
A little bit about Mercy:
Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here with me. I’m Mercy Russell and this is the inaugural show of my radio show, Remarkable Relationships. Today I will be having a conversation with my colleague and friend Priscilla Friesen. In this show, my goal is to bring a fresh perspective to you on all things related to how humans develop their individual brilliance while navigating the excitement, stickiness, and resistance in their relationships.
In my 39 years of working as a psychotherapist, I have been continually amazed at the ways in which people overcome challenges. My own journey led me into a deep dive into the study and application of Bowen Family Systems Theory to the universe of human behavior. I loved the big picture view, the move toward an integration of the biological sciences and the surprises that this perspective has given me aall along the way, I have also been a dogged and closeted consumer, student and experimenter in the intuitive arts and supernatural phenomena.
I began meditating and practicing yoga at 19. I have traveled to India and back with a steady stream of experiences of higher consciousness and occasional bolts of lightning. In this show, I want to honor both streams of learning. I hope to share the power of knowledge as well as courageous actions in daily life to surprise and transform. I will be interviewing a wide range of relationship experts and what you might call, but I don’t think of, as ordinary people for their experiences, insights and the magic in their stories. We will look at problems in mental, emotional, and social behavior that seem to plague us in order to explore how relationships bind us and ultimately free us from our troubles.
I was raised in St. Johnsbury Vermont, which is in the northeastern corner of Vermont, a town of 10,000 as the oldest daughter of a physician and of six siblings. My parents were both the youngest in their families. In my world that will tell you all you need to know about me. Perhaps over the weeks, you’ll learn more about what that might mean and why I feel that that’s a shorthand description of who I am. I was trained as Psychiatric Clinical Social Worker at UCLA in the early eighties at the Neuropsychiatric Institute and then worked in a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital as a group and family therapist. When I moved back home to St. Johnsbury, I worked in addiction treatment and community based treatment of sexual abuse and sex offenders. I also began working in the workplace as a therapist and consultant.
Facing my inability to be my new therapist self in my family, I was fortunate to find a mentor in Bowen Family Systems Theory in Burlington, Vermont. I discovered a book called “The Therapist’s Own Family” from a mail order Psychotherapy Book Club. Even though I had heard of Bowen Theory in graduate school, that topic seemed to be exactly what I needed. Thanks to Peter Titelman who I edited that book. I began studying Bowen Theory while I was living in my hometown close to my family. After several years, I moved to Burlington, Vermont where I had a private practice and continued to work in businesses. Eventually I became the Founding President of the Vermont Center for Family Studies. In this role I developed relationships with the national and international network of colleagues working with Bowen Theory. In 2008, I began the study of a large social system. In addition to the multi-generational family, family systems and the complex work systems in workplaces, I was also always fascinated from my Social Policy studies in Social Work in how these dynamics played out in large social systems. So in 2008, I entered a doctoral program in Educational Policy and Leadership Studies at the University of Vermont. In 2016 I graduated with a doctorate, a story in and of itself. Currently I am based in Scottsdale, Arizona on the trail of my lifelong passion of exploring both geography and cultural differences in our country. I’m the mother of two sons, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. As we progress, I will share many stories from my large dynamic family.
Welcome Priscilla Friesen:
The topic for today’s show is a conversation with myself and Priscilla to introduce to you how a systems view of the family provides a pathway to developing individuality over the course of a life and how the process of becoming more and more of an individual to be a spiritual path. Some people call it individuation or self-actualization. In our world, we call it differentiation. It’s really about becoming more and more of who you truly are in the cauldron of all the pressures of being a social creature in the social family and in your social relationships. That’s something I’m grappling with all the time and what Priscilla and I are going to tackle today.
In 1978, Priscilla moved to Washington DC from Kansas to study Family Systems Theory with Dr. Murray Bowen at the Georgetown Family Center. Dr. Bowen is the originator of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Her first appointment was in the Biofeedback Clinic with Lillian Rosenbaum. She began a lifelong study of the power of self-regulation and neurofeedback as a tool for advancing self-knowledge in the context of the complex family emotional system. That’s a big sentence. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. When she joined the Family Center Faculty, she served as Director of the Special Post-graduate Program among other teaching and administrative roles.
