Randy Frost/Bob Noone

Randy Frost interview

Andrea: …to see what kind of memories this sparked as to your relationship with Bowen… Randy: I first came across Bowen Theory in a first-year course at Pittsburg Theological Seminary. and it Bowen theory was one of several approaches to family that were represented in the course. My main recollection of reading that first paper was trying to figure out where I was on the scale of differentiation (laughs). Andrea: (laughs) Randy: Because I could see characteristics I had, you know, that were on the lower end and on the higher end of the scale. so that was…and I ended up actually writing a number of papers in seminary on incorporating systems ideas, drawing more, actually, from the book Pragmatics of Human Communication, by Don Jackson. Andrea: Don Jackson? Randy: Don Jackson, yes. That book really gripped me, actually, more than Bowen’s paper at the time. When I came to Washington after graduating, After graduating, I was accepted into an internship in clinical pastoral education at St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington. counseling at a My professor of pastoral counseling, who knew of my interest in systems, suggested I apply to the Bowen program. I was going to do an internship at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in pastoral education. And So I did and I was accepted. The first day, Bowen gave the initial lecture and I was just sort of enthralled and I came away thinking that I just heard an enigmatic guru. Andrea: (laughs) that is a perfect description of him. An enigmatic guru, who really hated being a guru. Randy: (laughs) Right, but that’s how it hit me. I didn’t know what he was talking about and but I just knew that it was enticing. And then He had a number of lectures that first year and I was in the in-town program. and then I didn’t continue for a second year but I continued with supervision with Bud Andres and then when I moved to southern Indiana I came back for the four times a year program. and At the end of the training program, I was going to…I was trying to put together a sabbatical for six months where I was to have a week in Washington for each of those month. I decided to write Bowen and request him to supervise me and I told him I was particularly interested in the overlap between pastoral counseling and Bowen Theory. And so He wrote back and said, “ I haven’t the foggiest notion of what Bowen theory has to say to pastoral counseling” (laughing) Randy: And then he went on to . I think he had me confused with someone else who at one time had been at St. Marys Meinrad and So he put a number of things in the letter that were kind of negative, “if you’re coming here to enhance your standing at St. Marys Meinrad…forget it!” (laughing) Andrea: (laughing) Randy: “But if I’m wrong about that, come ahead.” Andrea: So he did the same thing to you that he did to Bob, he kind of pushed you and challenging challenged you and put you back into the emotional muck. Randy: Yeah, and My supervisor in the four time a year program told me after he had sent the letter, and he showed it to her. after he had sent the letterand She said to him, “I don’t know anything about this” (laughs). Andrea: (laughs) Randy: And so Anyway I just ignored it and acted on the coming ahead part and we were off and running. And It was really fortuitous because I was in a terribly anxious place in the family and really sinking, and so it was an auspicious time. I actually ended up having another person that I was supposed to work with on sort of clinical things, and then with Bowen on my own family. But I was so anxious that I talked about my own family with both of them. And I reached a point where I was getting one sort of direction from Bowen and another sort of direction from this other supervisor and I said it was like riding two horse headed in the opposite direction, so I went with Bowen. And it, you know, He was great; he didn’t get into it with me. But he had this way of picking up on things I wasn’t seeing. Like my stepmom’s stepmother’s influence on my father’s functioning. I d say, said yeah, you know, when my stepmothers in the room and I’m on the phone with my dad, he’s talking one way and when she’s not, it’s a different tone. You know, and I had never thought about that. So, you know, for the next eight, no ten, well nine years, I consulted him at least several times a year on my own family after the sabbatical and actually had my last consultation with him four days before his death. Two days before he went to the AAMFT meeting. And he talked a little bit about it, saying my wife doesn’t want me to go to that meeting. She thinks it’s going to kill me HA HA HA (laughs) Andrea: (laughs) He did it despite being half dead, that’s Bowen. Randy: And I had a sense that this might be