Addiction, Dreamland, and Chasing the Scream for more about SUD.)

Despite the biases and prejudices, Bowen’s Theory provides a solid basis for Family Evaluation.

Book Review-The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

It was a conversation with John Gottman that led me to Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  (Gottman is known for his work on relationships, including The Science of Trust.)  Gottman was speaking about “away behaviors” and signaling how we’re not interested in the conversation.  Having previously read Goffman’s Stigma, I decided to pick up this work in the hopes of discovering more about how to identify away behaviors and coach people not to send these signals.  While I didn’t find much I could use in understanding away behaviors, I did find a fascinating exploration of how we portray one view while we’re “on life’s stage” and another when we’re “backstage” with our buddies.

Acceptance and Status

One of the challenges for me in this work is that I’m particularly low on two of the motivators in the Reiss Motivational Profile that would lead to the desire to focus on impression management.  (See Who Am I?)  I explain in my blog post, How to Be Yourself, how challenging it can be to project an image that isn’t the real you.  I deeply value the chance to know the real person – to move past the posturing and impression management to the real person.  (See Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited.)  The result is that, in some cases, the idea of presenting an image to people all the time feels strange and alien.

Many years ago, I was speaking with a friend who was working for me and talking about the reaction of some people to me when we met.  In some cases, the people would inexplicably back away and disappear.   She explained that I was too real for them.  That they saw the authenticity that I engaged with and were scared by it.  I’d never really given much thought to the degree of intimacy that people bring to non-partner interactions.

In partnered or closer relationships, there is sometimes a dynamic that emerges when one person is anxiously attached, and the other is avoidantly attached.  (See Attached for attachment styles.)  Depending upon the degree of insecurity in the attachment, these reactions can be triggered by securely attached individuals.  I’d never considered how it might be causing people to detect too much intimacy (or realness) in everyday interactions and how they might instinctively seek to create distance via avoidance.

Suspension of Disbelief

We go to the movies and watch fantastic things.  We see last-minute saves, impossible coincidences, and things that we know are too good to be true.  Despite this, few of us shout out at the screen about how impossible things are.  It’s called suspension of disbelief.  It’s also active in the television shows that we watch – and sometimes it’s more tragic.

In relationships, we see this as blind trust.  The other person is giving us reason to pause, but we unconsciously overlook it.  We want so badly to trust that we’re willing to overlook the evidence that we shouldn’t – and that can lead to unsalvageable relationships once the deception is discovered.

Another place where we see disbelief is cults.  The trust and belief in the leader blinds people to other potential realities.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.)  Even in our world today, we see the kind of polarization where we believe only what is consistent with our prior information.  (See Going to Extremes.)  Thomas Gilovich in How We Know What Isn’t So explains that when information contradicts what we believe, we ask if we must believe the new information – and that’s a high standard.

When it comes to the appearances that we give off – the performances on the world stage – once people are sufficiently indoctrinated to a particular view of a person, it will take substantial work to change those beliefs.  There are professional actors who have explained that they were typecast.  They played a villain in a popular show, and now they can only get parts as villains.  Once a person (or organization) has sufficiently anchored their role into the collective consciousness, they may be able to get away with harm and no one will bat an eye.

Keeping the Dreams Quiet

It’s easier to play your part when you know the parts that others will play.  It’s more predictable and safer.  It’s easier to be the buyer when you know the seller will want to continue to sell to you.  That’s why there are aspects that are often hidden or obscured.  No one wants to buy from the person who is only there until his “real” thing happens.  Dreamers are dangerous to the way that roles interact with each other.

While it’s more common these days for workers to have side-hustles that bring in extra money, employers rarely care until those side-hustles threaten to take over an employee’s main attention.  They suddenly become a threat to the employer, because they risk the employee’s departure.  Ironically, employers often create the very conditions they don’t want by trying to reign in side-hustles.

Anonymity

Guaranteeing anonymity has a huge impact on how honest people will be.  Human resources has started implementing 360 degree feedback – meaning that you get feedback from everyone that works with an employee.  Subordinates provide feedback on their manager’s performance – and if you want honest feedback, you’ve got to believe that you won’t be retaliated against.  It takes courage – but the promise of anonymity lowers the bar.  (See Find Your Courage.)

