The Thursday Professional Lecture Series

Speaker: John J. Engels President, Leadership Coaching Inc., Rochester, New York Beliefs about leadership govern every leader’s decisions and behavior. Some beliefs about leadership are closely aligned with reality. Others — including many widely accepted as “true” — are influenced more by emotional process and the imagination. This presentation will help leaders distinguish reality-based from emotionally-driven beliefs in an effort to maximize credibility and competence. This lecture was recorded live on March 14, 2013.

Speaker: Daniel V. Papero, PhD, LCSW Faculty Member at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, Washington, DC Like families, organizations have an emotional side to them that is predictable. In today’s anxious world, filled with stressed people and anxious organizations, systems ideas can help a leader understand the terrain of leadership, the forces at work within that terrain and provide some guidance for managing oneself effectively as a leader and a follower. This talk explores the implications of Bowen theory for organizational leadership. This lecture was recorded live on June 6, 2019. Can’t attend the lectures in DC? The lecture and discussion are streamed on our Facebook page. (Please note that if you participate in the discussion portion, your questions/comments will be streamed during the live broadcast, as well as recorded and saved onto Facebook.) Livestreamed recordings will be saved on the Bowen Center’s Facebook page to view.

Speaker: Sam Pappas, MD Private Practice, Tysons Corner, VA The Mediterranean diet has received wide acclaim for the many positive health effects it exerts. Adherence to this traditional diet has been shown to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment, dementia and neurodegenerative diseases overall. This talk will explore the multiple benefits a Mediterranean diet and lifestyle has on mood, cognitive function and overall brain health. This lecture was recorded live on May 2, 2019. Can’t attend the lectures in DC? The lecture and discussion are streamed on our Facebook Live page. (Please note that if you participate in the discussion portion, your questions/comments will be streamed during the live broadcast, as well as recorded and saved onto Facebook.) Livestreamed recordings will be saved on the Bowen Center’s Facebook page to view.

Speaker: Dr. Mona Sarfaty, MD, MPH, FAAFP Executive Director, Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA A family medicine physician and public health doctor who has engaged in teaching, research and advocacy for over 30 years, Dr. Sarfaty will describe her research using this background to show how climate change has affected her view of health care over the years. Her work and research were the impetus for founding the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health in 2016. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of options for advocacy. Can’t attend the lectures in DC? The lecture and discussion are streamed on our Facebook Live page. (Please note that if you participate in the discussion portion, your questions/comments will be streamed during the live broadcast, as well as recorded and saved onto Facebook.) Livestreamed recordings will be saved on the Bowen Center’s Facebook page to view. You can also listen to the audio recordings on our website or on Apple Podcasts. Search “The Bowen Center” to find The Professional Lecture podcast.

How much energy and attention does a family require of its members to sustain stability? How much room does the family allow for its members to pursue their individual interests and directions over time? This presentation explores variation in goal direction and its impact on the functioning of the nuclear family by examining the findings of a longitudinal family study. Phillip Klever, MSW maintains a private practice in Kansas City, MO. This lecture was recorded live on January 17, 2019.

John Bowlby and Murray Bowen were contemporaries, each basing their ideas about relationships on clinical observations influenced by evolutionary thinking. Bowlby focused on the interactions between the mother and the infant while Bowen examined the multigenerational family system. This evening will highlight the parallels and differences in their ideas. Anne S. McKnight, EdD, LCSW is the Director of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live on December 13, 2018.

Robert Felton will describe how he attempted to use Bowen Theory as a Supervisor of Special Education in a major school system where individual thinking was pervasive. The process for defining a child’s problem for special education services was based on a medical model which tended to increase anxiety in the system and child focus. Mr. Felton will address his ability to manage self using principles of Bowen Theory in working with the triangles as the system focused on the symptomatic child, parents and educational institution. Robert Felton, MEd is an educational consultant located in Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live on October 4, 2018.

Dr. Murray Bowen stated: “The degree of unresolved emotional attachment to the parents is equivalent to the degree of undifferentiation that must somehow be handled in a person’s own life and in future generations” (Bowen, 1978, p. 382). He observed that all people have some degree of unresolved emotional attachment from their parents. These emotional attachments in the parental triangle formed at birth are initially necessary for survival. In the process of growing up and moving toward increasing independence, individuals come up against degrees of unresolved emotional attachment, or as Bowen sometimes described it, emotional dependencies. This presentation describes one person’s effort over time to apply Bowen Family Systems Theory to resolve degrees of unresolved emotional attachment in the parental triangle. Selden Dunbar Illick, LCSW is a Bowen family systems consultant. This lecture was recorded live in Washington, DC on June 7, 2018.