In 1989, shortly before his death, Dr. Bowen asked her to assist the Bowen family and the Bowen Center to preserve and make his collection of written audio and video materials available to the world. They are now housed in the National Library of Medicine. In 2005. Priscilla founded the Learning Space in DC and eventually initiated Navigating Systems DC with her colleagues Kathy Weisman and Andrea Schara. She conducts basic and advanced training for leadership consultants, owners, and members of family enterprises, and individuals motivated to learn how to be their best self in complex relationship systems. Priscilla comes from a Mennonite family in Kansas. She is married to a delightful man of solid Appalachian stock who shares my fascination with ants. Her extended family is a rich network from both lineages. Why have I asked her to open this platform with me? She has walked side by side with me on this journey for 33 years. While our stories are unique, we share the experience of falling deeply in love with Bowen Family Systems Theory.
Just a side note. Bowen Family Systems Theory is not what I would consider in the mainstream. There’s a particular type of person who gets interested and takes this long study of Bowen Family Systems Theory. We share this experience. It’s not common and it isn’t actually even necessary really to use the theory, but that’s one thing we have in common. Along the way she has been my mentor and supervisor. She has been a colleague and a friend. We have had many conversations about theory, the application of the theory and families and social groups, evidence for the theory in the physiology and the role of spirituality in a science-based framework for human behavior. When we met, I was discovering Bowen Theory in Burlington, Vermont under the supervision of Ann Bunting, who was my mentor. I met Priscilla when she came to Vermont as a presenter for a Clinical Conference in 1990. In 1992, I entered the Special Postgraduate Program at the Bowen Family Center where Priscilla was my supervisor. We’ll hear a little story about that. I then trained in biofeedback and neurofeedback under Priscilla’s supervision. In 2002, we co-led a Biofeedback Research Seminar at the Center, which is now called the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.
So after the upcoming break, we will each describe early experiences in our own family lives that embodied the deep and mysterious family connections. For myself, this experience brought Family Theory alive. When I saw how cutoffs and prior generations lived in me, I saw that there was a path to independence from family patterns. From Priscilla, I look forward to her story. Priscilla, any, comments or thoughts before we take a break?
Priscilla:
Oh, there’s such a wonderful history. There are so many things you brought up, I look forward to touching. I think about the scope of these thirty years and just all that is really the in-depth path. I guess I would say given the audience you’re talking to, it is a path – this process of differentiation is a discipline of considering the systems that we’re a part of as integral to defining our own path. Differentiation or individuation, whatever words you choose to use, the important part is the system and how you learn about how it works and how you fit into it. I think that is the crux. So I look forward to talking about some of the details and to flesh them out. Great.
Mercy:
Hello. This is Mercy Russell with the Remarkable Relationship Show and today I’m with Priscilla Friesen. We are going to now dive deeply into, well, somewhat deeply, maybe not to the bottom, but …
Priscilla:
First steep dive.
Mercy:
Yes. We’ll do a deeper dive into our experiences, learning about self through our family system. I’m going to ask Priscilla to lead off in this segment where we are going to each talk about personal experiences that we had. Priscilla, what was your experience with family that catapulted your lifelong study and exploration of the family emotional system?
Priscilla:
Wow. I love that. That’s such a good, big overarching question. You know, I was just thinking about this. So I’ve been involved in this about 48 years. I was introduced to Bowen theory in graduate school about five years after my mother had died in 1971. Given my whole scope of my life, death has been the key, my experience with understanding the disruption, the remarkable disruption, that happened with my mother’s death, her illness and her death in our family. We were a family located separate from the extended family, kind of a little isolated unit with that death. And only over all these years, do I really appreciate how isolated that unit was and what an amazing job it did do in adapting. What my takeaway from that period was that, at that point in time, I really did not compute our family’s situation, frankly.
