EXPECTATIONS & Family

Here is the sermon from September 8, 2019

The Place Where We Are Right

by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

My maternal (Patton) 1954

          Murray Bowen, whose work on family systems I shall be pointing us toward, will say that to understand relationships, we have to look beyond the individual (child) to the nuclear family, the extended family, and the culture one is immersed in to begin to improve. To “do better” and have our kids “do better” is a modest but achievable goal.

When we think of expectations, we are almost inevitably thrust into thinking of our parents, guardians, and other family members, in addition to our own expectations of our children if we have them. It’s gratifying to know that we have tools to understand what’s going on, and perhaps to lighten up on ourselves or others. That’s why this work is a spiritual task.

As we approach the high holy days in the Jewish tradition, we are reminded that forgiveness of self and others is the most important spiritual task. We can probably agree that it is needed more now than ever.

(Here's a take on forgiveness shared by a GNUUC member: Taylor Swift on Forgiveness )

Bowen Family systems provides a tool and a lens. Allow me to begin by saying that to some extent, it is a Eurocentric and perhaps even North American-centric lens. Murray Bowen  (born in Waverly, TN: educated at UT; first practice in Crossville, TN) developed his theory in the 1960s and it was brought to congregations by Rabbi Edwin Friedman.  (Summary of Friedman on Leadership) Believe it or not, how you engage at work and in the institutions you join is largely determined by your emotional attachment to family of origin and your sibling position and birth order.

Further, he “believed that a major obstacle to scientific study of human behavior is that humankind has tended to consider itself a unique form of life, with a special pace in God’s plan. Such self-glorification precludes our seeing the myriad ways we act just like other forms of life,” he wrote.

Bowen systems is a rational, scientific way of looking at relationships.

The term Differentiation of self comes from biology. It can and should be understood through studying the development of cells; DNA; and evolution.

“I be you and you be me; or I be me and YOU be you?”

ANXIETY

It begins with anxiety.

My Maternal Granny Patton was chronically anxious. Even as a small child, I was aware of the tension and sense of doom in my relatives. Her anxiety was focused upon her husband, an alcoholic until he joined one of the first AA groups in the 1940s, in his seventies; her children, several of whom predeceased her: Mora, who died at 30; Wade Jr. who died of alcoholism, as did my mother’s sister Joyce, and my mother Marjorie who died at 44. These deaths mirrored the pattern in her family of origin, in which my great grandmother died in childbirth in her thirties, leaving my grandmother, two sisters, and a baby boy, who then died at 6 months.

Like the Kennedys, but less famous, my maternal family of origin was emotionally fused, and beset by tragedy. My cousin Wade the 3^rd died in his early 20s, while at a drive-in movie. His father and his aunt died of severe alcoholism. My nephew Jim died at 30 of a drug overdose. My twin sister’s other child, Jessica, (different father) struggles with addiction and instability, which is why I am raising her son. My mother, my nephew, two of my uncles all died within days of Christmas. These tragedies and untimely deaths create an anxious expectation of disaster. Numerous triangles form within such a family.

“Let’s you and Him/Her/Them fight!”

Triangles can be understood as the most stable building block of relationships. Whenever a 3^rd person or entity (food, alcohol, chronic illness, church, minister) is brought into the picture, you have a triangle. It serves to lessen the anxiety between the original dyad, but often creates unhealthy ways of coping.

“I will strive NOT to make my own salvation dependent on the functioning (no less the existence) of another.” 

What was missing in my Granny’s family, the Self and Patton crew, was self-differentiation. This is very simply, the ability to live from one’s core values and to reason out responses, rather than be jerked around by the emotions that surround us. The well differentiated person is provident, thoughtful and autonomous in the face of stress. Quite simply, less likely to freak out.

Take a moment and think about these “coincidences” and patterns in your family.

In what ways do I give away part of myself to connect with others?

“Wherever you go, there you are…”

Achieving self-differentiation is possibly the most important and most difficult task of maturation. Many people grow old and die without ever having done so. Whenever a member of the family is distancing and/or practicing cutoff from family, they are functioning under the mistaken assumption that by avoiding the family of origin, they can become more whole.

I was well into my adulthood when I began to understand this. Like my Granny Patton, my own mother died when my twin and I were five and my brother was 7. Even now, my brother, who lives in CT and has become successful in his life and work, does not visit and communicates rarely with us. My first marriage was to a printer from a family of printers (as was my Grandfather Patton) who was also well on his way to alcoholism.

How has emotional cutoff/distancing influenced your current relationships?

“Every over-functioner deserves their under-functioner.”

Overfunctioning is present when one observes the OF:

·        Giving advice

·        Worrying about people

·        Doing things others could do for themselves

·        Feeling responsible for others

·        Talking more than listening

·        Having goals others don’t have for themselves

·        Going through cycles of “burnout”.

Underfunctioning one might see

·        Asking for advice

·        Getting others to “help”.

·        Acting irresponsibly

·        Setting goals but not following through

·        Getting sick mentally and sometimes frequently

·        Tending to be addicted to substances

On my father’s side, I never knew my grandparents. Not only did my father never speak about his parents, ( cutoff) he almost never talked about my mother after she died.  When he did, it was with a kind of reverence that left me feeling the weight of his expectation for me. ( anxiety)I looked like her and reminded him of her, and I carried these projections way into my adulthood. In fact, I named my own daughter Marjorie Lee, and she looks even more like my mother than I do.(triangles) (multi-generational transmission)

My great-grandmother Cain 

As an expert underfunctioner, one family member nearly always blames/sees herself as innocent victim/draws in other family members/creates a “crisis”. It is exhausting for me, even after studying and practicing FS for over ten years, to manage to remain self-differentiated in the face of sabotage.

“No one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slave holders cheering them on”. (Friedman)

Family systems is the Pilates of spirit and being.

We each have within us a core of self, and we can develop it through recognizing (identify & isolate) what is truly “myself” and then practice using these muscles so that we can stay centered in times of anxiety. Just as Pilates and core strength benefit many other systems: our internal organs, our spines, our balance, just so defining and differentiating self will have consequences we cannot imagine: all of our relationships  will improve, and so will our health, both mental and physical. We will become more fully who we are meant to be, more human, more whole.

ADDENDUM:

Link to Bowen Family Center

recommended reading: Extraordinary Relationships, Roberta M. Gilbert

A good resource for congregations, especially leaders, HERE.

UUA Resource on Family Systems and Congregations HERE