my last conversation with him because I’d seen him in May that year in Indianapolis; and you were there. and So I just wished him well with it. But it was also at the time when I was considering coming to Vancouver and I had talked to him some about that. and He said, “well there’s a generic brand of the theory up there; stay close to Georgetown”. (laughs) But no, My biggest relationship with him was as a coach, a coach to me. and… but you know But he had a way of handling himself in public meetings that was very personal, and so he could say things in a public setting and you’d think he was talking directly to you… Andrea: Absolutely. Randy: …and that was important. I remember the first time I presented a paper at a meeting on Bowen Theory with Bowen sitting there; it was in Chicago in 1988. where Bob had invited me, and I thought, what I am doing here presenting a paper on Bowen theory with Bowen sitting in the audience…(inaudible)…(laughs) So When we got there (my wife and kids had come along just for the ride and to tour Chicago-)I said to myself, this is not going to cut it; and so I stayed up all night rewriting the paper and gave it the next morning. It was better, and Bowen’s response wass, “I don’t know where you get your ideas about science” (laughs) and So I knew that that part had to be reworked. Andrea: So he didn’t say the encyclopedia or National Geographic Randy: And so I reworked that section and submitted it as an abstract for the symposium that year. The whole time I was presenting this paper that which had been reworked again, he had a kind of ongoing mumbling dialogue monologue in the front row. and I couldn’t understand it but I was so nervous that when we sat down for the discussion (I was sitting down next to him), that I knocked the water over (laughs) and then he stood up and sort of lit into Walter Toman, who was also the other responder. And so it was quite an interesting baptism of presenting. And then I presented the next two years in Chicago as well before we moved to Vancouver. But he just had a way of incarnating the theory and challenging you to be your own person. And I do wonder once the generation dies off who had this personal coaching relationship, or some kind of encounter with Bowen, you know, how one replicates that experience in future generations. You know, the writing is there, the video tapes are there, which can help, but I think there’s something unique about coming up against Bowen the person that’s irreproducible. That doesn’t mean the theory can’t go forward into the future and that people can’t get a flavor from hearing others who knew him but ultimately, I guess, if the theory is worth its salt, you know, it becomes independent of the person. I remember once he told me, “I’m looking forward to the day when we can get the Bowen out of Bowen theory”. Andrea: Yeah Randy: so that was… Andrea: I had this conversation with Phil Gueran, who actually was the one who suggested it. According to Phil, he suggested that he Bowen use his name. He and his wife were having dinner with him and Bowen said that there are so many theories of the family. And there’s general systems theory and that people would say that they have family systems theory, so why don’t you use your name to make it separate, a separate part of knowledge about the family. And so he reluctantly went along with that. I wonder whether of or not, Bowen, as a researcher, could see things that other people can’t see and that’s why he was so good at what he did. I don’t know what Dr. Gilbert was saying this morning. Something like she thought that Bowen had said that he had the whole theory in his head before he left the Menninger Institute. I’m not so sure of that because after looking at the NIH papers, I noted he didn’t bring the father in at the beginning, he just had the mother and child there. Bowen was investing more into the symbiotic relationship initially and he didn’t see the whole thing start to change until he brought the fathers in. The fathers were the first ones to sort of define themselves. But nevertheless, my main point is that Bowen as a researcher and an observer had the ability, perhaps, to see the system in these various humanlike ant colonies. And when you came to see him he saw your ant colony. And when Bob came to see him, he saw Bob’s ant colony, and then he could relate to you in a way to help you understand the colony and in a way that could enable you to get you out of the “mishegas” with him. That is the transference stuff. I remember when he gave his paper, something abut trying to end transference and one of the guys who could have been Carl Whitaker, I think it was Carl Whitaker, who said to him that, you say that its not about transference but when I see you I’m in a transference up to my ears. (laughs) Randy: (laughs) I