"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.

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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