Book Summary: Bowen Theory’s Secrets by Michael Kerr

The book: Bowen Theory's Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families by Michael E. Kerr (Norton Professional Books)

On this page

1. Introduction
2. Chapter 1: Systems Thinking
3. Chapter 2: Evolution and the Emotional System
4. Chapter 3: The Molecule of an Emotional System
5. Chapter 4: Patterns of Emotional Functioning
6. Chapter 5: Differentiation of Self
7. Chapter 6: Emotional Regression
8. Chapter 7: Emotional Regression and the Individuality-Togetherness Balance
9. Chapter 8: Emotional Objectivity
10. Chapter 9: Emotional Programming
11. Chapter 10: Chronic Anxiety
12. Chapter 11: The Multigenerational Family Organism
13. Chapter 12: Sibling Position
14. Chapter 13: Emotional Cutoff
15. Chapter 14: Societal Emotional Process
16. Chapter 15: Key Ingredients in the Process of Differentiation
17. Chapter 16: Personal Vignettes of the Process of Differentiation
18. Chapter 17: Clinical Example of the Process of Differentiation
19. Chapter 18: The Process of Differentiation: Theory, Method, and Technique
20. Chapter 19: The Unabomber and His Family
21. Chapter 20: Gary Gilmore and His Family
22. Chapter 21: Adam Lanza and His Family
23. Chapter 22: John Nash: A Beautiful Mind
24. Chapter 23: Unidisease: A Proposed New Concept in Bowen Theory
25. Chapter 24: Toward a Systems Concept of Supernatural Phenomena
26. Epilogue: Applying Bowen Theory to My Own Family
27. Related video

Introduction

Kerr took his title from Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees. A tree can't be understood apart from the forest it's connected to, and a family member can't be understood apart from the family. Bowen theory rests on research begun more than seventy years ago, but its central idea, that families function as emotional units, still hasn't reached the public. Kerr says that isn't a conspiracy; it just takes a hard shift in thinking.

The book has four parts: the core concepts, the process of differentiation of self (which he calls the most important application of the theory), four families in the public eye, and two special applications. Kerr doesn't walk through Bowen's eight concepts one at a time. He reorganizes them to show how they connect.

He also starts telling his own story. For years he saw his mother as fragile, and came to recognize that as "a feeling-driven bias, not a fact." When he finally took her on and backed her off, she said the next day, "Finally, you told me what you think." Studying several generations of both parents' families, he came to see his own family as part of "a multigenerational emotional tapestry that no one family member had caused," which he found calming.

Chapter 1: Systems Thinking

Kerr begins with the difference between cause-and-effect thinking and systems thinking. A husband says, "I feel depressed because you would rather work in your garden than be with me." His wife says it's upsetting to be around him when he acts depressed, so she retreats to her garden. Each is reacting to the other. "They cocreate the process," and blaming each other "is like reacting to oneself."

Cause-and-effect thinking asks why: does my partner have abandonment issues, commitment issues, anger issues? Systems thinking asks how, what, when, and where, which lets you track what's actually happening between people. Kerr is clear that this doesn't excuse anyone's behavior. Physical abuse is irresponsible, and seeing the system doesn't change that.

Cause-and-effect thinking is our default, and blaming yourself is as much a problem as blaming the other person. But even if only one of two people learns to see the "dance," it makes a major difference.

Chapter 2: Evolution and the Emotional System

Human families work like other natural systems, such as ant colonies. Kerr quotes Deborah Gordon: "nothing ants do makes sense except in the context of the colony." Bowen theory's message is that people have far less autonomy in their emotional functioning than we assume. Better-differentiated people have more control over their automatic reactions than less differentiated people, but the emotional system is powerful in everyone.

Bowen theory uses "emotional" much more broadly than everyday speech. It includes the automatic systems that guide adaptive behavior in every living thing, going back long before what we call feelings. Kerr describes a son, mother, and father who each have trouble keeping a self in the others' presence. The mother isn't to blame; she's one of three equal participants.

