JSB EDITS 10/29/14 8:30 AM

The Nuclear Family and the Rabbi

As part of the Navigating System’s (http://www.navigatingsystemsdc.com) monthly webinar to discuss the basic ideas of Bowen theory, we saw Dr. Bowen’s video on the nuclear family emotional process. Dr. Bowen describes the nuclear family as two people, in an unstable relationship, putting pressure on one another so that eventually one person impinges on the other. I wondered about the implications for society if we are each born into emotional systems where we naturally and automatically impinge on one another.

As the nuclear family begins to form, love itself makes it hard to see “reality.”  One wants to spend time with the other warm and fuzzy person. It is so hard to see the beginning of the world of compromise. Hard to see how “wanting” to be with the other could be a part of impinging. Relationship pressure can be as silent as a wink, a smile, or even a sad look. We can be beaten, get sick or just make compromises to keep the peace in important relationships. Without a thought or even a whimper, we distance, we avoid, we may even get sick, or best or worst of all, when impinged upon, we blame others for creating our troubles, seek revenge or go to war.

Everyday we see the evidence of how these very same nuclear family dynamics leak out into society at large. The media and our newspapers show us some horrid situations and proclaim:  We are very busy looking to see who is to blame.  Stay tuned. No questions allowed. Each of us has blind spots that remain unacknowledged and of course, out of our awareness. Some people are unusually good at seeing the automatic emotional system working on us. That emotional system is full of urges, encouraging us to pick on people, to focus on others, to be negative, to worry, to blame to dislike, and finally to polarize (“They are not human”) and to cut off. Lacking knowledge of relationship dynamics often leaves people reacting to others, living in smaller and smaller relationship circles, barricading themselves against the “others” and living in a “social wasteland”.

The headlines amplify the blame game. Take for example the following alert: Washington Rabbi arrested. For the victims of voyeurs, a terrible theft of trust.   Read and be alarmed. One of our trusted leaders arrested for a dirty secret. Look what he did to us, the headlines screech. Not how did this person fall so far down? What leads to these kinds of behaviors?   Are we part of the problem? Is this the primitive emotional system at work tugging at us to follow along? People read the headlines and automatically blame, want the perpetrator to be punished and to suffer for his crimes. Perhaps there is another story that we can all learn from? Perhaps the rabbi was blindsided, not seeing the emotional nature of the pressure in his own marriage and in the synagogue?

 

The Georgetown rabbi arrested for allegedly hiding a camera in the mikvah pool area where Jewish women take sacred, private ritual baths, the Baltimore gynecologist who secretly filmed his patient examinations, the freaks hacking into celebrity mobile phones and even creeps snapping photos up women’s skirts all have easy access to plenty of porn. The turn-on here is about power, subjugation and humiliation. It’s about men getting what they want, despite what women say. Members of the local Jewish community were stunned this week by the news that Rabbi Barry Freundel, a renowned scholar and a towering figure in the Kesher Israel Congregation, had been charged with six counts of voyeurism and could face up to six years in prison. Investigators say Freundel, 62, recorded women in the mikvah area using a clock radio that contained a hidden camera. This is the wise man who guided women on their spiritual path, who helped them through times of tribulation or urged them on to further enlightenment. ….Twitter: @petulad.[1]

Understanding what happened here is not to excuse anyone. (People must be held responsible for their actions and breaking the law.)   The need is for us to understand, to gain knowledge in order to intervene early and to see who is vulnerable.  It is already an automatic behavior not to hold leaders responsible for their actions or the actions of their colleagues.  The question is how do we get beyond this? What could the family, the rabbinic council or the congregation have done differently?

People want to know how this man with so much talent and so many gifts become obsessed with crazy ways to stabilize himself.   How will the wife of this man understand her part in his acting out, if as I assume, everyone has a part in the nuclear family dance? She might have noticed and been fearful to act, or she may have been unaware. At this time there is no way to know what might have been useful to her or to the rest of the family, the rabbinic council and the congregation, although the rabbinic council had, according to news reports, information about the rabbi’s misuse of his office, e.g. asking potential converts to do clerical work for him without pay and the council had told him to stop cease and desist on those counts.

