What Murray Bowen Saw in Families
Updated: Sep 24
How Bowen Theory Explains Anxiety, Family Roles and Patterns Across Generations
Families can change addresses, partners and generations while repeating remarkably similar emotional patterns. Bowen theory offers a way to understand why: it shifts attention from isolated individuals to the relationship system, asking how anxiety moves through families, how roles form, and why the same reactions can persist even when nobody consciously chooses them.
A Life with Bowen Theory
Few people have lived with this way of thinking as long as Michael E. Kerr. He first heard Murray Bowen lecture as a medical student, worked alongside him for over a decade, and later became one of the people who carried the theory forward. In our conversation, Kerr repeatedly returns to his own family, his marriage and his work to show what Bowen’s ideas look like when they are lived rather than merely studied.
There is a moment in the interview where Michael Kerr describes standing at his brother's grave. Billy had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Michael, the youngest of the brothers, had not.
“I stood over his grave and I said: Billy, thank you for allowing me to grow up.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
It sounds like grief. It is closer to a diagnosis of the family system. Kerr goes on to explain why he said it: “He was the one who took the bigger force of the family system, whereas my brother Terry and Bob and myself got off the hook.” In one sentence, he describes a family not as separate people with separate fates, but as a single emotional unit in which anxiety was distributed unevenly, with one member carrying far more of it than the others.
The break with Freud
In the 1950s, one influential strand of psychiatry traced schizophrenia back to the mother. The term was schizophrenogenic mother: cold, intrusive, the supposed origin of her child’s illness. It was a theory about an individual — a damaged psyche, produced by another individual.
Murray Bowen, then at the National Institute of Mental Health, did something unusual. He brought whole families onto a research ward and watched them live together. What he saw did not fit what he had been taught. Kerr, who heard him lecture as a student, remembers exactly what caught him:
“This guy is not blaming the mother. He's blaming the whole family. We’re all involved in this. And that was a real wake-up call for me.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
The move sounds small. It is not. Freud looked inward, at the psyche. Bowen looked outward, at the field the person is standing in. If the unit of analysis is the family rather than the individual, then symptoms are no longer understood solely as properties of one person. Bowen’s claim was that they also reflect the functioning of the relationship system around that person.
This was not a popular position. Kerr describes colleagues warning him against getting “all tangled up with Murray Bowen”, telling him he would be “tainted”, that he was being “brainwashed”. Bowen theory has remained somewhat outside mainstream psychiatry ever since, which is worth naming honestly rather than glossing over. More on that near the end.
The family as an emotional system
Bowen's central claim is that the family functions as an emotional unit, governed by processes far older than human culture. Kerr puts it plainly in the interview:
“Birds have an emotional system. Every living thing on the planet has an emotional system.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
This is not a metaphor for him. Bowen theory sits deliberately inside evolutionary biology: the emotional system is the automatic, largely non-conscious machinery that regulates attachment, threat response and group cohesion in social animals, and humans run on the same machinery with a thinking brain layered on top. The forest imagery Kerr draws from Peter Wohlleben makes the same point sideways: no living organism exists entirely on its own (Kerr, 2019).
The practical consequence: what one person feels does not stay with that person. It moves. And the currency it moves in is anxiety.
Triangles: the molecule of the system
This concept did not make it into the video, and it is arguably the one most immediately visible in everyday life.
Bowen observed that a two-person relationship is inherently unstable. It can absorb only so much tension before a third person gets drawn in — a friend to confide in, a child to worry about, a colleague to complain to. Once the third person is involved, the tension has three relationships to move around in instead of one, and the system stabilizes. The Bowen Center describes the triangle as the building block or “molecule” of larger emotional systems, because it is the smallest stable relationship unit.
Nothing gets resolved this way. The tension is redistributed, not discharged. And triangles have a structural cost: someone is always the outsider. In calm periods two people are comfortable insiders and the third is left out; when tension rises, the positions shift, and the person who was excluded may suddenly find themselves pulled in while someone else is pushed out. Anticipating the outside position is itself a powerful motivator — much of what looks like loyalty, gossip or alliance-building in families is people managing their position in a triangle.
When one triangle can no longer hold the tension, it spreads into interlocking triangles. This is how a conflict between two people ends up organizing an entire extended family, or an entire office.
Once you have the concept, you cannot stop seeing it. Kerr’s own summary in the raw interview was exactly that: triangles are “ubiquitous. Everywhere.”
Differentiation of self
If triangles describe the structure, differentiation describes the variable that determines how the structure behaves.
Differentiation of self is the capacity to keep thinking while under emotional pressure, and to stay in contact with important people without being absorbed by them. Bowen conceived of it as a continuum rather than a category. At the low end, a person cannot separate what they feel from what is true; their positions shift with the emotional weather of the people around them. At the high end, a person can hold a position, tolerate disapproval, and remain connected anyway.
