breakdown Archives - A Diary of Everyday Growing Up Opportunities

“Are more of my energies going into reading and trying to manage relationships than going into my responsibilities?”

The topic of resilience has been getting lots of attention over the past years. It seems that many have realised that it is more helpful to aim for improved resilience than increased happiness. The core of resilience is seen in how well one deals with life’s setbacks. Think about it for a moment: What will be more useful in equipping a person for life’s daily challenges? Will it be striving for positive feelings? or will it be nurturing the capacity to bounce back after disappointments?

Definitions of the concept of resilience abound! I think it’s helpful to think of it as: The capacity to stay on track with goals and tasks in the midst of challenging environments. The majority of approaches to promoting resilience focus on the individual. They describe how a person can mobilize certain mindsets that allow them to see failure as opportunities rather than as a personal condemnation. This individual cognitive reframing and techniques for self-soothing can certainly be helpful in learning to not be crushed by disappointments; however they leave out the importance of relationship dynamics to our resilience. It’s easy to see external events like loss of job or an illness as the greatest threat to resilience but it is important not to underestimate the way that relationship dynamics can subtly drain a person’s capacity to manage life effectively. A useful question to ask is: Are more of my energies going into reading and trying to manage relationships than going into my responsibilities?

I recently spoke to a woman I will call Leanne, who was increasingly stressed at her workplace. She had taken on a job in a community organisation and was looking forward to making a real contribution. After just 6 month in the job however, she was losing the ability to focus on her work tasks because all of her energy was consumed by trying to work out the relationship dynamics. She sensed that one colleague didn’t value her and had started to seek reassurance from others at the office. Her boss had initially been available and supportive but she was now sensing a withdrawal of his involvement. She began imagining that he doubted her capabilities and that her colleague might even be bad mouthing her behind her back. Leanne had gone from an enthusiastic confident worker to an anxious and self-doubting person within a short time.

As with so many of us, Leanne’s sensitivities to relationships were a huge part of her lowered resilience. She was able to be productive when she felt valued and validated but any sense of disapproval and loss of attention would derail her from functioning well. All of us have emerged from our families with varying degrees of sensitivity to relationship undercurrents. The most common sensitivities are to approval, expectations, attention and distress in others. Which of these are most likely to destabilize you in your relationship contexts? What perceptions of others are most likely to distract you from managing life’s tasks? Is it seeing another upset and feeling that somehow you are responsible? Is it when you lose a perceived sense of importance or a shift from getting attention?

Here is a summary list of the common relationship patterns (drawn from family systems theory) that can impair people’s resilience. Each of these patterns deserves a blog all its own but a brief checklist might open up more ways of understanding how relationship context affects us all. See if you can recognise any of these going on in your life at the moment:

Through too much togetherness: When people invest in needing to be close and connected all the time it is hard to get on with life’s responsibilities. Sensitivities to being connected, through approval and validation, start to take over all other important tasks.
Through too much distance: When people use distance to deal with tensions with others it increases the awkwardness in relationships. Negative distance and avoidance skews people towards blame and superiority. This distracts people from their own responsibilities as well as getting in the way of sharing resources and good team work.
Through over functioning for others: When people start to be overly helpful in telling others how to think and behave it can get in the way of them solving their own problems and can promote dependency and reduced competency.
Through being part of triangles: When people experience tension and distress in one relationship it is all too easy to find a 3rd party to vent to about this. Venting, complaining and gossiping to others about an absent party can seem to reduce our angst and worries, by having someone align with our point of view. The initial problem is prevented from being addressed in the relationship it belongs in. Detouring relationship tension also reduces resilience as we don’t get good practice at expressing differences and working them out person to person.

Leanne was able to see how her dependence on others being warm and attentive towards her was threatening her capacity to manage in her job. As an individual she had all the competencies necessary to do her work well but in relationships she could so easily lose her sense of capacity and become consumed by feeling left out. It was helpful for her to consider how this developed in her relationships in her original family. She realised that it would not be an easy pattern to adjust but that she could re- build some resilience by taking the focus of trying to get steadiness through relationships and instead get back on track with performing her job duties well. She could stay in friendly contact with her colleagues without getting caught up in figuring out what they thought of her.

We all inherit different degrees of relational and emotional resilience from the families we grow up in. there are many variables that go into this complex process that help make sense of the different capacities family members and people from different families have to cope with the fortunes and misfortunes of life. Bowen theory provides a way to grapple with this and to research in our own lives the ways that we interact within our relationship environment and its impact on our moments of apparent strength and episodes of greatest vulnerability.

This blog originally appeared on the Family Systems Institute Website

To read more from Jenny Brown, you can purchase her book Growing Yourself Up here.

The FSI runs interactive groups promoting relational resilience for parents and adolescence, for more information go here.

New group schedules will be released in the coming months, if you are interested in attending please let us know by emailing us: info [at] thefsi [dot] com [dot] au or calling (02) 9904 5600

What can one family member do to bring some maturity to a system where ‘cut off’ is occurring?

I received the following question via Facebook. I have changed some of the details in order to write up my reflections as a public blog.

