A Systems-Based Approach to Counselling and Training
A Longstanding Approach to Counselling and Training
For over five decades, Living Systems has been working from a systems-based perspective, bringing together counselling, supervision, and training in one integrated approach.
The work is grounded in Bowen family systems theory and shaped by ongoing clinical practice, teaching, and research. This creates an environment that is both thoughtful and practical, where understanding is developed over time and applied in real situations.
Clients and trainees experience a steady and reflective space where the focus is not only on change, but on understanding the patterns that shape how people think, feel, and respond.
The Foundation: Bowen Family Systems Theory
The work at Living Systems is grounded in Bowen family systems theory, developed by psychiatrist Dr. Murray Bowen.
Bowen was one of the first to understand the family as an emotional system. His work shifted the focus from individual symptoms to the patterns that develop within relationships and across generations.
Today, this theory is practiced around the world and continues to inform counselling, training, and research. It provides the foundation for how Living Systems approaches both clinical work and education.
Key Ideas in Bowen Theory
Differentiation of Self
The ability to stay connected to others while maintaining your own thinking and perspective. This becomes especially important in stressful or emotionally charged situations.
Anxiety and Chronic Anxiety
Anxiety can move through relationships and systems, shaping how people respond. Over time, this can become chronic, leading to automatic reactions like conflict, withdrawal, or avoidance.
Families as Emotional Systems
Families function as interconnected systems. When one part of the system shifts, it affects others. These systems work to maintain balance, especially under stress.
Triangles
When tension builds between two people, a third person is often pulled in to help manage the stress. While this can reduce pressure in the moment, it can also reinforce ongoing patterns.
Patterns Across Generations
Relationship patterns are passed down over time. Under stress, families tend to repeat predictable ways of coping, such as conflict, distance, or over-focus on one person.
Sibling Position
Birth order can influence how individuals function within relationships. These tendencies are shaped by the family system and may show up differently depending on the dynamics.
Family Systems Perspective
What It Is
- A way of understanding patterns, not assigning blame
- Focused on increasing clarity and emotional steadiness for oneself
- Applicable to individuals, couples, families, and organizations
- Grounded in long-term understanding rather than short-term solutions
What Is Not
- Not about fixing or changing others
- Not technique-driven or focused on quick advice
- Not about reliving the past without purpose
- Not limited to symptoms or crisis situations
How This Work Is Applied
In counselling
You begin by understanding the patterns shaping your relationships and how they influence your responses. You get clear on how you want to show up in your relationships.
In training
You learn to observe these patterns more clearly and apply systems thinking in clinical and real-life situations.
In supervision
You continue to refine how you think and respond through reflection, consultation, and ongoing practice.
Bowen Theory FAQ
What is Differentiation of Self?
The term differentiation comes from biology. It is the scientific concept that most closely matches the processes Dr. Bowen observed within and between families. People vary across a broad continuum in their ability to function as emotionally separate individuals while in good emotional contact with important others in their families and workplaces. This is a naturally existing continuum that develops over several generations. It is neither bad nor good; it just is.
At one end of the continuum are individuals who are the most underdeveloped as persons, the most relationship-focused. Having the least self, they tend to live life reacting to others rather than out of their own well-defined beliefs and principles. They have little tolerance for short-term discomfort and delayed gratification. Short-term urges tend to dictate their lives at the expense of longer-term goals and gains. They are very sensitive to what others think about them. Feeling and anxiety states tend to dominate their behaviour and decision-making. This leads to swings between being overclose/positive and overdistant/ negative. Their behaviour is often at the expense of someone: themselves, their loved ones, employers, and friends. These individuals tend to have the most life problems.
At the other end of the continuum are those most fully developed as persons with the most self. They have well-thought-out beliefs and principles. Their behaviour matches these beliefs and principles most of the time. Functioning consistently in all their life roles and responsibilities unless their stress level is high comes naturally. They can experience strong feelings and anxiety states without losing their capacity to think and act more objectively and in the long-term best interest of themselves and others. Assuming high levels of self-responsibility they take on leadership roles in family, workplace and society.
What are Triangles?
Another pattern is that A+B can deny the unresolved tension in their relationship and begin to focus on D as the ‘problem’ or the ‘enemy’. They then form a more secure inside position with one another by having a common issue with D. Thus the tension between A+B lowers and the tension/stress builds in D as she/he is focused on as the problem. 