Bowen distinguished solid self from pseudo-self. Solid self is made of principles a person has actually worked out and will not trade under pressure. Pseudo-self is acquired from the relationship system — beliefs adopted to belong, negotiable the moment belonging is threatened. Most functioning, most of the time, runs on pseudo-self.
The passage Kerr reads aloud in the interview is Bowen’s own description of what a differentiated family leader looks like (Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, 1978). It describes someone with the courage to define self, who is as invested in the welfare of the family as in self, who is neither angry nor dogmatic, whose energy goes to changing self rather than telling others what they should do, and who is not influenced by the irresponsible opinions of others. Bowen adds that a family leader is beyond the popular notion of power.
Notice what is absent: no technique, no confrontation, no instructing anyone else. The energy goes to changing self. Bowen’s striking claim is that when one member moves toward differentiation, the functioning of the whole family begins to shift.
Kerr’s illustration of this is not a therapy session. It is a boat. Coming into a mooring in Maine, his wife at the helm, he decided she was going too fast and took over. Later she came down the stairs and said:
“I know you’re trying to do the best you can.”
“She didn’t react.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
That is differentiation in practice. Not calm, not detachment, not being right. One person in the system declining to complete the loop.
Asked where someone should start, Kerr’s answer was short:
“Motivation’s number one. And getting away from blaming others.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
Then:
“Time, time, time.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
Chronic anxiety — and what the research says
Bowen separated acute anxiety, the response to a real and present threat, from chronic anxiety, the response to threats that are largely anticipated and never resolved. Kerr repeats the distinction in the interview:
“Acute anxiety being real threats, chronic anxiety being imagined threats for the most part.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
In Bowen’s model, chronic anxiety has no clear endpoint. Rather than resolving with a specific threat, it persists and moves through the relationship system, and it is this chronic anxiety, rather than any one individual’s pathology alone, that drives symptom formation in a family.
Kerr’s own contribution has been to connect this emotional process more explicitly to physiology, arguing that chronic anxiety can contribute to processes such as chronic inflammation (Kerr, 2019). In the interview:
“You can’t call it something psychosomatic. In the end it’s somatic. It’s not psychosomatic, it’s somatic.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
This is the point where Bowen theory connects to a large and independent research literature, and it is worth setting out what that literature actually supports.
Stress mediators have a cost. Bruce McEwen’s concept of allostatic load describes the cumulative price of the physiological systems that adapt us to stress. In the short term, glucocorticoids and catecholamines are protective. Sustained or repeatedly triggered, they damage the systems they were meant to defend (McEwen, 1998).
Interpersonal conflict shows up in the immune system. In one of the more striking studies in this area, Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues admitted married couples to a research unit twice, once for a supportive interaction and once for a conflict discussion, and measured wound healing and inflammatory markers. Couples who behaved more hostilely healed more slowly, and their production of proinflammatory cytokines was markedly higher after conflict than after support (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2005). A relationship process, visible in physiology.
Social threat up-regulates inflammation. George Slavich and Michael Irwin’s social signal transduction theory of depression proposes a specific pathway: experiences of social threat, rejection and devaluation up-regulate inflammatory components of the immune system, and the resulting cytokine activity produces the behavioral signature of depression — withdrawal, fatigue, anhedonia (Slavich & Irwin, 2014). Slavich’s later Social Safety Theory generalizes this: the brain and immune system are built to monitor social safety, and threats to it are a central mechanism linking life stress to disease (Slavich, 2020).
The effect can also be laid down early and persist. In the Dunedin birth cohort, followed to age 32, childhood maltreatment predicted elevated inflammation in adulthood independently of other risk factors (Danese et al., 2007). This does not test Bowen theory, but it shows that early relational stress can leave physiological effects measurable decades later.
None of these researchers work in Bowen theory, and none of them set out to test it. That is precisely what makes the convergence interesting. Kerr’s claim — that the family’s emotional process is a physiological process — is not confirmed by this literature, but it is considerably more plausible in light of it than it was when he first made it.
Emotional cutoff: distance is not differentiation
When a family becomes unbearable, the intuitive move is to leave. Move away, call less, go quiet. Bowen called this emotional cutoff, and he did not consider it a solution — his view was that the unresolved attachment travels with you and reappears in the next relationship system.
Kerr learned this by mail. Six months into a two-year Navy assignment, he wrote to Bowen about how he was handling his family. Bowen wrote back:
“Mike, if this is how you deal with your family, no wonder you had so much trouble.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
One distinction has to be made carefully here, because it is the point at which this concept is most often misread. Bowen is not describing physical proximity. Distance changes the setting; differentiation changes how a person functions in relation to the system. A person can be geographically distant and still entirely reactive to a family — checking, rehearsing arguments, organising their identity around the conflict. And nothing in the concept requires remaining in contact where contact is unsafe. The question is not where you are standing. It is whether you can hold your own position when the system pushes.
