A Focus on Family: A Better Way of Thinking

– [Murray Bowen]- Over the years, I’ve never found anything I think a way of thinking is better. And you try to use it the best you can, whatever you can. It works better than other things work. And I would say that if you get- Now you have a way of going that is relatively consistent which is very difficult to do. And if you get to be so changeable that you are trying to change for each one, then you become as changeable as the parent is. So while you can, you become more definite than the parent is. Maybe I’ll have another opportunity to get into that some time this afternoon or tomorrow. I’ll do the best I can with it, but that is not easy. And basically that has to do, I think, with the therapist relationship with the family and not what the family does, but with the quality of the relationship. That would be a question, do I believe that cutting off with the past, if you take that past cutting off with the significant relationships, yes. And that would be across the board in society. And these would be two people in which they were both only siblings. With the past who’s dead, and they moved out and lost contact with the past. That immediately makes them more vulnerable. And they get in the service and they did okay in the service and he retires from the service, she’s already kept him alive by her working, but they were vulnerable in all kinds of places. And that is one in which the the treatment thing enabled them to get out of it pretty good, and these were two fairly gifted people. I don’t remember what this man’s rank in the army was, but he had been in the army all his life. I think probably he was a Colonel, or something like that. Maybe I’m not sure, maybe it’s Brigadier, he was a Brigadier, a Brigadier General. So he gets to fairly substantial people but all you gotta do, and I would say that the narrow family background sets the stage for it. Course, then how did the parents end up like this, you know divorced and dead, what have you, I don’t know what it was, but they ended up with single parents. That sets the stage for it. I had some more hands up back here, how about those?

– [Woman offscreen] I know it’s sad. She was cut off from her mother at a pretty young age and really took on her aunt as a mother, until her mother came to live with her, as I understood between ’77 and ’79, it seemed like a happy experience, but it was immediately after her death, that she wasn’t drinking apparently during those two years. She was going to AA, unless I misheard and began drinking again right after her mother’s death. So it was like the loss that had reoccurred again.

– [Murray Bowen] – Okay, okay. No quarrel with that, did everybody hear that question? I didn’t hear the details and then I didn’t remember it. That her mother didn’t come to live with her in the Washington area until I guess, until the time she died. But I wouldn’t see that. I would not see the late taking care of the mother before the mother died as a significant relationship. These are fairly common. And most people who are fairly cut off will have nothing to do with mother. And that, even if which is an only child. Most people will utilize whatever community resources are available for it, but she was close enough to her mother that her mother came to Washington and lived with her. But I would not see that as a significant relationship. If it is carried on long enough, yes, but that one wasn’t carried on that long. Anyway, I would still see the AA experience as being the primary thing in this.

– [Woman 2 Offscreen] I have a question.

– Okay.

– In the community I work in, and I think it’s fairly typical for this community, we see just the opposite, where the families are so involved with each other, in fact, the involvement in AA, they go and they stop and they go and they go and they drink and they go, and they go and they talk about it and they drink, but they have a great deal of contact with their families, of course, that they can’t get away. These are adults with a-

– [Murray Bowen] Now, that would be, now your comment would be, you see, the very opposite. When people get involved with their families at the very end and that increases the drinking.

– They’re overly involved with their families from day 1.

– Okay. Now how would you see that as different?

– Well, they’re not cut off.

– Oh?

– A forty year old man-

– You would say physical contact, then, prohibits cutoff?

– Oh okay, well, would you address that?

– Of course!

– That has to do-

– Nice wave

– That one was to do with the nature of cutoff. There are teenage youngsters who are cutoff from their families, who steal cars while their in families. What would you do with them? And they didn’t drink, they just stole a car. They are DJ teenage youngsters who are living in their family that get involved in all kinds of symptomatic things. Would you see that as the absence of a cutoff? Or the presence of it? Or would you see that as the quality of relationship between the parents and the child? I would say that, communication, or actual being together is practically nonexistent and they’re living right in it. I would say that this happens with elderly parents who are living with children and – I saw one recently where the husband is doing very well, one of the best I’ve seen, and he got into a fight with his wife and ended up not eating for a week. Would you see that as a cutoff? In other words, that would be when he went home and slept every night where he didn’t talk to his wife. In other words, that is a relationship thing. So, I would say there are all kinds of cutoffs. In other words, one cutoff can occur when one is immediately mixed up in it. Another one can occur with somebody several miles apart. A cutoff can occur when you’re living halfway around the world from somebody but are in contact with them. So that has to do with the quality of the relationship between the two and that, to me, is one of the difficult things that I’ve run into over the years with people who sort of have a partway understanding of what it means to make contact with the family. And which they go through the motions without changing the relationship. And there are people who go through the motions of being with each other while they hate each other’s guts. There are people nursing elderly parents who are doing it as a chore while they hate their guts. And that has to, there has to be some way to get a change in that. In other words, that has to do, I think, with the nature of a cutoff and not with the physical presence or absence of somebody. Generally speaking, if people are physically present, they will manage some of its kind of a- that’s the place where, I think, a therapist can change it with some kind of frequent contacts. And then, you got to watch the therapist because the therapist can get incorporated into the very thing and the therapist can be the one to be saving the families neck by just presence there. Anyway, that has to do with the nature of the cutoff. And what can the therapist do? What is the therapist trying to do? What is the difference between a significant contact between people and a contact that means nothing? Because you can live right with somebody and be totally cutoff from them. That’s why I put in this thing about the husband who is living and sleeping with his wife only he ain’t talking to her and he ain’t eating.