I EMPOWER others and myself when I get out of their way and anticipate that they will speak for themselves. I am empowered when I understand and apply the critical distinction between being responsible TO others but NOT and responsible FOR other adults. I empower others when I allow choices and consequences of choices to run their course. I am empowered when I learn to distinguish between helpful pain, necessary, useful anxiety, what to embrace and what to ignore. I am empowered when I work at healthy, necessary separation, even when in love, and even when having strong soul-ties.
I ENABLE others if I lie to cover, run interference, or protect others, in hopes of keeping people employed, protected, or “close.” I am an enabler if I feel overburdened with mis-placed responsibility or rewarded with mis-placed responsibility for anyone. I am enabling others when I feel like I am living more than ONE life. I am enabling when someone’s choices – both good and bad – feel like my responsibility. I am enabling when I am unable to see myself as a separate being from another, and regard the connection as “oneness” or love, a soul-tie, making the enabling crucial, necessary, and somehow inescapable.
DIFFERENTIATION of Self – a Murray Bowen family systems principle and term – is a life-long internal journey to be my distinct self, while also honoring, enjoying, recognizing the benefits of togetherness with others. It is the challenge every human must face.
If I avoid growth, I will fuse, I will be enmeshed with others, many of whom will appear to welcome the company of equally growth-avoidant people. They may find it very attractive, even “spiritual.” Little will feel as spiritual as a good fuse-buddy.
Enmeshment, or fusion, will make me more likely to place responsibility on others, even blame others, for the way in which my life develops.
Contrarily, to differentiate is to get into the driver’s seat of my life and provide a platform for maximum growth for myself and everyone in my circle of influence.
Differentiation of Self is being aware of not confusing the “I” the “you,” and the “we,” but giving the best of myself AND getting the best for myself from all three. I can be simultaneously intimate and autonomous, I can and will define myself, knowing that if I do not, others will naturally be inclined to fill the vacuum and define who I am for me.
The internal expectations, standards, limitations I set for myself constitute my BOUNDARIES. These are the things I will and won’t do and who I will and will not be.
I will be wisely generous. I will share resources and time with others as wisely as I know how. I will plan my days, pay my debts, and attempt to live a solvent, sober, adventurous life.
I will not steal, cheat, or intentionally hurt others or myself. I will try not to overextend myself or make promises I know I cannot fulfill. There are lines I will cross and lines I won’t cross. I will have my boundaries in place before I need them and respect my boundaries and the boundaries of others. I will try to know where I end and where others begin.
I hope my boundaries will be strong, flexible, and porous, “lines in the sand,” internal partitions which help me to get close to others without invading or overwhelming them, or losing myself.
Boundaries help protect us. They make Integrity possible. I am responsible for my boundaries. I set them, adjust them where necessary, enforce them when they are challenged or crossed. Living my boundaries clears the way for my boundaries to speak for themselves and reduces confusion in relationships.
Deep down where soul, spirit, will, heart, mind, join forces within me, I have a magnificent gift.
It is the God-given desire for AUTONOMY.
It comes packaged with my humanity.
Yes. I want to be autonomous, occupy the driver’s seat of my life. I want and need ALONE time; an hour or two here and there, a day or two, even a week or two. I want the freedom to plan, enter my sacred, private space, engage in uninterrupted thinking, do my own seeing, feel my own feelings, forge my own pathways.
This desire habitually whispers, and sometimes unfortunately, it has to yell for recognition. This is especially within my deepest, loving, closest and committed relationships. If I repeatedly ignore this primal beautiful part of me, I place my emotional well-being and physical health at risk. This beautiful gift, inextricably integrated with who I am, will demand attention if repeatedly ignored, denied, or overridden.
Acknowledging, respecting , enjoying, my desire for autonomy, enhances my capacity to love myself, love others, and become, even more beautifully, fully human.
(* to be read in conjunction with “I is for Intimacy” — Day 9!)
We have repeatedly discussed each of the 8 Bowen Concepts and looked at discussed genograms. I think you have worked very hard. I have tried to demonstrate how the concepts interlock and how they are Bowen’s observations about how families and groups and society “works” and evolves.
In closing today I would like to look at:
ANXIETY (3 kinds) / NON-ANXIOUS PRESENCE
Definitions of Growth and Holiness and Spirituality
Within milliseconds the drawbridge – we each have one – may go down with a hearty welcome or remain up and sealed shut.
There may be Immediate comfort or discomfort, or levels of both.
