“An Adventure
In Differentiation:
Family of Origin and the
Faith Family”
Friday, April 20, 2012
Leesburg, Virginia
Emlyn A. Ott
Healthy Congregations, Inc.
Trinity Lutheran Seminary
1992, Episode “I, Borg”
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Impetus to begin to look at
family
and congregation
What keeps me going
Assists along the way
The on-going challenges
Self to family to organization
and back
Our Family of Origin and Our Faith
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Use of the family diagram as a visual reminder of our
formation
Emotional process is key to our own stories.
Value in being able to hear the song beneath the words
of our family stories
Ability to observe ourselves is part of spiritual and
emotional maturity
Multigenerational experiences form our shaping of the
world—and the drives and hopes that create great
passion in us
Variables within the transmission include events at nodal
times (birth, death, divorce, conflict), changes in society
and situations that absorb anxiety
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Anxiety ramped up; disequilibrium
Painful changes in relationships
Avoidance of the work while looking as though the work was
being done!
Working on family while working on significant changes in
roles in two organizations
Parallel process between “faith families” and “families of origin”
How could Bowen family systems theory be introduced with
integrity to seminary students?
How could Healthy Congregations develop a next step to its
presence in religious organizations?
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Financially self-sustaining
Inclusion of new aspects (membership, theory groups, family of
origin work)
Training people to lead workshops that encourage broad
capacities for leadership in congregations
Process of organization making use of theory in Board and staff
meetings
Development of separate but connected identity with seminary
and with other people working in Bowen/Friedman thinking
Leadership Lab for students
Intersection of education for ministry leadership and
congregations
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Clergy/laity/students experience bumping up against people
engaged in a life-long endeavor to be a thoughtful, integrated,
believing leader
Varieties of educational and experiential learning all focused on
the on-going work of differentiation (didactic, theoretical, case
studies, family of origin)
Making the best use of thinking for oneself; creating opportunities
for that work to proceed with ground rules for interaction
Integrating resources of faith as expressions of understanding
personal and corporate belief, action, and deepening
relationships with God and the world
Ch-ch-ch change is not what appears to be at the
heart of anxiety.
 If anxiety is an expression of a threat, real or
imagined, then anxiety seems to be forming
around the presence or avoidance of pain.
 Multiplication of the f-words expresses this: fight,
flight—
but also: freeze, fuse, frenzy, fornicate
Karen Armstrong adds: feeding
And---pharmacology…in the spirit of f-words
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See the Process
Draw a picture (or look
at pictures)
Move into an observer
role
Observe processes
near and far
Stay in the
relationships
What Happens
When Anxiety
Descends?
The Book of Job
and Differentiation of
Self
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Job’s experience as universal
Incredible loss, anger, outrage
Everything intensifies; inability for one to see
the bigger picture of the situation
Opens Job’s experience up for us to view as
mirroring our own
Making former power/blessings useless in the
process
Could conflict be an indicator of the beginning
of a deeper relationship?
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Rejection of the experience of blame (emotional
projection)
Might fusion (right relationship) set us up for
bitterness in the midst of a life of free will and
autonomy in the world? Rain falls on the just and
unjust alike.
The view of God as a purveyor of lessons gets
overturned
Though we may be immersed in pain, God is not
stuck
Job complains, gets angry, accuses, calls on God
to act—yet never lets go of the relationship.
And it gets more
complicated
the more people
and emotions
that are engaged
in the process.
Emotional
Cut-off and
Fusion
--Job’s Wife
--Job’s Friends
--What about with God?
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Process: each speak without interruption or questions
Describe a personal experience where you can identify
with some of the relationship losses, changes or
intensities described in the Book of Job.
What observation would you have in your own story
about:
What raised yours or others anxiety?
Where was the intensity?
How did triangles, cut off, fusion or projection function in this
situation?
In what ways did your relationship with God or others
change? Or remain the same? Or begin a transition?
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To live in relationship is to live in the paradox of pain and
hope; we have been created by God to be in relationship
With important relationships come challenges—the more
important the relationship, the tougher the challenges
A relationship with God brings with it the challenge to shake
a fist and stay connected
Biblical witness tells the story of the comfort and challenge
of being a community that lives into what it believes; that is
when differentiation of self is given room to grow in
communities of faith
A challenge: to live into a relationship with a Holy Other
that manages, deals with and regulates pain with self
and members of the community
The Practice of Feeling Pain
There will always be people who run from any
kind of pain and suffering, just as there will
always be religions that promise to put them
to sleep. For those willing to stay awake,
pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a
place to discover that a life can be as full of
meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never
cancelled each other out and I doubt they
ever will, or at least not until each of us—or
all of us together—find the way through.
Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World
page 173
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Individuals, families and communities can be
invested in a life-long courageous search to
define beliefs, stay connected to God and
significant people and communities without
anger or entrenched dogma. Energy goes to
determining one’s own sense of responsibility
rather than defining someone else’s. Multiple
opinions can be known, challenged and
incorporated and the irresponsible words,
perspectives or actions of others do not set the
agenda for individuals or the group. Emlyn Ott