family relationships

When worrying about a child gets out of hand

Jenny Brown Bowen theory, Family, Family Systems Theory, Parenting , , , , , , , , , ,


Sarah* was a competent health professional. She had years of experience assisting families with their children’s development. In her work life, Sarah was steady and confident. At home with her 3 young children it was a different picture. Sarah was gripped by anxiety about her 6 month old child. She was fearful that her son might have a disability and as a result was constantly monitoring, looking for indications of such a problem. Any number of things became evidence of her fear: when he didn’t sustain eye contact, when he was slow to smile, when he seemed to prefer rolling in one direction, when he was restless….and so the list of possible signs expanded. Sarah had begun to do particular therapy exercises with her son to address any possible delays in his development.

Chatting to Sarah revealed that she previously had similar anxieties with her other children during their first year of life but this current period of anxiety was much more intense and influencing her mood and capacity to maintain her life tasks. I asked Sarah what she could see were the effects of looking for signs of something wrong with her baby boy. She acknowledged that looking for problems wasn’t reassuring her; rather it was providing endless possible confirmations for her worries. As she asked herself “What if there is a disability that needs early intervention?” she was creating a kind of bottomless pit for her anxiety. Sarah had good insight that her monitoring and ‘therapising’ her son was preventing her engaging in simple play and enjoying getting to know her son’s particular preferences and emerging personality. She could also appreciate that. even in the unlikely situation that her child had a factual disability, her anxious parent- child interactions would not be helpful. We discussed how a parent can contribute to an escalating worry cycle where an infant responds reactively to the mother’s intrusive monitoring, which in turn confirms the mother’s worry and increases her fussing around her child, who in turn responds with restless behaviour…and on it goes.

I explored with Sarah what was going on in her important relationships and learned that she had withdrawn from her extended family supports and wasn’t keeping regular conversational connection with her husband. Her elderly father had died a couple of years ago. She had perceived that her mother’s grief meant that she wouldn’t want the load of assisting with her grandchildren. It was likely that this important loss and change in her extended family had added to Sarah’s anxieties with her third child. Certainly Sarah’s growing isolation appeared to be increasing the degree of her fears and her focus on her infant son.

Sarah knew it would be extremely challenging to reduce her worry for her child. There was something quite compelling and steadying for her when she perceived herself as helping her son. She felt stronger as a mother even though she was also frustrated by the effects of her increasing anxiety. Over time Sarah made a range of efforts to break this problematic worry cycle – making herself the priority project, not her child. This involved:

  • Noticing when her thinking was in the ‘WHAT IF?’ category instead of a ‘WHAT NOW?’  factual platform.
  • Noticing how much she was making a ‘fixing’ project out of her child – a project that could become something of a self-fulfilling projection.
  • Working to shift this project back to herself – her self-care, her relating to her husband, her initiating more contact and garnering support from her mother, siblings and friends.
  • Getting clearer about her personal job description as a mother. This was different to being led by every emotion and behaviour in her child.

Today’s parents swim in a sea of anxiety about any number of possible defects and dangers for their children. When I did a Google search on how parents can recognise problems in their child development, 4,960,000 results appeared! Added to this information over-load are the numerous categories where parents can look for problems: Language and Speech Developmental Delays, Vision Developmental Delays, Motor Skill Developmental Delays, Social and Emotional Developmental Delays, Cognitive Developmental Delays….. Such worry generating information can easily drive up the anxiety in many parents. Furthermore a worried parent will significantly influence the parent- child interactions in ways that are likely to confirm their imagined fear. The more a parent is distant in their marriage and/or from their extended family, the more such a worry cycle intensifies. Reversing such a pattern is immensely challenging – it can feel like a denial of the essence of maternal caretaking. Actually, the shift away from focussing anxiously on a child can build a pathway to a more confident expression of a parent’s caretaking instinct and wisdom. It also gives a child valuable enlarged breathing space for their natural growth and development.

*Names and details of this story have been changed

Making room for distress in relationships

Jenny Brown Bowen theory, Family, Family Systems Theory, Relationships , , , , , , ,

 Reflections from a sisters weekend awaysisters weekend

“I could appreciate that our family has made some genuine progress. To be able to tolerate the stirred up emotions of another’s upset and not respond in ways that swiftly shut it down is very different to the way we grew up.”

It was jarring witnessing one of my 3 sisters’ breaking down in tears as we shared breakfast together. I felt my heart rate escalate in readiness to do my automatic smooth things over. On this occasion however, I managed to restrain my impulse and join my others sisters in acknowledging her hurt. I could then observe how this gave her space to be in charge of what she needed to do for herself at that moment.

