Goal of Differentiation

To be able to be yourself in the presence

of your family- That is, to remain in a
connected relationship and at the same
time to maintain your own beliefs and
values.
To remain in a person-to-person with
each member of your family.
He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out
Heretic, Rebel, A Thing to Flout
But Love and I had Wit to Win
We Drew a Circle That Drew Him In.
Edwin Markham
 Bowen’s Concept of Differentiation or Maturity
“Differentiation” describes a state of maturity, self
knowledge, and self definition which does not rely on
the acceptance of others for one’s beliefs, but
encourages one to be connected to others without the
need to defend one’s self, attack the other, placate, or
shut down emotionally.
It requires the establishment of a solid sense of our
unique selves in the context of our connections to
others.
Aristotle long ago laid out the importance of mind over
emotional reactivity, challenging us to manage our
emotional life with our intelligence: “Anyone can
become angry- that is easy! But to become angry with
the right person, to the right degree, at the right time,
for the right purpose--this is not easy!
 Coaching is Educational and Cognitive with
Grandiose Goals
™ Something like Zen: The ability to be outside the
emotional system but in contact with it is something
that can be learned but not taught.
™ Coaching relates to all systems--not just family of
origin
™ You work until you hit resistance and then let go.
People tend to work in spurts hopefully they do
enough work to feel successful and learn what the
signals of future trouble are so they can call again
when they need to.
™ Generally, to be motivated for coaching a person
needs a task or problem that's large enough to be
significant, but not so large it's unmanageable.
 Bowen’s Suggestions For Coaching
™ Optimum distance from family for coaching is
200-300 miles.
™ for the average motivated person it might take
100 hours over 4-5 yrs.
™ He said he spent only 50% of therapy sessions
working on client family and 50% working on
self and staying out of the family's process. He
said therapy is sitting in a room full of anxiety
and not letting any of it stick on you.
™ Termination--there is none. You just take a
vacation. Coach is like your Family Doctor or
Lawyer: There whenever you need them.
 Differentiation or Maturity Refers To:
™ Our ability to live in respectful relation to others and to our
complex and multifaceted world- the ability to feel safe in the
context of the familiar and the unfamiliar or different- the
ability to care for others and to be cared for by them.
™ Our ability to control our own impulses and empathize, trust,
communicate, collaborate, and respect others who are
different, and to negotiate our interdependence with our
environment and with our friends, partners, families,
communities, and society in ways which do not entail the
exploitation of others. Maturity depends on seeing past the
myopic myths of autonomy and self determination to
appreciate our basic interdependence on each other and on
nature, and to consider other people and future generations
when evaluating socio-political issues such as the
environment and human rights.
™ Our ability to maintain our values and beliefs and to relate
generously to others, even if we are not receiving support
from them or from anyone else for our beliefs.
 Feminist Critique of Bowen Theory
Because Bowen emphasized the necessity of
distinguishing between thinking and feeling, he has been
criticized by some feminists for elevating “male”
attributes of rationality over “female” expressiveness.
Actually, Bowen was addressing the need to train one’s
mind to control emotional reactivity so that we can
control our behavior and think about how we want to
respond, rather than be at the mercy of our fears,
compulsions, instincts, and sexual or aggressive
impulses. This does not in any way mean suppressing
authentic and appropriate emotional expressiveness,
which is part of the primary goal of Bowen therapy.
Grounding oneself emotionally and learning to connect
emotionally by developing a personal relationship with
every member of one’s family, are, indeed, the
“blueprints” for all subsequent emotional connections.
 Rules of thumb for Coaching (1)
1. Systems resist change. Remember you must plan your change,
predict the system's reaction and plan for it, and respond to the
system's reaction. Plan your timing, your context, and your
strategy for change
2. Make changes for yourself, not to change your family or anyone
else. You Can't differentiate together. Keep your own counsel.
3. Don't Attack, Don't Defend, Don't Shut Down.
4. Never remain with your family longer than you can afford to be
generous.
5. Never pursue a distancer. Running head on into resistance will
probably intensify it.
