Topic: Parents
Featured Guest: Kathleen Smith
Release Date: July 8, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “For many years I have been on the thesis that a person can neither “hate” nor “over-revere” a parent if they really know their parents… I insist that if you really get to know a parent as a person instead of an “angel” or a “devil,” then you cannot either hate or sanctify them…. How can you really “hate” someone you’ve never really known? Do you know what your mother was going through at the time you were born? Well why in the world didn’t you ever ask or try to find out? Do you make it a policy of “hating” people without really knowing facts?”
Source: Letter from Dr. Bowen to his family on May 11, 1968
Elevator Systems Podcast
Episodes of the Elevator Systems Podcast
Topic: Friendship
Featured Guest: Guillermo Cancio-Bello
Release Date: July 15, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “I began to accumulate such a wonderful new bunch of friends. I didn’t give a damn. In other words, if you follow differentiation along, you will part company with some of those who don’t see it your way. But if you keep going, you will work your way into another group.”
Source: Addictions and Family Systems, Tape Two, Part Five, April 1990
Topic: Adolescence
Featured Guest: Avrum Nadige
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “The absolute smartest I ever was in my entire life was the year I graduated from high school. I couldn’t convince others that I had all the answers but I secretly knew it.” … later… “Since then I have been getting stupider and stupider every year. The more I learn the more I find I do not know.”
Source: Bowen, Murray. “Letter of May 1970,” in Commitment to Principles: The Letters of Dr. Murray Bowen, ed. Clarence Boyd, chap. 23, “State of the Union and Dead‑End Alleys.” The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Dating
Featured Guest: Joe Berger
Release Date: August 5, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “How do you explain the differences in your perceptions? Are you seeing things that are not there or is he wearing blinders? Either of you could offer solid evidence to validate the separate views.”
Source: Bowen, Murray. “Letter of May 1970,” in Commitment to Principles: The Letters of Dr. Murray Bowen, ed. Clarence Boyd, chap. 18, “The Motivated One” The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Co-workers
Featured Guest: Jake Morrill, MDiv, MA, LMFT
Release Date: August 12, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “Are you going to run a department the way you think it ought to be run? Or are you going to run it the way the rest of the nation thinks it should be run? Are you going to be you… or are you going to be a pseudo self whose self is determined by all of the other people out there?”
Source: Bowen, M. (1987, March 9). Being all you can be yourself, instead of being better than the neighbors [Video]. The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Marriage
Featured Guest: Phil Klever, LCSW, LMFT
Release Date: August 19, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “To work at finding a solution means arousing all the old conflicts, anxieties, and turmoil that caused them to seek the distance in the first place.”
Source: Bowen, M. (1966, December). Letter of December 1966. In C. Boyd (Ed.), Commitment to Principles (chap. 18, “The Motivated One”). The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Parenting
Featured Guest: Lauren Errington, AASW, AAFT
Release Date: August 26, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “I will end this [life] not knowing anything, ready to turn it over to the kids who know they know it and the parents who agree their kids are the smartest.”
Source: Bowen, M. (1970, May). In C. Boyd (Ed.), Commitment to Principles (chap. 23, “State of the Union and Dead-End Alleys”). The Murray Bowen Archives Project
Topic: Kids with Challenges
Featured Guest: Devana Weiss, MA, RCC
Release Date: September 2, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quotes Referenced:
- “IF you can battle FOR YOU instead of AGAINST SOMETHING, maybe there is a way out.”
- “You are a gifted person with prodigious energy to put into something you believe in.”
Topic: Divorce
Featured Guest: Dr. Carrie Collier, LPC
Release Date: September 9, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “My effort has been to understand the marital disharmony as a human phenomenon in which both people have played a part, rather than a situation in which either one is primarily responsible.”
Source: Bowen, M. (1962, April 28). [Letter]. In C. Boyd (Ed.), Commitment to Principles (chap. 32, “Marriage and the Family Emotional System”). The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Launching
Featured Guest: Erik Thompson, MA
Release Date: September 23, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quotes Referenced:
- “After adolescence they deal with this by denying the importance of the parents and acting over-independent. In leaving home, they tear themselves away, or “go away” from the parents instead of “growing away”. They are vulnerable to future emotional involvements.”
- “Along the way my family of origin became more meaningful than ever before. Home was secure as long as my parents were there to maintain a home base. Home was as meaningful as it was in my childhood. Each trip home was another effort to know more and to further my effort to be an individual in my own right.”
Topic: Grandparenting
Featured Guest: Amie Post, MA, LCMFT
Release Date: October 7, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “A common phenomenon in our culture is one in which parents will say, “I want my children to have a better lot in life than I had. I do not want them to have to go through the problems and difficulties I had with my parents in my childhood.” So the parents make a concerted effort to correct what they FELT (there is a big distinction between what one feels to be right and what one believes to be right) was wrong in their childhood in the rearing of their children. The coin is turned over and on the surface appears to be different, but the problem remains the same. Their children, involved in the same problem but with different manifestations, resolve to make things better for their children and to not repeat the mistakes of their parents. Again comes another change of the coin in the third generation with the net result that the member of the third generation can come to have the exact characteristics that the parents (second generation) disliked so much in their parents (first generation).”
Source: Bowen, M. (1965). The Reality Orientation of Parents and the Communication of Reality to Their Children [Excerpt]. The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Retirement
Featured Guest: Kathy Kerr, MSN, MA, CNS
Release Date: October 14, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “The lack of clarity also applies to how the individual defines one’s responsibility to self. Does this responsibility terminate at retirement. What is one’s responsibility to the gift of being alive? Does living stop at a certain age? Does one become “resigned to life?” Will the increasing “ailments” define self? When does one stop learning? When does one stop being open to the environment? Can one maintain an aesthetic connection to the environment? When does one stop “giving something back”? Answers to these questions are usually implicit, but can be observed as well as the emotional consequence of the answers.”
Topic: Family Rifts
Featured Guest: Lisa Moss, MSW
Release Date: October 21, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “You cannot escape from your ancestors. You cannot escape from the stories that have been known about them, you just try to escape them…And as long as your family knows it and that story is alive, you’re part of it.”
Source: Bowen, M. (1984, September). Part 5: The System, The Past, Alcoholism, Schizophrenia, and Us [Video]. The Murray Bowen Archives Project.
Topic: Aging
Featured Guest: Selden Illick, LCSW
Release Date: October 21, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “You cannot escape from your ancestors. You cannot escape from the stories that have been known about them, you just try to escape them…And as long as your family knows it and that story is alive, you’re part of it.”
Source:Bowen, M. (1985). Conference on Aging 1985, Tape II [Video, unpublished archival recording, VC0513]. The Murray Bowen Archives Project
Topic: Death
Featured Guest: Priscilla Friesen, LICSW
Release Date: November 4, 2025
Dr. Bowen Quote Referenced: “Sometimes it is hard to find a “head of the clan.” Families will insist that they are big democracies, etc. and that they do not have such a person. However at times of crisis such as serious illness, or death, or court actions, a single person will step forward and become responsible and he, without knowing it, is head of the clan. Another way to find him is to find out who is, or who would be appointed Executor of an estate.”
Source: Bowen, M. (1964, November 18). Letter to Ed Luff [Excerpt]. The Murray Bowen Archives Project.