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You know your business needs to change, but you’re caught in the emotional and relational dynamics that are holding you back. Welcome to Noble Metal, the podcast that helps you forge a new kind of leadership. Host Phillip Weiss, a seasoned executive coach and organizational consultant, reveals how to become a more resilient, deliberate, and less-anxious leader.
Through powerful insights based on Bowen Theory and systems thinking, you’ll learn to navigate complex workplace relationships, manage challenging strategic issues, and lead your team to sustainable change. Get the clarity and tools you need to forge a new path for your business.
Ep24
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Bowen’s Bold Conference Move
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[00:00:00]
Phillip: It's 1967, Philadelphia. A conference at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, and it's a big one for the field. The idea here is to get the people who research families and the people who treat families into the same room talking to each other. One of the speakers is a psychiatrist from Georgetown University named Murray Bowen.
People [00:01:00] know his work, and he's expected to get up and deliver a paper on his research just the way everybody else does at the conference. But he doesn't. He gets to the podium and says more or less, "I'm not gonna talk about what's on the program. I'm gonna talk about my own family." And he does. He walks them through what happened when he was back home to a small town in Tennessee, especially one visit earlier that year where he was working on his relationships with his parents, his brothers, sisters, extended families.
The diagrams of his family go back generations. He talks about things that nobody in his family would talk about, and then what happened when he started talking about them. so for a room full of professionals in 1967, that was not normal.
You didn't stand up at a scientific conference and make yourself the case study. When the proceedings were published a few years later, Bowen's chapter didn't even have his [00:02:00] name on it. There's n- and it's not clear as to why the publisher wanted that, but it was printed under the author, quote-unquote, "Anonymous", which as I, as I understand, fooled pretty much nobody, you know, who was, who was aware or was in the room.
I love about that story is what it says about this theory. The man who built it tried it on for himself first in public, and that's the spirit I want for this episode.
Phillip: Hi, I'm Philip Weiss, and welcome to Noble Metal Podcast, where we explore leadership both at work and in life through the lens of Bowen family systems theory. Over the last episodes on this podcast, I've been pulling out Bowen theory in a sense kind of one piece at a time, like triangles here, differentiation there, last episode, multi-generational transmission when we talked about the Murdoch family.
My thinking is [00:03:00] that I'm, I'm overdue in some measure on this podcast to give some history of Murray Bowen, the theory, and the eight concepts that Bowen identified all together in plain language. So that's, that's today, a short history, a walk through the eight concepts Let's start in Waverly, Tennessee.
Origins in Waverly Tennessee
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Phillip: Murray Bowen was born there in 1913, the oldest of five kids. Waverly was, and I think still is, just checking it out on a map, a small town, and the Bowens were a fixture in it. His father at one point served as the town mayor, and the family ran a business in the town.
It sold furniture, household goods, and coffins, and over time, it grew into a funeral home that still carries the Bowen name. I have to admit or have to say that I like, I like that detail for this audience. The, because the man who gave us, in my opinion, the most useful theory of human behavior that I know of, like for, as in an application in family [00:04:00] businesses, this guy himself grew up in a family that was known around town and in business.
He knew what it was like to be a Bowen in Waverly in a sense before he even thought about it as a scientist. He went to University of Tennessee, Knoxville undergrad, and then went to medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis and finished in 1937.
From War to Systems Thinking
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Phillip: And then the war came, World War II. He spent about five years in the army.
Now, he'd been headed toward surgery, the surgical field. But what he saw during the war, the way people held up or didn't under that kind of pressure, what we would now term PTSD, this turned him towards psychiatry instead. And after the war in 1946, he went to Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Very famous, uh, clinic, which at the time, and to some degree still, as I understand, was one of the leading psychiatric centers in the country.
He was trained there in the [00:05:00] psychoanalytic tradition, so Freud, Freudian theory, and the people who came after him. And he worked with patients who had schizophrenia. And here's where the story starts to turn kinda toward the Bowen family systems theory direction.
He kept noticing the relationship between those patients and their mothers, and that it was very intense, very close and very anxious in both directions. When one of the players got calmer, the other one got more upset. It was like there were-- in a sense, like they were two halves of one system or in a sense, almost the same person.
And he started to wonder if he was looking at something bigger than either person. Psychoanalysis at the time, and even still, really didn't have a way to think about that. It was built to look individually inside just one person's head at a time. So Bowen started reading elsewhere, biology, [00:06:00] evolution, how other species lived in groups.
Began to see patterns, actually, that are similar in both human and non-human species.
NIMH Family Ward Breakthrough
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Phillip: And that is an unusual reading list for a psychiatrist in the late '40s, and it, and it really did end up shaping everything he did In 1954, he moved to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Mount-- Maryland.