hear that. Andrea: So it could be both of these things, the charisma, but to me it has always been this incredible ability that he had to see the ant colony in the human family, and to relate to you about that and then you felt that he had this secret knowledge, he knows somehow or another about you and the family and how the hell does he see all this… Randy: The enigmatic guru. Andrea: Yeah. Randy Bob: I think your comment about the way he presented himself in public and at meetings was really striking. Being able to respond in a way which is very personal and at the same time being able to represent his thinking and to be clear when others were trying to tell him how he he’s representing his thinking. Bowen was able to be clear with others, that that’s not my thinking, this is your thinking. And here’s my thinking. But I think that capacity to see the ant colony and being able to see emotional currents…I think he was just a master at that. He said a lot of subtle things, that when I would reflect on them, I would think, yes, that was obvious, but I wouldn’t have seen it. But yes, he was a master, I think, of picking up some of that family process that was going on. Andrea: And the de-triangulating stuff that he was doing, like the mumbling when Randy is giving his talk, that was another trick that I saw many times. And it was almost a taunt. You know, do you want to interrupt me cause I’m going to act out? A lot of the Third Thursday meetings were where he kind of was acting out, challenging the small in-group and then the people in the audience would just get paralyzed on how to deal with him. And I always take to heart what he said that I learned the most that I know from schizophrenics. Perhaps the test was can you deal with me? In a way that was always sort of the test, I thought. But I’m not one hundred percent clear about that, but I don’t know if you experienced him as testing you and pushing you a little bit, it sounds like it when I listen to it. Randy: Yeah, no, I think that letter he wrote to me was a challenge though I didn’t see it that way at the time. I was just flattered that he bothered to write back (laughs). Like Bob, I had such a high opinion of Dr. Bowen that, you know, when he wrote back, that was pretty, pretty amazing. But at the same time, you know, I got a little more clarity about what Roberta Gilbert was meaning by being equal today. There were times, even in a consultation with him, when he would ask you questions, or make statements that you could reply to, that suggested he was trying to learn from you, as well. I remember one time– he was probably, it was probably around the time when he was formulating this his ninth concept idea–he talked about he had these people who make predictions like Jean Dixon but and so on and you never you hear about all the ones that don’t come true. And I said, well, but there are people who have pretty good percentage rates on their predictions. And he listened to that, I think. Or the time he would ask, I guess it was a question he asked around a lot, “who was more differentiated Adolf Hitler or Martin Luther King?” I had an answer for that one (laughs). Andrea: Oh goodness (laughs). Randy: I don’t know if he agreed with it or not but he listened to it and he chuckled on the other hand. So I think there was that I think effort on his part to be respectful and challenging to the other. Bowen stories are just legion. Andrea: They’re legion; they are. They seem to contain some common elements if you listen to it for a while: his ability to be separate and create a space, finding ways to be interested in you and then your gaining knowledge about the way your head worked, basically. And But he could clobber people, I mean, he did clobber people. And it wasn’t always the nicest to be pulled up short. But I believe that he was just curious to see if you would get up again after he smacked you. A lot of pretending goes on and some people pretended that they didn’t get that he smacked, some people, didn’t get back up to deal with him. Randy: But in a consultation, you know he, he just had the capacity to be present in a way that was unusual. I never came out of a consultation feeling clobbered. Challenged maybe, but never clobbered. Now in the public arena maybe, again though again, it was more of a challenging challenge to your thinking, but still a kind of respect there. Andrea: I hear you. I think you got to go now. I was going to get your picture before you go, one second, so I can put it into my little collection here. That’s a good one (picture taken) Thank you, I appreciate that. Andrea: Ok, yeah, so you know, I wanted to ask you Randy because I asked Bob about the future of systems thinking and where you think it will go without Dr. Bowen’s presence…(to be continued, machine is turned off).