“My question relates to my mum and my younger sister who have been in conflict. My mum is avoiding my sister because she doesn’t want to have a difficult conversation and also believes my sister is in the wrong. I’ve encouraged her to try and stay connected to my sister and to have another conversation with her to see if they can resolve things, but she isn’t willing. She still feels very hurt by things that were said in the past. Any ideas of how else to encourage her to resolve things with my sister? What’s a mature action I can take in this situation?”

It can be heartbreaking to witness ruptures within our families – to have 2 people that we love dearly not talking to each other. The more that they avoid each other the stronger the ill-will seems to grow. Both family members can triangle us into their complaints about the other and we can find ourselves impossibly sandwiched in the middle. We can try hard not to take sides and to encourage each family member to reconnect and talk through their misunderstandings but predictably this mediation effort hits dead ends. Neither party is willing to give up their position about the wrong they feel has been done to them.

What can a family member can do towards peacemaking?

Observations of such circumstances reveal that the effort to change others and convince them to make amends is rarely productive. Relationship hurt and the resultant anxious defensiveness is unlikely to shift in response to another’s pressure. If there have been intergenerational patterns of people cutting off in the face of disagreements it will be especially hard for such programming to change. Distance and avoidance has become the default in the face of tension.
A family is an emotional unit – like a single organism. This means that any change one person makes will affect other’s experience of the family. So what can one family member do to bring some maturity to a system where ‘cut off’ is occurring? The following are some examples of options. It must be remembered however that each family has some unique ways of playing out tensions and alliances. Hence each of us has to work out what particular adjustments are useful to make in how we respond to each family member in the strained side of the triangle (in this instance the sister and mother are the strained side of the triangle with both aligned with the person who asks the question about the dilemmas they face). None of this can be rolled out as a technique.

Rather any change effort needs to make sense to the person seeking to make adjustments; and it needs to connect with their inner convictions if they are to contribute to the wellbeing of the unit.

Keep contact with each family member who is not talking to the third.
The effort is to relate from self not in an effort to change another.
Ensure the contact is person to person and not a vent about the third person. If venting begins it may help to say: “I know you are grappling with how to deal with your upset with X but I’m committed to our time together to be a catch up on each other.”
If the push to complain about the other continues it may help to say something like: “Mum when you talk angrily about my sister it affects me quite negatively. I care deeply about you both. Your venting about X leaves a vacuum in our relationship. I find the focus on my sister is making it harder for me to really connect with you the way I want to.”
If the protest comes again it may be helpful to speak from conviction saying: “I’m not willing to go there Mum. I don’t want to be part of creating frustration in our time together.”
In response to one family member not being invited to a family event it may be useful to say: “I understand you are making this call based on what you feel but I’m not OK about fully participating in a family gathering when my sister not invited. I will drop in briefly to acknowledge the event but won’t stay for meal time while ever this is the situation.”
Another option is to make transparent that each party in the tension is communicating with you about the other. Such openness about how each expresses their challenges to you can be a gesture of handing the issue back to the relationship where it has opportunity to be worked out. It’s a kind of reversal of the direction of communication. An example might sound like: “I heard from X last week that they are a bit stuck knowing how to move things forward after the fallout. I let them know how you are also sharing a similar impasse. I conveyed that I have no idea what it will take for the two of you to get unstuck but that I am interested to see what solutions you eventually come up with.”

Back to the original question: “What’s a mature action I can take in this situation with my mother and sister not speaking?”

The key is to remember is that ‘cut offs’ are a common way of relieving intense negative emotions in a relationship. A period of distance is just predictable in families with a tendency to handle offences with stonewalling. The distance provides substantial shorter term reduction in anxiety and over whelmed emotions. If you get caught in being the triangle ‘meat in the sandwich’ you contribute to fuelling the ‘cut off’. Similarly if you participate fully in events and conversations that exclude the other you are accommodating to it. Above all be patient – these patterns are embedded in the ways previous generations dealt with transitioning from family of origin to family of creation. There is no quick fix to a pattern that has helped (albeit not maturely) families to cope with relationship stress over centuries.

Note about Emotional Cut Off – 1 of Bowen theory’s 8 concepts

Emotionally cutting off to relieve internal discomfort has its roots in the way people leave home. If they distanced from their parents in establishing their adult life- not being real and open in negotiating this life transition with each parent- the foundations for future impulsive ‘cut offs’ are laid down. (We all have varying degrees of this with our parents – Bowen called this: unresolved emotional attachment) Working on meaningful relating back to parents can reduce the likelihood of this pattern being repeated in the current generations.

Dr Bowen writes: “The concept deals with the way people separate themselves from the past in order to start their lives in the present generation (FTCP : 382).”

Dr Kerr writes: “People reduce the tensions of family interactions by cutting off, but risk making their new relationships too important. For example, the more a man cuts off from his family of origin, the more he looks to his spouse, children, and friends to meet his needs.”

For a full description of this pattern read: Bowen Theory Eight Concepts or Kerr, Michael E. “One Family’s Story: A Primer on Bowen Theory.” The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. 2000.