So this guy had a really stellar blue-chip background here. So the NIMH in Maryland, and he did something really bold. He brought whole families onto a research ward to live there together with the family member who was ill. At first, it was mothers and patients, then fathers and brothers and sisters too, even for months at a time, came to live on campus at the NIMH.
Imagine being on that research staff. You're not seeing a family for fif-fifty minutes just like once a week. You're watching many of their [00:07:00] act-- interactions o-on a daily basis. You're seeing that, for example, one person's mood shifts, everybody else adjusts to it. So what Bowen saw over those five years, and I could say so much more about that project.
Phillip: It, it was very interesting, the evolution of the whole thing and how, Bowen and his team began to think about how they were managing themselves in the face of the project. But what they saw over those fifty years convinced him that the challenge or the problem, if you will, wasn't really located necessarily inside the individual patient, but that the family was functioning as one emotional unit.
The person with the symptoms was where the strain showed up, but the whole family, in a sense, was carrying it. And that is a huge idea, and everything, in a sense, the theory grew out of it.
Georgetown and a Science of Behavior
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Phillip: In 1959, he went yet to another blue-chip location, Georgetown University, and he was there for the rest [00:08:00] of his career, about thirty years.
That's where he built the theory out piece by piece, and in 1975, he founded the Georgetown Family Center, which today is the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. And in 1978, he published his kind of famous work, Family Therapy and Clinical Pr-Practice. It's really a collection of papers. And in, in 1988, along with Michael Kerr, he published Family Evaluation, which, still-- i-is still the book I'd hand many people who wanna understand the theory.
Kerr has since gone on to publish his own work that I re-referenced last week, that does a nice job, uh, in the twenty-first century of summarizing concepts. Murray Bowen died actually in October of 1990, and his legacy still continues through the Bowen Center in DC, as long-- as well as through smaller Bowen centers scattered around, internationally There's one more thing about Bowen that I want to name because I think it explains why the theory feels [00:09:00] different from most of what you'd find, in a sense, on the psychology bookshelf.
Bowen wanted a science of human behavior. He wanted in-- which as the way I understand it is that, that he wanted a certain sort of predictability to it. So he was looking for a science, not really a technique. He was not looking to found a school of therapy. He thought human beings should be understood the way you understand any other species, as part of nature.
Living in relationship systems. We're not necessarily a special case. We, we all come from the same source. In a way, he put theory first and technique second, which is why if you go looking for, say, the, the Bowen five-step meth- method for fixing your family, you're not gonna find it. Instead, what you'll find is a way of seeing, a way of thinking, and in my experience, once you see it, you really can't [00:10:00] unsee it.
So a lot more interesting things can be said about Murray Bowen and the development of, of the theory. But what I wanna go to at this point is I wanna go to the eight concepts. The, the theory itself really summarized in the eight concepts. And this is what Bowen developed over time.
Two Foundations Anxiety and Togetherness
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Phillip: Six of them were pl- in, pretty much in place by 1966, and he added two more in the mid-'70s But before I walk through them, I-- there are two ideas I think that are really embedded or foundational to all eight.
And you've heard me talk about this before, both of these. The first is anxiety, not the I'm worried about my presentation kind, the sort of momentary thing that p- comes and goes. Bowen was talking about chronic persistent anxiety in a family system or any human system. It's the background level intention that goes up and down depending upon what the group is [00:11:00] facing.
Every family has some. If you're not feeling my opinion, if you don't feel a level of anxiety, you know, throughout the day off and on, you know, you're probably not alive. And some, some of, some of us have a lot more than others The second key concept here is that every one of us is pulled in two directions, you know, and feeling that pressure at, at the same time.
There's a pull toward togetherness, that is belonging, closeness, being on the same page. this is the more compelling pull in some ways for most of us. We want to be part of the group. We wanna go along to get along. But then there's also a, a pull toward individuality, being your own person, thinking your own thoughts.
We need both. And the eight descriptions are basically a description of how families handle the tension between those two poles, [00:12:00] especially when that ubiquitous, ever-present anxiety or anxiousness goes up. Okay, so here we go. Let's talk about these eight concepts.
Concept 1 Differentiation of Self
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Phillip: The first one and, and the hub, the backbone of the whole thing is differentiation of self.
I wish that was a shorter word, but hey, it, it isn't. Bowen actually took that from biology, cellular biology, and the idea of cells, healthy cells being able to distinguish themselves from, say, cancerous cells. If you've listened to me in this podcast for a bit, you've heard me come back to this concept of differentiation again and again.
