Dateline: DFW Airport Branch Headquarters. Today I saw Willie Nelson, so there was entertainment.
Why Bowen Theory?
Psychology was not my direction in undergraduate school. I took the pre-med route planning a future as a veterinarian. By the time I was ready for graduate school, I’d changed my mind, realizing that showing horses and working all day inside a small animal clinic had little in common. I floundered, then decided on psychology.
Two decades ago, I was ready to quit the profession. I’d concluded that psychology was too faddish with “explanations” for behaviors made up with the latest big book or diagnosis insurance would pay for. All the “explanations” required knowing what was going on in someone else’s head, drawing conclusions based on the latest seminar, and handing out blame–which didn’t make any sense to me.
The way I saw it, therapy might help a person feel better temporarily, but it didn’t improve people’s lives.
STRESS. ONLINE THERAPY. RELATIONSHIPS. PSYCHOLOGY. HUMOR.
As it happened, during this period the Menninger Clinic was holding a series on family therapy in our offices. I sat in on a class on Bowen Theory and decided to stay in practice. Here was a way of understanding behavior that had science and not fads behind it. Where the therapist didn’t claim to know “why” a person behaved as he or she behaved. The therapist did have a way of thinking about observed behavior that made sense and respected the client as the expert on himself or herself. I was in.
Why Bowen Theory, the Second Reason. 
My special person and I were taking a walk in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio, Texas. The night before we’d attended the wedding of a friend of mine who came from a very wealthy family. The kind of family that not only picked up the ticket for college and grad school, but paid board on a couple of horses and paid for horse shows through the entire seven years. She married a surgeon who came from an even wealthier family.
As we’re walking, I said: “Gee, I wonder what that would be like? You know, never worrying about what something costs? Think about it. She doesn’t have to by plane tickets twenty-one days in advance or look at tags in stores. If she wants a new car, she can pick one out and write a check without even thinking about if she managed a good deal.”
The walk slowed. I’m thinking: “Uh oh. I’ve been here before. What I said has made him defensive. My going on about my friend’s ‘lucky’ marriage was as if a man asked his wife, I wonder what it would be like to wake up every morning next to a truly beautiful woman who was always in a good mood. A woman who never aged and who considered dressing attractively important?”
I prepared for the onslaught of reasons why I wouldn’t want to be married to this particular guy, “He works all the time, He’s not into theater or arts, he’s a cowboy, he’s prejudiced, he’s not very tall,” etc. I thought he’d be defensive because that’s the way our relationship worked. Both ways.
But he didn’t respond on the defensive. He let some time go without saying anything (Right here you have one way of reducing anxiety in a relationship) and then he said, “I don’t know what that would seem like. I think boys just grow up knowing that their standard of living will be determined by our own efforts. We don’t think about how marriage might add to the standard of living.”
I was stunned. This “thoughtfulness” was not the way “we” worked. I’d expected an unpleasant ten minutes at the least. 
Me: “How did you do that?”
Him: “It’s something I’m working on. Not letting anxiety control what I say, I mean. Bowen Theory is lived out, not just talked about.” (He’d started Bowen Theory training several months earlier.)
Me: “Okay, but how did you do that?”
Him: “When you started talking, I felt myself getting anxious. I didn’t want to respond out of the anxiety, so I imagined I had a big thermometer in my body, the metal kind you used to see out in the country. I set it at 72 degrees and instead of listening too closely (Another way to slow anxiety.) I focused on keeping my temperature at 72 degrees.”
I was in big-time. I saw a way of thinking about behavior that could actually help people have better lives.
To understand the major elements of Bowen Theory check out the Bowen Family Center Site.