What is the Nuclear Family Emotional System?
Emotional Process
This refers to the automatic, hard-wired sensitivity and accompanying anxiety reactions humans have to one another – from the level of our cells to our psychological and social reactions and interactions. In a family, these sensitivities can be heightened such that a particular response in a loved one can be seen as a major problem and the same response in a stranger is not noticed or reacted to as a problem.Nuclear Family
The nuclear family is the basic emotional unit of a family system. The traditional form of this unit is comprised of husband, wife and one or more children. When the differentiation level of the couple is higher they will have more automatic capacity to manage the anxiety of their sensitivities – fears, disappointments, unrealistic expectations, etc.- with one another. They will have more capacity to resolve these tensions and differences. A less well differentiated couple will chronically generate more anxiety/stress around these same issues and have less effective means for resolving them. When the level of chronic anxiety exceeds the coping capacity of the unit, the result is symptoms in the most vulnerable area of the family unit. This could mean symptoms in a spouse, in the couple relationship or symptoms in one or more children (see Nuclear Family Projection Process). There are three broad categories of individual symptoms: a) physical; b) psychological/psychiatric; and c) social. Symptoms in the relationships include conflict, distancing toward or including cutoff, and triangling. Triangling can move up into the extended family, out into the workplace or an affair or through projection down toward the children. What is the Family Projection Process?
Triangle Patterns
The triangling pattern that most compromises the child’s development of self is one in which the parents ease the anxiety in themselves by denying their underlying weakness and colluding in seeing the problem as in the child. This automatic projection process includes the hard-wired survival response mechanisms for solving a perceived problem: assess, diagnose, and treat (fix or solve). For example, a parent with unresolved anxiety around social situations and fear of rejection can deny this problem in self and focus anxiously on this as a problem in one’s child. The normal rejections and struggles of a young child’s social interactions are then perceived as abnormal and needing solving by the parent. The child picks up on the anxiety in the parent and begins to respond more to the parent’s anxious focus than on their natural strengths and abilities. Over time, the perceived problem in the head and feelings of the parent become a real problem in the development of a self in the child. The second parent intensifies the process by actively or passively following this view. What is the Multigenerational Transmission Process?
The Multigenerational Transmission Process describes how level of differentiation is transmitted through family generations like an inheritance. According to Bowen Theory, parents transmit their own level of differentiation of self (the ability to manage anxiety and think independently from family emotional pressures) to their children through modeling and emotional processes. For examplle, children internalize how their parents regulate emotions, handle conflict, and manage relationships—essentially absorbing the emotional “maturity” level of the family system. This transmission occurs largely outside conscious awareness; parents don’t intentionally teach dysfunction, but rather children absorb the emotional tone and patterns they witness and experience.
Over multiple generations, this process creates predictable patterns: if parents have low differentiation and high chronic anxiety, they tend to produce children with similarly low differentiation, who then parent their own children from that same anxious, reactive stance. Conversely, individuals who work toward greater differentiation can interrupt this cycle by becoming more emotionally responsive and less reactive, creating space for their children to develop stronger emotional autonomy. The Multigenerational Transmission Process isn’t deterministic—it’s a tendency, not a guarantee—but it explains why certain family patterns (cutoffs, triangulation, emotional reactivity) repeat across generations and why therapeutic work often requires understanding the broader family history and how one’s own emotional functioning was shaped by earlier generations.
What is Emotional Cutoff?
Distancing is one of the hard-wired coping mechanisms for dealing with real or imagined threats to one’s well-being. We know it most stereotypically as the flight component of the stress response. The Nuclear Family Emotional Process includes the mechanism of emotional cut-off.
Individuals within families vary in how they use distance as a major coping mechanism. Distance becomes entrenched as a way of life in a multigenerational family system. With this, the older and younger generations end up emotionally cut off from one another. This often includes geographic distancing. However, living far apart doesn’t necessarily mean being cut off. The important criterion is that important aspects of one another’s lives are openly discussed and responsibly acted upon.
Humans need a certain quantity and quality of emotional contact with important others to function responsibly. Individuals who are emotionally cut off from their families tend to use their workplace and friendships as a substitute family. Research on emotional cut-off seems to corroborate one Dr. Bowen’s observations. He found that the family’s emotional system is a more effective emotional field with which to be in active contact. In these studies, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were shown to be the freest in pursuing a responsible life course when they had active emotional contact with the previous generations.