Societal emotional process
In 1975 Bowen extended the model beyond the family, arguing that the same emotional process operates at the level of institutions and societies — and that a society under sustained chronic anxiety regresses in recognizable ways: more reactivity, more blame, more polarization, more decisions taken for immediate relief at the expense of long-term consequence. He was widely criticized for it.
Kerr’s view in the interview is unambiguous and slightly weary:
“Turn on the television. Listen to the news all over the world. These are signs of societal regression, but nobody has caught on to that idea outside Bowen theory.” And later: “It’s hard to believe how regressed the world is. But there it is.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
Asked what a more differentiated person should do about it, he declined the obvious answer:
“I wish I had something that was pithy and great. I don’t have it.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
It is worth taking that seriously rather than reading it as evasion. Bowen’s own position was that societies change course not through insight but through pressure — when the pain of continuing outweighs the pain of taking the longer view. That is a bleak mechanism, and Kerr does not dress it up.
What the evidence supports, and what it does not
Bowen theory is a theory, not a finding, and it is only honest to say where it stands.
Differentiation of self is the concept with the most empirical traction. Since Skowron and Friedlander introduced the Differentiation of Self Inventory in 1998, hundreds of studies have used it, and higher differentiation scores consistently predict lower psychological distress and better relationship functioning (Skowron & Friedlander, 1998). The construct behaves the way the theory says it should.
Beyond that, the picture thins. Rigorous outcome trials of Bowen-based therapy as a complete protocol are scarce compared with the evidence base for CBT or emotionally focused therapy. Concepts like sibling position have weak support. Societal emotional process is essentially untestable in its current form — it is a lens, not a hypothesis. And the mechanism Kerr proposes between family emotional process and inflammation, while consistent with the stress literature above, has not been tested directly in the terms Bowen theory sets out.
That is not a reason to discard it. It is a reason to hold it as what it is: a powerful and unusually coherent way of seeing relationship systems, parts of which have been independently corroborated and parts of which have not yet been put to the test.
Murray Bowen's eight concepts, in brief
1. Differentiation of self — the capacity to think clearly under emotional pressure and stay in contact without being absorbed. The scale runs from fused to solidly defined.
2. Triangles — the three-person system; the smallest stable relationship unit and the building block of every larger emotional system.
3. Nuclear family emotional system — the four ways families bind anxiety: emotional distance, marital conflict, dysfunction in one partner, and impairment of a child.
4. Family projection process — the transmission of parental anxiety onto one or more children, focusing the family’s worry and shaping the child around it. Kerr understands Billy’s position in his own family through this concept.
5. Multigenerational transmission process — small differences in differentiation passing across generations, compounding over time into large differences in functioning between branches of the same family.
6. Emotional cutoff — managing unresolved attachment by distance or silence, and carrying the unresolved part into the next system.
7. Sibling position — the influence of birth position on functioning within a family, drawn from Walter Toman’s work.
8. Societal emotional process — the same processes operating at the level of institutions and societies, including periods of progression and regression.
What to do with it
Kerr’s own answer, at the end of the conversation, was not a technique. It was a stance:
“Study it. Study your part in it.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
And, on what understanding actually buys you:
“Even though you can’t change it. But you can watch it.”
Michael Kerr in the interview
That is less modest than it sounds. Watching, in this framework, is not passivity. It is the precondition for everything else, because the one contributor to the system you have any authority over is yourself, and you cannot change what you have not first been able to see without immediately reacting to it.
Sources and further reading
Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson.
Danese, A., Pariante, C. M., Caspi, A., Taylor, A., & Poulton, R. (2007). Childhood maltreatment predicts adult inflammation in a life-course study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(4), 1319–1324. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610362104
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation. New York: W. W. Norton.
Kerr, M. E. (2019). Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families. New York: W. W. Norton.
Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., Loving, T. J., Stowell, J. R., Malarkey, W. B., Lemeshow, S., Dickinson, S. L., & Glaser, R. (2005). Hostile marital interactions, proinflammatory cytokine production, and wound healing. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62(12), 1377–1384. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.62.12.1377
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307
Skowron, E. A., & Friedlander, M. L. (1998). The Differentiation of Self Inventory: Development and initial validation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 45(3), 235–246. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.45.3.235
Slavich, G. M. (2020). Social Safety Theory: A biologically based evolutionary perspective on life stress, health, and behavior. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16, 265–295. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032816-045159
Slavich, G. M., & Irwin, M. R. (2014). From stress to inflammation and major depressive disorder: A social signal transduction theory of depression. Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 774–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035302
The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. Introduction to the Eight Concepts and Triangles. thebowencenter.org
About the interview
In this episode of Reclaim Your Reality, I speak with Michael E. Kerr about Murray Bowen’s family systems theory, chronic anxiety, self-differentiation, family projection, emotional cutoff, multigenerational patterns, societal regression, and what more than sixty years of applying Bowen theory taught him about family, marriage, responsibility and personal agency.
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