He connects this to neuroscience. The brain's emotional system is regulated by family interactions, and family interactions are regulated by the brain's emotional system. What matters most for Bowen theory is the brain's ability to tell feeling from thinking, and to choose to act on thinking.

Chapter 3: The Molecule of an Emotional System

This chapter is about triangles, which Kerr calls the molecules of an emotional system: the smallest stable relationship system. The chapter opens with Mary Karr: "A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it." Two-person relationships are unstable because people need emotional closeness but don't tolerate too much of it. Too much distance feels like rejection; too much closeness feels intrusive and overwhelming.

A triangle is a "solution" to that instability, and someone pays the price: two people gain at the expense of a third. Kerr walks through how anxiety moves around a triangle, with insiders and an outsider, using his own family: his mother, his father, and his older brother, who had schizophrenia. "My schizophrenic brother was not a victim of the triangles but an active participant in them." He also notes that gossip spreads through triangles.

Chapter 4: Patterns of Emotional Functioning

Bowen described four patterns of emotional functioning in families. Kerr renames them to fit the language biologists use: emotional conflict (Bowen's marital conflict), dominant-adaptive or deferential interactions (dysfunction in one spouse), triangles (impairment of one or more children, including the family projection process), and emotional distance, which accompanies all the others. They are all expressions of the same thing: undifferentiation and chronic anxiety in the family. The more it shows up in one pattern, the less it shows up in the others.

The patterns help explain which family member develops symptoms. Kerr argues the medical model, which locates the problem entirely inside the patient, "lets you off the hook in facing up to your own part in the problem." Overfunctioning and underfunctioning are anxiety-driven and based on distorted perceptions of who is strong and who is weak, not on reality.

With an adolescent who has symptoms, Bowen-based therapy helps the parents understand the triangle and their part in it rather than treating only the teen. "One person with sufficient importance to the system is enough to halt the spread of anxiety."

Chapter 5: Differentiation of Self

Kerr calls differentiation of self the most misunderstood concept in Bowen theory, and probably the most important. A well-known family therapist once joked, "Poor Murray Bowen, he differentiated from his family; now he has no family." That joke shows the confusion: differentiation isn't distance or cutoff. It also isn't repressing feelings. A key part of it is using the higher brain to regulate the emotional brain.

Kerr distinguishes solid self from pseudo-self. Pseudo-self is borrowed from and traded with others, and it can collapse under pressure. Knee-jerk opposition is another form of pseudo-self: having so little solid self that agreeing with someone feels like giving up. When people are strongly fused, they react so predictably to each other that the family functions like a single organism.

People can raise their basic level of differentiation, but it takes motivation, hard work, and time. Kerr ends with Bowen: "The world will always need differentiation of self."

Chapter 6: Emotional Regression

This chapter begins what Kerr calls the "three Es" of Bowen theory: emotional regression, emotional objectivity, and emotional programming. He defines emotional regression this way: when chronic anxiety escalates in a relationship system, the system becomes dominated by less thoughtful, more reactive ways of interacting that are older in an evolutionary sense. Two people who were cooperating start to dominate and defer instead.

One calm, well-thought-out "I-position" can help an anxious family, such as "I am no longer willing to believe and act as if our son's behavior is the cause of this family's anxiety. We all have a part in this." That isn't telling others what to do. "It does not help to tell others to calm down; the key is to live it by calming oneself."

Kerr notes that many people function better at work than at home, and uses James Madison as an example. How people manage themselves with their spouse, not at work, is the main factor in the differentiation of their children.

Chapter 7: Emotional Regression and the Individuality-Togetherness Balance

Every relationship balances two forces: individuality and togetherness. The more emotional energy partners invest in each other, the more each person's well-being depends on the other's attention and acceptance. Kerr is careful that this isn't the same as genuine, respectful interest in each other. It reflects how much people are "completing" themselves by borrowing pseudo-self from each other.

