For the next few weeks, I'll be featuring excerpts from authors who have applied Bowen Family Systems Theory to congregational systems and leadership.  We begin with Ron Richardson who was the first faith leader to write a book about Dr. Murray Bowen's theory of human behavior.  Creating a Healthier Church (1996), while not his first book, was an important contribution to  faith communities.

The following excerpt is taken from page 182-183:

Clergy and congregational leaders play an important role in supporting families before a funeral.  There is variation in the way families prepare for a funeral service.  Some families need more support than others.  When someone dies, families have an opportunity to step up their level of functioning.  Clergy can learn to do a better job of managing their anxiety and not overfunction for others.
 
I see variation in the ability of families to plan a service.  Some families, because of the leadership of one or two individuals, have a clear idea of what needs to happen and are open to the ideas of others.  On rare occasions, the one who dies leaves behind ideas for the service.  Other families struggle to pick hymns and scripture readings.  When families struggle, it’s tempting for clergy to overfunction.
 
My practice (when meeting with the family to plan a service) was to invite family members to tell stories about the person who died.  This experience, common for most clergy, was therapeutic for families and provided me information for the sermon.  As one family member after another talked, I’d take copious notes of the stories, themes, and images they shared.  By the end of the conversation, I’d gathered enough information to give a sermon and a eulogy.  My notes would include important life principle, beliefs and favorite activities.  Some family members would volunteer to speak.  But most families were fine with me pulling it all together for them.  Back at the office, I’d work my preaching magic to weave together a meaningful and memorable message about the person’s life.  I was really good at it. 
 
A few years ago, I faced the reality that I was sharing stories about people I didn’t know personally.  It’s common for pastors to preside over the funeral of someone they don't know.  People don’t wait for you to get to know them before they die.  Although in one congregation, a member insisted I meet her the week I arrived because she was convinced she was going to die.  She did not want a stranger officiating at her funeral!  She lived for many more years and was still alive when I left.  Sometimes clergy are invited to officiate at the funeral of a spouse of a member who didn’t attend church.  I addressed these realities by being clear about my relationship to the person and acknowledging that there are family and friends who knew them better than I did. 
 
Eventually, I came to the realization that in my sermon/eulogy I was telling stories that belonged to other people.  The stories were their stories to tell, not mine.  So, I quit this practice.  I began to invite family members to speak at the funeral service.  The response was varied.  Then and now, their responses fall into two categories.
 
In the first category, families can identify with ease individuals to speak.  In the other group, families struggle to find one person to give a eulogy.  I encourage families to find at least one person to speak about their relationship with the person who died.  More if possible.  People vary in how they use their time. Some people talk directly about their relationship with the person who died.  They share experiences and insights into the relationship.  Other people become a “spokesperson” for the family, collecting stories and experiences to share.  That was the role I stopped playing.
 
For my part, the focus of my sermon is to articulate what I know and don’t know about death and the mysteries of life.  If I have a relationship with the person who died, I talk about it but avoid making comments from other relationship angles.  The sermon includes observations of the strengths of the family as they come together to support one another.  I speak about the intersection of faith, life and death with an effort to be as clear as I can.  Each funeral is an opportunity to clarify these things and to learn how to sit with questions and the mysteries of life. 
 
My observation after doing this project for several years is that families do better, especially family members who stand up and speak about their relationship with the person who has died.  Speakers have little trouble making it through the service.  There is some variation but, in general, it’s true.  One might want to debate that those who agree to speak already have the capacity to speak.  I’ve observed individuals, who were resistant to speaking, even struggling for a day or two with what to say, come around and speak at the funeral with what I would call ease.  I originally found this observation to be counter-intuitive.
 
Funerals have new meaning for me.  They are an opportunity to define a self.  Inevitably families push back at the invitation to speak.  Some resist and try to pressure me into reading what other people write, asking me to be the spokesperson for the family.  I evaluate these requests on a case by case basis.  There have been times, not very often, when I’ve agreed to it when the circumstances call for it.  Typically, though, families can identify at least one person (sometimes in the extended family) who will speak about their relationship with the person who has died.  My observation is that families get more out of these eulogies. 
 
The shift in my focus has been a worthwhile challenge.  When I don’t know the person who has died (and so I don't speak about them), it’s an opportunity to clarifying my thinking about death and dying which has not been easy.  I can do a good job pretending I know something about death.  Opportunities to think about death, life, faith and relationships have given me a place to stand as I engage my family about these important issues. 
 
At the end of the day, it’s about responsibility.  What is a pastor or congregational leader responsible for at a funeral?  How do clergy overfunction in the face of the anxiety and grief in a family?  How does overfunctioning undercut the functioning of others during the grieving process?  What are the benefits and challenges of being clear about what one is willing to do and not willing to do?  These are questions I’ve considered?  What questions come to your mind?

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. 
 
In response to the Las Vegas shooting on October 1, 2017, when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers killing 58 people and wounding 851, I started to write a blog post to clarify my thinking about gun violence.  I ended up deleting it.  At the time, I was struggling to articulate my understanding of how humans become violent. 
 
