hi guys welcome back to my channel and if you're new welcome to my channel my name is stephanie yates i'm ubuile and i'm a licensed associate marriage and family therapist today's video is for those who are considering becoming therapist or are in the process of becoming therapist because we'll be doing another model review today we'll be reviewing bowen's family systems model if you're interested or curious stay tuned [Music] okay so first i want to shout out my subscribers who've specifically requested models i'm seeing all of your requests and they are in progress specifically shout out
to the subscribers that requested the bowens family systems model so we're going to jump right into talking about what this model is about and why it was created [Music] so bowen's model goes by several different names i remember in grad school not even being sure if we were talking about bowen's models until we started getting into the concept so it's known as extended family systems intergenerational family therapy family systems therapy it has so many different names i refer to it as bowen's family systems model and i hear a lot of people say bowen when they're
talking about his model just to be clear about which model we're talking about the first thing i want to do is talk a little bit about bowen himself murray bowen was one of the foundational leaders when it came to marriage and family therapy he's credited for being one of the founders of systemic therapy and his work was conducted primarily with parents of schizophrenic patients this model was developed in the 1950s and his working theory was that there were certain family dynamics that would persist throughout multiple generations and cultivate severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia that
is how he began his family therapy work and this is really what brought us into examining the family as opposed to only examining the individual so the other notable thing about bowen's model is that it really boils down to eight interrelated concepts and if you can remember these concepts then you're pretty much golden when it comes to any marijuana family therapy exam or paper when it comes to bowen's model the first and most important concept and honestly my favorite aspect of this model is the concept of differentiation differentiation you can think of this as like
the anchor of bowen's model this if you hear it if you see it on an exam more than likely they're going to be referring to his model so you think about differentiation from two different perspectives you think about it interpersonally and you think about it intra-psychically what that means is that we are evaluating both the individual and their community or family so interpersonal differentiation refers to one's ability to differentiate themselves from their family so being able to have your own unique identity opinions feelings outside of your family then interest psychically when we talk about differentiation
we're talking about being able to separate emotions from rationality so if a person is undifferentiated then they're probably going to make a lot of decisions from a purely emotional place without thinking about them logically when you have families that were interpersonally undifferentiated you would see what he described as an undifferentiated family ego mass and this is where you have a family that is characterized by being highly emotional and this is where you might see families that end up getting into a lot of fights or arguments or over-involved in one another's lives and so bowen did
focus on making sure one tends to their rational side when making decisions from bowen's perspective it's very important for your emotions not to be so high that you can't separate them from logical thoughts or separate yourself from your family so that's what differentiation is it is intra-psychic and interpersonal the next concept is the nuclear family emotional system his whole theory here is that people tend to choose partners that are similarly differentiated to them so if you've got a partner who is lowly differentiated they're probably going to find another partner who is lowly differentiated which leads
to an unstable family unit that's characterized by high emotions and dysfunction signs of this is if you see chronic marital conflict or psychological dysfunction in a child the third concept is another concept that is i would say on the same level really as differentiation when it comes to identifying bowen's model is emotional triangles when you are dealing with an unstable family unit particularly you have two partners who've gotten together and neither of them is differentiated and able to separate their emotions from their thoughts right if you have this situation one of the easiest ways that
they deal with that lack of balance is by channeling or involving a third party often that third party is a child but you can also see an emotional triangulation by a person focusing exclusively on work or taking up a hobby that takes up all of their attention basically having to bring in a third party to balance the unevenness or instability in the relationship i always think about this in terms of if you have for example a couple of people who they really only connect through their dislike of another person right they don't really have anything
in common they don't enjoy being with each other except when it's geared towards this third party or it could be the opposite you could have two parents who are giving devoting loving energy affectionate energy to their child they might not be able to work well together or communicate together except if they are talking about that child so triangulation is really balancing the unevenness by bringing in a third leg if you will imagine a table that typically could function on two legs but it's a little bit wobbly so you put a third one in so that
it can be steady that's what triangulation looks like the fourth concept is the family projection process which really just simply means that as we see these two people who are lowly differentiated get together and focus their attention on their child in order to deal with their instability the child ultimately ends up being even less differentiated than the parent so this is where we start seeing that multi-generational pattern happening all the way through to where you ultimately see a severe psychological disorder again this is not proven this is the theory that founds bowen's model now keep
in mind with the family projection process depending on the time the child is born or the amount of stress in the family that is going to highly impact how much more undifferentiated that child is than the parent one of the understandings or theories that bowen proposes that the most vulnerable child is going to be the child that is getting all of that additional attention so it could be based on the child being younger it could be based on the child being talented it could be several different factors that would make that child be the one