Bowen theory sees "selfish" and "unselfish" as emotional postures, not character traits. Both reflect an inability to keep a self in the relationship. In a case example, a wife stops trying to please her husband and holds her position while he escalates the pressure for a week. Then he blurts out, "You are acting disgustingly mature," and laughs.

The therapist doesn't tell the family how to change. The therapist helps the family define the problem more factually, which opens up new options on its own.

Chapter 8: Emotional Objectivity

Emotional objectivity means describing what happens in relationships factually, including how your own feelings and what happens between people affect each other. Kerr quotes a mother who learned to recognize her anxiety as her own ("I would just say I'm anxious") instead of tying it to something someone else did or something she did. First you recognize your anxiety as your own. Then you recognize the cues in others that trigger it, and the effect your anxious response has on them.

Kerr describes a turning point with his own mother. When he saw her distressed, his stomach tightened and he started to move toward her to fix it, then caught himself and could suddenly see the dance they had been doing for years. Bowen believed more internal change came from developing more of a self with your parents and other important people than from psychoanalysis. Kerr calls the split between relationship problems and internal problems a false dichotomy.

Chapter 9: Emotional Programming

Emotional programming is information passed across generations through relationships and learning, not genes. The most intense programming happens in a person's parental triangle while growing up, though siblings and other relatives matter too. Most of it happens outside awareness, and it shapes countless automatic reactions, including how strongly we react to social cues.

Kerr describes a mother who explains her fierce protectiveness of her rebellious teenage son as a deep wish to make him happy. She overfunctions, and he feels hassled. Each of their explanations is one part of a reciprocal process.

A baby starts out fused with its caretaker, which helps a helpless infant survive. Both the child and the parent also have an instinct to separate gradually. Siblings turn out differently partly because of how much of that early fusion each one resolves. In Kerr's family, his brother who developed schizophrenia had the least resolution. A mother's anxiety isn't just hers; it reflects the anxiety of the whole family and its wider network. "It is all too easy to blame parents rather than exercise the discipline to comprehend the many variables that go into the explanation of a human emotional problem."

Chapter 10: Chronic Anxiety

Bowen theory doesn't treat anxiety as a psychiatric disorder. Anxiety exists in all people and probably in all living things; Kerr cites Eric Kandel's research on anxiety-like processes in a sea snail. Anxiety is one of the two main variables in the theory. The other is differentiation of self, or how well thinking and feeling work as a team.

Bowen theory defines anxiety as an organism's reaction to a real or imagined threat. Acute anxiety is usually a reaction to real threats and is time-limited; chronic anxiety is more often a reaction to imagined threats. Kerr describes a husband whose obsessive dread was far stronger at home than at work. When he saw how reactive he was to his wife's facial expressions, and that the same dynamic had existed with his mother, the dread eased. Bowen liked to say that what was created in a relationship can be fixed in a relationship.

Chronic anxiety doesn't cause physical or emotional symptoms, but it makes people more vulnerable to them. Seeing a rise in a family's anxiety as something no one person caused can move people out of blame and self-blame.

Chapter 11: The Multigenerational Family Organism

This chapter covers the multigenerational transmission process. The chapter opens with Santayana's line that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and Kurt Vonnegut's reply that we're doomed to repeat it no matter what. Bowen theory sees the multigenerational family as a living organism. You can't fully understand any person or nuclear family without understanding the multigenerational family emotional system.

Kerr explains the family diagram (what many therapists call a genogram) and says that estimating someone's basic level of differentiation from a three-, four-, or five-generation diagram is the most accurate method available. No questionnaire or computer program can do it yet.

Some people find the idea fatalistic. Kerr suggests testing it against your own multigenerational family. Over many generations, the process generates variation: some lines become more differentiated and stable, others less so, and every family has members across that range.