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Interview with Robert Noone Conducted by Andrea Schara (Randy Frost is present in the room)

June 15, 2012

For the Murray Bowen Archives Project

Schara: So today is June the 15th, and we’ve been at the clinical conference Robbie Gilbert did today. Bob Noone: is from Chicago, Randy Frost: is from Vancouver, and I’ve asked them to think a little bit about their relationship with Dr. Bowen, and the kind of impact he had on them as a person. What they got out of that relationship they had with him, and how that relationship then fit into understanding Bowen Theory, if it ever did; whether or not theory was important to them; and where they want to go with the ideas in Bowen Theory. So that’s just sort of an opening, and Bob and Randy can talk with each other, or I might interrupt, if I can. [Laughter] As the older sister of two brothers, [I] might.

Noone: [laughter] Get a word-

Schara: And, just let you start off Bob, if you would.

Noone: Okay, well maybe I’ll just start with my first encounter with Dr. Bowen. It wasn’t a direct one but think it must’ve been 1969 or 1970. He did a day presentation on the family at the state mental health hospital that I was working at and I had just newly become interested in family. And I hadn’t read Bowen but was intrigued with the day. He showed a couple of videotapes of his clinical work.

And I was intrigued by two things. One was just the questions he asked. I kept wondering, “Where’d he come up with such interesting questions to ask the family?” And the second one was just seeing the diagram of the multigenerational family. I hadn’t seen it before. And I knew that I was in this multigenerational family and it had never occurred to me before. So that stuck with me. But I didn’t read or pursue Bowen Theory for another five years. I was interested in other approaches to the family. And then when I decided I wanted to get a more solid grounding, I decided to go to post-graduate program at Georgetown Family Center.

And, well, Dr. Bowen was here. That was in 1975. I never really approached him that I can recall, during that year. I think I was too intimidated by him to- it was a big class, I may have asked- I certainly asked him questions, in the class format, but not on a one-to-one basis. And that, really- I corresponded with him about doing a research study, through the Department of Psychiatry, and he was very open and friendly about that, so I had some contact with him at that point.

And later, wanting to have him come out and speak in Chicago I had contacted him. But there were four of us who started the center in Chicago. I said that I would ask him if he’d be interested in coming, and he said he would, and I said, “Well, we’ll get back to you.” And he said, “I’m not interested in talking to a group.” [laughter] “Have someone contact me.” [laughter] “But I don’t want to make arrangements with a group.” [laughter]

Schara: ‘We’ll?’ ‘We’ll?’ ‘We’ll get back with you?’ He stopped you dead in your tracks.

Noone: He stopped me dead in my tracks. I knew exactly what he meant. So, at that point, I was the one who made the arrangements to have him come to Chicago. And it went fairly smoothly. I don’t have a lot of memories about the interchanges. I just remember being so impressed with his thinking. And again, not teaching, but presenting his thinking. I thought he just captured systems thinking so well. And that was one of the things that intrigued me the five, six years before that, even before hearing Dr. Bowen, was just knowing there was something about systems thinking that was an important step forward.

I never had encountered someone who did that as well as he did. I did have a lot of time with him on his visits to Chicago and we corresponded back and forth, over the next number of years. So, in terms of some of the things that he said, I remember one time was after a conference in Chicago, in terms of I think sizing me up, and I think the [knocking]

Noone: One of the things he said when we were at the airport, I remember we were waiting, having a drink before he took off to come back to Washington, and he said, “One thing about you, Bob,” he said, “You really just don’t give a damn what other people think about you, do you?” [Laughter] And I thought about it later, and my response to him was, I said, “The problem with me is that I give too much of a damn about what other people think about me!” But I think he knew that. [Laughter]

Schara: [laughter] He knew that.

Noone: But that was a good twist on his part, so there were many interchanges like that, and unfortunately I just don’t recall a lot of them. It was more just the process of interacting with him, that struck me and I realize I certainly had to think for myself, and that was a workout. There weren’t many people that I would have a workout interacting with like I did with Dr. Bowen.

You know, I would be thinking about it before he came, I would be thinking about it before I went to Washington and thinking about it when I was meeting with him. And it was always a workout. I do remember that in terms of- comment came up today, about giving people a space to be a self. I thought about one dream I had, it was the first time I was doing a presentation at the Georgetown Family Center conference and it was an alcoholism conference. It was the night before I was going to be leaving Chicago to come to Washington, and I had a dream I had my paper there. I was in Washington, I was running late for the meeting and I was running through the streets in Washington. And all of a sudden, a wind gust blew, and my paper went flying all over the street! I was frantically running around trying to collect my paper and I finally got it. I got to the conference, and got to the podium, and Dr. Bowen was sitting in the front row. I read my paper, and I looked up when I was finished with my paper, and his head was back, his eyes were closed. He was snoring. [Laughter]

And I thought about it, I woke up from that dream laughing, you know, all my anxiety about what he thought, and actually, he was going to be indifferent. What was really important wasn’t what he thought, and I knew that going into it, but it was still my own concern about what he would think about it. But, it was very clear to me that over the years, he not only gave me room to be a self, but I had to actually work on it in relation to him.

Schara: The one story you told, about him saying, “You don’t give a damn about what people think about you.” You know, that’s such a clear pushing you back into your own emotional system, in a way. Is that what you’re talking about as a workout. Or I mean, two questions, one: what do you mean by systems thinking and where did he put you with that comment, was that back into stuff that you needed to figure out for yourself, is that what you’re talking about?

