Bowen & Friedman Quotes

"You can’t control a whole damn family, but you can control you, and anytime you can control you, the family is a healthier organism. That is a reason to become a self. The more you can become a self, the more to your advantage, and the family’s."

“One of the most important aspects of family dysfunction is an equal degree of over function in another part of the family system. It is factual that dysfunctioning and over functioning exist together.”

“The overall goal is to help family members become ‘systems experts’ who could know [their] family system so well that the family could readjust itself without the help of an expert.”

“A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.”

"The grass is only greener when you're not caring for your own lawn.”

"The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them.”

"Sabotage . . . comes with the territory of leading.... And a leader's capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is---that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution's specific issues, makeup, or goals---is the key to the kingdom."

"Living with crisis is a major part of leaders' lives. The crises come in two major varieties: (1) those that are not of their making but are imposed on them from outside or within the system; and (2) those that are actually triggered by the leaders through doing precisely what they should be doing."