The Importance of Not Being Earnest
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

11/16/03

“If we assume that any chronic condition that we are persistently trying to change will, perversely, be supported not to change by our serious efforts to bring about change, then it is logical to consider the possibility that one way out of this paradox is to be paradoxical.” —Rabbi Edwin Friedman

Reading

Our reading this morning is a fable by Rabbi Edwin Friedman entitled “Panic”

There was a row of dominoes standing equidistant in a long, narrow line that circled back onto itself. Since the distance between them was shorter by half than their length, all knew that if ever one lost its balance, all would have trouble keeping theirs.

Now and then, something happened that made them shake, and some seemed more tipsy than others, but no force that touched them ever went beyond each one’s ability to rebalance, and the dreaded, unstoppable chain reaction, which each knew it was powerless to reverse, never began.

But one day it happened. It was number 10101. Number 10101 teetered, shook, pivoted on its corner, righted itself, and then fell flat against its neighbor.

Its neighbor, 10100, was taken so unawares that it immediately fell against its neighbor, and that sequence repeated itself at least several hundred times before all the dominoes recognized the malignant state of their condition. As the process continued, some gave in without a fight. Others pretended it wasn’t happening. A few became so anxious that they fell over before it was their time, so that, here and there, the tipping was being replicated in more than one place along the line.

Wherever the original tumbling order reached such a point, it momentarily appeared to stop. But the process went right on, continued by the secondary pattern. Actually, the dominoes had accelerated the process by quantum leaps.

As the wave persistently moved on, each domino mobilized all its energy to hold up or push back its falling neighbor. But it was to no avail! The continuing felling force was just too much for each individual domino’s own weight and size. In addition, the very nature of their existence worked against them. To hold one neighbor up would have been difficult enough, but to fight the accumulating momentum was out of the question.

The attitude of those that remained standing was pretty uniform. Each asked itself what it could do to fight this plague-like process proceeding inexorably toward them. Some tried to calculate the power in ergs of energy as against the rest mass of their own weight. Others wondered if perhaps some aerodynamic innovation could be conceived to drag this juggernaut to a halt. Still others considered the possibility that they could help their neighbors stem the tide if they could bring their own strength to greater, hitherto unimagined, peaks. And several thought of sacrificing themselves for the greater good by falling before their turn, in the misguided hope that by such action they would in effect create a “fire-line”, whose gap the coming conflagration could not bridge.

But inevitability prevailed, and it was becoming increasingly hopeless to think that anything could arrest the course of these events before they reached their natural termination, when, suddenly, things stopped.

Indeed, they stopped with such resounding force and suddenness that at first the cumulative energy, redirected, created a backlash. A ricochet occurred that actually reversed the process, but without lessening its destructive effects. At some point the dominoes began to go in the other direction, straightening up again, only to fall the other way. This continued at the same rate as in the previous direction, past the starting point, running right through the original 10101, and mowing down the remainder of those previously untouched, until, once again, the last one fell against the other side of the domino that had not gone down. Again the process abruptly reversed itself, now in the original direction. But, somewhat spent, the energy being expended was just enough to push each, in succession, into an upright position without bowling it over.

This verse and converse occurred so fast, however, that before any of the dominoes had time to consider what had happened, all were standing once again, erect, quivering here and there, but basically stable.

Eventually all began to focus on the point where things had turned. What had happened? Which one had stopped the pernicious process and how? At that spot all that could be seen was a domino no different in size, or shape, or weight, or color, or density, or any visible characteristic. Nor was there any prosthesis or other artifice present to prop it up or reinforce its strength. The entire line was agog; slowly each began to realize what it owed to this one member of their community.

“But how did you do it?” they all wanted to know. “What formula did you use to check it? What did you understand about its nature? How did you calculate the proper measure? What did you see that we didn’t?” the others all asked.

“I’m not sure what the difference was,” said the domino that had not been dominoed. “All I can say is that while each of you kept trying to hold your neighbor up, my concern was that I did not go down.”

The moral of this story is “Put your own oxygen mask on first.”

