I think I've fallen into a triangle! Part 1

Murray Bowen, the founder of Family Systems Theory, spent his professional life studying the dynamics of human relationships. He described the complex interrelationships within a family.  And he used systems theory to analyze them  He formulated his thinking into Family Systems Theory.

I am certainly no expert in Bowen's theory although I have personally benefitted from his insights.  I have used them to understand better my own and others' behavior in my families.  I have also experienced how they can clarify interrelationships and resulting behavior in other human groups.  Perhaps, even an entire society.  With apologies to the late Dr. Bowen and his many highly trained followers, I want to use my version of one of his basic ideas to look at my own behavior.

Triangles:  Matin Tiller on YouTube

Bowen taught that two-person relationships, or dyads, are inherently unstable.  They have a low tolerance for tension and quickly turn to third parties.  A triangle with a third person can stabilize a two-person relationship experiencing tension.  For example, a mother and a teenage daughter are experiencing tension in their relationship.  The mother reaches out to a friend to talk about her daughter and the behavior that is creating the tension.  The friend can play a vital and useful role in helping to stabilize the mother-daughter relationship.  If the friend listens sympathetically and suggests strategies to help the mother and daughter communicate directly, the third person can help reduce tension and reestablish a livable balance.  We can probably all recall times when we reached out to a third person this way.  Perhaps we have been a third person for a dyad.

But triangles don't always turn out that way.  Sometimes triangulating a third person accentuates problems in the relations making it harder for the dyad to grapple directly with problems and feelings.  This can be especially toxic, I believe, if the third person is also experiencing tension in other relationships.  Let's adjust the genders in the example.   A father experiences tension  with his teenage son.  He reaches out to a female friend who it happens is also experiencing stress in her marital relationship.  It is deceptively easy for the two people to calm their tension and anxiety by bonding together through sharing information and criticism of the other person in the relation.  The friend deepens her relationship with the father by listening to criticism of the son.  She agrees with it and even stimulates it.  She never says or does anything that would help the father deal directly with the son.  She may even begin to share about her marital relationship.  Over time, the two may grow more emotionally enmeshed and thus more distant from the son and the husband, as well as the father's wife.  They have calmed their anxiety but have done nothing to address underlying issues.  The situation has become worse by inserting a third person into two family dyads and creating two new outsiders, the mother and the son.  They may, in turn, triangulate in retribution.  (By the way, I could change the genders in the examples and the result would stay the same.  These are human dynamics.)

There are also predators who cruise around the social landscape probing relationships to see if one or both members of a dyad are experiencing tension.  This creates an opening for a third party whose motivation is typically not benign.  This is especially disastrous in marital relationships.  An outsider senses a vulnerability in a couple of which even they may be unaware.  The predator typically focuses on the dyad member of the opposite sex and begins to ingratiate him or herself into the relationship as a friend of both.  Under the cover of friendship, the predator cultivates emotional closeness with his or her target.  This eventually pushes the other member into an outsider role.  The predator may become physically intimate with the target thus achieving his or her ultimate goal. There may be a reduction of the tension for the target member and surely for the predator but the original relationship can be damaged beyond repair.

So, this is a long way around to get to the triangle I think I have fallen into.  What I am about to say may sound ridiculous.  I know it did to me as it began to emerge into my consciousness.  Each of us as citizens of the United States is in a relationship with our elected leader, currently Donald J. Trump.

In my lifetime, there have been 14 presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt.  I have had a good relationship with the first 13.  I didn't like or agree with all of them.  I felt closer to some than to others.  (Disclosure:  I was born in Kansas City MO into a line of Democrats stretching five generations in rural Missouri and further still in Virginia.  While many of those would probably be Republicans today, my Dad would certainly not be.  However, this essay is not about politics although it seems to be headed that way.  Just hold on.)

The current president is the problem, or at least my problem.  On every level--personal behavior, style, and policy--I simply cannot stand Trump.  Beginning with the night of his election, I experienced intense anxiety that I had never felt with other presidents.  As time passed after the election, my anxiety didn't decrease; it increased.  The more he talked in those elliptical sentences, blurting out nouns without verbs, the more anxious I became.  My response was predictable, I began to recruit third persons into my Trump triangle.

Some of these weren't persons at all.  I began reading theology to try to understand some of the more fundamental issues of life.  I especially was drawn to Reality, Grief and Hope by Walter Brueggemann.  I needed to deal with reality, grieve what had been lost and experience hope.  It helped...a bit.  I got more engaged in hobbies:  photography, writing, web design.  Not much help there.  I was trying to find something to which I could become emotionally engaged and thus calm my anxiety.  It worked as long as I was actively engaged in those activities, but the impact quickly waned.

Next, I began to spend a lot of time talking about Trump with my wife and other like-minded people.  We would share outrage after outrage.  It felt good to let it all out with another person who shared my feelings.  This strengthened my emotional bonds with them.  My emotional space grew more settled.  The acceptance of those with whom I shared my feelings reduced the Trump-induced anxiety.  This is a classic triangulation.  I was bonding with a third person and reducing tension while doing nothing to deal with whatever was causing the disruption.  If I kept on this way without dealing with the real problem, there would be no end to this.

Then I turned to the national media to understand better what was happening.  What I now think happened then was a surprise.  I will pick up there in the next blog.

A crisis, an opportunity.

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before."  Rahm Emanuel  November 19, 2008

Emanuel said this as the Obama administration was preparing to take over the national government.    During the growing COVID-19 crisis, I think it has a particular relevance although I would restate the opportunity.  It is not that we can do things we should have done but for which we have been unable to build political support.  Rather this is an opportunity to reconnect with values that have become substantially less salient to our national life.