I’m embarrassed how disconnected I was. But it’s a clue that I did not connect my miserable, emotional experience of depression, disorientation and anxiousness with the fact my mother had died. It took me five years, when graduate school happened, to have that even be a part of my experience. So that was obviously very big and a big pivot point. I think from the beginning, what I learned, I would say the first opening to understanding was that my mother’s death was crucial to me and my orientation in life. That was number one. And secondly, I did not know the impact of simply not having contact with people. Our family had become somewhat disconnected during the nine years of my mother’s illness and her death. We were a young family at a distance without the routines of what could be the supports of the extended family. While there were connections they weren’t a part of life. What happened in our family, we adapted by including people from our social network. The disconnect from the family itself only became more clear to me as over the next 10 years my extended family became more a part of my adult life. Now, what was interesting was my emotional state. You know, people talk about grief and all this kind of unresolved stuff. The first thing that happened was when I went back from Kansas to my mother’s grave in Ohio. A very interesting thing happened. There are a lot of synchronicities that happened. But the interesting thing was the link my spiritual experience that happened then.
I was at my mother’s grave. I’m looking off into the field a hundred yards away. There was this very interesting woman who was placing flowers on a new grave. The interesting thing that my mother’s death and the ensuing years included the interruption of a marriage that was happening simultaneous to my trip. I looked into the distance and there was my married name on that tombstone. And I thought, wow, that is amazing here. Isn’t this totally symbolic here I am. And here is this woman and it’s a death of my marriage. It’s a reigniting with my mother. So I noticed it and I computed it. Then I went back to my meditating and writing that I was doing. About a half hour later, I get in the car and I drive past, yes, what did not exist.
That stone did not exist. There was not a new grave and there was no woman. Now it kind of takes my breath away in a way to experience that. In fact, what am I? What is my life? How am I, how does this really work? And I’m telling you that that woman was as real, as real could be. And that tombstone was as real as could be. And to experience this simultaneous experience of kind of re-engaging my mother, this very important disconnect, this time period, that was so important. And then kind of seeing that this is much more expansive than I, this was another aspect of this. And it, it lives with me today. I think that it was important that those two things happened simultaneously, given the rest of what I’ve learned over time, exploring what death meant over the generations. That can be kind of a next deep dive, but I think that was my first kind of “whoa”. And then it was not long after that the disorientation was more emotionally eased and I ceased having the depression and the anxiety that I experienced.
Mercy:
Priscilla, what, what do you make of that experience now?
Priscilla:
Well, I make of it two things. One is that my very nature is my mother and my family and the nature of how I am in my family. My relationship with this disruption with my mother has over 45 years crystallized the nature of the most important attachments. The disruption highlighted to me how essential relationships are to one’s own stability and one’s own functioning. And how disconnects of all kind have a range. I love my family, but I wasn’t connected to them. They were not a part of what held our system.
I didn’t know that my mother’s death, which I took so personally I even thought that I was going to die young. That’s how deep it is. In fact, it’s five generations old in my mother’s family. Where her great grandmother died in childbirth when her grandmother was 18 months old, who then went on to marry and lose three children. My grandmother was the strong one in that group of everybody dying. And she ended up in this position of compromise and decreasing her functioning. I only knew her with decreased functioning. I didn’t know her role. And my mother was responding to all that. And I was responding to my mother.
Mercy:
So for our listeners, this experience of seeing the gravestone with your married name on it, that then wasn’t there. That in a way shocked you,to see that it wasn’t there. How do you understand that, that you saw that, or that it appeared to you visually?
Priscilla:
It’s only in hindsight that I thought of it a certain way then, and I think of it a little bit differently now. I think in some ways that period of my life and that experience was kind of a prototype. It’s like, “This is how it works, Priscilla. Get it. That how you create what you think is meaning includes this remarkable live natural world happenings. That is a part of this multi-generational history. And it’s this, you see it, you see things that are also a part of how this works.
