Healing and Emotional Process in Society

In my thirties, following a career in modern dance and then interior design, I became a stay-at-home mom. After a few years I began looking for something I could do for a little income and to keep me engaged with other adults. At that time massage therapy was emerging as an accredited profession with training and a state license required to practice. I attended a 14-month intensive training. I learned about every muscle, ligament, tendon, and bone in the body, how they moved and worked together. I learned about facia and connective tissue and the idea of referred pain. Sometimes when one has pain in the body the origin of that pain is elsewhere in the body, carried along the facia like a snag in a sweater that runs to a different area. The body communicates in amazing ways and as a massage therapist I loved to follow the path of pain and alleviate it.

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Reflections on Societal Regression

Murray Bowen’s unique contribution to the science of human behavior was his ability to observe family interaction and to describe the underlying emotional process that governs all families to varying degrees.  He went on to describe an analogous emotional process in societies and introduced the concept of emotional regression: “When a family is subjected to chronic, sustained anxiety, the family begins to lose contact with its intellectually-determined principles, to resort more and more to emotionally determined decisions to allay the anxiety of the moment. …The societal concept postulates that the same process is evolving in society.”  (Bowen 1978, 386)

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The Caste System and The Emotional System

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste:  The origins of our discontents, is a hard book.  Her words confront us with a hard truth about human behavior:  that humans are capable of imposing extreme cruelty and suffering on other humans and have done so at many points in history.  With brilliant writing and thorough research on three caste systems–American slavery and its aftermath, Nazi Germany, and the millennia-long caste system of India–she traces the forces that drive human behavior to destructive extremes.

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Welcome to a New Year of Opportunity

The new year and new decade present us, our families and our nation with “necessary, serious, and great things,” some which have not been faced before.  Can we bring to it the wisdom we need to transcend our differences and build the cooperation that these times require?

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Violence in Society

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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From Family to Society: The Broad Scope of Bowen Systems Thinking

“From Family to Society: The Broad Scope of Bowen Systems Thinking” was the subject of the Center for Family Consultation Summer Conference held in Oak Park on July 20, 2018. Dr. Katharine Gratwick Baker, a scholar of Bowen Family Systems Theory and historian, was the presenter. Dr. Baker has a PhD in Social Work and an MA in Russian History.

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Reacting to a Racist Family Member

Authored by John Bell, M. Div.

As I followed the news about Charlottesville, I came across a story of a family coming to grips with the revelation that their son participated in the organized rally of white nationalists.  I’ve decided not to reprint their names.  The story is about a father who published a letter online in response to his son’s participation in the rally.  In the letter, the father repudiates the son’s beliefs and behavior.  The father tells the son that he is not welcomed …

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