Sermon

In light of the fact that we are together today on the cusp of another holiday season, a time when many of us will gather with our extended families…a time when we cannot help but be acutely aware of all the joy and trauma that familial relationships can bring, I have chosen to ground my sermon this morning in Dr. Murray Bowen’s Family Systems theory. I have been a student of Bowen theory since theological school and have found its principles helpful in countless ways. In fact, I consider my continued study of Bowen theory and attempts to incorporate its concepts into my life to be an important part of my spiritual practice because it leads me to better understand the oftentimes-baffling nature of human relationships and my participation in them. It is my hope, then, that my examination of some aspects of Bowen theory this morning will help you to reflect on your relationships in all the families of your lives.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bowen theory, here’s a thumbnail sketch. Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist who, before he died in 1990, spent over forty years developing a theory of human behavior that sought to objectively describe human interaction not as it should or could be, but as it is. Bowen saw that the predominant way people tried to understand human behavior was based in human subjectivity—one person’s experience interpreted by that person…and sometimes by the person’s therapist--an approach based in the belief that the basic unit of emotional functioning is the individual. If an individual has a problem, the traditional belief says, there is undoubtedly an individual to blame: one’s mother, or father, or sibling, or self. Bowen sought to escape this inherently subjective, cause-and-effect, symptom-based approach, believing that it was too centered on blame and guilt and that it obscured the inherent strength and resilience of the human animal. The theory he developed, then, took the emphasis off the individual, and focused instead on the entire family as an emotional unit, as a system where each individual member holds a functioning position and contributes to the working of the whole.

Bowen believed that even if a problem or symptom is evident in only one person, an emphasis on “fixing” or “helping” that person alone would always be misguided, for the whole system—meaning the entire multi-generational family itself and not just a single individual—has inevitably contributed to and enabled any symptom that emerges. In other words, the system must change in order for the symptom to be alleviated.

Bowen theory can sometimes be a little difficult to get one’s mind around, mostly because it is so beyond the pale of how we typically view our family relationships. When we think about our own families, whether they be our families of origin, or our church, work, or school families, most of us can point to a member or two, or a group of members, who we perceive to be the source of most of the family’s problems. Bowen theory contends that this impulse to diagnose symptomatic family members actually increases the family’s anxiety and limits its repertoire of responses to stressful situations because it leads individual members to focus too much on the functioning of others and away from considering their own functioning in the system…the only thing over which they have any real control…and therefore, the only means by which they can expect to bring about meaningful change.

Bowen theory contends that the primary factor in a family’s ability to handle conflict or crisis is the degree to which the members are self-differentiated, or the degree to which the members can define their own life goals and values as separate from the other family members. The more differentiated a person is, the greater her capacity to say “I” when others surrounding her are saying “you” and “we.” The more differentiated a person is, the greater his capacity to maintain a non-anxious presence in the midst of an anxious system, or the degree to which he can take responsibility for his own destiny and emotional well-being even in the face of panic or crisis. Self-differentiation is not the same thing as narcissism or even simple autonomy. And differentiation is not a willingness to remove oneself from the family system when things aren’t going one’s way. On the contrary, differentiation is the ability to maintain one’s status as an individual while still remaining connected to the system.

Every human could be placed somewhere along a self-differentiation continuum. Where each of us lands is, in large part, a product of where our extended families…going back generations in time…were on the scale. Families that have traditionally functioned toward the bottom of the self-differentiation scale (where most of us function, by the way) do not necessarily have more problems or are less healthy than more highly differentiated families. Mostly, a family’s position on the scale indicates the degree to which the family might be challenged by crisis or reactive to a member’s attempts to become more self-differentiated herself.

The relationships in a family that ranks highly on the differentiation scale are characterized by flexibility. There are more “I” statements in which members defined their positions, than blaming “you” statements, which proclaim that members are responsible for each other’s functioning or destiny. In a highly differentiated family, the members may even seem to be disconnected at times; however this feeling of distance is healthy and to be expected because there is nothing to keep them from being close one minute and separate the next, a state of affairs that ultimately leads to a higher degree of togetherness because there is a lower degree of stuck-togetherness.

Let’s say for example that a highly differentiated family with adult children is gathered around the Thanksgiving table determining where to celebrate Christmas. The members each have an opportunity to express their views. Everyone is using “I” statements and no blaming “you” statements are made. There is no heavy sighing or eye-rolling or kicking under the table. And there is no withdrawal from the discussion. No one feels like cutting off from the process. While there may be some disagreement about what the best option is, everyone feels heard and there is a lack of emotional reactivity. Sound like a fantasy family? Well, it may be. After all, none of us can be self-differentiated at all times…especially when we are around our extended families. There are too many ingrained patterns of reactivity in our families, developed over too long a time--even before we arrived on the scene--for most of us to completely overcome. It’s as though we are equipped with switches that certain family members just innately know how to flip: the brother who insists you are competitive with him; the sister who seems too narcissistic to ever consider anyone but herself; the son or daughter or cousin who always shows up late or who tries to start fights or who is always playing the martyr; the parents who are too demanding, or not demanding enough, too close or too far away. I’m sure we all have lists (both spoken and unspoken) of the ways other family members could straighten up to improve themselves and, in turn, improve the family.