Right now we do not know enough about the situation to be useful.  But we can become more aware of the difficulty of understanding others.   Not just the Rabbi and the terrorist, but all of us, are to some degree relationship blind.  We are blind to the way we see ourselves, the way others see us, the way we see others and of course how each wishes others would see us. For a few it is worth the time and effort to untangle relationships and to learn to function rather than be swept along the emotional stream of life.

But do not give up on the media because sometimes they do follow the clues and turn towards the family for understanding. After the recent terrorist act in Canada, the press looked at the family.  “Details of Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau’s life are hard to come by. But his radicalism seems only to have strengthened as his grip on ordinary life grew weak. And his hold appears to have begun to slip in the late 1990s, when his family fell apart.”[1] Just one fact as to the intensity of cut off: he had not seen his mother in 5 years.

Explanation/speculation 101 – Now back to the nuclear family. Often people do not like the behavior of their spouse and so they distance, hoping to keep the marriage or the family going. They are impinged on by the way the other is, and have little ability to come back and relate well. Anxiety rises and each individual in the relationship looks for relief. One wants closeness to feel better. The other wants distance. Over time each pretends to be something they are not, and to compensate in some way that is sustaining or possible. Probably both are cut off or compromised by distance in their own families.

It all begins in the two-person relationship, when one innocently impinges on the other. “Please take out the garbage. After all you have more time than I do.” It is so subtle as one person begins to impinge on the other and the other begins to look for a way out, “OK I will do it,” or “You’re so maddening,” “In a minute…” or “I feel sick.” And then of course, “You and I can make the kids do it.” The intensity of these mechanisms (conflict and winning or losing, distance, sickness and projection) have been highlighted by researchers like John Gottman and others, as one of the central causes of marriages ending. But just suppose you can find a small place to hide and feel better and save your marriage and pretend….for awhile.

Is it possible this man’s behavior began a long time ago, when the need for distance crept into the synagogue, infecting and overwhelming all his wisdom? Was this rabbi psychologically blind or knowingly revengeful or malicious? Was this synagogue different from any other organization, where peace and comfort is prized over disruption, where differences and disruption are frowned upon? Darwin shined the light on diversity but differences in families and organizations make people uncomfortable. To understand the way the system distributes anxiety onto the weak, and what one can do, requires a new way to think about how to function in social systems with differentiation in mind.

What can I do? If the only one I can change is me, then how do I see what is going on in the relationships around me in order to change the social system around me as it accidently impinges on me? What does it take to recognize the automatic nature of threat? Can I get to the middle kingdom so to speak by at least describing what is going on?

Can I create a “no blame, but hold them responsible zone?”

Perhaps evolution will provide us with a periscope that peeks out and sees our part in relationship compromises? Perhaps Jiminy Cricket could stop by, sit on our shoulders and tell us what is going on in the “no blame zone”. While we wait for evolution to provide us with an easy out there is another way to deal with these automatic mechanisms that govern life, the fifth way, differentiation of self. I believe that by observing and commenting on the system you can create opportunities to be more for self and less reactive to “perceived pressure.” Of course in so doing, you run the risk of upsetting the others. There is no risk free zone.

Of course all kind of events stir our biochemistry, even turning on and off our genes, as we try to cope with the outside world. From the time we are born until we die we are influenced. We are almost pre-programmed to attack, to defend, and to seek comfort without awareness of what we are doing and why.

Choices can be made about the way we react to others.  We can learn about our automatic behaviors, and in so doing we can rise up to relationship challenges and offer the system a bit more information. This is not always fun, but it does promise a bit more emotional freedom for each of us and for others.

[1] www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-a-georgetown-synagogue-a-terrible-theft-of-trust/2014/10/16/36b27288-554f-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/world/americas/ottawa-canada-gunmans-radicalism-deepened-as-life-crumbled.html?_r=0