So what is it? In summary, it's your ability to stay yourself, stay true to yourself while staying... still staying connected to people who matter to you, to key stakeholders. To think clearly when the emotional temperature goes up. To know what you believe or [00:13:00] don't believe without needing everybody to agree and without cutting them off when they don't I, think it's fair to say that this is not a necessarily an internal trait that you do or don't have, because this is primarily something that's showing up in relationship systems.
Phillip: So somebody can look very calm and together at work in one system and then turn fourteen years old the minute they walk into their mother's kitchen, even though they're an adult. Most of us have been there, done that, or something like it. Okay, so differentiation of self.
Concepts 2–3 Triangles and Family Process
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Phillip: The second concept, triangles. We spent a whole episode on this actually, and they came up again actually with the Murdochs.
Two people get tense. One of them or both pull in a third to take some of the pressure off. You're frustrated with your spouse, so you call your sister. Bowen called the triangle the smallest stable [00:14:00] relationship system.
A pair, two people hold together fine when things are calm, but when things heat up, it often needs a third person to kind of spread the load. Third concept is what Bowen called the nuclear family emotional process. A mouthful as well, but the idea is actually pretty simple When anxiety goes up in a family, it has got to go somewhere.
Phillip: and Bowen saw it tending to go really in four directions. The first is conflict between partners. The second, going, into one partner doing more while the other does less, so over-functioning. So the first one, conflict. Second, over-functioning and under-functioning. Third one is it goes into a child who starts to show the strain in the family.[00:15:00]
And then fourthly is distance, where people just sort of stop engaging with each other. And we've, we have touched on all of these in some-- in varying degrees along the way. So conflict, over and under functioning focus on a child or distance leading to cutoff eventually.
Most families use some combination of these. So the question isn't whether your family does or doesn't have one. It's, it's kind of, in a sense, it's which one is sort of the default. And I would actually argue, um, as do other Bowen folks that I know some, is that in, in America, we are massive distancers. it kind of goes with our DNA and is-- if you think about how our country was founded with so many people immigrating and leaving family and just by virtue of lack of communication cutting off.
So we have here that sort of n-nuclear family emotional process with four distinct sort of ways it shows up.
Concepts 4–6 Projection Transmission Cutoff
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Phillip: So the fourth one kind of coming out [00:16:00] of this is the family projection process. A parent's worry, or in some cases a parent's hope, settles on a particular kid. So it can either be a really negative focus, "Oh, I'm so worried about this, this kid because of X, Y, and Z," or, "I have such great hopes for this kid.
They're brilliant." But any rate, this child gets watched more closely, worried about more or counted on more, and the kid tends to grow up inside of that focus, sometimes becoming exactly what the parent was worried about or carrying a weight that was never really theirs to carry. to a degree, we kinda touched on this in the last episode with a spotlight moving from one Murdoch kid to another.
So that's family projection process. The fifth is multi-generational transmission. And so yes, there is yet another mouthful. The family projection [00:17:00] process describes the primary way parents transmit their emotion, kind of emotional challenges or problems to a child. The patterns in your family didn't start with you.
They came down from your parents who got them from theirs, and that's the, this idea of transmitting through the generation. And Bowen's point was that small differences in how differentiated a person is add up over generations, and they can add up. One branch of the family drifts toward greater differentiation and more stability.
Another toward less over three or four generations. A generation, by the way, being anywhere from twenty to thirty years. And you can see real difference and divergence over time. When we looked, for example, at Rupert Murdoch's father, Keith, that was in a sense the question I was asking, which is what got handed down in a sense along with the newspaper business? What [00:18:00] patterns of behavior have come down the line? So again, multi-generational transmission.
The sixth, again also embedded in, in the, you know, the two before, is emotional cutoff. Bowen really zeroed in on this one. This is how people handle unresolved attachment to their family by putting distance between themselves and others. Sometimes it's geographic. Sometimes you move across the country.
Phillip: Sometimes it's silence and it's subtler. I, I, I am prone to say that we can be distanced and cut off from the person, you know, down in the same house as us or down the hall from us at work. You can still go home for the holidays and ev-- but everything kind of stays polite and on the surface and nothing gets really said.
Cutoff, extreme distancing often feels like freedom in the moment. I would actually say it's sort of like relationship aspirin. [00:19:00] It's quick, it's easy to do, and it really feels good in the moment. Like finally I am out from under all of this. But Bowen's observation was that the unresolved part tends to travel with you.
It shows up in the next relationship or in your own family down the road or in a friendship. Distance changes the scenery, but it doesn't usually change the pattern as a rule of thumb.