that gets that additional attention from the parents that actually lessens their differentiation over time so speaking of sibling position that is the fifth interrelated concept that bowen talks about so one of the most talked about sibling positions is the oldest child the oldest child in a family typically takes on more responsibility for caring for their siblings and they might again be that child that is getting the most attention from the parents or being leaned on the most heavily by the parents my aacbs book that i talked about in my how i passed the american family
therapy exam it really anchors me as i talk about these models and it even talks about how if you have two older children who get together then what ends up happening is that they can become very competitive with one another because they're both used to being the leader the sibling position can really have a big impact on the child's likelihood for becoming well differentiated now something that's really important to talk about is the sixth concept which is the emotional cut off emotional cutoff is really where you see a child maybe be fed up and actually
run away from the family depart from the family in an attempt to develop their own identity but most of the time when the family is fused just because they've run away does not mean that they are truly separate from the family or the family's ideologies so please don't confuse having a client who's moved far away from their family or has cut off all ties or communication with their family as them becoming more differentiated because it's really more of a sign of having an in-meshed refused family than it is for being truly differentiated the multi-generational transmission
process which is our seventh concept is kind of similar to the family projection process so i do want to say that in advance because it's going to be a little bit confusing but here we're just emphasizing how generationally when you see this over time you have two parents who are literally differentiated they get together they have a bunch of children you have some children who are going to be receiving less attention from these lowly differentiated parents they ultimately end up becoming more differentiated than their parents because they're not involved in their drama let's just leave
it at that whereas you have the child who is very involved in their parents distress whether the parents are triangulating them and by giving them a lot of attention or leaning on them too heavily to pick a side anything where that child is brought into the parents conflict in any way whether the parents are being competitive or they're being nasty whatever the case that child getting attention ends up being less differentiated than the parent then that child pairs up as we talked about before with another lowly differentiated person they have children they focus on their
child that child becomes less differentiated and multi-generationally we see less and less differentiation until the outcome is ultimately a severe mental disorder psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia and this is just bowen's theory again i want to emphasize this is not empirically proven this is just the foundation of his theory um when we talk about why bowen came up with this model and really why family therapy even exists is because someone like bowen paid attention to the impact of the family on the outcome of the individual now the eighth principle i love that bowen took the
lens all the way further back right because we started with the individual then we talk about that individual pairing up with someone similarly differentiated then we talk about them having children and how they might focus on one child who becomes less differentiated then we talk about what it looks like through multiple generations and lastly bowen's pulling it all the way back and say now let's look at society as a whole okay he connects differentiation with societal regression so he doesn't blame it all on the family certain societal factors can play a huge factor into the
differentiation of an individual family or person we talk about natural disasters or wars political traumas these things can contribute to lower differentiation at the individual or family or generational level okay we talk about genocide for example how that impacts families through multiple generations some of the factors in society that contribute to lower differentiation or vice versa when we think systemic it's never a leads to b it's always a leads to b leads back to a so we see that low differentiation also can contribute to the societal regression now if you're looking for some signs of
societal regression and this is really profound to me because honestly i see a lot of this in today's society increased rates of violence drug abuse crime and divorce and greater tension between majority and minority groups and the last one is less principled decision making by leaders this is directly from again my aatbs book and that i thought was really important to think about the connection between our society and the individual family and vice versa so what's the goal of owens model it's really just to decrease anxiety and to increase the individual levels differentiation within the
family members i will say that one of the disadvantages to bowen's model is that it's highly theoretical and a lot of the earliest models of family therapy were because the the idea was working with the family that's the radical idea is to work with the family instead of just the individual but there aren't a ton of techniques to support the theory so we ask how do we make a person more differentiated there's still a lot of questions around that but i will share with you some of the techniques that he proposed in his work so
the first thing is the genogram which is something that if you are even brand new in your marriage and family therapy program you've probably heard of a genogram is basically outlining the family tree and looking at the relationship between family members so you might know that you have an estranged relationship between this person and this person or a death or a miscarriage a genogram is really showing that family history and trying to bring to light any milestones family trauma or conflict that could contribute to issues with differentiation with the genogram you want to make sure
that you are incorporating at least the last three generations just to get the best idea of that multi-generational transmission process that we talked about earlier now i want to talk about the difference between a modern or classic model or a post-modern model this model being developed in the 50s is absolutely a classic model in marriage and family therapy and what that means to me is that there was still a belief at that time that the therapist could be objective or neutral his research initiated by working with the parents of adult schizophrenic patient so he would
