WPFC Perspectives


WPFC Perspectives: Insights from Bowen Family Systems Theory, No. 1 Working with Families Experiencing Loss A Discussion with Carl Jensen, DMin, Catherine Murphy Rakow, MSW, ACSW, and Anne Vogeding Read, MA, MEd
As a clinician, how do you prefer to approach the subject of loss when working with families? Anne Vogeding Read: Much the same as I approach any other subject a hurting person brings to me. I listen as carefully as I can to what is being expressed, knowing that what I am hearing and observing is but one small part of much more complex picture. A lot of personal effort goes into curbing my own inclination to solve (or attempt to solve) problems more quickly than they really can be solved with incomplete understanding. Rushing people through their pain may reduce everyone’s immediate anxiety (including mine), but I do not believe this is generally helpful if one’s goal is long term healing. My approach generally involves looking a each family’s unique configuration, multigenerational history and present day relationships. When loss of a loved one is the presenting problem I would be particularly interested in how past generations of the family have dealt with death, and how the one who is now talking with me generally functions in the family. Always my approach would be to keep in mind that the problem of death (like all human problems) is a challenging opportunity for everyone in the family to grow and mature. Carl Jensen: It depends upon what families present. Very often in my experience, I will be presented with a marital conflict or a “problem child”; but when I broaden the lens, I find that a significant family member has died within the last year or two, has been seriously ill, or is dying. There is then a natural progression to discussing directly the issues	of such an actual or anticipated loss. Less often, people present a loss issue initially. In these cases, there is often a need to vent. While I honor this need, I also invite the client to broaden the focus. This includes remembering and reflecting on one’s relationship with the deceased, and considering ways to maintain contact with fellow grievers. I also invite people to consider how a death affects their families, how it can shift functioning positions, and how it presents to my clients some decisions about how they will function in the new family situation. I see it as useful to discuss the death and its impact openly and directly, especially since my clients often perceive that few people are willing to talk with them about their loss, once a month or two have passed since the death. Since I am a pastoral counselor, clients often come to me in order to reflect on their issues in the context of the faith, religious tradition, and/or religious community. Part of broadening the lens involves the opportunity for dialogue between the bereaved and that person’s God. That spiritual relationship also may shift as part of dealing with loss, as matters of meaning, hope, forgiveness, acceptance, etc., are taken to God. Catherine Murphy Rakow: There is a lot known and written about the experience of loss including death as an individual experience. There is far less study of loss and death as a relationship and family system phenomena. Broadening the understanding of death to the relationship system gives more options. Death as a multigenerational phenomenon impacts the present. The person who died	was “in relationship” to each member of a family. Each of these points of contact will experience the loss individually. Death brings to this surface issues that were always there. The removal of one member of a system activates the emotional system and gives assistance to seeing the unresolved emotional issues. It’s there – if one is open to seeing in one’s own family. The thing about a family and death is that each member addresses the emptiness of the loss or the relationship vacuum individually. Some individuals know they will find a way to figure out what is needed. Others take a long time to know how to move forward or to even know what is needed to assist that. Some people have to have as many facts as possible, some do not want to know much. Some want contact with the memories and create photo albums, some want a tangible representation that goes to memorial funds, scholarships and charitable donations. These artifacts represent something about the dead person and the relationship’s meaning to the person still alive. Somewhere I heard that the Harlem Dance Theater came about as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King. This would be one example of how a loss experienced by one individual focused that person’s emotional energy into doing something. Others are not action oriented and prefer to deal with the loss very privately. It is possible to see these individual ways of acknowledging death as a whole, broad view of the family unit as it reconstitutes.