Chapter 12: Sibling Position

Bowen built this concept on Walter Toman's Family Constellation, which describes eleven sibling profiles drawn from more than three thousand families. Kerr remembers first reading Toman's profile of an oldest sister of sisters and feeling it was unfair for someone to know so much about his wife without meeting her. Toman wasn't a systems theorist, but his findings fit: how each person functions depends as much on how others function around them as on anything inside them.

Kerr summarizes several of Toman's profiles. Oldest siblings tend to volunteer for responsibility, and youngest siblings are more prone to anti-establishment views. Level of differentiation affects how strongly the traits show up. In his own family, his parents' sibling positions, the distance in their marriage, and his mother's intense focus on his oldest brother all contributed to that brother's impairment. The same process gave Kerr some traits of an oldest child even though he was the youngest. Understanding that helped him get past blame.

Chapter 13: Emotional Cutoff

Bowen added emotional cutoff in 1975. It describes how adult children handle their unresolved emotional attachment to their parents as they leave home. Emotional distance and cutoff both manage the same dilemma: the need for closeness and the aversion to too much of it. Cutoff is distance between generations.

Cutoff can bring some peace from painful family interactions, but it intensifies future relationships. People who seem to have smoothed things over with their parents often replicate the same problems with their own children or spouse. People with a good level of resolution "grow away rather than break away" and remain a resource for each other.

Kerr describes hearing Bowen lecture on cutoff in 1969 and realizing, "My gosh, that is what I am doing: cutting off from my family of origin." Bridging a cutoff can calm current relationships enough to allow some objectivity. Kerr stresses that cutoff isn't pathological, but it has consequences.

Chapter 14: Societal Emotional Process

Bowen extended the idea of emotional regression from families to whole societies in a 1976 paper. A request from the Environmental Protection Agency to write about how people react to environmental problems helped prompt it. Societies go through periods of progression and regression as chronic anxiety rises and falls. Kerr half-seriously proposes renaming our species Homo dysrationalis, borrowing Keith Stanovich's term for being capable of wisdom but often falling short of it.

Bowen noticed a pattern in juvenile court decisions in the years before the early 1970s: they swung between overly lenient and overly harsh, the same pattern seen in the families of delinquent teenagers. He suspected the regression under way since shortly after World War II was driven by a disturbance between people and nature, including the depletion of natural resources, the population explosion, and the absence of new frontiers. Kerr compares the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, in which many groups played a part, to an emotional regression that biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant observed in Galápagos ground finches in 1982 and 1983.

Chapter 15: Key Ingredients in the Process of Differentiation

Part II turns to differentiation of self in practice. Kerr points to Bowen's account of returning to his own family as a model: being in contact with an anxious family while staying outside its emotional field, guided by theory. After a talk Kerr gave on the island in Maine where he lives, a woman told him the ideas were compelling but she didn't think she could apply them to her family. He said, "With some help, I think you could."

Most people get stuck early, because being reactive to your own family's emotionality is the rule, not the exception. The key ingredients include learning the theory well enough to see process instead of content, telling thoughts from feelings, and recognizing your own reactivity. Kerr treats trauma, abuse, and neglect as indicators of a chronically anxious family, and notes that siblings who grew up in the same environment can still turn out very differently.

He also recommends what biologist George C. Williams called scientific inquiry, including research into your own multigenerational family. Comparing your branch of the family with others helps you see how the whole process shaped your immediate family.

Chapter 16: Personal Vignettes of the Process of Differentiation

Kerr shares his own work on his family. When he started asking relatives about family history, he got many different versions. By talking with enough people and keeping fact and opinion separate, he developed his own view. Seeing that you do many of the same things your parents did, without sliding into guilt or anger, brings real equanimity. "People do not leave their families but take their families with them."

In a consultation with Bowen, Kerr realized how anxious he had been, and for how long. "Bowen did not need to tell me that I had been caught in the system; he simply did not get caught in my anxiety, and that was enough to get me out of it."