often be meeting with the couple and what he would do is try to become that third leg in the wobbly or unstable table he would purposefully triangulate himself into the unit so the theory as to why he did that is because he believed that as long as the therapist was neutral and unbiased then they would be able to help relieve some of the conflict or tension between the couple or the family as a whole and they'd be able to work through that the problem with that if you look at it through a post-modern lens is
how can a therapist truly be unemotionally involved and not have an opinion and be biased i mean we come into therapy with our own experiences that are going to shape the way we talk with the clients too therapists aren't robots any two three four therapists are going to ask different questions pick up on different things and yes sometimes side with different people within the family based on their own experiences so i do want to mention that through a postmodern lens this approach is really unrealistic but it is important to mention that this is one of
the techniques that bowen proposed for helping family members become more differentiated now alternatively and this is what i hear more often if he's not working with the couple he would want to work with the most differentiated member of the family and that often would be like we talked about earlier if you have two parents who are lowly differentiated and they have a group of children the child who gets the least attention from them or is the least involved with them tends to be the most differentiated so bowen would propose working with that individual assuming that
as they increase their differentiation which is already higher than that of their other family members it would motivate the other family members to become more differentiated as well so in the modern models these classic models the therapist is viewed as an expert as i talk about in my structural therapy video uh when you are viewed as the expert you're taking on the role not really as a collaborator as you would see in some of the later models that we can talk about in other videos such as my narrative family therapy video i'll put the card
there if you want to check that one out so the role of the therapist is being like an educator maybe sometimes taking on the role of a parent taking control of the room essentially another way that bowen proposed increasing differentiation reducing conflict in the family is by having family members talk specifically to the therapist instead of talking to one another it's interesting to think about that now especially when having active and healthy communication amongst family members is so important one critique of bowen's model is that the therapist is too involved in trying to reduce the
conflict in the family and if you take the family outside of the situation with that therapist then they're going to just revert back to their typical style of communication another thing that bowen proposed would be process questions and i think of this kind of like meta communication really assessing not just how you feel but communicating how you feel instead of only reacting to how you feel so to give you an example it would be like if you had a pair of siblings in the room and you have siblings who are talking about for example one
of them took the other one shirt so instead of allowing them to get really heated and argue about it's my shirt it's my shirt you say how did you feel when your sister took your shirt and then now the client has to tap into their logic and reasoning to express how they feel instead of just displaying how they feel and this is how we contribute to helping with that intra-psychic differentiation we're separating thoughts from feelings but at the same time we're joining them together so you don't have to be overly emotional and responding you can
share how it made you feel then you could even ask the sibling now hearing that how do you feel hearing how you impacted your sister emotionally when you took her shirt so you're asking questions that create a space for people to process and pay more attention to what they're doing and how they're feeling about it instead of allowing people to let their emotions take the forefront and just respond from a place of hurt instead of a place of rationality another technique that bone would use are like stories so he would share probably not stories about
himself when you're talking about being an expert in the room usually self-disclosure is not the way you do that so when bowen is sharing stories with his families it's probably more about him sharing stories that other clients have shared with him to help the clients envision being able to get to the other side of their conflict or to not feel alone in the tension and conflict that they're having another way that bowen would address differentiation issues and this is more the interpersonal differentiation is by encouraging the clients to take the eye position so instead of
talking on behalf of a person saying oh well they think that i'm dumb you say instead i feel that they think i am dumb or you say i feel dumb okay because most of the time when we expedite the process we're projecting our own feelings onto others but that's not part of bowen's model it's just about taking ownership for how you feel and what you've said instead of trying to place blame or speak for someone else within the family the last technique is home visit and i find this is used most often when we have
a client who has emotionally cut off from their family they may think that by running away from their family they're running away from their family drama or conflict but those things typically will still stay with you you still feel hurt and you're still triggered often so what bowen would suggest are home visits where you either write letters to your family of origin you call them you might go back because often what he would see is that when people even if they feel that they've made all this progress when they were back in the position of
being with their family of origin they would revert back to the same level of differentiation that they had before being in treatment so it is important to make sure that there is progress even in a very triggering space um so that you can positively influence the rest of your family members and see their differentiation increase as well so i hope that you found this useful again i use my aatbs materials to help me fully understand this model if you want to get it yourself i will have a link for it below um in the description
box i just don't want to take credit when it's really been so useful for me and helped me pass my exam and so if you have any other questions about bowen's model or any other ideas that might help other people understand it better please put them in the comments below i appreciate you for watching i hope you found this helpful again my name is stephanie yates i am bleeley stephania for short i thank you so much for watching until the end of the video that really really helps me thank you [Music]