Mercy:
Was it, are you saying it was like, as if you thought about that, what you saw was in a way, a projection of all of this multi-generational experience around death, that it had come out in a way almost from you as a projection, almost symbol or something, but it was experience to you as real as…it wasn’t a fuzzy thing and the key, is it surprised you, you weren’t looking for something like that.
Priscilla:
It was stunning. Absolutely stunning. And it included this other very important thing, which was a marriage that had really been kind of my help when my mother was…
Mercy:
Done when your mother died.
Priscilla:
So it’s all a part of the same thing and it died too. It died too.
Mercy:
And also interestingly that death of the marriage then became an open door for you to begin to see more clearly how you were living, which had to do with the death of your mother. Right? So the marriage kind of carried you along for a while, but then there was a point at which it didn’t work anymore. If we could look at it from out here, you were in the process of letting the marriage go, not necessarily knowing what it was leading you to. But that experience in the graveyard sort of dropped in to help you see there’s a bigger connection here that you hadn’t seen. But it was so interesting. It wasn’t a gravestone. It wasn’t your mother you saw. It was so interesting that it was that symbol of the death of the marriage.
Priscilla:
Over time, just to back up on that, with time, I learned so much more about how to think about how my marriage functioned for the group. So you could think about it as I got married, very young, no one in my family ever get married at 18. But we decided to marry 10 days after my mother had her diagnosis of her bone cancer.
Mercy:
Interesting. 10 days.
Priscilla:
10 days. We were married that summer. And my mother had declined in her health that year. My husband, who was a good buddy of mine, had been around all through high school. And his parents became like aunt aunts and uncles to me. And they were, and they have to this day, been essential to that time period. Very important parts of what I would call the emotional unit, the group that was surviving. When my mother died, my father remarried, my marriage didn’t function in the same way anymore. And it was okay. It went on. He remarried and had five kids and I was a good friend.
Mercy:
So in many ways it wasn’t a failed marriage. It was a marriage that had served its purpose literally.
Priscilla:
And he was a dear friend for my life.
Mercy:
Going back to the experience of what you saw. There would be thoughts out there from the world that it’s more of supernatural phenomena or spirituality that understands that people who have died can come in and give us experiences or appear to us at certain times. And I just wanted to mention that, at least in my thinking, the fact that what you saw that wasn’t simply a psychological projection or a hallucination. It, in a sense, it could have been something that emerged from the system, which still, obviously included your dead mother. And in the spiritual world, they say, yeah, she’s up there. And, she kind of gave you this little download. But even if you’re not wed to that view of the cosmos, what Bowen Theory allows you to see is the deep connection that’s still there. That the people you have died are, and that we are living. In fact, my story, which I’ll tell in the next segment, after our break, talks about how these past generations of people we never knew, never had contact with and hardly know their stories live in us in very embodied ways. Through our perceptions and, and in our experiences. Um, it’s not just an academic idea.
Priscilla:
I think just to put in a summary for myself. I think what Family Systems Theory has contributed to me is a bridge between the tangible understanding of how these interrelationships have functioned to survive over the generations that live in me. All of this lives in me today in a way that I think you could call it past lives. But it doesn’t need to be that. It is more towards the science of how this works. I think that has been kind of linking to me there. I’ve had other experiences with my mother that have been accessible in a different way. This was much more tangible. This was much more tangible. And I think was kind of, “This is the way it works, Priscilla.” “I want you to pay attention to this. This is it.”
Mercy:
So many connections were made in that choice of the visitation or the projection or however you frame it. The way that it worked. This is what you and I like to do, dive deep into those experiences. And see all the connections. So it’s time for us to take another break. And when we come back, we’ll continue this conversation. I’m going to tell a little story about myself and how this theory came alive for me. Then hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk a little more openly about this for our listeners.