He also tells the longer story of taking on his mother. When she accused him of making a stupid decision about an adoption and blamed it on his wife, he first tried not to react, then saw that wasn't enough. He pulled the car over and told her firmly what he thought. Their relationship improved after that.

Chapter 17: Clinical Example of the Process of Differentiation

Kerr presents a composite case, the "S" family, to show three things: one spouse can take the lead in differentiating, the process isn't predictable or step-by-step, and one person's effort benefits the whole family. The coach's job is to stay emotionally neutral and interested, and to help the person move from cause-and-effect thinking to systems thinking. The coach should "represent a way of thinking but not to try to sell it."

Mr. S. starts out focused on his wife and his own frustration. Over several years he reconnects with his brother, who has schizophrenia, and starts to see how much he was the target of his mother's overmothering. His son tells him, "Dad, you are less oppositional, you think differently." After close to four years, during a tense conversation in the kitchen, Mr. S. realizes that the tense expression he sees on his wife's face reflects his own face and tone of voice. That's the shift to seeing the system. Kerr compares it to a glider pilot rising on an updraft: you can stop trying to change others without giving up on things improving.

Chapter 18: The Process of Differentiation: Theory, Method, and Technique

Kerr reviews how Bowen-based family therapy has changed since the Family Study Project at the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1950s. The theory comes from observed facts about how families interact. The method is facilitating differentiation, and the techniques have evolved: first whole-family group therapy, then sessions with the parents and the symptomatic child, then, by the 1960s, mostly working with the parents together, each one working on themselves in relation to the other.

Whole-family sessions can lower anxiety, but they distract from the central point: progress depends on one or both parents functioning with more of a self. Children are too dependent on the family to lead it, and when the child is in the room, parents tend to sit back and wait for the child to change. In couples sessions, each partner talks to a neutral third person while the other listens, which helps them see their reciprocal reactivity.

"People do not need to be instructed on how to change; they need to learn what the obstacles are to change and to reflect on them." Kerr adds that people usually need to make progress in their own families before they can apply differentiation at work or in other groups.

Chapter 19: The Unabomber and His Family

Part III applies Bowen theory to four families in the public eye. A 1996 Washington Post article about Ted Kaczynski's family caught Kerr's interest, and a conference talk later led to a weekend meeting with Ted's mother, Wanda, his younger brother, David, and David's wife, Linda. Kerr also corresponded with Ted in prison. No one in the family connected Ted to the bombings until the manifesto was published in 1995. Linda recognized his writing, and David, with his mother's agreement, went to the FBI. Between 1978 and 1995, Ted's bombs killed three people and injured twenty-three.

Kerr calls it a case of a normal-appearing family producing a highly dysfunctional child. Wanda read to Ted constantly, including articles from Scientific American before he was five, and kept a detailed journal about him, along with intense worry that his social development was lagging. Ted grew up feeling superior and special. In adolescence the fusion between mother and son turned to friction and distance, and Ted blamed his family. Kerr notes the many parallels with his own family.

Chapter 20: Gary Gilmore and His Family

Kerr draws on Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. Gary was the second of four sons, and Mikal the youngest. The repeated interactions among Gary, his father, and his mother fit Bowen's observation that the parents of people with severe acting-out problems consistently convey "I love you no matter what you do," however harsh the punishments.

Kerr thinks Mikal puts too much weight on the father and too little on the mother. He traces his mother Bessie's background, including her cutoff from her family, and the parental triangle around Gary. Each time Gary was arrested, his father hired more lawyers to get him off, which Kerr connects to the overly permissive court decisions Bowen noticed in that era. Kerr also cites Jonathan Haidt: reasoning usually follows emotionally driven judgments, as after-the-fact rationalization.

Chapter 21: Adam Lanza and His Family

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother, then twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and then himself. The state's investigation found no evidence of why. Kerr says Bowen theory can't answer the why question either, but it adds important variables. His main sources are Matthew Lysiak's book Newtown and Andrew Solomon's New Yorker article "The Reckoning," which drew on hundreds of emails from Adam's father, Peter.

