Family System

WHAT IS FAMILY SYSTEMS?

Family systems theory is a psychological approach to understanding the way families as a whole unit adapt to the stresses of life. It is an approach that seeks to understand the huge variation in the way different individuals and families cope with and manage stress in their lives – and what resources and challenges each family brings to this.

Murray Bowen described taking a systems view of relationships as being like sitting in the seats highest up in a football stadium, where the view from the top of the stadium allows someone to get a completely different perspective of the sporting game. From there the person is able to observe the patterns of play, and the way the team functions as a whole. This in turn, Bowen suggested, doesn’t detract from the close-up ground level view, but this new alternative perspective actually enhances it.

The ‘systems’ part of family systems, is the idea that relationships are systems – with each point linked and interconnected to others, and so each part affecting others. With its origins in natural systems theory, family systems theory poses that there is much to observe in any species group about how living creatures respond and react to one another in its own system.

For people in relationships, each person in the ‘system’ responds and reacts constantly to others in the system. A lot of the reciprocity in relating is unseen. People respond automatically to audio and visual stimuli constantly. This is what, in family systems, is called the emotional process. It is a challenge to slow down and learn to observe what we can about the emotional process in a relationship. A systems view is being able to observe what happens between people in relationship interactions and begin to make sense of what belongs to whom.

The ‘family’ part of family systems is that we are wired to different ways of responding to stress or tension in relationships. This is influenced primarily from our own family patterns growing up and the way multi-generations in our families have adapted to different challenges over time. In very natural way, each person learns to respond and adapt and participate in relationships based on their relational context.

What this looks like, how sensitive we are to different things, how we manage stress, who we look to for support (or who we avoid) are all things that are influenced by our own family history. The effect of this is often played out in our most significant and current relationships, where we can begin to observe how the individual and the family are a reciprocal interaction process: each affects the other.

A family systems approach encourages each person to observe themselves in their relationships, and make efforts toward taking small steps to manage their own emotional reactivity more effectively and take more responsibility for their contribution in relationships.

Part of this work is being able to distinguish between our thinking and feeling. For example, how much happens automatically and is emotionally reactive, compared to other times when we might be able to observe our feelings, work on feeling calmer, and engage more thoughtfully and in line with how we want to relate to others.

While this is easier to do when things are calm, the real challenge, Bowen suggested, was the ability for someone to be a separate person and still able to be in good emotional contact with other people when things are tense or stressful situations.

This is especially difficult in our closest relationships with significant others. But it is also true for any other relationships we have – with friends, in workplaces, in religious or other communities, or anywhere else where we bump up against others in relationship. The application of family systems theory continues to resonate with a wide range of people in different contexts because the nature of the theory is primarily an observation of what occurs for people when they are in relationship with others.

The efforts of working to be a separate self, rather than persuaded by others to think and act and behave differently, and still stay in good contact with people, rather than becoming totally dependent on someone, or avoiding people, is at the heart of what Bowen described as differentiation of self. This idea, also known as emotional maturity, is one of the key variables in how people manage dilemmas in their lives. The other variable is how much and what type of stress, people are trying to manage.

Bowen’s observations of these things led to his own research on the family unit and the development of his theory. You can read more about Bowen Family Systems Theory on our website here.

There are some excellent resources that help grapple with family systems theory, some on this website, and others that we have provided links to, which dive deeper into the origins of family systems theory and the shape of Bowen Family Systems Theory in particular. Take some time to read and think, and have a look at whether any of our early learning pathway options might be a good next step for you if you are interested in finding out more.