Anxiety is a self wanting to be defined is a phrase attributed to Dr. Bowen. It actually makes sense if you understand Bowen Theory.
Do we have an emotional inflammatory system?
Did evolution create emotional inflammation systems by leveraging our physical inflammation system? Evolution designed our inflammatory system to help the body defend our physical self and not lose this “self” to our environment. What might be parallels for our emotional or psychological self? A recent review in Science provides some interesting ideas. Is being reactive our emotional immune system's response to defend self? Try not to get too inflamed by my line of thinking in this post; stay curious.
Our past experiences may have influenced our “orbit” but that doesn’t mean we can’t change things in the present. Working to change in the present is the high road to resolving the past.
How do you want to function in 2022 from a systems perspective? How do you want to function in your family, workplace, and planet?
“The primary social cues that mediate interactions between people are sensitivities to approval, attention, expectations, and distress.” How well do you observe this for yourself?
Bowen theory posits that changing your functional role in a family will lead to a change in how you feel about your family.
Most people don’t appreciate how often emotions influence their thinking, decision-making, and behaviours. Two recent items have reinforced this idea for me. The first is research on social interactions among primates and bats (Science, 2021-10-24). A reviewer of the study asked, “What if embedding the brain in a group changed how it works?”
The discussion about vaccinations gets pretty polarized. What’s driving that polarization may surprise you.
I often think of the concepts of emotional distance and fusion as opposites, but are they? Dr. Bowen borrowed the concepts of fusion and differentiation from biological processes.
