Differentiation Of The Self

Differentiation Of The SelfMurray Bowen laid a readyation for family systems possibleness and established an effective way of carrying bulge family therapy. Among his concepts is that of speciality of the self, which w swooning be explored in this paper. The paper begins with my hold connection with the vagary. Next, I explore the theory, describing pigment players in its development, those related to specialism, and how it brush run into be customd to treat family therapy issues.Keywords Bowen, eminence of self, family therapy I am he as you argon he as you argon me and we be both unitedly. (Lennon and McCartney, 1967.)In the above lyrics from the song I am The Walrus, the singer sees himself and early(a)s as just another translation of each(prenominal) other. Any speciality among self and other is erased.The ability to self-differentiate, however, is unfavorable for soulal development, especially with respect to family members. Consequently, the specialism of the self is not exactly a theoretical idea solely as healthful as a support task for all persons, including family therapists. As I listen to this Beatles song, I meditate upon how I both capability find my enthr wiz in the manhood and how I might relate to my family of origin. I find Bowens theory of distinction of the self compelling beca physical exercise it offers me a means of reviewing past family human sex actships and dealing with express dynamics in a positive manner, rather than simply raw off family members integrally and disowning them.Personal Connection To The ThemeMy worry in Murray Bowens idea of differentiation of the self arose as I read family therapy literature. Bowens theories spurred me to reevaluate my life, close recently my spousals of June 2010 and my source give notice outside(a) my p atomic number 18nts home in family of the same year. I had move into this plate with my family in August 9, 1974, the day that Richard Nixon resign ed from office. This move from our previous home took place to live in a better school district as well as help c ar for my elderly maternal grandp arents. Those grandparents died in 1975. On February 13, 1976, just three days after my ninth featureday and when my brother was not yet eight, my father died of a heart attack.The changes to our family dynamics were profound. At a very young age, I was forced into a position in which I had adult responsibilities as the man of the ho single-valued function, and as my dumbfounds confidante, which included not only hearing adult topics, but universe triangulated when my brother acted out. new(prenominal) new alignments included us brothers acting against our mother and my brother and mother aligning against me. These dynamics support continued and stay on the dominant modes of interactions between us three. At durations, over the last xix years, our stirred interactions became particularly intense, including my departure to atten d college, my brothers moving in and out of the house several times, and my mothers repeated illnesses.From 1991 to 2010 I served as my mothers caregiver, with extensive duties including her transportation, errands, house-cleaning, informal psychotherapy, and rough medical care. During this period, I sacrificed career advancement and earning potential by refusing to consider jobs that would decrease my availability to her if needed. At the same time, I also pursued avenues such as com droper training to keep me crabbed and out of the house. It was very difficult to resolve these competing goals.The dynamics began to change when I met my wife in April, 2009. We bonded over a period of six months, became engaged, and were hook up with on June 27, 2010. My mother was opposed to our race from the start, insisting that a relationship would get in the way of my schoolwork. My brother also was hostile to my wife, expression snide things. Clearly, both preferred the status quo of my e nslavement. After the wedding, my wife moved into the house and helped me determine care of my mother for both months. This situation short became intolerable for all three of us. We moved out on September 1, 2010, angering my brother because he had not been consulted somewhat our mothers care arrangements. Since then, I have provided my mother with commwholey resources for her various needs, leaving it up to her to decide if she wishes to use them, as I do not have the time to relegate care of her any more.Meanwhile, I am currently addressing my self-differentiation run in both individual and yokes therapy. As I reflect again upon the Beatles song, I apply it to my own situation, seeing how critical it is to differentiate on the ane hand from the he (referring to a deceased father) and the he (referring to a brother), not to mention a she (referring to a mother).I know firsthand how it is a major challenge to scram oneself yet at the same time retaining healthy and loving ties with ones family of origin. It is with this difficult enterprise in mind that Murray Bowen authentic his gamyly influential theory. This paper will discuss this theory and its relation to differentiation of the self, beginning with a history of the theory, its key-players and successors.Early History and Successors gibe to Nichols and Schwartz (2009), Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic in the late 1940s. He was elicit in the relationship between insanes and their mothers, which he understood not as a symbiosis of two equal partners, but as an amplified version of a tendency to stirredly react in relationships. Then, while operative at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which he became a part of in 1954, he initiated the hospitalization of entire families with a schizophrenic member. Among his significant findings was the realization that the entire family was involved in the bond between the mother and the disturbed child. From these obse rvations he formulated the idea of anxious adherence, a phenomenon in which closeness in troubled families is driven by worry to the point that family, members were stuck together or fused to the point that they missed personal autonomy. When the NIMH cipher ended in 1959, Bowen moved to Georgetown University, where he worked for 31 years. In 1990, he died after a long illness, but not before conveyance his wisdom to several students and successors.Nichols and Schwartz (2009) note that Bowens students