Suspicions may be endorsed or deleted.
Information and misinformation transmission occurs at a speedy rate.
We read and misread and read and misread each other constantly – all within the backdrop of our unique experiences and training, our hurts, pains, goals, and desires – known and unknown.
The accent (if one party is not from “here”) is loaded with meaning. Clothes (anything unusual); laid-back or dominant stance; voice tone, volume, intonations; levels of energy or lack thereof, are cumulatively processed.
Triggers can be triggered. Stereotypes ignited. Warmth flows, or doesn’t.
The wave, the handshake, the hug, smile or frown, degrees of sincerity or insincerity are downloaded by the “who-are-you” antenna and the “can I trust you” antenna issued to all at birth to be processed with the morass of stored history, experience, memories, good and bad.
Every encounter is a miracle.
And, yes, with all that, we — you and I – are called to be neighbors and to love one another.
On days when I feel like a local adventure I drive for Uber. I have to believe there is something powerful at play when it comes to coincidences.
This week I picked up a passenger from an obscure petrol station in a busy truck stop. The gentleman headed for the front passenger door, which I have noticed, only South Africans and Australians tend to do. The rider revealed he’s from KZN, specifically Isipingo. I immediately practiced my limited Zulu with him and we are both taken aback by the serendipitous nature of our meeting. On the same day, hours later, another passenger informs me that he goes regularly to visit the elephants at Thula Thula Game Park in KZN — and spends a few days in Umhlanga on the way!
KZN’s own best selling author Terry Angelos and I will have a morning together where we talk about her memoir “White Trash.” We will discuss her powerful work and its themes of redemption and reconciliation. You are welcome to attend. Terry will talk about her book and I hope to show how Terry has unintentionally revealed several fundamental principles of Family Therapy, applicable to all families of all cultures. Join us please for this 3 hour morning session on May 11, 2024. Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za has all the details.
It’s doing what’s good and right to the best of your awareness, as limited as your awareness may be, for the greatest number of people possible in your immediate circle of influence, including those whom you don’t know and even those who may have rejected you or may even hate you.
It’s gathering your strength and harvesting your latent patience and shopping at your store of inner kindness when others test you your many daily contexts, and then being strong and patient and kind even if it feels like you’re surrounded by people who don’t appear to think very much, and, if they do, their thinking appears limited to considering only what pertains to themselves alone.
It’s paying for someone’s groceries or petrol (gas) or electricity, but it’s also stopping to consider why it is that you are able to and trying to understand what circumstances have placed the recipients of your generosity in such vulnerable, often humiliating situations, that they need your help and thinking these things through without resorting to low-hanging stereotypes like “I’ve worked hard and ‘they’ have not.”
It’s seeing people’s faces, acknowledging their unique stories, accepting that all people want to be seen, heard and included, even if their day-to-day behavior suggests volumes of evidence to the contrary.
Everyone, it appears to me, is looking for someone or for something, some experience to re-live, something to either re-do, or undo, some event in the past, a journey to shed some shame or re-light the limelight.
I see it in my travels, during brief interactions I’ll enjoy with strangers when they may allow themselves unplanned moments to be distracted and untethered from cell phones.
“Retracing my steps,” said a young man at a table in a coffee shop – neither of us in our home countries – when he had no option but to chat. His phone had “died” and he needed the power outlet behind my seat. “Visiting the places I went with my dad before he died.”
My empathy immediately rose: one so young already searching.
“We are going back to the UK to show my son where his grandfather was born,” said a woman a few seats from me on a largely empty plane.
I held back on suggesting the journey was really hers given the child was at least 4-years-old and it was surely not his suggestion that brought them to this brief encounter.
Leadership will always be strongest, most effective when the leader sees and regards herself or himself as a servant to those in her or his care.
This is not for effect or for greater impact, it is simply how authentic leadership works.
If you are the leader then you will be a servant who seeks to serve those whom she or he leads. You will do so with all your heart, mind, soul and you will love those in your care. You will love them to such a degree that they will end up even unknowingly tapping into the very best of who they are because that’s how people behave when they are loved.
If you think of yourself as elevated, deserving of being served by others, afforded status by your role, you are not a leader no matter what you think you are. What you are is one who is capitalizing on those whom you are really called to serve.
Your leadership function must benefit others, not you.
When you are the true leader there is nothing you will not do within the bounds of law and the boundaries of sound ethics to enhance the lives of those whom you lead.
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