Concepts 7–8 Sibling Position and Society
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Phillip: Seventh is sibling position. Here, Bowen drew very specifically and heavily on the work of a psychologist by the name of Walter Toman, T-O-M-A-N, who studied how birth order shapes people.
Oldest kids often take charge and take responsibility, sometimes more than they should. Youngest sometimes are often more comfortable being looked after and, uh, more inclined to push the rules and kinda be sort of [00:20:00] the free spirits. And middle kids can go a few different ways. and I'm being very generic here and, and high level.
This is a-- It's a useful framework, I believe, to think about, and I would view it as kind of a tendency and not necessarily like a horoscope. Plenty of oldest children were never put in charge of anything. That said, many take charge types are often oldest. Uh, it's just a, it's a role they learn from day one.
So sibling position having a certain level of impact and kind of potentially being somewhat predictable about the way people have learned to show up, and I would say, in my opinion, it's a learned pa-- these are learned patterns. By the way, one thing, a, a comment that I wanna make regarding sibling position that I think is, was really useful more for me to think about, both in terms of my own personal life as well as professionally, each kid in a family is, in a sense, born into a different family.
Yes, same [00:21:00] parents, but what I mean by that is, you know, an oldest, is born with just as, and is living with really just their parents. And then when the next one comes along, that kid is coming into a family with the parents and an oldest. And so in my case, by the time I came along as a fourth, uh, and ten years gap between me and my oldest brother, I was born into a very different family than my oldest brother was.
And it's neither good nor bad, it's just different. So which I think explains why you might see differences in shaping. Anyway, whole other, other, other discussion. The eighth and final concept currently in Bowen theory is what is referred to as societal emotional process. Bowen believed that the same patterns you see in a family show up at essentially the same scale in all of society.
When anxiety stays high for a long time, [00:22:00] groups tend to pull toward that togetherness, groupthink, and quick fixes toward kind of the, the relieving the pressure of the moment right now instead of thinking through kind of longer term solutions
I'll, I'll leave it there at the moment. Uh, there, there are probably many examples, especially in our present day and age, where we can think about this idea of kind of the, the whole group dynamic that pull toward to-togetherness, the challenge to be an individual thinker. you can probably think of your own examples, and I'll let you think about that.
So that's the eight. Got differentiation, triangles, nuclear family emotional process, family projection process, multigenerational transmission, emotional cutoff, sibling position, and societal emotional process. You don't need to memorize the list. What matters here, I think, is that they're, they're really [00:23:00] not eight separate ideas.
They're really eight views, different ways of looking at the same system. The anxiety comes in, the pull toward togetherness gets stronger. A-and these concepts then describe, in a sense, the way, different ways really, that families or teams or groups absorb it and pass it around and pass it down. By the way, one thing I want to mention, often in working with clients, certainly if it's a family, uh, oriented business and client, one of the things that we absolutely, uh, do is map, go back and look at history of how, uh, the family, can-- at least a couple generations of how the family has rolled.
What are the patterns you see for better or sometimes, uh, more challenging? We also do the same thing, though, uh, sometimes in organizations to go back, uh, in other words, non-family organizations, businesses, companies. Go back and look what historically have been the patterns of this team or this group or this [00:24:00] organization under different leaders.
I think that that's one of the things also that I want to just mention that I really do appreciate about Bowen theory is its valuing of history past because we didn't just fall off, so to speak, uh, like a turnip truck and show up in our families or, or in our organizations. We, we're coming into long existing systems that have histories and ways of functioning
Using the Theory on Yourself
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Phillip: now here's the part that I care about most really as we come to a wrap. It would be easy to listen to these concepts and start thinking about other people. You know, your-- My brother's definitely the cutoff guy. Your-- You know, my mom is the textbook case of projection. My boss is always triangling somebody in.
And, and you know, and you might be right, but that's not really, I don't think, how Bowen meant for the theory to be used. Go back to Philadelphia for a minute. Bowen didn't, he didn't stand up and talk about his patients' families, [00:25:00] and he certainly did that often over time. He, um, he was great at actually showing case studies.
But in this instance, he talked about his own family, and what he described wasn't fixing them. What he described was working on his own part. How he showed up when he went home, where he got pulled in, where he went quiet, where he lost track of what he actually thought. It was about taking responsibility for himself
So let's step back from this list then for a minute. in a sense, forget about the ind- the individual concepts, and I wanna think about the whole thing. The theory itself, that is. I-- It is, in my opinion, a way of looking at people that says you can't really s- understand somebody by looking just at them as an isolated individual.
