Bowenian Family Therapy Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards for reviewing Bowenian Family Therapy concepts.

Differentiation

A lifelong process of striving to keep one’s own being in balance through the reciprocal external and internal processes of self-definition and self-regulation. A person’s ability to differentiate between thoughts and feelings and the capacity to take a stand in an intense emotional system.

Solid-self

A person who is more highly differentiated and is able to function based upon a personally defined set of values, beliefs, convictions, and life principles.

Pseudo-self

A person who is not differentiated and may be fused with another person; therefore, they do not reason from their own internal values but instead borrow the values of the person whom they’re fused with and commonly makes emotionally reactive choices.

Triangles

The smallest stable unit in a family system that forms out of the anxiety of the two-person system.

Nuclear family emotional process (undifferentiated ego mass)

Groups of people (emotional systems) evolve their own specific organization and develop a set of rules and patterns that are stable over time. People tend to select partners who are at similar levels of differentiation.

Family projection process

Undifferentiated parents transmit their immaturity, or lack of differentiation, to their children through this process.

Multigenerational transmission process

All generations are part of a continuous natural process with each generation pressing up against the next. Emotional responses, both their nature and the degree of their intensity, are passed down from generation to generation.

Sibling position

Birth order tends to exert an influence on the characteristics children develop, therefore knowing the sibling configuration enables a therapist to predict certain roles that a child may play in the family emotional process and what might be passed to the next generation

Genogram

A family diagram that contains important data about relationships within the family system.

Emotional cut off

Results in minimizing contact among family members and is considered when assessing level of fusion.

Person-to-person relationship

This characterizes differentiated relationships; Bowenian therapists encourage the development of talking rationally without blaming one another and without attempting to triangulate another person into the relationship.

Coaching

Therapist stance is one of helping clients start a life-long process of self-discovery and differentiation. Therapist is a growth model who teaches clients about family process and coaches them in their efforts to change

I position

Encouraging family members to take increasing responsibility for their roles in creating and maintaining problems by coaching them to make statements that reflect their own thought and feelings instead of blaming others

Murray Bowen

Creater

Expanded on work

Philip Guerin, Betty Carter, Monica McGoldrick