What is Sibling Position in Bowen Theory?
One significant factor shaping individual family members’ functioning is their sibling position. Dr. Bowen incorporated the research on sibling position done by the late Dr. Walter Toman, an Austrian psychologist. In Bowen theory, sibling position represents both the work of Dr. Toman and Dr. Bowen’s understanding of the impact of the family projection process on the developmental course followed by a child.
Sibling position appears to be one of nature’s ways of enhancing survival by evolving different roles and positions. This results in forming family leaders and followers and all combinations in between. Each position naturally develops certain predictable strengths and weaknesses. The emotional process in the nuclear family unit can result in the individual in one sibling position being more vulnerable to the family projection process. The result is the impingement of the natural development-of-a-self process for the individual in that sibling position.
The following exemplifies an emotional process acting on a particular sibling position. Eldest children are naturally trained to take on greater leadership and responsibility. This is both in and for the family in the next generation. If the family projection process is on the eldest, the natural eldest abilities can be exaggerated or weakened. However, if weakening is the result, the usually capable and accomplished eldest functions more toward the helpless youngest. When exaggeration is the pattern, the eldest’s behaviour takes on the harsher side of leadership. For example, dominating, domineering, bossy, authoritarian behaviours.
Describe the Emotional Process in Society concept.
The Emotional Process in Society concept extends Bowen’s family systems theory to larger social and organizational systems, positing that societies function much like families—as emotional units governed by similar dynamics and anxiety patterns. Just as families experience chronic anxiety that drives reactive behavior, societies accumulate anxiety around issues like economic threat, political conflict, or social change, which then triggers regressive (less thoughtful, more reactive) responses across the population. When societal anxiety is high, people become less differentiated as a group; critical thinking decreases, polarization increases, scapegoating intensifies, and leadership becomes more reactive rather than principled. Media, political discourse, and institutional responses to crises all reflect and amplify this collective emotional state, creating feedback loops where anxiety breeds more anxiety and poor decision-making breeds consequences that justify the original fears.
Bowen observed that during periods of low societal anxiety, people are more capable of thoughtful dialogue, nuance, and tolerating difference; but during high-anxiety periods, society regresses toward black-and-white thinking, increased aggression toward “outsiders,” and emotional cutoffs from differing viewpoints. Leaders play a critical role—those who remain differentiated (calm, principled, non-reactive) can help “detoxify” societal anxiety, whereas anxious or reactive leaders amplify the emotional contagion. Understanding Societal Emotional Process helps explain why certain historical periods become characterized by witch hunts, extreme political movements, or social scapegoating, and why these cycles can repeat across generations unless conscious effort is made to foster differentiation and reduce chronic anxiety at the societal level.
What is Chronic Anxiety?
Chronic anxiety refers to the habitual, automatic ways humans react when perceiving a life situation, most often a relationship interaction, as threatening. One may not be aware of feeling threatened. For many, this perception of threat happens below the awareness level. The individual starts eating, drinking, smoking, feeling bored, seeking a rush, needing action – to move, change, run, argue, fight back, or the opposite – avoiding, going passive and helpless, etc. These responses are both instinctual and learned coping strategies. Unfortunately, they usually reinforce greater levels of chronic anxiety and stress.
The formation of these automatic, chronic reactions can begin, possibly in utero, but certainly at birth. The child is equipped at birth to respond to internal and external cues for surviving and thriving. When the child’s needs are met in a manner that is realistic to the facts of those needs, the child’s focus will remain primarily cued to him or herself. When the child’s needs are defined and met more out of feeling states in the caregiver, a mismatch will develop between the child’s true needs and the caretaker’s efforts to meet those needs. Parent and child behaviour quickly becomes reciprocal. The child learns to focus more on the relationship process than on himself or herself.
Role of Perception
The parents’ and child’s perceptions of need come more from internal feeling states than the child’s (or later, the parent’s) factual needs. The child’s self-knowledge and self-development become compromised, more or less, over time. The patterns of responding to and out of relationship anxiety become automatic and chronically stressful. It affects all levels of the person’s functioning – from cellular responses in the gut, heart, skin, etc., to the psychological and social mechanisms for survival. These learned responses contribute to the development of the short-term coping responses listed in paragraph one.