"The NHF Family System ."

Rev. Bruce R. Russell-Jayne
January 11, 2009.

Sermon

Relationships. The importance of relationships in our lives makes understanding them critical to success in our work life, happiness in our love life and to peace and harmony in our families. Years ago, when I attended Alcoholics Anonymous conventions there were always workshops on relationships, and those workshops never failed to fill up the room. Most of us had blown it in a relationship or two, and in our loneliness we were dying to know how to make our current or future relationships come out better. If we had learned anything in sobriety, it was the quality of our life and our chances at success in all our enterprises depended on the quality of our relationships. All the workshop leaders started out with one premise, happy relationships rarely if ever happen by accident – especially if you have a history of family strife – as most of us did. And then they would tell us some of the principles we could use to develop respectful, supportive, and loving relationships over time. Yeah, that’s what we wanted, and we just lapped up their words.

And we practiced those principles – things like listening – really listening – to hear not only the words but to become attuned to the emotional content of the message. We tried being less anxious when another person’s emotions were escalating. We learned to set healthy boundaries for our interactions with others, that is, telling others what we could accept and what we couldn’t handle in a relationship. These were all good things, and a few of our relationships began to improve – especially those with others who were practicing the same principles. But then, as we knew we must, we went back to some of the people with whom we had had trouble to try to make amends and to our dismay, our new techniques, while appreciated, often weren’t enough to put relationships back right.

I’ll give you an example of a couple I knew pretty well. We’ll call them Jan and George. In an attempt to put their life together in better order, they made agreements on housecleaning, family finances, and child rearing. Unfortunately, their attempts at setting boundaries on these issues often turned into conflicts. In principle, they knew if they could agree on these things daily life and decisions should be simpler. Trying to find a way to reduce the constant tension in the house, Jan bought books on marriage and on communicating. She even got George to go to a workshop on how to fight fairly. Each time they tried something - it helped, but always only temporarily, and then the bickering would begin again. Another couple I knew determined they should always be polite to each other, no matter how they felt, and never criticize or blame each other for anything. However, avoiding conflict and not dealing with issues created distance between them, and their friends often heard the complaints their partner didn’t hear. I had similar experiences in my relationships, and I kept looking for solutions, too. But when things didn’t get better after awhile, I just assumed that because I had made mistakes in the past, I must be the problem. That kind of thinking made me pretty depressed over my prospects.

There was something fundamental to relationships that we weren’t getting at. Something that when I first heard about it all kinds of “Aha”s started coming into my awareness. That something was family systems theory. The underlying idea in family systems theory is that “the basic unit of emotional functioning is not the individual, but the nuclear family.” Family systems theory is also known as Bowen Theory, named after Dr. Murry Bowen, a psychiatrist who first developed it back in the 1960s. I’m sure those of you who work in or have had dealings with the field of psychology are aware of Bowen Theory which treats emotional issues by looking at the entire family rather than at just the person with the identified problem.
In the 1950s, some psychologists presumed that certain mental illnesses were caused by the parents, often the mother. Dr. Bowen brought whole families into treatment to study this, and what he noticed was that anxiety in one family member seemed to get passed around to others. Sometimes large amounts of anxiety was focused on one member. At other times, he documented anxiety being passed on through multiple generations. He began to replace cause and effect thinking – that parents caused mental illness - with the idea that the entire multi-generational family were participants in a complex emotional process.

By focusing on an individual and assuming she or he is solely responsible for her or his behavior, we miss some important emotional dynamics that are always in play. By looking at an entire family system and understanding how relationships work within it an individual can not only improve their own functioning but that of the entire system.
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Let me tell you a story that illustrates one of the ways a family operates as an emotional system:
Luis and Victoria were caring parents. They were well-educated, and before the birth of their first child, they prepared for natural child birth, read books on parenting, nutrition, and the emotional needs of an infant. After baby Marissa arrived, Victoria breast fed her as long as she could. If you saw them at church, you would have judged them to be nurturing parents. Yet, Victoria worried a lot about Marissa, but that was the way her mother had been, and Victoria thought worrying was what a conscientious parent did. Luis seemed tentative with his daughter, a little unsure of how to take care of a young girl. His own father had been quite distant most of the time only occasionally interceding in child rearing, and then usually only to punish Luis and his brothers. Luis didn’t want to do the same thing with his family.

As Marissa progressed through the first years of school, she struggled with reading and seemed to have no real friends. She was quick to throw tantrums in the evenings, and Luis and Victoria became pre-occupied with trying to help her. They dared not leave her alone, and always went everywhere as a family. However, nothing was helping and the more Marissa struggled, the more they worried.

They finally went to a counselor and told her in great detail all of Marissa’s problems. When the counselor eventually got them to focus less on Marissa’s under-functioning and more on her good traits, Marissa miraculously started to improve. However, as soon as Marissa started to come into her own at school, Victoria and Luis started telling the counselor about problems in their own relationship. They had set up a triangular relationship with their daughter which kept the focus on her and allowed them to avoid dealing with each other.