6. Lower your expectations to 0 and you'll probably be pleasantly
surprised.
7. Silence doesn't fool an emotional system. Not communicating is
also a communication.
 Rules of thumb for Coaching (2)
8. If someone is blocking your way to a third person, work out
a relationship with the blocker first. You are not likely to get
around him or her.
9. You can't talk logic into an emotional system. There is no
point taking an I-Position in a system in emotional turmoil.
10. Beware of seeing villains, victims, or angels in a system. It
generally means you're "hooked." If anyone is always wrong
or right, you are probably not seeing them clearly.
11. When you're stuck, expand the context. For example, if you
are stuck with your mother, think about her and her mother.
12. Distinguish between planned and reactive distance. The
first gives you perspective, the second is likely to interfere
with your progress.
13. Make relationships unpredictable, which is different from
being unreliable.
 Rules of thumb for Coaching (3)
14. Let go of stubbornly held issues. Reversing your long held
stance may teach you something about the inflexibilities of
your system and the intensity of your reactions (anger or hurt)
may be signals that important issues are at stake.
15. Do not be discouraged by backsliding. Under enough stress we
all revert to old patterns. Hopefully we don't stay in them as
long.
16. When you find yourself too ready to work on anyone else's
relationships (e.g. your spouse's family), look at what you may
be avoiding in your own.
17. If no family members are available, try making a relationship
with your worst enemy.
18. Humor may be the best way to detoxify a tense issue.
19. Beware of the reciprocal cycles of helper and helpee or
overfunctioner and underfunctioner and try shifting your
usual stance.
20. Beware of believing any rules of thumb too strongly.
 Repairing Cutoff Relationships (1)
1. Cutoffs are not good for your health. It is never time to write-
off a family member.
2. Opening the door to a cutoff a relationship is about taking your
power back- not about whether the other person walks through
the door.
3. Your changes are for yourself, because you believe we are all in
it together.
4. The effort cannot be made to change others but to change
yourself.
5. Do not under-estimate the family’s reaction to your efforts.
Family reactivity is likely to be intense, if the family has been
stuck for a long time.
6. Your most useful mantra will be “Don’t attack; don’t defend;
don’t cave in; and don't shut down.”
 Repairing Cutoff Relationships (2)
7. Have a plan. It is essential to schematize and hypothesize
ahead of time, and to think out very clearly how you
want to act and respond so you are not at the mercy of
your own emotional reactivity.
8. When you become too convinced you are the victim and
the other person the villain, enlarge the context. Look at
the other as part of your system, think of the long range
ramifications of silence, cutoff or vengeance.
9. Distinguish carefully between planned and reactive
distance. While it may be useful to distance from an
intense emotional field to gain objectivity, this move
should be intentional and based on flexibility, so that
when the other starts moving in, you are free to move
back, rather than keeping the distance fixed.
 Repairing Cutoff Relationships (3)
10. Expand the context. It is often useful, when anxiety
is high, to bring up the problem with members of the
larger family system in order to increase the realm in
which it can be dealt with and absorbed.
11. Keep family visits time limited in order to maintain
your focus. Never stay with your family longer than
you can afford to be generous.
12. Take up serious issues with people individually,
rather than at large, ritualized family gatherings.
 Repairing Cutoff Relationships (4)
13. If someone is blocking the way to a distant family
member, it is usually futile to try to get around such
interference. Develop a relationship with the person
who is blocking, even though he or she may seem
peripheral to your efforts.
14. Writing letters that are not attacking or defensive is
a useful way to open difficult emotional issues
without having to deal immediately with the
reactivity of the system. By predicting the response in
the letter itself, some of the intensity can also be
deflected. In general, writing individual letters, and
taking up only one emotional issue in each letter may
help to focus your efforts.
 Guidelines for Coaching (1)
1. Expect intense resistance to the idea of dealing directly with
parents and family members in real life. The client must be
helped to see that the goal is to create change in the actual
family relationships, not simply a change in the client’s
feelings about them. Clients may have tried to initiate change,
but were then unprepared for family resistance—“the two
step.” Suggest readings and tell stories of colleagues and other
clients’ success and satisfaction, including personal stories,
when clinically appropriate.