The desire for anonymity signals the need for it.  You don’t ask the hotel clerk to not acknowledge you’re staying there unless you don’t want to be found by admiring fans, a spouse, or a stalker.  Anonymity is needed most when people feel they have the most to lose.

Hidden Signals

Sometimes, the appearance transmitted to the world is designed to intentionally hide other aspects.  In productions of any sort, there are people in the back and people in the front, and they often signal each other in ways that aren’t apparent to the audience.  Maybe it’s a hand left on a guitar indicating a song is being added.  It might be looking up at the sound engineer to indicate that there’s an audio problem.  Done well, these signals are so subtle that the audience misses them while the performers communicate silently to one another.

Sometimes, these subtle signals are subliminal persuasion.  (See The Hidden Persuaders.)  Sometimes, they help frame the way people think.  An instructor of mine in standup comedy had a joke he liked – but it only worked if he rubbed his stomach when he did it.  He couldn’t explain it, but somehow that small signal was enough to turn a bomb of a joke into something that blew the roof off with laughter.

Interdependence

While some still hail independence as a pinnacle to be sought, others recognize that we’re designed for relationships.  Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People explains it in a business context, and others like Jonathan Haidt have explained it in evolutionary terms.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The challenge is how to move to interdependence from dependence or co-dependence.  Goffman calls it “justifiable reliance.”  It’s a non-manipulative relationship that allows us to be dependent on each other.

Goffman proposes that we need these relationships where the walls fall down, and we don’t need to manage The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Book Review-I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships

It’s a short book, but it makes an important point.  I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships echoes the guidance from several others and then adds something critical to the mix to make your results better when you’re communicating with others.

Understanding and Agreement

One of the key points made by many is that we need to start by focusing on our understanding and separating whether we agree or not.  (See Effective Apology and Solve Employee Problems Before They Start for more.)  Too often, we get wrapped up in the need to defend our position and perspective, and this hampers our ability to fully listen to the other person to try to understand their perspective and values in the situation.  (See Who Am I? for basic motivators – or values.)

Acceptance

To be able to get to a place of just understanding, we need to focus on acceptance.  That is, we need to accept that people can perceive things differently, and that those perceptions are valid – even if incorrect.  By accepting the other person’s reality as their own, which may be more valid than our reality, can be difficult.  (For more on acceptance, see How to Be an Adult in Relationships and Why Are We Yelling?)

John Gottman uses the word “attunement” in The Science of Trust to describe the degree to which one person is sensitive to another.  We get to this attunement by first seeking to understand, and then ensuring that we actively accept the other person’s point of view – even if we don’t agree.

Disagree and Dialogue

Once there appears to be good understanding of the other person’s perspective, it’s time to consider whether you do or don’t agree with them – in whole or in part.  Disagreement isn’t bad, it’s an opportunity to learn.

Collaborating with the Enemy encourages us to disagree and move towards dialogue.  (See Dialogue for more.)  Said differently, the encouragement is that you continue to learn and seek understanding even after the belief that you do understand – because you’ll never understand completely.

The key is creating the kind of psychological safety that Amy Edmondson calls for in The Fearless Organization.  This safety allows for differences to be explored without premature judgement or defensiveness.  One of the benefits of the Dialogue Mapping approach is the instant confirmation that someone is being heard and understood.

Active Listening

Many people think that any parrot can do active listening.  All you need to do is repeat back what the person said.  This is, obviously, something that some parrots can do.  However, the truth about active listening comes in what Motivational Interviewing calls “reflection.”  It’s more than just repeating back the words.  It’s an effort to make sense of what you’re hearing and to share back the meaning you find in it.  One way that I teach it is to speak about walking up Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Interference.  (I cover this in more detail in my review of Choice Theory.)

Validation

The key word that Michael Sorensen uses is “validation.”  It’s the statement that you understand and accept the person and their experience – still separate from your agreement.  Validation is the thing that people experience when they feel the acceptance of someone trying to make sense of their perspective.  Validated is what people get when you can reflect some portion of their experience.  Validation, Sorensen asserts, is the best way to say, and really mean, I Hear You.