BREAK
Mercy:
Hello, this is Mercy Russell with the Remarkable Relationships Show. I’m back again for the third segment in my conversation with Priscilla Friesen. We’re talking today about our deep relationship of 30 or 40 years with Bowen Family Systems Theory, a way of looking at the family and human behavior, has has deepened and catapulted our own journeys to become more of a self. Priscilla just talked about one of the early experiences she had that was not only sort of extraordinary, but also opened the door for her to see the connection between her own personal experience and her family life over generations. So I’m going to now tell you my story. In the intro to this, I talked about my background and how I discovered Bowen Theory.
I started studying Bowen Theory and met Priscilla in 1989. I was living in Burlington, Vermont, and studying with my mentor there, Ann Bunting. Priscilla was living in Washington DC and working at the Georgetown Family Center with Dr. Murray Bowen, who is the creator of this theory. Ann Bunting had also studied in Washington DC with directly with Dr. Bowen. By 1992, I decided to do my postgraduate training in Washington DC. At that time, Priscilla was the Director of the Special Postgraduate Program. It was special because we were people from out of state who were coming in for three day segments four times a year to study Bowen Theory. We each had our own clinical supervisor and Priscilla was my supervisor.
So we not only had lectures and a group supervision while we were there. We also followed with our supervisors on an individual basis. The focus of training in Bowen Theory is your work on your own family. The fact is that until you can be a self in your own family and see how your own family works as a complex relationship system, you need that in order to help other people to do the same thing. So that’s what I was doing at the same time. Priscilla, as I mentioned before, was Director of the Biofeedback Program at the Family Center. And so as part of my interest in general, I would get on the biofeedback equipment with Priscilla. When I went to Washington I was just getting to know Priscilla.
At the time the Biofeedback Program consisted of the use of hand temperature biofeedback, sweat response biofeedback, or EMDR it’s what’s used in lie detector tests, and muscle tension. So those would be the types of leads that would’ve been on my body and the type of physiology we were tracking. The way that we did this is that I would sit in a session like I was having a regular consultation, but hooked up to the equipment. And while I was talking, Priscilla would be taking note of the shifts or the changes in the physiology. It was all live that you could see. I also practiced this way after I trained with Priscilla. What I would do is keep track of the time and what we were talking about. Then because the equipment itself would, at the end of the session, give you a report of how the pieces of physiology shifted.
It would just be: she talked about this at this moment, that at this moment, this at this moment. So when I went back to see what happened when her hand temperature dropped, which would’ve been a sign of anxiety. If I’m with a client I would’ve known what was she talking about. That her physiology made that little dip, that there was a little anxiety there. She might have been aware of it. So that was sort of the way we were using biofeedback in those days. And one of the things that as a supervisor or therapist that you do with Bowen Theory is that you take a history. You draw a diagram of the family and take a history of functional facts, births, deaths, the dates of marriages, divorces, that kind of thing.
I was sitting in a session, hooked up with Priscilla and I was simply telling her the facts of my family. The important fact in this situation is that my mother never knew her father. My mother’s parents were married at age 16 when my grandmother became pregnant with my uncle. And then my grandmother became pregnant with my mother two years later. Her husband was a young German boy with red hair. And their first son was a boy with red hair and my mother had black hair. And when she was born, my grandmother’s husband, my mother’s father denied my mother and said, this is not my child because she had black hair. No genetic testing in those days and they separated. My grandmother took my mother off into an apartment. The man who would be, I think, is my grandfather took my uncle back to his parents’ house. So this is just a fact. I knew it growing up. My grandmother remarried. I grew up with another man as my grandfather. She remarried when my mother was seven. These were just the facts in the family. I never met that man who was my mother’s father. And didn’t ever hear much about him. I knew my uncle and my cousins. They had some contact with him, but never talked about it. My mother had no feeling about it. She didn’t care. She just said, “Well, I never knew him. He’s nobody to me. So if you asked any questions she just didn’t care. If you asked my grandmother, she’d say, well, I didn’t at that point, I hadn’t ever talked to my grandmother about it at that time.
