The triangle theory has more latitude and is more predictable

According to Dr Murray Bowen, the characteristics of a triangle are: when it is calm, it consists of a two-some, that’s, togetherness and an outsider. Take three people and put them into a living, working, and doing together situation, two people on the inside with a calm stage and one on the outside holding most of the anxiety.

The emotional forces are in a constant state of motion and fluxation in a triangle. It’s never still; it’s moving from moment to moment. Over a long period of time, a triangle has patterns that persist. These patterns are based on sensitivities that increase the forces of togetherness :

Sensitivities that evoke threat within the internal mechanism for an individual are:

1. Approval,
2. Attention,
3. Expectations and
4. Distress

Patterns and the position people take are:

1. Conflict and distance,
2. Focus on the third,
3. Over-adequate and under-adequate,
4. Symptoms in one of the individuals in the triangle.

The sensitivities, patterns, and reactions can remain constant in a family system over generations. So it can go from calmness to tension and out and back and around and around. That is triangles forcing two-some together and excluding the other.

For example, there can be various permutations, but I will keep it simple for the readers.

A family of four immigrates to another country for better opportunities. This family includes two adults and two children. They left their extended families behind. This extended family could have eight living members, four old parents and two children on each side of the parents.

This can be configured as two groups, one with four and the other with eight members.

The two adults who have immigrated work hard to make ends meet. Their contact with the extended family is intermittent. However, when the stress is high in the unit of the couple who immigrated, they distance themselves from the extended family.

The emotional thoughts that can guide this family’s perception and actions: “They are too far away, they can’t help, we don’t want to trouble them, they were not that helpful while we stayed close to them.” Hence, the pattern of distance is matched in this case with expectation.

The stress for this family could be that the child seeks attention by being defiant. The distressed parent focuses on the child and distances from the other parent. Believing that the more love and attention provided to the child, the child will stop the defiance. Hence, the focus patterns on the child and distance from the spouse are matched with distress and attention.

This family deals with two similar patterns and three sensitivities in a given timeline. The two similar patterns are distance, and the sensitivities are approval, attention, and distress.

Therefore, the family has gone from calmness to tension and out and back and around and around.

Therefore, it is essential to keep this in mind. To understand intense emotional reactivity, that the problems related to too much or too little attention, approval or distress in this family are not related to the emotions themselves but to the internal that could be expectations towards how a child has to behave or how the other spouse has to behave about the child who is defiant or external emotionally competent stimuli that could be the other children behave better, what would our extended family think?

To make sense of the family’s reactivity, one needs to understand how this family could have learned to be anxiously over-reactive and under-reactive in the sense of automatically constraining emotional expression.

In essence, the triangle theory has more latitude and is more predictable in managing emotional reactivity.

Let 2024 bring learning and balance to all my reader’s life.