Adam didn't speak until he was three, was extremely sensitive to touch, and avoided other children from an early age. Kerr describes an intensely fused relationship between Adam and his mother, Nancy, with his father as the consistent outsider, and growing distance between the parents, who separated in 2001 and divorced in 2009. Over time Nancy lost confidence in her ability to help Adam and traveled more. Kerr focuses on the context around Adam and the critical changes in it, which can be described with more certainty than his motives.

Chapter 22: John Nash: A Beautiful Mind

Kerr uses John Nash's life, mainly from Sylvia Nasar's biography A Beautiful Mind, to show how the course of schizophrenia tracks with what's happening in a person's family and social world. Bowen theory sees schizophrenia as an emotional dysfunction in the individual and an emotionally driven disorder of the family relationship system. A person with very little self struggles to regulate intense emotional reactivity, which can disrupt thinking.

Kerr describes three infantile yearnings that show up in adults with very little self: to be taken care of, to be free of responsibility, and to have "an all-loving, all-giving, nondemanding figure always alongside." Everyone has these yearnings at times. Seeing people as differing in degree, not in kind, reduces the stigma of mental illness. Kerr follows Nash's breakdown and recovery alongside events in his family, including his father's death and his son's own diagnosis. He calls the calming effect of seeing and accepting your own part in a relationship problem "the systems miracle."

Chapter 23: Unidisease: A Proposed New Concept in Bowen Theory

Kerr proposes a new concept. The chapter opens with cardiologist Peter Libby: "We all study the same disease." Libby observed the same biological processes in atherosclerosis that appear in all diseases, including inflammation, cell proliferation, scarring, and blood vessel growth. Bowen theory says heightened chronic anxiety in a family triggers physical, mental, or social symptoms in a family member. Kerr suggests those symptoms often come from the same biological processes pushed to harmful levels.

He separates symptoms that internalize anxiety (mental and physical) from those that externalize it, such as compulsive gambling, shoplifting, and substance abuse. He draws on research about shared gene networks in different diseases, homeostasis, and the lifetime wear and tear of chronic stress. He's clear that the idea isn't proven. He presents it as a scientific inquiry consistent with the studies he cites.

Chapter 24: Toward a Systems Concept of Supernatural Phenomena

This short chapter is closer to an addendum. Bowen began talking about supernatural phenomena in the late 1970s but never developed it into a concept. In 1980 he presented "Towards a Systems Concept of Spiritual Phenomena," and soon replaced "spiritual" with "supernatural" because people assumed he meant religion.

Kerr says a common misreading is treating Bowen's interest as support for faith in a supernatural realm. Bowen was interested in how powerfully beliefs affect people. Kerr cites research on how expectation changes the experience of pain, and stories of healing through ritual. "Belief in a supernatural realm is not a pathology but part of human nature." He connects it to pseudo-self: we often think we understand things we don't.

Epilogue: Applying Bowen Theory to My Own Family

Kerr ends with his own family. He considers it reductionistic to see schizophrenia only as a brain disease. Medication helps the psychotic symptoms but does little for the "negative" symptoms, like lack of motivation, that keep people dependent on their families. His older brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty-eight, just before Kerr started medical school at Georgetown, and killed himself seven years later.

Kerr traces the forces around his brother: his father's distance, his mother's powerful caretaking and her worry about her son, and the patterns she carried from her own family. After his father died in 1962, his mother and brother became more and more reactive to each other. Years later, Kerr pressured his mother to visit him and his young family without his brother, and was frustrated when she wouldn't. "It was arrogant for me to think I knew what was best for them."

He closes with a hope: when Bowen theory finally enters public consciousness, and people accept how little emotional autonomy we have, it will have a constructive impact on how people treat each other and the natural world.

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