Book Review-Attachment in Adults: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives

The attachment system that John Bowlby first theorized has spawned a great deal of research and knowledge (in part due to Mary Ainsworth’s contributions).  Attachment in Adults: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives shares some of the interesting and intriguing results of this continued research.

Multi-Generational

One of the more confusing results of the continued research is how a parent’s – particularly a mother’s – attachment style can influence the attachment style of their children.  Securely attached mothers tend to produce securely attached infants.  In short, parents can help their children’s lifelong trajectory by focusing on their own mental wellness.

Another confusing corollary is that children who are securely attached have more complex and mature representation of their parents.  They seem to understand the nuances and details of how the parents will interact in ways that their insecure counterparts do not.

Timing

There’s an odd thing about the timing of attachment styles.  First, attachment styles seem to appear between 9 and 18 months after birth – the same timeframe as object permanence.  In other words, from the very first moments we can recognize something not in our sight – something for which we have a mental model – we start working on attachments.

As adults, the research seems to indicate that a relationship with a securely attached individual has the effect of moving an insecurely attached partner towards secure attachment – over a two-year period.  It seems as if there’s an importance to the period of time that the secure relationship is available.

Individualism

The challenges with the Western/American view of rugged individualism has surfaced before.  I’ve addressed the challenges with the illusion in my reviews of How Good People Make Tough Choices,  Humble Inquiry, and Our Kids.  However, as the power of attachment to shape our lives for good or bad is brought to the forefront, the degree to which we believe that we’re able to survive as an individual seems even more of a pernicious delusion.  Whether it’s the data from Loneliness or the research around attachment, we know that we can’t live life alone.

Fathers Be Good to Your Daughters

John Mayer’s song, Daughters, includes the lyrics, “Fathers be good to your daughters / Daughters will love like you do.”  Strangely, research has found that the best predictor of a daughter’s emotional security in a love relationship is a close emotional bond with her father.  The degree of impact that fathers have in this regard is stunning given the relatively low amount of time that fathers spend directly interacting with their daughters.

Approval Competition

In some families, approval is a scarce resource that must be saved.  It may be that there is only one person who is receiving approval at one time.  There’s a favorite child.  The problem with this is that it develops anxiety in the children who feel that they must earn love, acceptance, and approval.  They believe that they’re one mistake away from losing their status within the family, with disastrous consequences to their long-term relationships.

Network Maps

If you ask people to map out their important relationships, they’ll often include people who are deceased.  As mentioned in New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment, people develop internal representations for people that are no longer with them.  It’s a plausible explanation that they still feel that person’s presence through the internalized concept of them.  It could also be that they just aren’t thinking clearly.  Either way, it signals that there’s more to our world than we realize and a great role for Attachment in Adults to play.

Book Review-The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life

Dr. Ruth is all most people need to hear to know exactly who we’re talking about.  In The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life, Dr. Ruth Westheimer shares her direct style of tackling the problem of loneliness.  Dr. Ruth was a sensation when she started talking directly about sexual needs and fulfilment on radio and television in the 1980s.  In this book, the elderly (now recently departed) Dr. Ruth shares her loneliness as a child and after the passing of her (third, lifelong) husband.

Quality, not Quantity

Dr. Ruth explains that loneliness is about the lack of quality connections not the quantity.  It’s not a competition of Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections.  What matters, in her opinion, is having a few quality connections that help you believe that people see you and understand you.  This echoes the insights of Sherry Turkle in Alone Together and Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation.  It’s who you can be open and honest with.

Sleeping with Loneliness

A unique quote from Dr. Ruth is, “I’ve been sleeping with loneliness my entire life.”  From that context, loneliness was a companion.  It’s a feeling that was relatively persistent.  It started with the German Nazi party and the Holocaust, when she was shipped away by her mother (her father had already been taken) to protect her from the atrocities that were befalling Jews at the time.  Traveling without a companion couldn’t help but get the loneliness ball rolling.  While she grew up in a group home, her fellow refugees didn’t quiet the longing that had already started to pervade her soul.

She quotes from her diary on July 12, 1945: “Above all, I’m longing for a friend.”  And the following day, “I live with 150 people – and I’m alone.”  These quotes help to spark the understanding that loneliness – the feeling – is different than being without other people.