Noone: Not that one, I think that wasn’t a workout. But the workout more had to do with, I think there would be- I had such high regard for him, that my own sensitivity to wanting to be at my best to please him, in a sense, to demonstrate my own ability to grasp the theory. So, it had to do with some of my own insecurity, I think, and then recognizing I wasn’t going to get any kind of response that was going to reflect how he was responding to me in terms of what I might be looking for.

I think he had a good way of responding to what I was saying, and then I had to, in terms of following up in the discussion, just had to really think about not what I think he might want to hear, or what I thought was the correct thing to say but what I really thought. And that was something that I wasn’t really particularly good at in that situation. And systems thinking, well, that’s a good question, because I think just the complexity of human behavior is pretty clear to me, even as a young man, that any formulation that was going to approach dealing with that level of complexity required looking at interactive systems, mutually influencing systems. I didn’t have a sense of the emotional system at the time.

I did have a sense of systems and I had read quite a bit, a broad range of systems thinking. I knew that was going to be vital for any kind of solid grounding in thinking about the family and human behavior. So his particular theory, but more than the theory, the way he thought, indicated to me that he was well-grounded in systems thinking and that was something that was very attractive to me.

Schara: Okay. Sometimes people talk about the cause and effect thinking is not systems thinking, and systems are non-linear dynamical systems, and therefore, they’re harder to predict. But if you could get enough of the variables together, you might possibly be able to predict. I’ve heard you talk a little bit about the future, and systems, and systems thinking, and so I was thinking about this, what do you see as the future? Obviously, a natural system is a non-linear system, but there are some predictive things. Do you think, for the human family to become more scientific, that it has to be able to predict? Or do you think that for systems thinking to move into the future, it’s enough to just describe? Without predicting?

Noone: Oh I think describing is probably more important. I think that in terms of predictability, there does have to be a level of more probabilistic than anything else. So, with any very complex systems, there isn’t any kind of exact predictions that can be made. Because so many variables are involved. I think you can be probabilistic. I think you can make some assessments about where a family is going, where individuals are going. Based on knowing enough about a particular family. I think you can make some predictions about where a life course is going, and you could be wrong, but you can, in a high percentage of situations with enough information, you can be pretty good about predicting where a life course is going to go, I think.

Schara: Do you think he took a reading on you in terms of his scale? And aimed his comments at you, to see whether-how you would deal with the challenge?

Noone: I don’t know if he- I never thought about that, in terms of how he would try to assess me on the scale, that’s an interesting question that never even occurred to me. But I do know- I did have, after not too long a period of time, I had a sense that he did respect me and respected my thinking. So, that was certainly a very basic element, I think, in terms of my relationship with him over the fifteen years, was having a pretty solid respect for who I was.

Schara: Yes, he used that – he had this long conversation with (Toman) in three tapes, I think, and (Toman), being a psychologist, was saying, like “100 points on a scale, that’s impossible, you can’t make science out of that, it’s like ridiculous!” And he was trying to say, I think, that “I’m just pointing in a direction, and it will be it will, eventually, but more predictive. If you’re in the 0-25 level, maybe it’s going to be really hard, to get to the 25-50 level, or the 50-75 level. What do you think about that, do you think there’s some predictability, in the

Noone: Yes, I think so. One, Ernst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist, in one book, he was describing the difference between the life sciences and physics. And described that you can have laws in physics, but you can’t have laws in the life sciences. That the equivalent to a law is a concept in the life sciences. I think the concepts in the theory, as Bowen developed them, are predictive. You know, something like as simple as sibling position, there’s so many variables that go into that, overall, the concept of the sibling position, says a lot about who a person is. And then if you add in some of the other variables in the theory, it adds more predictability to birth order. But, it’s pretty clear there’s some predictability about it, as long as again, all things being equal, and you add some of the other concepts from the theory to it, there is something very predictable about it.

Schara: Did you ever tell him about your own family, your ant colony, and have him, coach you a little bit, on your ant colony?

Noone: Oh, yes, I, the last number of years, I’m trying to think how many years, I sought him out as a coach. I met with him when I would come to Washington and corresponded. When he came to Chicago I would take the time to get some coaching from him. He was very useful for me, you know I never quite grasped as well as I would like to, triangles. And I was just so intrigued with them, the way he would respond when I would be presenting some of the dilemmas in my family, related to, well, all kinds of people in my family.