I’ve written other blogs about violence in society: Understanding Violence, Reacting to a Racist Family Member, Can Understanding the Family and Chronic Anxiety Make for Better Policing?, and Fear and the Criminal Justice System.  With this post, I’m a little clearer in my thinking, but I’ll let you be the judge of it (you can comment below).
 
Guns have become a polarizing issue in the United States.  The debate teeters between the rights of individuals and the rights of society.  To what extent can a community negate individual rights?  Or do individual rights superseded (can’t use the word trump anymore) the rights of a population?  Whose rights create better outcomes for society?  One says, “The government does not have the right to take away my guns!  Individual rights protect a democracy.”  Another says,  “Guns are dangerous to society!  Individuals do not have the right to possess them.  Guns are not good for society.”    
 
An interesting development in the debate is the shift to mental health.  Gun rights advocates make the point, “Clearly, anyone who would kill a group of kids is not ‘normal.’”  Whatever normal means.  This focus on pathology and an effort to identify individuals who are potentially dangerous is an effort to sway societal rights advocate away from a focus on guns towards mental illness.  The shift in focus to pathology has gained minimal traction and for a good reason.  The focus on pathology in the mental health field is not working.  People know it, although perhaps not at a conscious level yet.  Bowen Family Systems Theory provides a different way to think about the problem.  It begins with a focus on relationship systems and emotional process.
 
People are becoming increasingly isolated.  Neighbors no longer know their neighbors.  Families no longer work together to solve neighborhood problems.  As a child, I remember an episode where an older teenage boy in our neighborhood intentionally damaged personal property. The families involved got together to address and correct the behavior.  Today, neighborhood problems are passed on to police, the courts, schools, community organizations, health departments, municipalities, and the press.   When neighbors are less isolated and work together, they rely less on institutions for help.  They can solve their problems. 
 
Instead of resourcing families and neighborhoods, institutions have perpetuated problems.  The closer an institution gets to a problem, the more they encounter the intense anxiety in the family.  As institutions absorb the anxiety, it spreads throughout the organization and is handed back to families and neighborhoods at an equal or higher level of reactivity.  For example, police departments, experiencing pressure from community leaders to do better, blame other community stakeholders for not doing their part in solving community problems.  Schools, dealing with an increase in problematic behavior, push back and blame families who are not being held accountable for the behavior of their children.  Families who take a helpless position will demand that their school do better in addressing the problematic behavior.  Back and forth goes the reactivity like a hot potato.  Each is blaming the other for not doing more to address the problem. 
 
When people blame others and are reactive, it indicates a high level of distancing and cutoff.  As anxiety goes up and tension increases in the relationship system, if an effort to change the other does not work (which it rarely does) people will do the opposite which is to distance and cutoff.  This movement exasperates the original problem as leaders are no longer in good emotional contact to problem solve, adapt and work on being flexible.  Isolation is a problem because it reduces access to resources and good thinkers in a community.
 
Not much is known about the family of Nikolas Cruz.  We do know that both of his adoptive parents died.  His father died when he was little, and his mother died three months before the shooting (the blog photo is of mother and Nikolas).  Reports indicate that the mother struggled for years to address Mr. Cruz's behavior.  We do know that after the adoptive mother's death, Mr. Cruz had difficulty deciding on where to live, bouncing between family and friends.  Bowen Theory indicates that behavioral problems, like the ones displayed by Mr. Cruz, would be related to the level of cutoff and isolation in the family (particularly for Mr. Cruz), the level of chronic anxiety in the family and the current challenges being presented to the family (like the death of a family member).  But whether any of this applies to Mr. Cruz specifically is purely speculation at this point. 
 
Researchers like Steve Cole, John Capitanio, John Cacioppo and Stephen Suomi have studied the effects of isolation on humans.  Their research has pioneered a new way of thinking about behavior.  Under chronic levels of stress, the bodies inflammatory response system remains elevated.  Researchers have shown a connection between a heightened level of stress, increased levels of inflammation and physical and psychological challenges present in the human body.  Physical challenges, like colds, diseases, and cardiovascular problems, are connected to elevated levels of inflammation which is a result of experienced isolation.  Psychological challenges, like anxiety disorders, depression, aggressive actions, substance abuse and PTSD, are also related to chronic levels of inflammation and the experience of isolation.
 
What remains to be seen is how committing a violent act is connected to higher levels of inflammation.  If this is the case, then the perception (or reality) of being isolate would play a significant role in making one vulnerable to committing acts of violence.  Killing self or others is the ultimate form of isolation and cutoff. 
 
This makes sense when one considers the fact that higher levels of tension in the family results in distancing and cutoff.  When chronic anxiety in the family remains elevated over time, the relationship between parent and child is difficult to manage as each tries to offload the anxiety to the other by blaming them for problems in the family.  When tension in the relationship system moves beyond the ability of the family to access available resources, someone will get hurt (violence), or someone may leave (cutoff) or both.  This family pattern of distancing and cutoff remains in place and is replicated in subsequent relationships. 
 
There are factors that influence cutoff in the family that come from outside of the family.  Increases in population, a decrease in resources, worry about the planet, national and international tensions and other societal pressures raise the level of anxiety in the family, particularly those facing significant challenges. 
 