Love

One could expect that the conversation about love is going to come up in a book by Dr. Ruth – however, it’s not what you think.  She starts by recognizing that there’s an absolute need for self-love.  Until you can learn to love yourself, you can’t fully accept others’ love of you.  (See also Compassion and Self-Hate.)  She admits that learning to love herself took time.  It took time to realize not only could she love herself but that she was worthy of others’ love as well.

It’s a Numbers Game

On the one hand, loneliness isn’t about the quantity of connections – but that doesn’t mean that it’s still not, in some respects, a numbers game.  You don’t need many connections, but you’re going to need to make a lot of connections to find out which ones you can really count on when it’s important.  You must “kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.”  It’s easy to get discouraged in the process if you don’t seem to be finding those solid people who will be your precious few.  The unfortunate reality is that it’s all about probabilities.

Turning friends into good friends, it seems, is also a numbers game.  Dr. Ruth quotes a study by Dr. Jeffrey Hall, who claims that it takes 200 hours over 6 weeks to turn a friend into a best friend.  I don’t believe it’s quite that formulaic – but definitely it takes time to build relationships that will survive over the long term.

What About Me?

In a world that sells the idea that you must be connected to be real, valid, and included, it’s hard to accept that for a time you’re not connected with a romantic relationship.  It’s hard to accept that you’re going through a period of estrangement with your family.  It’s hard to feel like your best friends are so far away.  It’s easy to wonder, “What about me?”  It’s easy to think that we’re excluded from the rest of the world – but that’s not true.  Dr. Ruth calls us to recognize that there will be a time when we will experience The Joy of Connections.

Book Review-A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion

When there’s a famous person that we’re interested in, we’ll read a biography.  However, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion isn’t about a person.  It’s about an emotion that rose to prominence over the last several decades to the point where the US Surgeon General calls it an epidemic.  It’s important enough that it deserves more discovery.  I’d already read Loneliness by John Cacioppo, and it was a wonderful book.  It seemed like some perspective from across the pond would add depth to my understanding – and it did.

Feeling Misunderstood, Estranged, and Rejected

There are many definitions for loneliness, but the experience of loneliness is described consistently.  It’s the feeling that someone is disconnected from the rest of humanity.  It’s a feeling that somehow a great gulf exists between us and others.  It can bloom from feeling as though others don’t understand us.  It can be triggered by a specific misunderstanding but more frequently is just a general sense that we’re out of alignment with the rest of humanity.

Sometimes, this sense of disconnection is founded in concrete reality.  It can be that we’ve become estranged from some part of our family.  (See Fault Lines.)  While this is painful, it’s helpful to know that it’s all too common.  Even Fred Rogers’ son didn’t speak with him for a while.  (See Life’s Journeys According to Mister Rogers.)

Another cause for a sense of loneliness – and disconnection from others – is the specific case where we’ve been rejected by another, whether it was a simple refusal to join us for an event or a more serious rejection like a breakup or divorce.  While, intellectually, we may recognize that this is one person (or perhaps a few people) and not the entire world, it doesn’t feel that way.  Martin Seligman explains how things can feel personal, pervasive, and persistent in The Hope Circuit.  It certainly can feel that way even if the rejection is a trivial one.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address highlighted the fact that fear can be a problem itself.  This is particularly true with loneliness, because fear changes the way we behave.  Because of that, we often make choices that lead us toward loneliness.  We pull ourselves into our shells like scared turtles, and by eliminating opportunities to interact with others, we intensify our feelings of loneliness.

Loneliness Visits All

If you find someone who says that they’ve never felt lonely, they’re probably lying.  (See Telling Lies.)  Loneliness – the feeling of disconnection – is a part of the human condition.  Everyone feels it.  The difference isn’t whether someone does or doesn’t feel lonely.  The real concern is when the feeling becomes more consistent, persistent, or pervasive.  While my loneliness and your loneliness may not line up in time or by contextual situation, we can understand the feeling.