What has been your most useful insight in working with families experiencing a loss? C J: Bowen’s concept of the “emotional shock wave” after certain deaths has been validated repeatedly in my experience, as has his idea of direct and honest discussion of death. These ideas guide what I intend to do in working with families. The level of my own work on issues related to death and grief are what make me more or less able to do what I intend. CMR: Two useful points in Bowen theory would be the idea of having operating space, and that births and deaths in a family are part of an emotional process that is generations deep. Space to be yourself without eliciting relationship pressure to change and space to be present with others without the other pulling away is one of the things a clinician offers. Family members also can do this for each other; it is not a specialty of clinicians. As individual as the responses to a death are within a family, collectively the group is dealing with a loss and this makes being present with another who is suffering difficult when you too are hurting. Birth and deaths are part of the survival of a family. One way that I have thought of death in a relationship system would be analogous to the early neuronal pruning that takes place in the brain. The death of all those neurons builds in developmental proficiencies necessary for successful functioning of the brain. Death in a family can offer the same opportunity. AVR: My most useful insight is best summarized by a statement which opens the play, I Never Sang for My Father. It goes something like this: “Death ends a life. It doesn’t end a relationship.” That idea has been helpful to me in understanding a wide variety of family emotional reactions to death and the fact that all deaths are not the same.	What qualities of Bowen theory provide you with a good lens for viewing the problems of families coping with loss? CMR: The concepts of Bowen theory give one perspective. Unresolved emotional issues in families are sustained by emotional triangles. These persist over generations though the individuals in the original triangle die off. New people take up the positions in the triangle and the unresolved emotional issue is carried into the future generations. Deaths can produce responses that bind anxiety. This allows the family to adapt. Death and differentiation support each other. There are certain deaths and relationships that allow for years of work to be accomplished in the course of contact with one death. Beliefs can be put into practice and a person can relate to a whole system. Funerals allow a person to represent self and self’s beliefs by conducting one’s self in accord with those beliefs for all to see. And if you happen to be the family member who is receiving the family’s outpouring of comfort, all the better. A real time saver! AVR: The lens of Bowen theory brings a unique perspective to all family situations and problems. Certain qualities of this theory are particularly relevant when looking at the problems of a family coping with loss. Bowen theory requires giving up traditional simplistic notions of causality. This opens up new possibilities for understanding the death experience. Unresolved emotional issues which intensify the grieving experience and block the healing process can then be more easily identified. The theory’s focus on objectivity and management of the professional’s own anxiety encourages frank discussions about death using concrete language rather than more obscure terminology which attempts to soften or deny reality. Recognition that “different” does not necessarily equate	with “pathological” is another unique quality of Bowen theory which is very useful in working with death related problems. A popular notion that crying is the best way to express grief may not be true for everyone. Pressuring some people to cry may actually complicate their grieving process. People are different and “normal” is a judgment call that is extremely hard to make. This nonjudgmental quality of Bowen theory (solidly balanced by the theory’s insistence on personal responsibility) often helps me to reduce my own professional nearsightedness. And viewing families who are experiencing the pain of loss—or the pain of some other difficult life event—through the corrective, wide angle lens of Bowen theory generally opens up new possibilities of change for everyone. CJ: Briefly, theory helps me to see the individual’s grief reaction in the larger context of the multigenerational family as it deals with a shock wave. More specifically, theory helps me to see the current loss in terms of: the characteristic responses of the family to bereavements and to other stresses over several years and possibly over a number of generations; reciprocal functioning among family members as families deal with stress; the opportunities to bridge cutoffs, to change functioning position, or to choose not to take the role of the person who has died; and, the value of keeping contact with the legacy of the deceased. It also helps me to see the problematic behavior of family members in terms of the shock wave set in motion by a loss. Such problematic behavior would include marital conflict and/or various forms of under-functioning in an adult or child. Theory helps to place this in the larger context of how a family is affected by a death.
Western Pennsylvania Family Center 733 North Highland Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15206 P-412.362.2295 \| F-412.363.2489 INFO@WPFC.NET Home - About WPFC - History - Faculty - Board - Course Catalog - Training - Education - Consultation Continuing Education Credits - Up-Coming Events - Bowen Theory - Contact WPFC Educational Resource Center Library - Publications & Audio/Video Distance Learning - Membership All Content Copyright © 2010 Western Pennsylvania Family Center. All Rights Reserved. Site by ISM, Inc.