But- and I came away, and just again, having to think for myself, what I was going to do in relation to my family. But the ability to just think of it in terms of triangles and to prepare for my meeting with him, in terms of what I thought, what did I know, what didn’t I know, and what did I want to try to accomplish. And to have someone with his knowledge who could listen and then make some comments, it wasn’t very specific but I certainly gained each time I met with him, in terms of what I was going to do with myself in relation to my family.

Schara: So now, just go take it to a little tiny broader thing, how is this knowledge ever going to spread without Bowen? Was he such a unique character in the way he interacted with people and taught theory that without his kind of presence it’s difficult for the family systems theory to spread through the community of people who are interested in human behavior? Or do you think it’ll just spread because there’s enough, really, curiosity, about a complicated systems theory of human behavior that will draw people eventually.

Noone: Yes, I mean there isn’t a lot of predictability about that! [Laughter]

Schara: Yes, how much the man, how much the theory?

Noone: I think it’s a real question whether this theory is going to be accepted in the near future or even in the distant future. I mean, Bowen certainly speculated that perhaps, at some point, bits and pieces of the theory will be incorporated and won’t be necessarily known as Bowen Theory, but eventually what’s in the theory will be represented. I do think that there has not been much interest in systems thinking, or in theory, in terms of human behavior, I don’t think in the last couple of decades. And I tend to be more optimistic overall. I do think that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way, there seems to be an increasing frustration in psychiatry. I think there’s an awareness that, in the life sciences, evolutionary theory came along much faster than I ever thought it would.

So when Bowen started talking about it in the seventies and eighties, it wasn’t in the social sciences, in psychology, or in psychiatry or even in some of the other sciences related to human behavior – Anthropology. But it’s taken off in the nineties so now that it’s almost mainstream to be thinking in terms of evolution with human behavior, in social sciences. I think the same thing is going to happen with family. It’s striking that in all the disciplines that move towards looking at human behavior [they] take into account multiple levels and they take into account evolutionary theory and theory. Take into account the brain, but you can’t talk about the evolution of the brain without talking about the evolution of the family. And the interdependence and the coevolution of the brain and family.

So evolution’s a pathway to the brain, and the brain’s a pathway to evolution thinking. But they’re both pathways to the family. And that’s going to become more and more apparent, I think, in the next ten years. It’s just a question of whether or not people in academia or in science, can look back to a theory that was written in the 1960s and 70s, and get interested in it. So it is a question of, how well can the theory be represented by individuals, like the three of us sitting at this table, in a way in which we can get heard. So it hasn’t leaked into the sciences yet but I do think that’s a good possibility in the next 10-15 years. But it’s also a possibility it won’t happen. And, these a memory or a footnote in people’s descriptions about family.

Schara: Well, at least we know that you’ll be doing your best to do something about it, and probably your best is probably not going to be a popularity contest, but a communication, a way of communicating with these ideas. I wonder, Randy, if you have some questions or thoughts or ideas that you wanted to ask Bob, before he had to leave?

Frost: Yes. [silence] If you think about kind of the development of your own thinking towards systems, have there been any kind of ‘nodal points’ along the way, where you increasingly shifted from more of an individual model to systems?

Noone: Yes, the nodal point for me was, without theory, but working on a unit in a hospital where individuals who were hospitalized had little contact with family maybe chronic patients. And working on a unit where families were brought in and I could see the difference. Because the medical records indicated they they had the same symptoms but if the family was involved it made a difference. And then sitting in people’s homes, as an alternative to hospitalization, with an individual and seeing the interactional process. (Carl Whittaker) was a consultant to the hospital I was at and so was (Robert McGregor). So those were two individuals that were making an effort to have a systems view of the family that influenced me, and got me intrigued.

And so those were nodal points for me. I think another nodal point was after six years of reading everything in family except Bowen, I don’t think I had read Bowen yet, I was frustrated enough that my learning was very slow, and I wanted to get a more conceptual grounding. And coming to the Georgetown Family Center was a nodal event for me, because the theory, in terms of its linkage with science, was a nodal point for me. That I thought, “Here’s an approach that has the potential to not become just a belief system, like psychoanalysis had, or many other, even family approaches.” And it wasn’t geared just towards trying to fix problems [or]-some people, but it was really something that I was attracted to, was trying to understand what goes on with people, what goes on with myself. And being aware of it highlighted the blind spots in my thinking more than anything and just got me intrigued because of all the blind spots that it raised for me.