Philip Guerin and Thomas Fogarty formed the Center For Family training in New Rochelle, New York in 1973. Guerin was interested in criterion the severity of the conflict and then singling out specific issues to work on. This therapy copy had several components. Guerin evince the multigenerational context of families, carefully defined familial relationship patterns, and paid close care to addressing the intense emotions of the family member. Bowen also passed the mantle to Bet ty Carter and Monica McGoldrick, who are best known for elucidating the family life cycle and promoting feminist perspectives within the field. perchance Michael Kerr is Bowens most faithful student and colleague. He has been the director of the Georgetown Family Center since 1977. He wrote the book Family Evaluation with Bowen in 1988.Theoretical ConstructsBowens theory is multifaceted. harmonise to Winek (2010), his first main idea is that of chronic fear, which holds them together. Bowen found that although chronic anxiety is found across the animal kingdom and it is less a cognitive receipt than an automatic one. When the anxiety experienced by individuals is low, those persons have a great capacity to contemplate either a specific situation or their overall existence. When the level of anxiety increases, the ability to think about(predicate) a situation calmly declines and affected individuals become far more emotionally reactive. Over time, an emotionally reactive person becomes conflicted, distant or emotionally sewoff. These cutoffs will be discussed later.As noted by Winek (2010), the ancestrying ideas of differentiation and emotional fusion are important to Bowen in the attempt to lenify a patient of that anxiety. Differentiation refers to how a person functions in resolution to his or her level of anxiety. This is an individual reaction in that differentiated persons can deal with their anxiety on their own and allow emotional issues to be addressed without being fused with others emotions. Bowen worked with Michael Kerr to develop a differentiation scale, and nidused that the more differentiated a person was, the less possible they would be ill or irrational because of stress. In contrast, emotional fusion is in many a(prenominal) ways an unhealthy extension of a natural process. When infants are born, they are emotionally fused with their primary caregiver, usually the mother. They have the developmental task of developing their own p ersonality, and should be able to grow into adolescence and adulthood, move out and start their own family. If a family is said to be fused, family members luck common emotional responses. If a single family member experience anxiety, the entire family does so as well. If one member attempts to become more autonomous, the other members collectively experience these actions as abandonment.Emotionally fused persons are disempowered in several ways. They can cope with anxiety-producing situations either emotionally or intellectually, but not both at the same time. They also have an all or nothing approach in dealing with relationships, to the point that when these relationships become too intense, they tend to cut off emotionally and physically. These acts of cutting off do not ultimately reduce anxiety, but rather increases it (Winek, 2010).Other ideas important to Bowen include the pseudo-self, which he developed with Michael Kerr. When people sentience they lack positive attribut es such as strength and wisdom, within themselves, they attempt to put on a false front that exhibit those traits toseek proof from others, the false self they present is the pseudo-self. Another important idea Bowen presented is that of borrowed cognitive operation, which refers to an individual who ostensibly functions at a higher level than his or her partner. For example, in a couple in which there is a health problem, the ill partner may be functioning at a tear down level in part because the other partner is invested in perpetuating a dynamic in which he or she is a care backpackr. Both pseudo-self and borrowed functioning operate at an unconscious level (Winek, 2010).Winek (2010) states that the remaining constructs developed by Bowen further help to elucidate differentiation of self. Other theorists refer to a family system but Bowen calls it the emotional system. Bowen refers to a naturally occurring multigenerational transmission process, in which current generations ar e connected to past generations. Thus, current symptoms in a given family emotional system may derive from an earlier generation. These long symptoms may persist until individual family members are able to differentiate further. unrivaled can think of differentiation, fusion and the pseudo-self all as attempts to relieve anxiety in an emotional system. According to Winek (2010), this is particularly apparent in Bowens idea of the emotional triangle. When two family members experience anxiety, they achieve balance by incorporating a third member into their relationship, thus creating the triangle. Triangles occur in what Bowen called nuclear family emotional system. Viewed in this way, any constant anxiety within a family unit over time would show up as a disfunction within the whole family. An example of a triangle is when parents experience matrimonial difficulties, but rather then address the problems together, they revolve around their attention together upon one or more child ren. Bowen also was able to conclude that birth order will affect a childs relationships including involvement in triangles by drawing upon Walter Tomans work concerning ten distinct personality subtypes of siblings based on birth order.Lastly, Bowen extended his work with the family to apply to society as a whole, whichhe believed also operates like a family, with its own multigenerational transmission, chronic anxiety, and struggles of differentiation. within both a family and society, there are subsides and flows in anxiety, with social problems occurring when high anxiety is present. Bowen even applied his idea of societal regression to the family therapy profession, and was pertain that it might have rapid growth, but also fade chop-chop like a fad. He was afraid that it might quickly ebb and flow (Winek, 2010). Fortunately for mental health professionals and society, family therapy has not faded.More office On DifferentiationBecvar and Becvar (2009) provide further detail regarding