2. Clients often come in crisis, but the coach works to create a
calm, thoughtful atmosphere for the sessions, which are about
thinking and planning, not emotional catharsis. Showing
interest in the client’s reports and information about the
family through comments and questions and does not
encourage or support emotional reactivity, the client’s anxiety
level, hopefully, goes down enough for him or her to be able to
hear the coach’s ideas about the situation. Now the coach can
start to explain systems concepts.
 Coaching (2)
3. Advise the client to expect a surge of anxiety symptoms with
each new move, and normalize this. We sometimes ask what
symptoms the client experienced during adolescence as a
way of indicating the intensity of the emotional reactions
that are ahead.
4. Once the client has agreed to work, emphasize the need for
planned, not reactive or impulsive, moves in the family
system.
5. Resist the pull to see the individual as the unit of dysfunction
or treatment. Resist the pull to accept the client’s
descriptions of family members and their motivations as
“truth.” Keep the multigenerational family and its cultural
context in mind as the client speaks. Put yourself mentally
in the position of various family members the client is
complaining about.
 Coaching (3)
6. Help client to prioritize and strategize throughout the work,
without getting ahead of the client in investment in the work.
Encourage the client’s curiosity and research interest in family
patterns by asking questions about family process. Keep in
mind the gender, sexual orientation, racial, and cultural
context of the client and family when making suggestions.
7. Remember a coach also cheers from the sidelines and provides
encouragement and appreciation. This is not the same as being
a source of emotional support, approval, reassurance, or pity,
which might disable the client because they increase the
transference phenomena, focusing client’s attention and
emotions on the therapist instead of on the client’s family. The
therapist should convey the belief that the client can deal with
his or her own family, a premise of Bowen systems therapy.
8. If you have not worked on differentiating yourself in your own
family, you will probably be prone to misjudge the intensity of
systemic reaction to your client’s moves and also prone to
accept the client’s resistance.
 Coaching (4)
• 9. When the client is concurrently in another type of
therapy, suggest that the client put one of you on hold
until the other therapy is completed because this
orientation goes counter to most other therapies.
• 10. Resist the client’s tendency, especially if he or she
has been in psychodynamically oriented therapy, to try
to make you the “good parent” or intensify the
emotional climate between you. Explain openly that
coaching is focused on dealing with family-of-origin
relationships directly, rather than through replacement
relationships with the therapist.
• 11. Keep monitoring your own culture, class, race, and
gender issues. If the client is of a different race,
ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or social
class, you have a responsibility to educate yourself
about the issues involved for that client.
 Cultural Genogram Questions (1)
• What ethnic groups, religious traditions, nations, racial groups,
trades, professions, communities, and other groups do you
consider yourself a part of?
• When and why did you or your family come to the U.S.? To
this community? How old were family members at the time?
Did they and do you feel secure about your status in the US?
Did they (Do you) have a green card?
• What language did they (do you) speak at home? In the
community? In your family of origin?
• What burdening wounds has your racial or ethnic group
experienced? What burden does your ethnic or racial group
carry for injuries to other groups? How have you been affected
by the wounds your group has committed, or that have been
committed against your group?
• How have you been wounded by the wrongs done to your
ancestors? How have you been complicit in the wrongs done by
your ancestors?
 Cultural Genogram Questions (2)
• How can you give voice to your group’s guilt, your own sorrow,
or your own complicity in the harm done by your ancestors?
What would reparations entail?
• What experiences have been most stressful for family members
in the US?
• To whom do family members in your culture turn when in
need of help?
• What are your culture’s values regarding male and female
roles? Education? Work and success? Family connectedness?
Family caretaking? Religious practices? Have these values
changed in your family over time?
• Do you still have contact with family members in your country
of origin?
• Has immigration changed family members’ education or social
status?
• What do you feel about your culture(s) of origin? Do you feel
you belong to the dominant U.S. culture?