How can institutions, like the church, take a more responsible position in resourcing individuals and families who are overwhelmed?  What opportunities are available to strengthen families and encourage them to take a more active leadership role in addressing family problems?  How might institutional leaders function differently to be more responsible for their part of the problem?  How might connecting families in neighborhoods help strengthen individual families and their efforts to do better?

​What questions or solutions come to your mind?

All experiences are technically memories.  Your phone rings.  You hear it but only a millisecond or two after it rings. That’s the amount of time it takes for sound to travel through time and space to your ear and then travel from your ear to your brain.  Don’t forget it takes time for the brain to identify the sound from memory or to label it as a new sound.  Either way, the interaction with my memory lets me know, “My cell phone is ringing.”  Just because this process is quick (the quickest of the senses) doesn’t mean it’s free from error.  In fact, our perceptions (a combination of senses and processed memory) can betray us.  This raises the question, “When you think you're right, how do you know when you’re wrong?”
 
Not a day goes by that I don’t run into this problem with perception.  I remember an event differently than someone else.  I heard something different than what was intended.  I clearly articulate a point that is not understood by someone else.  I interpreted someone’s actions inaccurately.  I know I'm not alone.  All humans struggle with perception.  
 
The challenge of seeing the world as it is, not how we want or wish it would be, is a humbling and confusing process.  Humbling in the sense that I’d like to think my perception of the world is always on point.  Confusing in the sense that if my perceptions are skewed, how then do I engage the world (and those who live in it)?  How do I know when my perceptions are accurate?  How often am I accurate?  Can I ever be confident that the way I perceive the world is accurate?  How do I know when I’m wrong if I think I’m always right?
 
 
Language
 
Language is a good example of how memory and perception alter reality.  Language is symbolic, so words mean different things to different people.  At a recent city hall meeting, a white alderman referred to the renewal date of a city policy as “sundown.”  In the African-American community, “sundown” is a reference to something completely different.  It refers to the discriminative practices of a local government to arrest and mistreat African-Americans who remain in “white” cities after sunset. 
 
Words matter.  So do efforts that clearly define the usage of a word.  Humans are social creatures and language is essential to collaboration.  What does it take to describe the world accurately?  What are the challenges of using language to describe reality accurately? 
 
 
Those Crazy “Flat-Earthers” And Other Scientific Matters
 
Before the time of Socrates, scientists have understood the earth to be round.  And yet, the flat earth theory lives on, even experiencing something of a resurgence.  The earth cannot be flat and round at the same time.  It is, however, possible to perceive it as either flat or round.   So, what is real?  If you are convinced the earth is round, how do you know you are right?  I, too, believe the earth is round.  But my point is this.  When you believe you're right about the natural world, how do you know when you're wrong?  You may think those flat-earthers are crazy but what’s different about them?  To what extent are you free of the perceptive problems inherent to all human experience? 
 
 
Issues of faith
 
While issues of faith are sacred, people of faith categorize beliefs into two categories: crazy beliefs and reasonable beliefs.  It’s easy for people of faith (and even those who have no religious affiliation) to point the finger at the Jonestown Massacre and declare that their faith was misplaced.  Even, perhaps, crazy.  However, we all profess faith in something.  Granted, a “reasonable” faith (whatever that is) may not ask you to follow blindly into death.  But many faiths require the faithful to make a sacrifice.  What makes one faith expression right and another wrong?  How do you know that your faith holds the “truth” and  others do not?  When you know you are right about the way you see the world, how do you know when you are wrong?
 
And it’s not just an issue between faith communities.  Within communities, denominations, etc., people disagree about interpretation and the requirements for faithful participation.  When you believe your interpretation and practice are right, how do you know when you get it wrong?
 
 
The Force For Togetherness
 
Facts can get washed away in the sea of emotional process.  My desire to be connected with other important people and to participate in a meaningful relationship system can skew my ability to experience reality accurately.  Dr. Murray Bowen had an amazing way of articulating how our thinking system can be overridden by our feeling system.  In this way, the need to agree (to be fused together) outweighs the need to be accurate.  It can work the opposite way as well.  People who are too close will disagree about what’s real to create distance between them.  It is less about being accurate and more about managing the anxiety in self and in the relationship system.
 
The emotional process is driven by fear.  One-way the relationship system addresses a perceived fear is through a strongly articulated position that demands compliance by others.  You are either with us or against us.  We are right, and they are wrong.  They are the devil, and we hold the truth from God.  Horrible things have happened in the name of religion and science in response to perceived fears.  War, research and public policy that made sense at the time was based on inaccurate perceptions.  Again, when you know you're right, how do you know when you're wrong?
 
So, how do we align perception with reality?  It’s a process.  One that takes time, often years.  It is what Dr. Bowen called an effort towards differentiation of self.  It's the ability to see what “is” while staying connected to meaningful others.  For me, I’m clear about a couple of things.  You can call them beliefs and core principles.  I base my actions on them.  When I’m afraid or am surrounded by people who are afraid, these beliefs and principles guide me.  It may not be much, but it helps me get through the day.