The Systems Thinker - Center for Family Consultation's blog

Thoughts for Thanksgiving 2024

Authored by Terri Pilarski, M.Div., M.S.W.

Thanksgiving may be the one holiday that everyone can celebrate. It is an invitation to be grateful for all of life’s blessings. Well, everyone except Indigenous peoples who may prefer not to, all things considered. When I lived in Dearborn, Michigan, Thanksgiving was a big deal. It was common for the interfaith community to hold an interfaith worship service on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. We would all gather in one of the various houses of worship, a church or a mosque, and worship in English and Arabic, with Christian texts and readings from the Quran. And some time in that week, usually Sunday night, we would all share a big holiday meal of giving thanks. The events were spirit-filled, honing our sense of gratitude for the rich diversity of our community life. They were also a lot of work. Any time a group of people holding different values and beliefs gathers for a shared event there are challenges and also moments of joy.

As an Episcopal priest and a student of Bowen theory for thirty years I am familiar with the effort to manage one’s self when one is in the midst of people who are very different from one’s self. I have spent nearly a decade studying and learning about intercultural partnerships and how to create opportunities for meaningful relationships in and between differences. I’ve come to value the idea that it is the differences that make a difference.

In most of our relationships, human beings seek out and nurture relationships with people who think alike. Bowen wrote about togetherness, and of the often found comfort in being together. Yet there is a cost to this as well. This year, if what I am reading on social media is an accurate reflection of people in this country, Thanksgiving may be an anxious event. Many family members are split from one another over the outcome of the recent presidential election. Some people have intentionally decided not to celebrate Thanksgiving with family members who hold an opposing political position to their own. Others will celebrate the holiday together, knowing that the effort to manage oneself will be all the more intense.

Murray Bowen encouraged himself and those who are practicing the theory to enter into these family occasions. They are opportunities to learn more about one’s self and to practice, in particular, the effort to define self while staying connected to significant others. The challenge is to observe the family effort to maintain emotional equilibrium. Cutoff is one way that family members function to maintain the emotional equilibrium of the family system. Cutoff, which is an automatic response to anxiety, is managed by members of the family through physical and/or emotional distance. Increased awareness of the automatic processes in the family emotional system allows one to be slightly more capable of making conscious choices for how one wants to define one’s self and be in relationship with others.  Michael Kerr writes in the footnotes on page 173 of Family Evaluation, that “Emotional distance, whether maintained by physical avoidance or by some form of internal withdrawal, is not ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If an individual cannot control his reactions to another person, and if the reactions are intense, he must distance from that person to control himself.”

Thanksgiving is, on the one hand, a holiday for everyone to celebrate. A time of coming together and giving thanks. Author Diana Butler Bass wrote in Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks, “Gratitude is not about stuff. Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence, to sensing that inner light and realizing the astonishing sacred, social, and scientific events that brought each one of us into being. Gratitude is complicated. Sometimes gratitude feels like payback or a reward for behavior. But, when gratitude is a mutual reliance upon shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence.”

On the other hand, there is the potential that this Thanksgiving will be more anxious than previous family gatherings. Gratitude and giving thanks may be elusive and seemingly impossible. Cutoff may feel like the best option, considering the intensity of emotion in individuals and society. No doubt there can be benefits to staying present, defining self and remaining in contact with important other people in one’s life. It is sometimes exhausting, but well worth the effort. Making the effort to bridge a cut-off is a process that occurs through time. It provides one with information about self and others, which enables one to respect the differences, thereby reducing some tension in the system.

However one chooses to spend this Thanksgiving, whether alone, or with people who feel comfortable and easy, or with those with whom the effort will be more intense, may there be moments of gratitude and giving thanks.

References:

Bowen, Murray.  Family Therapy in Clinical Practice: 1978, A Jason Aronson Book, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Kerr, Michael E.  Bowen Theory’s Secrets:  2019, W.W. Norton and Company

Bass, Diana Butler. Grateful: 2018, Harper One, an imprint of Harper Collins

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