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Peter L. Steinke

5/13/2018

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My introduction into Bowen Family Systems Theory came through Rev. Peter Steinke.  It was at a workshop in Madison, WI around the time his second book Healthy Congregations was published.  I attended the conference at the invitation of a staff member of my annual conference.  

As a not-quite-ordained pastor, fresh out of seminary, the ideas and concepts Steinke presented made sense.  He gave language to a reality I knew intuitively.  I remember writing down the phrase, "Good leadership rises above the anxiety of the group."  I carried it around with me for months.  That one simple phrase propelled me into twenty years of learning Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Peter Steinke was a "student" of Rabbi Ed Friedman.  In the preface to the 2006 reprint of the How Your Church Family Works (originally published in 1993), Steinke writes, "In 1991, I asked him (Friedman) why he didn't abridge his book Generation to Generation and write a short version of it so that it could be available to more people.  He saw no need to do it since the book had had multiple printings.  'You,' he said to me, 'could write the short version.' With his encouragement, I contacted the Alban Institute and How Your Church Family Works was written."

I learned a few years go, at a conference attended by Steinke and hosted by the group Voyagers that Steinke's initial exposure to theory was through Ron Richardson.

After attending the Madison conference, I read all of Steinke's published works.  Soon after receiving a flyer in the mail from a local organization, I attended a Healthy Congregation seminar based on the writings of Steinke.  I'll save the rest of the story for another blog post.

Like the other authors I've highlighted (see the last two blog posts), it's impossible to find just one section of Steinke's writings to represent his works.  I selected an excerpt from his first book, How Your Church Family Works.  As I've read Steinke, and listened to him speak over the years, I've been struck by his desire to connect theology and systems thinking.  

This excerpt is taken from the last chapter, "Believing and Belonging" and the section on "Response and Recovery."  He writes:
"Systems theory provides no magical answers," Murray Bowen remarks, "but it does provide a different way of conceptualizing human problems."  We learn that in relationship we do not act completely on our own "steam."  Nor do we always express ourselves, simply because of our "nature."  Environment is always an influence. "It is the context," Gregory Bateson contends, "that fixes meaning."  We are constantly influencing the behaviors of others and likewise being influenced by them.  Looking at what takes place between people, we observe the reciprocal influences and the mutual reinforcement of functioning positions.  This does not mean that there is no sense of individual responsibility.  If anything, system thinking elevates the need to be responsible. Individually, we decide who will or will not be allowed in our personal space, what we will stand for and what will not be tolerated, and how far or close the sphere of influence will be negotiated.  Being responsible, for example, we set our own limits, not someone else's.  We regulate our own anxiety rather than assigning it to others in the form of criticisms or fault-finding.  We look at how we can change ourselves instead of how we can force or manipulate others to make changes in themselves.  This is more than psychology.  It goes to the very core of creation theology, that we are created to be responsible creatures.  One of the words that church has used to distinguish responsible living is "stewardship."  A stewards is a  manager of what is given.  Our primary responsibility is the management of our own life and the relationships we form - anxiety and all.

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Edwin H. Friedman

5/6/2018

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For me, Rabbi Friedman was like the Apostle Paul.  There were things he wrote that I came to love and appreciate, there were things he wrote that I struggled to understand and things he wrote I think differently about.  How true this is of every relationship!

It took time to read through all of Ed's publications looking for an excerpt to share.  Each of the books is filled with my handwritten scribbles and notes.  The books and my notations represent my early adventures (Ed liked that word) into systems thinking.  

Generation to Generation was his most famous publication.  There were others.  Published in 1985, it became for many clergy their first introduction into systems thinking, family systems and Bowen Family Systems Thinking.  

I've chosen his essay, The Myth of the Shiksa, which is published in a book by the same name.  The essay was written around 1981, before there were personal computers, which is evident in Ed's use of the phrase "word processor."  The essay was important to me at a time when I was examining this cultural phenomena in my family.  I found Ed's thinking useful in seeing how the emotional process can hijack cultural identity.  Ed used the word "camouflage" to explain how a family's use of cultural identity made the emotional process difficult to see. 

I recommend to you the forward of the book written by Ed's daughter Shira Friedman Bogart.  I never met Ed in person (although I'd seen him on video).  Shira's reflection on her relationship with her father is insightful.

This excerpt below is taken from page 88:
In this essay on the relationship between culture and family process in the formation of Jewish identity, I tried to explain the failure of the emphasis on cultural content to produce a stronger identity.  I suggested that such content could be compared to the fuel needed to run a motor, but that we could not make a vehicle go forward by simply filling it with gas if the "transmission" was in neutral, let alone reverse.  When the emotional system is ignored and the focus remains on cultural content, communication has the effect of typing a message on a word processor when the power has been turned off.  When it comes to changing families, since all families are supplied by their culture with an infinite variety of rationalizations for their behavior, a focus on values and ideological positions is often just another from of displacement.  To offer reasonable alternatives to such positions, therefore, is once again only to conspire in the family's denial of its emotional process.

It has been my experience in working with families of all backgrounds that rather than values or reasons, power is the most forceful agent of change.  This is not the power of conquest and domination but rather the strength to get enough distance from the anxiety maelstrom whirling around us to think out our own values, whether or not they coincide with values from our own background, to define them clearly, and then to have the strength to hold that position against the efforts of others to change us back.  In other words, the most powerful agent of change comes more out of a focus on our own values than on trying to define the values of others.  

Therefore the widespread but erroneous belief that expressed values are the cause of family members' positions and that, therefore, change in a given family member's functioning can be brought about by appealing to or changing those values, simply escalates anxiety and resistance on both sides.  For it encourages a process wherein each side is perpetually trying to define, convince, change, and, therefore, convert the other.
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    John Bell is the thinker behind Thinking Congregations.  As a thought partner he believes the best way forward is for leaders to do their best thinking.

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