Oneness, Solitude, and Loneliness

Thus far in this review, I’ve focused on the feeling that loneliness creates, because it’s the key aspect that separates two other conditions, which are often co-mingled with loneliness.  The way that you can distinguish the state of being the only person in an area or a sense of solitude from loneliness is the emotional impact.  In fact, if we were to arrange them on a continuum, where loneliness is the most distressful, oneness would be neutral.  It’s a relatively benign observation of the count of people.  The other end would be held down by solitude with the idea that this is oneness that is desired.

As an introvert, I crave time when I’m alone.  (See Quiet for more on introverts.)  I crave the chance to read and write uninterrupted.  This isn’t to say that I don’t like time with my family – I need that, too.  The point, however, is there are times when I want to be in a state of oneness.

Accountability Separates Online and Offline

When we start looking at how society has changed and the impact on loneliness, we cannot ignore the transformation that information technology and telecommunications have fueled.  (See also The Upswing and The Anxious Generation for more on these changes.)  While we can talk about the specific technologies and their specific impacts, there’s been a subtle shift that has made a big difference sitting below the increased opportunities the technology brings.

Take a trip back in time a little over a century ago.  Travel is mostly by horse-drawn carriage, with railroad becoming an option for the more affluent.  Rather than the population being concentrated in large cities, it was spread out in small hamlets and villages.  Imagine you’re born into a little village.  You’ll know everyone, and they’ll know you.

Structurally, your relationships will be different than they are today.  If you don’t like someone, you can’t really move away.  You can’t afford to be mean to them or to alienate them.  You and all your neighbors know you need each other, even if you don’t like or even fully trust one another.

Today, we’re more mobile.  We leave the city we grew up in to take a job in another state.  We move when we don’t like our neighbors.  We find ways to build a new set of friends and discard the friends we grew up with.  The ease of finding and making new friends has made us less concerned about offending others.

It’s also made us less accountable.  Instead of meeting our commitments, we collectively think that no one will notice.  We can simply focus on ourselves rather than focusing on our integrity and character.

Even if we stand against these values, others may not.  (I’ve been in my home for over 20 years in one of the three places that I grew up as a child.)  We’re living in a world where people discard others because of perceived injustices without a second thought.  (For more, see The Art of Community.)

The Fear of Social Death

Our fear of death is well researched.  (See The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core.)  The proposal is made in this book is that our fear of loneliness may be a result of a fear of social death.  We may feel that we’ll no longer be connected and “alive” to other humans.  It’s this fear that drives loneliness.

Rituals

Rituals operate around us at every level.  Joseph Campbell explains in The Power of Myth how rituals connect stories.  In Anthro-Vision, Gillian Tett explains how rituals are connected with cultures.  John and Julie Gottman explain in The Relationship Cure how critical positive rituals can be to relational health.  In The Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep explains how rituals help us feel connected to history and each other.

If we’re struggling with loneliness, one place to look for a fix is to find rituals that we can find comfort and connection in.  Maybe a good first ritual is one where you grab a drink and curl up to read a good book like A Biography of Loneliness.

Book Review-Marital Separation

It started with work on what happens when one member of a couple dies.  What’s the process by which the bereaved person reconstructs their life?  This led Robert Weiss to a broader study of all Marital Separation, inclusive of divorce.  (For more on divorce, see the book, Divorce.)  Weiss’ focus remained on the transformations that the bereaved make to cope with their new circumstances.

Social Responsibility

The way that we see the institution of marriage varies by society, culture, and time.  Our beliefs about social structures and love are subject to similar kinds of forces.  (See Anatomy of Love for more.)  Arranged marriages are all but gone in America though they remain the standard in other parts of the world.  In America, we believe that we should marry for love.  Marriage is about two people who fall madly in love and decide that they want to make the commitment to sustain that love over a lifetime – at least in theory.

This perspective is one of individual desires and economic advancement.  It’s not a social responsibility.  These are the words that Weiss uses, insisting that we’ve de-sacralized marriage.  He believes that the no-fault divorce has allowed us an easy escape from a difficult patch in a marriage.  The data on divorce rates dramatically increased following the acceptance of no-fault divorce.

His point is that individuals are so focused on the impact to their happiness that they don’t recognize and account for the impact that their decisions to get – and stay – married has on others.

