On July 19, 2013, the Center for Family
Consultation gave a warm, no, make that a very warm, welcome to
Pittsburgh-based, Bowen-trained psychologist Walter H. Smith, Jr., Ph.D., who
returned to the summer conference to describe his approach to violence in
families and society. The hot
Friday weather sparked memories of the last day he presented to the CFC during
Chicago’s lethal heat wave of July 1995.
Fortunately, cooler temperatures prevailed so that he could engage us in
a wide-ranging conversation about the primacy of the multigenerational
emotional process as the subject of investigation in work around violence.
But he did not come to
implicate any particular "hot triangles" in the emotional processes where family
or social violence occurs or to promote generalizations. Quite the contrary. In the morning presentation on the
conceptual frame regarding the problem of child abuse, he asked us to take off
our Bowen-colored glasses and to sharpen our descriptive and definitional
skills to receive and perceive each family as a specific instance of a unique
family process; and not to see “triangles” or to talk about relationships
without very clearly defining terms.
As did the scientist that Dr. Bowen was, he invited us to observe,
describe, and hypothesize, and to use our consultation space as a laboratory to
study, not help, the families that come to us explicitly seeking “help” for the
“problem” of violence. He asked us
to see the people in the room, and not the problem.
For the overfunctioners
among us who work in the everyday, individual-oriented, pathologizing and even
interactionally-oriented clinical world, this is no small task. Yet Dr. Smith continued to demonstrate
and embody how he interacts with a group of others to deliver information
without influencing (“Having an agenda with a family is a form of aggression”,
influencing being an attempt to fuse).
Moreover, I observed how he stands (or sits) alongside the system to ask
questions and to listen, without forgetting his own presence as a member of
another unique family system. As
he taught, he regularly diagrammed the nuclear family in the traditional
format. He would add the person of
the therapist in the lower left corner, emphasize the emotional process/family
system aspect by drawing a circle around the family; and then add a large
amoeba-like diagram of the multigenerational family (“into which new members
are being born and within which members are always dying”) in the upper right
hand corner.
I especially enjoyed his
paradoxical style of presentation.
In his interaction with participants, I thought that he demonstrated how
to join a system and defining self while doing so. For example, when I posed a question about active and more
indirect forms of violence in an overfunctioning-underfuntioning parental dyad,
using the typical therapist locution, “So is what you’re saying is that….?”, he
promptly replied, “No, I’m not saying that.” I could have made a logical and evidentiary-oriented case
for what I said being an apt summary of what he had indeed said; yet after some
reflection, I got from his response the invitation to be a self, and to say
that not as an echo or interpretation of his ideas, but as my own take on
it. He also addressed the role of
the therapist as regards his/her own family of origin in sitting with families
whose violence may be difficult to sit with. He talked about a primary triangle in his family of origin,
describing the relief of seeing the person (a parent) and not the problem
(abuse) and how that orientation and shift in relationship helps the therapist
avoid getting ensnared in trying to help or fix the problem in one’s own family
or any family.
Take-Aways
Dr. Smith had so many
interesting ideas and refreshing viewpoints that it is daunting to try to
summarize, Here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite take-aways, as
I recall them and have framed them.
·
Relationship
o
Can
be defined as a condition of emotional responsiveness between two people or
people and things that is fairly automatic A <-->B
o
Attachment
is the time and energy you put into sustaining a relationship. (“If I live to stay away from you,
am I more or less attached?”)
o
Cut-off
is not a verb describing an action between two people, it’s a condition of
relationship within a family emotional process
·
Marriage
o
Can
be defined as an intense emotional partnership for survival for the process of
building a family.
o
Bowen
quote of the day: “My wife may be
right about me about what I do wrong, but it’s none of her business.”
·
Violence
o
Can
be defined as the use of aggression to control someone or something else.
o
Is
a universal risk among humans.
o
Exists
on a continuum—mental/thinking-->indirect/withholding
emotionally-->direct/expressing emotionally-->verbal/physical/mechanized (guns/drones)
(my characterization of a continuum)
o
Is
first in a sequence—As opposed to being “caused” by another, “First you become
violent, then you
find the victim/target”.