Let me explain the context. I was away for a rare weekend break with my 3 sisters in a charming rural setting outside of Sydney. We had relished a relaxed time of walking, chatting, reminiscing, laughing, country store shopping, and cooking up some great food to match our wine selections. On the Sunday morning I’d suggested listening to a pod cast and had randomly chosen one from a site I follow that linked to the theme of mother’s day (which coincided with our weekend). I had thought it might be interesting to reflect on our own mother, who we’d lost some 30+ years earlier; and I also hoped that this post would add some helpful Sunday faith reflection. The message went straight to interviews of mother’s talking about their deep intimate experience of their baby’s expressed love and dependence. For my dear sister, who has lived the complex heartache of infertility, this touched on a raw and deep grief; and through tears she asked that we stop the tape saying it was too painful for her to continue listening.

I immediately felt foolish and insensitive at my contribution to her upset. It would have been easy for me to try to compensate for this by lots of apologising and quickly moving the conversation and activity to something cheery. (This would have been the kind of apologising that was driven by wanting to feel better about myself as opposed to genuinely taking responsibility for wrong doing toward another.)  On this occasion I just stayed quite, along with my other sisters, and we listened to an honest insightful description from our sister of her living through extraordinarily challenging times. She was able to describe so many aspects of her life at the time which added an understanding of our whole family system and the different ways we were each impacted by the death of each of our parents while trying to make our way in our adult lives. It revealed her personal journey of coming to faith in the aftermath of suffering, providing a gift of encouragement that no online pod cast could have delivered. After a period of listening and learning I walked over to my sister and gave her a quiet hug. It had been a moment of connecting that would have been missed if any of us had tried to relieve and distract from the expression of pain and loss.

Our family has certainly shifted from our previous ways of dealing with distress. As we were growing up, the jolts of suffering and loss were minimised in an effort to keep going and to survive. As a family we closed up expressing our hurts and fears to each other and took the path of ‘soldiering on’. This happened in the face of grandparents’ deaths, the trauma of our house burning down and of our mother’s excruciating battle with terminal cancer. This closing up conversation in the face of upset was entrenched in the coping patterns of previous generations. It has taken its toll on each of us and our relationships in different ways.

As the years have been on fast forward to this sister’s gathering, I could appreciate that our family has made some genuine progress. To be able to tolerate the stirred up emotions of another’s upset and not respond in ways that swiftly shut it down is very different to the way we grew up. There are many times I see my immaturities when I’m with my original family but on this occasion, each sister contributed to a precious mature space where no one got in another’s way. It was a moment of intimacy and appreciation for the different experiences each has dealt with. The younger sister was trail blazing courageous honesty to her elders (yes elders in sibling position even though in reality our ages are so close we are peers). It was an opportunity for getting to know, at a deeper level, one of our siblings and to show love for each other that would not have been possible with the old pattern of smoothing over another’s distress. Our brother, as the youngest after 4 sisters (tough gig right?!), was in many ways the most vulnerable to the isolation that came from our closed communication about grief. As part of my effort with ALL my siblings, I need to keep working at becoming more open and honest in the way I relate with him.

The growing up lesson for me is to be aware of the old stress reducing family impulses, while at the same time, slowing down the reactions so that conversation can open up. For me it is not making it all about my embarrassment for upsetting another by self-protective apologies; on this occasion it was about learning from another as they had the space to truly express themselves.

__________________

Note: I sent this blog to the sister I have written about to as a check that I had represented the situation factually and was not inappropriately crossing privacy boundaries. Her feedback provided a few extra ideas that I included.

Questions for reflection

  • How was distress responded to in the family I grew up in?
  • To what extent did my family system allow open communication from each person about their response to difficult circumstances?
  • What are the signs of closed communication (shutting down, avoiding, distracting, smoothing over, taking over…) in my relationships?
  • How can I practice tolerating the tension in myself when another is expressing strong feelings?
  • Are there ways I am unknowingly preventing others from having the room to speak their experience? Or am I accommodating to others smoothing over my own expression of difficult times?

Relevant Quotes from Bowen:

“An open relationship system is one in which an individual is free to communicate a high percentage of inner thoughts, feelings, and fantasies to another who can reciprocate. No one ever has a completely open relationship with another, but it is a healthy state when a person can have one relationship in which a reasonable of openness is possible.” FTCP p 322

“The closed communication system is an automatic reflex to protect self from the anxiety in the other person., though most people say they avoid the taboo subjects to keep form upsetting the other person. “ p 322

“From family research we have learned that the higher the level of anxiety and symptoms in a family, the more the family members are emotionally isolated from each other. The greater the isolation, the lower the level of responsible communication between family members and the higher the level of irresponsible underground gossip about each other in the family and the confiding of secrets to those outside of the family.” P 291

 

“Making room for distress in relationships:  Reflections from a sisters weekend away” – Jenny Brown

A trip to hospital & the slow progress of learning to be vulnerable

Jenny Brown Bowen theory, Family, Family Systems Theory, Independence, Relationships , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 “Once an Overfunctioner,………….”