That’s because most of us, and our families, function more toward the other end of the differentiation scale, the end where a family is fused, with no individuals thinking about self…no individuals “putting their oxygen mask on first” when the going gets rough. The focus in the fused family is always on we or us and blaming others, with members not simply together…but stuck together. There are two kinds of families in this category. One kind is always in the midst of conflict because the members cannot help but be reactive to each other. Every issue leads to an argument because no one is able to take a stand for self that is not overburdened with emotionality…whether passive, aggressive, or a mixture of the two. The other kind is characterized by a sometimes comfortable, yet always sticky togetherness created by the sacrifice of each member’s individual sense of self toward a goal of never rocking the boat. This kind of family might feature a mother and father who stay married for over 50 years while the kids carry the family dysfunction into all their relationships since they have had virtually no experience with autonomy in a family system.

In a highly fused family at the bottom end of the differentiation scale, the same scenario of planning where to spend Christmas might result in a shouting match, with members storming away, or a decision made by one member that everyone else accepts at the time, even though they don’t really like it and will complain about it to each other afterwards. Another possibility is that a member (or maybe two or three…) is not even present for the discussion because he has chosen to emotionally cut-off from the family of origin. He has stopped coming to family events, doesn’t return phone calls…he has completely withdrawn. Interestingly, in Bowen theory, this emotional distancing is known as “cut-off” and is considered to be a chronic form of unresolved emotional attachment…in other words, while cutting off seems like a move of independence, it is really just another form of fusion.

Members of a family in the middle of the differentiation scale have some capacity for movement away from fusion, some capacity for differentiation. However, when one member begins to differentiate herself, there is a predictable reactivity geared toward restoring things to the way they were. If a family in the middle of the differentiation scale were faced with the same scenario of Christmas planning, one or two members might make a stand for self, maybe by asserting that they would prefer to go somewhere other than Mom and Dad’s, but inevitably there would be some reactivity from members who felt threatened by the shift in the balance of the family dynamic. This reactivity might be blatant, in the form of an attack statement like, “You always have to have things your way” or it might be more subtle, such as “We all need to understand how important it is for Mom to be in her own home on Christmas day.” In most cases, the member striving for self-differentiation will be unable to handle the family pressure to keep things in balance and will back down, or be drawn out of her “I” statement and into an emotionally reactive “you” statement herself.

The other night, I caught a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a program that is a veritable laboratory exhibit of a fused family. In this episode, Deborah, wife of Raymond, tells her husband that she feels like she has no privacy, that she needs some time alone. He resists her request, wondering what it is about him that makes her need her own space. He finally concedes to taking the kids next door to his parents’ house for the afternoon. Still fearful of what his wife’s need for alone time might really mean, Ray ends up spying on her through the window and sees her crying. Seeing his wife in tears really gets his reactivity sparking, and later, after a few passive attempts to get Deborah to confess that she was crying, he finally tells her, “I understand. I know why you were crying and I’ll try to be a better husband.” Deborah is furious and yells at him, “This is how you give me privacy…by spying on me!” She then goes on to say that he is an ego-maniac to think that everything in her life revolves around him.

I think, though, that Ray was not being an ego-maniac. In fact, he may have been the exact opposite, for he effectively sacrificed his own sense of self by assuming that Deborah’s behavior was so dependent on his. He couldn’t enjoy his afternoon because he was so concerned about hers.

This episode, like many in the series, offers a prime example of how when one family member takes a stand for her own needs, other family members often scramble to restore the balance. Bowen theory contends that the farther down the differentiation scale any family is to begin with, the more difficult it is for a family member to maintain the very non-anxious presence that is required for the family to improve their functioning. The more anxious and fused the system, the theory says, the less apt it will be to accept a well-differentiated member.

When Ray admitted to Deborah that he had seen her crying, she was understandably angry. However, it is important to note, that she also reacted to his reactivity. He flipped her switch, so to speak, and she reacted emotionally, thereby forfeiting her chance to be a non-anxious presence. She missed an opportunity to be playful instead of reactive. What might have been the result if she had chosen to be playful and nurturing instead of angry? What if she had recognized his own reactivity and used it to remind herself of her need to have a light touch in her response? Instead she got pulled into a well-worn emotional response pattern of attacking that further contributed to the anxiety of the system.

Rabbi Ed Friedman, a Bowen theorist and author of this morning’s reading, pointed out that a major contributor to the anxiety in a system is an overt seriousness that can often be an affliction in itself. It is this seriousness, in fact, that leads families to fall into the trap of diagnosis and that limits the members’ ability to differentiate and therefore the family’s ability to improve its functioning. The too-serious family cannot escape the lure of focusing on the object of its discontent instead of examining the way they relate to one another. In the reading, this seriousness was exhibited in the dominoes’ attempts to stop the crisis of their toppling over by analyzing the problem, instead of just altering their own functioning. When one domino finally stopped worrying about holding its neighbor up, and simply held its own ground, there were positive consequences for everyone. It is important to note that initially, there was reactivity: the dominoes fell the other way. Eventually however, the independence shown by the differentiated domino enabled others in the system to stand on their own as well.

