The Family Leader

Post Date November 11, 2019
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Category Leadership, Stephanie Ferrera

Leaders are often described in terms of their individual characteristics:  special talents or knowledge, confidence, charisma, organizing ability and especially the ability to excite others around an important mission.  Some are “born leaders” and others work at developing leadership skills.  Leadership and followership are reciprocal functions in human systems. Leadership training programs abound, but I know of none on followership training which may be equally important.  One cannot lead if no one follows.

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“Forward” to Death and Chronic Illness in the Family: Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives

Post Date May 31, 2019
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Death & Chronic Illness, Family Emotional Process, Grief & Mourning, Robert J. Noone

The consideration of death, especially of one’s own mortality, has been a preoccupation of the human since the evolution of the wondrous primate brain allowed for the awareness of the future and so of one’s end. The reality of death is never far from consciousness. Along with the effort to understand life and how it came to be, the human has struggled to comprehend death and its meaning. It is a subject many seek to avoid considering and yet in one form or another it influences our daily lives.

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Violence in Society

Post Date February 22, 2019
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Chronic Anxiety, John Bell, Societal Emotional Process, Societal Regression

Following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz killed seventeen people and wounded seventeen more, I found myself in a conversation (really a debate) with a gun rights advocate. I’m grateful for the conversation because it helped clarify my thinking about gun violence and violence in general.

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Looking at Marriage: Seeing One’s Own Part

Post Date September 18, 2018
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Differentiation of Self, Emotional Triangles, Family Emotional Process, Stephanie Ferrera

The husband had a way of erupting emotionally that led his wife to call him “the volcano.” He pursued; she distanced; he pursued more rigorously. Her way of retreating, seemingly impervious to his needs, led him to call her “the sphinx.” At times of high stress, this pattern left this truly devoted couple in considerable distress, he feeling shut out, she feeling pressured. They found their own language—volcano, sphinx—as a step to observing their reciprocal functioning and eventually to seeing the absurdity and humor in it.

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The “Techniques” of Bowen Theory and Therapy

Post Date March 29, 2018
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Sydney K. Reed

Authored by Sydney K. Reed, M.S.W.

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines technique as “the method or details of procedure essential to the expertness of execution in any art, science.”  At CFC’s last Clinical Application of Bowen Family Theory and Therapy conference a participant, after seeing the video presentation of a Kerr/Bowen interview talking about differentiation of self, asked if there were techniques we could provide to learn how to do this.  I replied that without an understanding of theory, techniques would be useless and might fail. I …

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