Schara: [silence] Yes, the consciousness of humans is the tip of the iceberg. All this stuff is going on underneath the iceberg that we’re pretty blind to, really blind to. And that’s the biggest problem, still probably is for people. Maybe it has to do with this whole thing about the difference between science and belief too. That people think they have an understanding of the way human nature is, and I’d say that ants have enough feeling that they understand what’s going on too. [Laughter] And they have no real knowledge of the forces in the ant colony that are regulating their behavior.

Noone: Well that’s certainly a, well watching families, and knowing that they didn’t know what was going on in their families, and then knowing for sure. I could see something that I thought was going on in families but I couldn’t see it in my own family. [That} was a highlight to me. Then knowing that you didn’t have to analyze your own subjective world, you could observe the family if you’re really a part of it. So here was something that I think added a whole new level of being able to more towards a science of human behavior, something that was observable.

Schara: That’s really, hugely important, that you could see it in other families but you can’t see it in your own self. That emotional blind spot has a tremendous impact on people, in terms of their willingness to even go to this next level, to imagine their behaviors being regulated by the family as a unit.

Noone: Yes, I think if you watch families for enough time, you see how much people can’t see what’s going on. I remember in a meeting, it was before starting to read Bowen Theory, Norman Paul was doing a presentation and I asked him how much awareness did he think – how much did he think awareness entered into human behavior. And, he said not very much, almost zero.

Schara: [laughter] I love that.

Noone: [laughter]

Frost: [laughter]

Noone: And that resonated for me. I mean, that’s what I was thinking when I asked that question. But that was a real shift for me to, because I thought people’s behavior could be more intentional including my own. But the proof was that some of it’s intentional, but not nearly as much as I thought it was.

Schara: Yes, it’s intentional until you walk in the room with somebody you like [laughter] And then all of a sudden, your brain turns to mush, and, wait a minute. “The anxiety in this room is driving me up the wall! How did it get here?” So the unseen, the notion of unseen forces and our sensitivity to the forces of the multigenerational family. I remember once I said to Bowen, “Family, the multigenerational family, is like a washing machine! It washes one cycle of family and then the next cycle of family gets in there, and the whole thing just keeps on.”

But there’s something to this notion that by being able to be more objective and neutral and not participating in this family emotional process, whatever it is, that you do interrupt, and that some certain things, balls are thrown in the air, and chaos emerges, and people get mad at you a little bit, and something different happens when you are no longer involved in it at the level that you were.

Noone: Yes, and then the resistance to a move towards family, in learning more about oneself, that became certainly one of the primary motivators for me. I’d say “What the hecks going on here,” you know. I visit family and get stuck within mini-seconds, and think about, “Okay, how am I going to get unstuck?” You know, but, at least knowing that there was a way to do that, people had done it, that was the challenge. I could tell people had done it. I knew Bowen had done it, and other people had done it, made progress, so I knew that there’d be a way to do that, so that was certainly enticing to me.

Schara: Last questions: What did you think of his differentiation of self paper, when you read that, what sense did you make of that?

Noone: I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I just thought, here’s a guy who can have some fun with his family, he worked at getting a little bit more on the outside of this family, after years of work, but I thought, boy, if I could do something like that with my family, it would be [laughter]. I would love to be able to do that. No, that was very uplifting for me.

Schara: Uplifting for (you). I agree. I think that was one of the things that appealed to me, I saw this as a way that I thought of Bowen as a guy who looked at a lake, and saw a lake, and felt the wind, and decided that he was going to build a sailboat. And he was going to sail across that lake! He was the first person to be able to, really, chart the emotional winds and what would happen. And he pushed everybody back away from it. And it was like an amazing voyage out into the lake! And back again,

Noone: And he had to make some good guesses about what way to go. I remember one time, him saying that it was like he knew he had to start fresh, in terms of the direction to go in, with that new theory of human behavior. It was like being dropped in the ocean with no land in sight, and then you had to try to make a decision, “Okay, which direction am I going to swim in?” And that’s where he started, in many ways.

Schara: That’s really the compass that he developed for himself. And that nobody can really give you, but they can give you clues, as to the emotional process. And if you can hear the clues, then you might have a better swim, when you set out on your voyage! So I don’t know, do you have to go?

Noone: Yes.

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