When it Breaks

Weiss starts with separations and the disruption this causes to both parties and to any children that may be a part of the marriage.  His data points to half of the separations ending in divorce.  Similar concerns can be raised when one member of the couple encounters a life-threatening disease and dies.  There’s expected impairment of reason, rationale, and logic.  (One that attorneys lament when they’re engaged.)  This is, of course, trauma.  (See Trauma and Recovery for more on trauma.)

Regardless of the cause, the remaining parties develop their own accounts – their own stories – about what transpired that has left them decoupled.  James Pennebaker’s research illuminates the need for creating our own narratives of every serious situation that we survive, particularly traumas.  (See Opening Up.)

What is interesting about these accounts for a couple that is separated or divorced is that they often agree on the things that happened but differ in their interpretation of them.  The meaning that each party creates around the actual things that happened can be quite radically different.

The Ties

Weiss speaks of many times when couples would separate or divorce only to come back together for support – or sexual relationships.  It’s hard to separate permanently from someone who you’ve been so close to, so reconnections are common.  In some cases, Weiss reports that people speak of their ability to be friends or sexual partners with their former spouse – even if they know they can’t be husband and wife.

There is one exception to this which is if the person is understood to become intrinsically different.  That is, the person they are now is separate and distinct from the person that you fell in love with and the person with whom you have shared a relationship.  This can be because of extreme behavior or a substantial betrayal, which leaves you wondering how much you knew about the other person.

Rage

Anger is disappointment directed.  (See Destructive Emotions.)  Rage is often when you have a need that’s not being met.  Rage between separated parties often occurs if there’s an unfulfilled need that continues.  The need can be material or financial, emotional, or sexual.  These unmet needs create more and more pressure on the individual until they’re no longer able to be contained and they erupt as rage.

Family of Origin

While not the language Weiss uses, more contemporary language calls the family you grew up in your “family of origin.”  With some tragic exceptions, these are the people that one can depend upon when they’re in need.  There’s an unwritten expectation that you can count on any member of your family to respond to your request for help.  Despite this, most of us are guarded with our families.

There are topics that are off limits.  You can’t discuss religion with Aunt Mary.  Don’t get Uncle Ralph started about politics.  Don’t talk about your concern for Tibet with your mother.  Those are not particularly difficult, because they’re not personal.  However, stories are told all the time by people who are openly gay – except with their families.

The truth is that we are careful when it comes to letting our families into our confidence for fear that whatever we share will come back to haunt us – repeatedly.

Friend Fallout

Much is made about the division of assets in a divorce.  There’s the concern for who gets the house, the cars, the furniture and so on.  Little is said, however, about how friends tend to divide themselves between the couple, choosing the husband, the wife, or neither.  In my own divorce, there were some friends that chose sides and others who chose to separate from both of us.  It’s as if they believed that divorce was contagious, or, perhaps more likely, they decided that we were both bad because of the divorce.

Even when friends stand by you, it’s often the case when you can feel out of place, because the things you did before were primarily as couples – and that no longer matches your status, so you’re inadvertently not invited, or you feel out of place when you are.  Ultimately, the decision to stop being a couple can have dramatic impacts on friends as well.

Guilt and Shame

One of the barriers to being able to effectively support the children involved is the guilt over a divorce.  One – or both – of the couple feel as if they’re responsible for the divorce, and as a result, they may not be able to effectively navigate the role of parent in providing support and discipline.  (See The Psychology of Not Holding Children Accountable.)  They may find themselves barely to accept themselves, and a small rejection by the children may set off waves of self-doubt and remorse that immobilizes them.

Shame, guilt’s evil cousin, expands from just that they’ve committed a bad act and instead associates that they are bad.  The absolute of “divorce is bad” becomes a permanent stain on them.  The result is they’re so focused on trying to cleanse their own guilt that they barely notice what the children need of them.

Recovery

The good news is that the effects of marital separation aren’t forever.  Weiss suggests that the typical recovery is two to four years, with the average being closer to four than two.  In my own experience, the time can vary widely outside of this range depending upon the work the person has done beforehand and the work they need to do afterwards.

There are ways that people can prepare – even while working hard to preserve their marriage.  However, sometimes there’s nothing that can be done to prevent Marital Separation.