(Question: Is this part of
why, despite racial profiling, “stop and frisk” may reduce mortality? The
activation/violence has already arisen, there are lethal means of aggression,
and the target is being sought.)
o
Of
many forms can potentially be dialed back by “bystander” programs (for parent
maltreatment of children in public (“One Kind Word”), for peer bullying)
because being a bystander does not exempt a person from being part of an
ongoing process.
o
Occurs
in families as the underfunctioning parent actively abuses and the
overfunctioning parent adapts or becomes desensitized/unresponsive to the child
being abused (thereby creating a secondary aggression through
neglect/disengagement)
o
Is
differentially experienced and interpreted depending on the quality of the
ongoing relationship within which the abuse occurs
·
Consultant
Presence and Awareness
o
Be
more interested in the people than in the problems
o
Help
more by helping less
o
Care
more about families, feel less responsible for families
o
Have
a hypothesis for every family
o
Make
your office a laboratory
o
It’s
a “workout” to figure out how to stay neutral enough
o
Part
of staying neutral is being aware that you’re part of your own emotional unit
He Left Me Wanting More
I basically would like
to learn more from Dr. Smith about two topics. First, he talked about the new agency he is heading up, and
how families have been empowered to do some shaping of their own service needs
and goals. I’d like to hear about
what those are and how the clinicians and system are processing these
requests. Would you like to hear
more on this subject?
Second, I am personally
interested in societal violence, especially in urban Chicago. In response to my question, Dr. Smith
opened the door to some interesting views of how social policies (choosing
interstate/cars/suburbs vs. trains/people/cities in the 1950s) left urban
communities emptied out of vital resources and large homogenous populations
experiencing being “cut off” from both larger socioeconomic heterogeneity and
from their multigenerational family process. That really made me think very hard about how the urban
Chicago system has may be one of cutoffs that are both geographical and
economic (haves and have nots), but maintains this situation at the risk of the
overall health of the city populous as a whole.
I want to close by
including several paragraphs from a recent Charles Blow column (Barack and Trayvon,
New York Times, July 19, 2013) on violence , gender, and race in
society. It resonated strongly
with Dr. Smith’s presentation about violence generally and multigenerational
cutoff in a broad spectrum of societal arenas:
·
There
is no denying that an enormous amount of violence — both physical and
psychological — is aimed at black men. That violence is both interracial and
intraracial. Too many black men inflict that violence on one another, feeding a
self-destructive cycle of victimization until hope is crushed to the ground and
opportunity seems beyond the sky.
·
All
of this must be considered when we speak of race, and those conversations
cannot be a communion of the aggrieved. All parties must acknowledge and accept
their role in the problems for us to solve them. Only when the burden of bias
is shared — only when we can empathize with the feelings of “the other” —
can we move beyond injury to healing.
·
Yes,
we should encourage young black men to value themselves and make better choices
that reflect that value.
·
But
we must also acknowledge that poverty is sticky and despair, dogged. The
legacy effects of American oppression — which destroyed families, ingrained
cultural violence, and denied generations of African-Americans the luxury of
accruing and transferring intergenerational wealth — cannot simply be written
off. (emphasis mine)
I think that the last
sentence speaks to how cut off (“oppression”) has contributed to violence
against black males. The process
has worked, in part, both by interrupting the flow of the material wealth of
families, as well as by the dehumanization of black males, and our clients who
are “multiproblemed”, by seeing them as separate from their multigenerationally
“wealthy” emotional systems that all humans are part of, and will ever be. This is why I want to become more able
to use Bowen theory to understand larger systems and to reconnect people to
their multigenerational family wealth.
Yours in
#thinkingsystems,
Rosalyn Chrenka, Ph.D.
@dr_rozonthego #thinkingsystems
© Rosalyn Chrenka 2013