To me, it was just like, okay, you want to draw a family diagram? Well, there was this. And then my grandmother remarried. And then there was the next grandfather. So anyway, after the session, we looked at my physiology and my sweat response, which is what’s used in lie detector tests. So if your sweat response spikes, it’s an indication of anxiety, increased anxiety that my sweat response spiked. When I was talking about that grandfather who I never knew. This blew me away because he meant nothing to me. He wasn’t even a figure in a story book. He was just some remote fact. Why would, of all the things I was talk, because I talked about a lot of other things in that session, including my marriage, stuff with my siblings, with my mother. But that’s when it spiked, when I talked about my mother’s father.
That was what really shocked me. To think that in my body there was that anxiety living about the fact that my mother’s father rejected her. When nobody in the family ever talked about it as being anything other than a random fact, it wasn’t shameful. It wasn’t, my grandmother remarried very well. So why would it live in my body? I couldn’t believe it. So that was what really just cemented for me the fact that the family emotional system is integral to who I am and that this cutoff, in fact, the fact that nobody talked about it or, or knew anything about it, and acted like it didn’t exist. And these were cousins who lived within three miles of my mother. Who she had no contact with, that whole family. So that was my experience.
It wasn’t the thing that really caught me about it. There wasn’t anything made up in my mind. I mean there was nothing psychological about it. And I know that that was the beginning of my real commitment to really understanding more about the physiology and the links between science and this world of self development, psychology, trying to be a better self, understanding your family, which had all been very psychological in the culture. And I thought, oh no, this is really living in our bodies. This is not something created out of our minds. It is amazing to see what really is and how it lives in us. So that was the beginning of that. What I did then eventually was to undertake, over the years I undertook a long project and it took a long time to get to know that grandfather.
That’s another long story that I have to tell, but there was a lot of resistance in the family to even thinking that learning about that grandfather was important. I got a lot of pushback from my mother. I did learn more about him because I pursued a relationship with my uncle and and my grandmother in order to learn more about this. Because somehow I made the connection. Priscilla, you helped me with this, that the current life problems I was having were linked to this cutoff, This fact, this absolute psychological denial of my mother’s that that’s who her father was, was not important to her. Whether it was that man or another man. My grandmother had, she had a funny little story about it. So that was my experience. I guess what I just want to convey about it is what is shock. It just hadn’t occurred to me how things in your family from another generation could live in your own reactivity. I then came over the years to begin to understand how that affected the way I saw the world and related to people. And then by trying as a self, as a person, as an individual to think and move for myself in the family around those facts. Yes. It brought up a lot of information about the family that I never would’ve seen otherwise.
Priscilla:
I think that’s such a good example of the disconnects, what we make up as fact, or what we think and act as if things are what they are. I think what this understanding about the family and the multi-generational family is that it contributes facts to what our reactivity may be. That we’re attributing things to what would not be accurate. And this was a beautiful example. I think the physiology is gold because it is a more accurate language for the emotional system. It bypasses this stuff you make up.
Mercy:
Exactly, exactly. I just sort of want to tip my hat to Marie Manchehri who is really how I was introduced to the station. She has another way of talking about how our lives and past lives, live in our cells, in the body, which is also very intriguing. But this totally makes sense to me because I’ve had this experience. What I want to do is to highlight my hope today which was to get to what’s important here is to explore how understanding and seeing your life as you were given it. Or as you created it by coming in or choosing this family, how this, your life, in this complex multi-generational family system protects us, gives us comfort as social creatures, but also how understanding that is your path to freedom, to become more of who you want to be as an individual.
So this is just my little introduction to that. I just am fascinated with both my individuality and your individuality and your family. And I’m really looking forward to exploring this more with stories of friends and colleagues, and hopefully eventually with you. I hope eventually to have a calling component of the show. So we can talk about what you’re are up against and how this way of looking at behavior can help us. So this is Mercy Russell with The Remarkable Relationship Show. I’ve been talking with Priscilla Friesen we will post how you can reach her.
You can reach me at leadershipwithmercy.com
You can reach Priscilla Friesen at pjfries9249@gmail.com