Book Review-Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention

“Bereavement is the objective situation of having lost someone significant; grief is the emotional response to one’s loss; and mourning denotes the actions and manner of expressing grief, which often reflect the mourning practices of one’s culture.”  So start my notes from Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention.  Like many of the topics that I read about, bereavement isn’t “mainstream.”  However, it’s important for all of us, because we know for certain that death will call on those we love and on us one day.  (See The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core for more about our thoughts of death.)  What if there were secrets to how we grieve that would make it easier, shorter, and less painful?

A Rainbow of Reactions

Reactions to the death of someone you love varies.  Some people find themselves sobbing endlessly on the floor, unable to get up or even make their way to a comfortable bed or chair.  Others, in somber tone, push forward through the hours, days, weeks, months, and sometimes years of grief.  There’s no one way to grieve or bereave.  There are ways that last shorter – and longer.  There are ways that are more – and less – disruptive to life, beyond the disruption of the loss of the person.

In short, while there are many ways to be bereaved, some of them are less painful.  That isn’t to say someone should try to hide or unnaturally manipulate themselves into the belief that they’re doing better than they are.  Instead, there’s a desire to discover what makes it easier for people to cope with their loss.  The goal is to alleviate unnecessary suffering, not stifle the natural healing process.

Stages of Grief

In addition to the well-known stage model of grief from Kubler-Ross, many others have proposed staged models of grief.  (See On Death and Dying and Finding Meaning for more.)  I cautioned that many people don’t read carefully enough to understand that the stages aren’t always exactly linear and aren’t experienced in the same way while reviewing The Grief Recovery Handbook.  Handbook of Bereavement echoes this point, insisting that people not take any staged model too literally while exposing other scholars who have proposed staged models.

An important point raised is that, just like any trauma, most bereaved never totally resolve their grief.  It changes, but it never fully goes away.  (See Posttraumatic Growth for more.)

Bereavement as a Special Kind of Trauma

One can get lost in the study of bereavement and grief and get so focused on the details that they fail to appreciate that the broader study of trauma has a lot to offer.  Psychological trauma is a temporarily overwhelming event – which anyone who has lost someone close to them can identify with.  (See Trauma and Recovery for more on this definition.)

The broader study of trauma helps us to understand the psychological defenses of compartmentalization and dissociation.  (See Traumatic Stress and Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice for more on both.)

Relationship Changes

When someone we love dies, there are obvious relationship changes.  They’re no longer physically present.  However, there are also psychological relational changes.  First, we tend to idealize the person.  We forget about the fights and remember the good things about them.  This is one of the reasons for the struggles in second marriages of widows and widowers.  Their new love feels as if they can measure up.  In some ways, they’re right.  They’re competing with an ideal image that has been stripped of its frustrations and problems.

Second, we tend to internalize the other person – we create an internal representation of the person with whom we “consult” as though they were still physically with us.  This representation of the person is not the same – but it is also a way we keep them with us even long after their death.

Saying the Wrong Thing

Many people in the community, even family members and close friends, tend to isolate the grieving person for fear of saying the wrong thing.  Somehow, they don’t see that the act of isolation is the worst part of losing someone, and their movement away exacerbates the problem.  (See Loneliness for more.)  It’s possible that someone will say something that causes the grieving person to experience more of their grief – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing.  It can be that those emotions needed to be expressed.

In general, there’s not something that can be said that will make the grief worse – at least unintentionally.  The fear is largely unfounded.  However, that doesn’t change the behavior.  It can be someone’s discomfort with grief and emotion that causes the avoidance more than their concern for the grieving.

There is one well-intentioned phrase that won’t likely cause harm – but isn’t helpful.  That is, “I know exactly how you feel.”  We can’t ever know “exactly” how someone else feels.  What we can know is some of what someone else is feeling.  The framework we recommend in our Empathetic Conversations course is the definition of empathy, which is “I understand this about you.”  In other words, “I know what it was like for me to lose a spouse” is a better response, because it recognizes your limitations in understanding.