Phillip: But if you're gonna really understand sort of how they [00:26:00] roll, why they roll the way they do to a degree, you have to... I, I think, and the theory is saying, you gotta look at that bigger picture that they're part of. And that's what has been so valuable to me with this theory, both in terms of my personal life and in working with clients, seeing the bigger family system of my own or helping clients see that larger, bigger picture and then thinking about how they need to navigate in the face of that.
. So, you know, what's your reaction to, to the theory in, in a sense, to these concepts, to the overall emphasis of the theory?
Is there something specifically that resonates with you? And if, and if it does, I'd be curious to know why. I-Is it because it explains things you've lived and experienced? Is it because in some way it takes weight off, in the sense that, uh, it, it's-- it, it kind of explains things that you've observed but never been able to really name?
Phillip: Does it [00:27:00] give you what I like to say sometimes as sort of handholds? Or maybe, you know, it puts, uh, it's because it puts weight on things you weren't expecting. There's a strong emphasis in this theory on individual and personal responsibility in the face of all these system pressures
How I Found Bowen Theory
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Phillip: I wanna go back, back to 2008 is when I first was introduced to the theory. I was coming out of my HR role into the coaching practice, and I literally was asking fellow coaches in Houston, "Do you have a theory of human behavior that informs your coaching work?" And honestly, uh, the closest answer or the closest I ever got to an answer was, yeah, emotional intelligence.
And I think Daniel Goleman is totally onto it and, uh, there's a lot of positive to be said about EQ. one of the things I've been prone to say just on that EQ note is that I consider Bowen theory to kinda be EQ on steroids. [00:28:00] But my point is, is that I really wasn't getting very many good answers. And finally, someone said to me, "Yes, there is a theory I use.
It's called Bowen theory, and there's gonna be a, a one-day conference here in Houston. In two weeks, you need to go." So I went, and it happened to be Dan Papero, who is somebody I'm still in contact with and who I've referenced on this podcast. But Dan is excellent at explaining the theory in very accessible terms.
He-- You know, I went through the day with him, and for me, that was it. This just really resonated. It made sense. It did what I was just saying back there. It gave me handholds and, and some explanation for patterns and things that I was experiencing. And it just seemed to me to be a little weightier, more common sense-oriented, and I really appreciate as well the fact that there was an effort to tie it to science.
In the world Bowen trained in, if something was wrong with a person, you [00:29:00] looked inside that person, their history, their, their sort of unconscious, you know, their inner conflicts. Really, to be fair, that tradition gave us a lot. It, it took the inner life seriously in a way that nobody really had before.
But think about what happens when you drop that into a family model. One person gets the diagnosis. One g- person gets the treatment. Everybody else kinda just waits outside in the waiting room. Then the, the person comes home to the same family doing the same things, and a lot of the time, the problem just kinda returns, and it might actually turn up in somebody else.
And that's exactly what Bowen saw, you know, in the war- in the ward there at the NIMH. So he asked a different question. Not what's wrong with this person, but what's going on in the system where it shows up? I find that question more useful and more hopeful. It takes a lot of blame out because nobody has to be the villain necessarily.[00:30:00]
And, and when I say that, it doesn't mean that people as adults in particular don't have individual responsibility. But what it's speaking about is kind of where are the levers for change? It, it means you don't have to necessarily wait for everybody else to change in order for you to feel right or good.
If you change how you show up even a little bit, the system has to adjust in a sense around you A- and again, back to the note I made earlier, this is where I think Bowen theory just really shines. It places responsibility right where it belongs, and that is with me.
As I am prone to say sometimes with a client or in a class, breaking news, you cannot change other people. And so if you're waiting for other people to change in order for you to feel good, I think we have a long wait on our hands So that's what I'd leave you with. Not really [00:31:00] which concept fits you, but what this way of seeing does for you.
What does it open up? Where it might change how you think about your family, your work, or yourself.
Return to 1967
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Phillip: So let's go back to nineteen sixty-seven one more time. A psychiatrist well-regarded, standing in front of his peers. He was supposed to give a paper. Instead, he talks about going home I think that's the most important thing to know right now about this theory.
It asks the same thing of everyone who uses it, Bowen included, me included. Before you work on the system, work on your own part. Get a little clearer about what you think, what you believe. Stay a little more connected than maybe feels comfortable in the moment, and notice your own moves. And I'll be honest, that's, that's not a quick fix, but Bowen spent his whole career on it.
It's the most-- and it, and it's a very powerful [00:32:00] thing. Thank you so much for joining me for this particular episode. And if you found this useful, please refer us on to other pe- other folks that you think might, might be helped or find this intriguing. And would love to have you go in and, uh, make some comments as well on your podcast platform.
Again, thank you so much. And until then, I'm Philip. Thank you for listening to Noble Metal.