Relationship triangles are not always this intense, but this story shows how anxiety often moves around in them. Relationship triangles are present in every family system. In fact, according to Bowen Theory practitioner, Dr. Roberta Gilbert, when any “two people who are important to each other develop a problem, which we invariably do, we automatically look for a third person to relieve the anxiety. A triangle in a state of calm consists of a comfortable twosome and an outsider. The favored position is to be a member of the twosome. If tension arises in the outsider, her next predicable move is to form a twosome with one of the original members of the twosome, leaving the other one as an outsider. When the triangle is in a state of tension, the outside position is the preferred position, in a posture that says, ‘you two fight and leave me out of it.’ In a state of tension, when it is not possible for the triangle to conveniently shift the forces within the triangle, a member of the original twosome will find another convenient third person, and the emotional forces will run the circuits in this new triangle. In periods of very high tension, the system will triangle in more and more outsiders.”

In her book Extraordinary Relationships, which I recommend to you, Dr. Gilbert describes another key idea in family systems theory – self differentiation – which basically means having confidence to see oneself as an independent actor within an emotional system, to have the ability to refrain from over-reacting to anxiety as it moves through the system. To differentiate is not distancing from a relationship; it is to remain engaged, but not totally enmeshed in the feelings of another person. After you begin to understand how triangles work, you can practice self differentiation to help work better within them.
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Now I want to let you in on my secret weapon. I use these two ideas from Family Systems Theory all the time. They help me to analyze what’s going on within the extended emotional system that is Northern Hills, and they help me to remain a non-anxious presence in the face of anxiety – or at least to try to remain non-anxious. I learned that Family Systems ideas apply to churches when I read a book by Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, which has been an absolutely must read for all seminarians since it was first published in 1985.

I have heard some of you talk about triangles. I’m sure someone has taught about triangles at Northern Hills sometime in the past. I first learned something about them from our minister at the UU Church of Chattanooga. She had a rule about triangles. When someone came to her with a criticism or suggestion and said they had heard it from a third person, she always asked who the third person was. She said she could better address this third person’s concern by talking to her or him directly. There was one person who did this a lot, and the minister was never sure if there really was a third person or if it was her own problem. The minister always said, “I can’t deal with triangles, I need to get clarity on the issue from the person with the issue.”

Her way of dealing with triangles made sense to me. From that early experience, I got the impression triangles were to be avoided, that I should always cut them off when I detected them. However, I have learned more about triangles since then, and now I know triangles are ubiquitous, and they are normal, and we just have to learn how to work with them. I’m sure my former minister understood Family systems better than I did back then, and my apologies to her if she ever reads this sermon on the internet. I think her rule is still a good one. She knew that people were coming to her with anxieties that were present in the church emotional system hoping she could relieve them. It was good for her to know about them, in fact it is critical to a minister to know when emotions are running high in the congregation – in whole or in a significant part of it. It is important to the system to reduce high anxiety in it, and we can be much more effective if we hear directly from the source and can talk with people about their issues.

Triangles aren’t bad, and we all use them all the time. They help us when we need a little support or advice on a relationship. We should all learn to use them properly. When someone comes to me with an issue, I talk with that person about how it is affecting her or him, and I usually don’t insert myself into another relationship that is experiencing anxiety. When I hear a criticism about a worship service passed along to me by a third party, I listen for the truth of the complaint, try not to take it personally, and then if the Worship Committee and I agree, we try to fix the problem. And – we try to talk with the person who voiced the complaint to make sure they know they’ve been heard and taken seriously.

The point I’m trying to make about family systems and Northern Hills Fellowship, is that we are one. We are not a family the same as our nuclear families of origin, but we are a family system in the sense that “All human emotional systems are built out of triangles, and a system larger than three people becomes a series of interlocking triangles.” We need to think in terms of the system and how to keep it in balance. When an individual is expressing anxiety, we can look for what in the system might be contributing to it, and we can use the system to reduce it. Keeping the system healthy is one of the best things we can do to help the individuals who are involved with it.
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You have probably heard we are working on creating what we are calling a Covenant of Beloved Community for our church. Everyone will be involved in envisioning the kind of healthy, life-giving and happy community we wish Northern Hills to be. As part of the process we will talk about the qualities of relationships, and the values which work in loving relationships. Today, I am injecting family systems theory into the thinking we will do about relationships in our fellowship. We will focus on the positive as we imagine what our community might be. We will also talk about how we can reduce conflicts when they arise and how we can help each other with anxieties which are inevitable in a complex emotional system. One of the best tools we can use when addressing these is to think in terms of the system and watch the process of emotions traveling through it.

Whether you are a Northern Hills Trustee who needs to think in terms of our church’s complex set of emotional triangles or a first time visitor here today, maybe learning a little about family systems has given you some insight into the underpinnings of your personal relationships and some tips on how to make them work better. My hope for us is that we will all learn to contribute more love to all our relationships.
May this be so.

Gilbert, Roberta M. Extraordinary Relationships:A New Way of Thinking About Human Interactions, Chronimed Publishing (Minneapolis: 1992) 6.
Gilbert, 28-29.
Gilbert, 29.