Schema of the World

In Efficiency in Learning, we were introduced to an explanation for how we can operate in a complex world with such limited brains.  The schemas that we build about the world and its parts allow us to simplify things, so we don’t have to consider all the details all at once.  Learning these schemas allows us to be effective in a world that’s too complex for us to really understand everything.  (See Focused, Fast, and Flexible.)  Gary Klein in Sources of Power explains that these mental models allow us to make better decisions – his recognition primed decisions.  When we lose someone, our schemas of the world must change to accommodate the new conditions – and this can be a difficult and overwhelming process.

In my review of The Body Keeps the Score, I discussed trauma in the context of a temporarily overwhelming event and how this shuts down our ability to process the event.  (See also Opening Up, In an Unspoken Voice, and Trauma Treatment.)  I also connected it to the fact that our sense of consciousness is fundamentally a prediction engine designed to keep us safe.  (See Mindreading.)  By predicting what will happen, we can avoid bad circumstances and live longer.  (See The Selfish Gene, The Evolution of Cooperation, and SuperCooperators for how evolution might have developed consciousness as a protective factor.)

Magical Properties

Sometimes bereavement has an added challenge of shame or guilt.  A child who was angry at a parent shortly before their death may believe that their anger resulted in their parent’s death.  Similarly, a child who had misbehaved may view the parent’s death as a punishment for their misdeeds.  One of Erik Erikson’s stages of development is intuitive vs. guilt and involves magical thinking.  (See Childhood and Society.)  However, adults can have various forms of magical thinking related to death.

Certainly, there are desires for the person who has died to come back, even if adults know that isn’t possible.

Constructive Thinking Inventory

Constructive thinking is defined as the ability to solve problems in living at a minimal cost in stress.  In other words, it is the ability to live with minimal stress.  The Constructive Thinking Inventory focuses on areas of emotional coping, behavioral coping, categorical thinking, superstitious thinking, naïve optimism, and negative thinking.  Taken as a whole package, this inventory touches on many of the key factors that lead to the kind of destructive thought spirals that were discussed in Capture.

Many of the things measured are also directly addressed by works today.  Negative thinking is squarely tackled by Hardwiring Happiness.  Naïve optimism is addressed by Bright-sided.  Emotional coping is addressed by many works, including Happiness.

Grief Work

The stark statement is, “Our results did not unequivocally support the grief work hypothesis. Widows who avoided confronting their loss did not differ in their depressive or somatic symptomatology from widows who worked through their grief.”  However, it can be that the construct for grief work isn’t right.  The authors aren’t clear what “grief work” means in this context.  It could mean forced processing before the person is ready – which would obviously not be helpful.  It could be expected (but not forced) work – which is also not helpful.  Grief work, done properly, goes at the pace of the grieving person.  They’re exposed to the right amount of re-exposure, awareness, and work to match their capacity.

The follow up is that those who overly distract from or overly control emotions don’t have as good of an adjustment as those who were less controlled.

The Walking Dead

Some bereaved describe themselves as the walking dead.  The idea is that they’re hollow or have died inside due to the psychological trauma of losing someone.  They feel as if their spark and life is gone.  (See Acedia & Me and The Noonday Demon for more on depression.)

There’s no one “cure” for this condition.  There will be some improvement as time passes, but it’s definitely a concern and one of the reasons why suicide is so high following the death of a loved one.  Loss and pain are expected, but permanent damage should not be.

Death of a Way of Life

Sometimes, it’s not just the loss of the person or person’s that you’re reeling from.  Sometimes, the issues are deeper.  Not only is there the loss to contend with, but often it changes the entire way of life.  A father dies, and the mother needs to take a job outside the house – or the new finances drive changes in what the family can do.  Sometimes, the loss of parents means a move.

In the case of spouses, it changes status from married to widow or widower.  For children losing their parents, they’re permanently connected to the label of orphan.  We can’t untangle the trauma of dealing with the loss and the trauma of having your life upended – nor should we try.

Autonomous Identity

What we must disentangle is our identity as it relates to the other person.  Losing a spouse means moving from couple to individual again.  Ultimately, we need to decide who we are now that the death has occurred.  We can’t go back to our old ways or identity.  Parents and grandparents, spouses and siblings, even children and grandchildren may die before us, starting the bereavement process.  Unlike life, luckily there’s a Handbook of Bereavement.