differentiation, noting that Bowen was concerned with two kinds of differentiation, both the external differentiation of the self from others and also the internal differentiation of feeling processes from intellectual processes. People who are undifferentiated from others are likely to marry or make permanent commitments to each other. Instead, a couple composed of two undifferentiated persons will experience one or more of the quest emotional distance between themselves, dysfunction in at least one of the spouses, open conflict, or projection of problems onto children. Children and so are significantly affected in such a family. Bowens believed that because a child resonates the mothers instability, the mother, thinking the child is the one with the problem, becomes overprotective, thus further impairing the child.According to Bowen, simply because individuals live physically apart from their family of origin, it does not mean that they are differentiated. As noted ab ove, even a complete emotional cut off is not a successful form of differentiation. Until emotional attachments and cutoffs are successfully negotiated, fusion will increase and the multigenerational transmission will persist. Amidst these attachment issues, a highly differentiated person will recover from stress because they have more coping mechanisms in contrast to a person who is less differentiated. Finally, Becvar and Becvar stress that though Bowen valued a high academic degree of differentiation, he nevertheless lie withd that it was a theoretical ideal in which each person could be self-reliant, and not make others responsible for their emotions (Becvar and Becvar, 2009). judicial decision and Treatment IssuesWalsh and McGraw (2002) discuss the practical applications of Bowens theory for the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of family issues. Therapists following Bowens theory do not pathologize a single family member, but instead address the problem in the context of t he family system. The first sessions consist of fetching a history of the presenting problem, the nuclear family as a whole, as well as a history of both spouses extended family systems. Thus might include the initial documentation of births, divorces, and deaths on a genogram. Particular attention would be given to any triangles and emotional cutoffs that affect the nuclear family. The most important issue for Bowenians in the practical applications of his theory is to foster differentiation of the self. The reason is that if individuals increase differentiation, they can better cope with anxiety intellectually and will hopefully lessen their emotional reactivity as they change their intellectual functioning. A related goal with family therapy is to take care of unsanded business in the family of origin. Bowenian therapists will seek to reduce anxiety and lessen symptoms. While symptom and anxiety reduction can occur between a few sessions or months of treatment, improving diffe rentiation can take years.Along with assessment, Walsh and McGraw (2002) delineate six steps in treatment. First, the presenting problem is explored, south the therapist works with the family to develop their genogram. Third, systemic questions are used to pick up family relationships. Fourth, the focus is broadened to larger family systems. Fifth, feedback is provided to families. Finally, techniques are used to promote change. In contrast to other family therapy models, Bowenian family therapy does not employ many techniques. Those that are used are designed to decrease anxiety and emotional reactivity in the family. The use of genograms remains the most important component in this model, because genograms both develop family information and capture family dynamics.Also central to success in family therapy are other techniques. This includes the therapists commitment to a stance of emotional neutrality, thus ensuring that he or she does not being triangulated into the system. T o this end, Bowenian therapists employ factual questioning to focus with the family upon their dynamics as opposed to the tense emotionality and reactivity. They make use of didactic teaching by directly teaching family members about emotional systems so that family members can think more objectively. Other helpful techniques a therapist can suggest for family members include role-playing, talking to an drop go to represent absent members, journaling, and writing letters to each other about family situations and their feelings about them. In multiple family therapy, families work as a group, with Bowen addressing one family at a time while the other families observed (Walsh and McGraw, 2002). railleryIn preparing for this paper, I learned how much of Bowens theory made sense for my own life. My development as an adult including my familys response to my recent marriage have provided unique educational models. I have learned how to perform boundaries with my mother and brother, wh ile my wife does the same with her family. I started preparing this paper currently after we started couples work to deal with our families of origin. While I have not finished my differentiation work, I see myself in the midst of the process with my wife. We want to have healthy emotional lives, and are concerned about passing on dynamics to our children.I have also recognize that there are common treatment issues in all families. For example, many families like my own face anxiety in how members relate. There are degrees of fusion and separation in families. Mine has been obviously fused, probably for some generations back. I also realized that physically cutting myself off from my family or my wife doing so would not help anyone. I choose to acknowledge my own family experience with those clients I meet, and will seek to remain objective.My own preference for using Bowens model is to be more engaged than observational. I am particularly interested in using the aforementioned te chniques of genograms, role-playing, letter-writing and the empty chair. As a future counselor, I also know that differentiation does not mean isolation and abandonment of ones family, and I will take that knowledge into my practice. In returning to the song lyrics, I hope that I can apply Bowens theories to my life and my work. My goal is to separate being me from he or you or she. Then, I can truly say that we are altogether as individuals, not in a fused mass.