Help wantedI’m not that comfortable asking for help. In fact I struggle to really know when it’s appropriate to ask for help. I realise that I have an overdeveloped sense of independent coping and tend to minimise various life challenges and carry on as if I’m not affected. This is not a new discovery for me. When I first came across Bowen theory some 25 years ago I realised that I was attuned to helping others but not good at being vulnerable in my relationships. I have been consciously practicing sharing my needs and stressors with those close to me over the years. My progress is sometimes slow.

Last week I was booked into hospital for an overnight stay to have some minor surgery. It was not a life threatening issue and I was told that recovery would be quite fast. Hence, in my typical fashion, I minimised the effect of the experience and independently took myself to the hospital. When there were no taxis at the rank, I caught a bus and admitted myself in isolation. I had organised for my work administrator to collect me the next day as I didn’t see the need to disrupt my husband or other family member’s working days. Once in my hospital bed, with preparations for surgery commencing, I reflected on the inklings of stress arising. The nurse commented that my blood pressure was a little high, alerting me that my perceived sense of calm independence was not the true story according to my physiology. As I was wheeled up to the theatre area and greeted by the anaesthetist’s nurse I realised that this was bringing back the emotionally charged experience of my cancer surgery a few years earlier. I had underestimated the power of my memory system to evoke similar feelings of fragility and aloneness. At that moment I realised that my well-honed pattern of pseudo independent strength had once again been ruling the show and I resolved to ask my husband to come and be with me the following morning and take me home when I was all clear for discharge.

This pattern of being sensitive to others needs but under sensitive to my own has been shaped in my family relationships growing up. It is a common pattern that Bowen observed in his research and termed the “over and under functioning reciprocity”. It’s like a see-saw in relationships where one person steadies self through being strong and helpful and another by willingly being helped and advised. The downside in any relationship is the loss of mutuality of shared strength and weakness. One person assumes the stronger posture at the expense of another’s capacity to manage. My mother was a classic “overfunctioner” in her relationships and unwittingly helped train me to operate similarly; she would share her concerns for others but didn’t share any of her own feelings and personal experiences. In my teenage years we both talked about others needs but not our own. Even as she was dying of cancer in her 50s she didn’t know how to be vulnerable for fear of upsetting others; and conversely my father didn’t know how to respond with strong support. All families have variations of these functional postures where each person automatically adjusts what they express of themselves in response to their sensitivity to another. Examples are “the Panicker & the Soother”; “the Distancer & the Pursuer”; “the Problem Generator and Problem Solver”; “the Intense one and the Clown”. For me the posture of being strong and independent means that my stress goes underground and is not dealt with appropriately at the time. It also means that I don’t allow myself to fully experience the wonderful nurture of family and friends reaching out to support me in their own unique ways. For those close to me they are robbed of the space to develop their own empathic strength in our relationship.

I’m grateful that my recovery is going smoothly as predicted. I’m also pleased that I was able to at least let extended family members know about my surgery and I could appreciate the caring phone calls I received. It was soothing to draw from my husband’s strong presence and not leave the hospital as independently as I arrived; and it was just delightful to have a friend from my church community deliver a delicious meal to enjoy. I am resolved to do better at asking for and joyously receiving care; both for myself, for the benefit of the important people in my life and for the growth of our relationships.

Questions for reflection:

• Do I tend to assume a posture of strength or neediness in my important relationships?

• What is the effect of this on the relationship?

• When things were stressful in my family growing up did I tend to collapse/struggle and/or distance or did I step into the over responsible, fixing position? What can I recall was the way other family member’s responded?

• What aspect of myself do I need to consciously practice expressing in my relationships – my capacity to manage or my struggles?

Quotes from M Bowen (family Therapy in Clinical practice):

The “emotional process” is deep …It runs silently beneath the surface between people who have very close relationships.” P 66

“Overadequate refers to a functioning façade of strength that is greater than realistic. Inadequacy refers to a functioning façade of helplessness that is as unrealistic as the façade of strength is unrealistic in the other direction.” P 53

“One of the most important aspects of family dysfuction is an equal degree of overfunction in another part of the family system. It is factual that dysfunctioning and over functioning exist together.” P 155

“When the therapist (helper) allows him/herself to become a “healer” or “repairman,” the family (or individual) goes into dysfunction to wiat for the therapist to accomplish his/her work.” P 157-8

 

‘A trip to hospital & the slow progress of learning to be vulnerable’ – Jenny Brown