This fable is a reminder that self-differentiation, standing up for oneself while remaining connected, can impact the functionality of the entire system. However, the question remains, how does one nurture differentiation in the midst of a system that is too caught up in seriousness…that cannot escape its own reactivity? Friedman suggested that a primary means by which a member can alter a system’s chronic seriousness is by developing the capacity to be playful. He referred to this playfulness as “paradoxical intervention.”

I confess, I had difficulty understanding this concept at first. After all, I had seen people, myself included, try to be playful in the midst of stressful situations and often we just came across as insensitive smart alecks. But I came to understand that playfulness in Bowen theory is not simply making jokes…or offering quick one-liners. A playful response is one based in self-differentiation, meaning it is independent while remaining connected. The goal of the playful response should not be an insult or a zinger, because that would not honor the relationship. What takes a playful response out of the category of put-down and into a nurturing challenge is the emotional context in which it is delivered. The comment must show respect for the independence of the people involved without sacrificing the naming of the paradoxical nature of the situation.

Here’s a story that Rabbi Friedman has told as an example of the power of this kind of playfulness.

“A good husband and dedicated father found that his wife had chronically been having affairs. He took her once to a marriage counselor, but she refused to go again. He continued for two years, desperately trying to make her see the light. He showed anger. He threatened. He tried making her jealous. At his wit’s end, ready to throw in the towel, he heard a discussion at church about how families never teach their members to push one another away. We are trained to hang onto others, or to withdraw (pull away). Pushing people we care about at others, or into activities we don’t care about, is almost inconceivable. When a relationship is caught in a skid, we almost never think to turn the wheel the other way.

“The next day, when the husband came home, he found his wife on the phone. Predictably she hung up quickly. Resisting the urge to berate her, he said, ‘Listen, honey, I know you want some privacy. I’ll go for a walk around the block.’ Predictably, the wife’s behavior escalated. At the end of the week, she informed him she was going to Miami to visit an old boyfriend. He went to a travel agency and got her brochures on places to have fun in southern Florida, adding some suggestions based on his own experience. She took them without comment and flew off, returned within three days, and announced that she had had a terrible time. The following week she joined him in counseling and continued long after he dropped out.”

While acknowledging that some may hear this story as manipulative, Friedman pointed out that this is a “too serious way of listening.” The primary goal of the playful response is not to outsmart the other person, but to free the person offering the response from the tendency toward reactivity. The playful response is a means by which the person responding can maintain his emotional independence and not be lured into someone else’s emotional process. In the story, the husband’s serious responses to his wife’s behavior did nothing but maintain the status quo of a troubled relationship. Once he removed himself from a predictable cycle of reactivity, other possibilities opened up and the couple could consider their relationship anew.

The lesson of this story can be applied in many situations in the various families of our lives. Maybe when a son confronts you with all of the things you did wrong as parents, you could pull out a notepad, gently telling him that you want to be sure you get down every word. Maybe when a co-worker or a fellow student insists on trying to tell you gossip, you could respond with a smile, “Oh you better not tell me that. I’m terrible at keeping secrets.” Maybe when a ministerial search committee tells you that you can’t use the word worship, you could suggest that the lights be flashed every time the word is spoken.

To learn the importance of not being earnest, to take a stand of playfulness in the midst of what feels like a serious situation, feels counter-intuitive, and therefore is something we have to practice. Some of us will find it easier to be playful than others do, which can be expected since each of our families of origin is so different. We should also remember that offering playful responses in times of anxiety or crisis is not like waving magic wand that eliminates the crisis. In fact, when we choose to be playful, we may initially see more reactivity than if we would have just reacted emotionally ourselves. However, the point that Bowen theory makes, and the point of this sermon, is that being playful is a way to articulate our own emotional independence, while giving others space to do the same. Being playful is a way to keep options open and remove oneself from the emotional roller-coaster that our family interactions can be. Being playful is a way for our domino to hold its ground rather than topple over like the rest.

So this holiday season, as we gather with family and friends, and we feel ourselves getting a little too-earnest about our interactions, let’s pay attention to our own reactivity and look for ways to be paradoxical and playful.

The possibilities that will open up are endless and important and potentially redemptive for all involved.

After all, our families and our lives in them are too important to be taken too seriously.

Bibliography

Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation, (New York: Guilford Press, 1985)

Friedman, Friedman’s Fables, (New York: Guilford Press, 1990)

Michael Kerr and Murray Bowen, Family Evaluation, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988)

Further reading