In 1985 Robert Bellah and a group of fellow sociologists published a study of the American character entitled "Habits of the Heart:  Individualism and Commitment in American Life."

"The title is from Alexis de Tocqueville who, writing about us in “Democracy in America” from 1835 to 1839, discovered habits of the heart--he named family life, religious convictions and participation in local politics--as helping to form the unique American character.  They were habits that would help sustain free institutions, De Tocqueville said. But he also suggested that individualism , a word he was one of the earliest to use and long since a catchword for the American character, could prove dangerous, setting citizens apart from one another, making positive collective action difficult if not impossible, and therefore threatening those same free institutions."  Charles Champlin Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1985  

 I read it shortly after publication and found it insightful.  It helped me--as a college administrator--understand the society for which we were preparing students.  My takeaway was this:  There were two principles at work in the American character:  communitarian and individual.  Our past could be read as the dynamic interplay between these two:  the urge to be a strong individual and the urge to be part of a community.  Bellah and his fellow authors expressed a concern that the creative balance between these two had been shifting.  Since the late 1940s individualism had been gaining strength and communitarian values were fading.  If this trend continued, the American character and society could be damaged in significant ways.

More than 30 years later, that concern has become urgent.  I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic can be an opportunity for America to rediscover its deeply rooted communitarian values which have been overshadowed by individualism.  Perhaps a rebalancing is possible.

The pandemic is and will be a challenging and intrusive experience for all Americans.  It may well be the marker for the rising generation much as 9/11 was for the Millenials.   The pandemic is forcing many but not all Americans to confront the reality that short term optimization of one's economic and social assets may lead to a sub-optimization of the economic and social assets of the larger community.  It would be nice, I suppose, if the single-minded pursuit of my own self-interest would somehow result in the improvement of the conditions of everyone.  Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand," required a society where the common good was clearly in mind for all.  It didn't take some special focus on the common good because that was assumed.  All that worked pretty well in more rural-based, face to face societies.  That focus began to break down with industrialization and urbanization.

While we could discuss which is the better--individualism or commitment to community--we would never come to conclude that one is better than the other, or a least we shouldn't.  We need both, not one at the expense of the other.  Ours is not a choice between a totalitarian communism or the objectivism of Ayn Rand.  We need a slider variable that will move toward individualism or toward communitarianism based on the circumstances and challenges.  The creative tension between these two fosters the vitality and creativity of a social group.  There is no absolute "best" state.  The optimum moves between but never to the two extremes.  Bellah et. al. were concerned that the movement toward individualism would be so drastic that the balance would be permanently damaged.

What we are all experiencing now is the dysfunction of extreme individualism that sees no problem with compromising the health of others as long as people can do what they want to do.  "I deserve a spring break so I am going to the beach and the bars."  "I always get together with this group of friends at a restaurant.  Why should I change my plans?"  "I am willing to run the risk of getting the virus.  Let other people worry about themselves; I'll worry about me."  "The virus has not come to my neighborhood.  Why should I change my behavior?"

Some are realizing now and soon everyone will that what I do impacts not only my health but also that of others, especially those whose age and/or underlying conditions place them at increased risk of negative outcomes from an infection.  We all have the chance to experience not our equality with others but our solidarity with them.  We have the opportunity to experience a conversion, a change of heart.  I don't mean this in any political or economic sense.  I don't even mean this in a religious sense.  We have the opportunity to experience an always present but often hidden reality.  We, all of us, are in this together.  Not just this pandemic but life.

We are called to act out of this change of heart in ways that most of us have never experienced.  Because this pandemic will spread through the country touching every state and locality, we all can experience what it means to be a community, with each of us doing what we can to help others, especially those who are often invisible.  I harbor no illusions that this spells the death of individualism.  That would be disastrous.  Maybe, just maybe, we can recalibrate our slider and move back toward those communitarian values that have always been an essential part of what makes us America.

Humanity has been at this point often in its history.  When the poet and priest, John Dunn, lay seriously ill with spotted fever during an epidemic in 1624,  he wrote a book of prose reflections entitled, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions..." where his most famous lines--ironically prose not poetry--appear.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

We are likely to hear many bells tolling over the next months.  If we can take Dunn's sentiment to heart and act on it, perhaps there will be fewer, and we will be less diminished.

What mitigation means and why it is important

Mitigation efforts like social distancing help reduce the disease caseload
 on any given date, and can keep the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed.Credit...
Drew Harris

I came across this graphic this morning in the NY Times.  It was part of an interview with Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.  The graphic was created by Rosamund Pearce for an article in The Economist and is based on a 2017 CDC article about how to deal with a novel influenza A pandemic.  In yesterday's White House briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, "What we need to do is flatten that [curve] down."  I didn't understand the importance of that until I saw this graphic and read the interview.

Once a county moves to mitigation, as the U. S., there is no hope of stopping the spread of the virus.  However, we can do something to impact the speed and trajectory of that spread.  If we do nothing or do something too late, the virus infection increase dramatically in a short period of time.  We get the red curve.  If we take steps to "interfere with the natural flow of the outbreak," the infection spreads through the community at a slower rate over a longer period of time.  The blue curve.  These are called epi curves.  The broken line in the chart shows the healthcare system's capacity in a community.  The red curve rapidly exceeds that capacity which means that some people cannot get the treatment they need to survive.   There are more people than the system can handle and there are fewer health care workers who are healthy enough to work.  A double whammy.

This helped me understand the importance of doing my part in trying to mitigate this infectious disease and, in fact, any other including the seasonal flu.  Even before more extreme measures (social distancing) are mandated by local health offices, I can begin to develop good habits to interrupt community transmission.  Eventually, more severe measures will be needed but for now, I can do the common sense things recommended by the CDC.

For more information, go to www.coronavirus.gov