1. Bowen’s
Family Systems Theory
Conceptualization of the family as an emotional unit, a
network of interlocking relationships, best understood
when analyzed within a multigenerational or historical
framework

2. KeyConcepts
1. Whole is greater than sum of its parts
2. Balance of change & stability
3. A change in one part part of the system can impact
change in the entire system
4. Circular causality
5. Subsystems and larger systems
6. Family rules
7. Family communication

3. Theoretical Concepts
Differentiation of Self:
 Degree to which one is able to avoid having his or her behavior
automatically driven by emotion. The goal is to strive for balance
between feelings and rationality. The key is to be able to separate
emotionally from parents.
 The opposite of differentiation is fusion – mercy of emotional
reactions & become anxious at low levels of stress (fusion-
differentiation scale)

4. Triangles
• Bowen postulated that when a two person system (dyad) is stressed
& develops anxiety, one or both will draw in another person to form
a three person interaction in order to reduce anxiety levels.
• Considered his greatest contribution
• emphasis on triangles and the process of triangulization.

5. Nuclear Family Emotional System
• People choose mates with similar levels of differentiation
• A poorly differentiated marital dyad will become highly fused and create a
family of their own that will share the same characteristics
• When highly fused, three possible resulting symptomatic patterns: physical
or emotional dysfunction in a parent; marital conflict (cycles of emotional
distance vs. overcloseness); psychological impairment in child (parents
overly focused on child)

6. Family Projection Process
• Parents transmit their own level of differentiation onto
the most susceptible child
• The intensity of the family projection process depends
on: degree of undifferentiation and levels of anxiety

7. Emotional Cutoff
• A flight of extreme emotional distancing from family of origin in
order to break emotional ties and not true individuation (as a way
to cope with unresolved fusion and anxiety)
• Bowen contended that adults must resolve their emotional
attachments to their families of origin

8. Multigenerational Transmission
Process
 Degrees of differentiation transmitted over several generations
 If the least well differentiated members of two families marry, then as
a result of the projection process, the offspring may have even lower
differentiation levels (“weak links”), these people are vulnerable to
anxiety & fusion

9. Sibling position
Bowen borrows from Toman’s
research on birth order &
personality to develop his
thinking that birth order
frequently predicts certain
roles & functions within a
family’s emotional system,
but it is a person’s functional
position in the family system,
not necessarily the order of
birth that shapes future
expectations & behavior.

10. Societal Regression
• Society, like a family, contains forces towards
undifferentiation and individuation and under chronic
stress there is an erosion of differentiation (thus society
is unable to make rational decisions & instead acts on
feelings)

11. Bowen’s
Therapy
Goals
Reduce levels of anxiety
Alleviate the symptoms (e.g., projection,
triangulation, fusion)
Raise each person’s level of
differentiation (this is a self & a systems
theory)

12. NOW WHAT?
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