Dr. Ruff was both a partner in life through marriage and in research with Candace B. Pert, PhD., with their discovery of Peptide-T which controlled the pain and extended thousands of lives in the treatment of the HIV virus. This discovery opened the door to a non-opioid treatment for pain. Dr. Pert contributed to the founding of the field of MindBody (her term) medicine in the mid-1980’s. Her sudden death in September 2013 created a whirlpool of reactivity in the family and their business requiring significant changes for Dr. Ruff in the last 5 years. These included a successful court action to give credit to Dr. Pert for her discoveries and his creation of a new business, Creative Bio-Peptides, Inc. Michael R. Ruff, PhD is the CEO and President of Creative Bio-Peptides, Inc. This lecture was recorded live in Washington, DC on May 17, 2018.

For the last six decades a dedicated team of researchers in Siberia has been domesticating silver foxes to replay the evolution of the dog in real time. Lyudmila Trut has been lead scientist on this work since 1959, and together with biologist and historian of science, Lee Dugatkin, she tells the inside story of the science, politics, adventure, and love behind it all. Together these two risked not just their careers, but to an extent their lives, to make scientific history. If you go one level deeper, you find yourself lost in the magical tale of how some hardscrabble but openhearted humans and the wild animals which they domesticated developed such deep attachments to each other that both seemed to forget the species divide between them. Lee Alan Dugatkin, PhD, a biologist and historian of science, as well as a Professor and University Scholar in the Department of Biology at The University of Louisville in Kentucky. This lecture was recorded live at George Mason Univerity’s Arlington Campus on April 12, 2018.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman was a colleague and student of Murray Bowen’s family systems theory. As a dynamic speaker and brilliant thinker, he applied systems theory to the lives of clergy and the work of congregational life. Although he adopted some of Bowen’s concepts taken from natural systems, he added his own ideas in distinctive ways. The two speakers will address their different perspectives about their similarities and differences in their ideas. Slides for Dr. Jeunnette’s talk Slides for Dr. McKnight’s talk Carol P. Jeunnette, MDiv, PhD, Lutheran minister and a leader in the Voyageurs clergy group, and Anne S. McKnight, EdD, LCSW, Director of The Bowen Center. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on February 1, 2018.

The multi-faceted concept of differentiation of self includes numerous variables which, taken together, describe variation in lifestyle of individuals and families. This presentation will review and evaluate some of the ways in which the concept has been operationalized for purposes of family research. Other concepts such as resilience, coping, adaptation, and self-esteem will also be examined for their possible relevance to research on differentiation of self. Randall Frost, MDiv is a family therapist and pastoral counsellor; the Director of Training and Research at Living Systems in Vancouver, BC, and a Faculty Member at the Bowen Center in Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on January 11, 2018.

Like a small rowboat in a big ocean, parenting an adolescent can leave adults feeling like they are far from safe harbor with no oars. Spend any time on Facebook and a parent will encounter advice, cajoling, and even criticism about how to parent. Carpool lines and soccer field sidelines are full of stories of how parents navigate the challenges of raising children. Through case study presentations and conversations with parents, grandparents, and educators (and anyone else who encounters adolescents on the loose), one can develop ways to think about their responsibilities to youth in their teen years for navigating the waters of this stage of human development. Amie Post, MA, LCMFT is the Executive/Clinical Director of the Family Crisis Center in Baltimore County, MD and the Administrator and Faculty Member at the Bowen Center, Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on December 7, 2017.

This presentation will describe the approach to preserve Dr. Bowen’s original letters and videotapes at the National Library of Medicine where they will be available for the ages and to also create an online digital database so that researchers can do their primary work. To enable both NLM researchers and the public to explore how Bowen developed his theory in his own words, The goal is to recreate the totality of each of his “laboratories,” including his family, genealogical records, and his professional world into a searchable, online database. Discussion will focus on how an archivist can select records that have the breadth and depth to replicate Bowen’s odyssey toward science as he documented the evolution of his thinking. Joanne Bowen, PhD is the Retired Senior Curator, Environmental Collections at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Research Professor in Anthropology at The College of William and Mary; and Current Director, Founder, and First President of The Murray Bowen Archives Project. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on June 15, 2017.

Dr. Anne S. McKnight will discuss J. D. Vance’s best-selling book in which he describes his life growing up in the Rust Bowl with his addicted mother and her ever-changing partners. His grandmother played a pivotal role in providing a connection out of the family chaos and instability. He went into the Marines, and then onto the Ohio State University and Yale Law School. The story does not end there. He still had work to do on differentiation. Anne S. McKnight, EdD, MSW is the Director of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on May 18, 2017.

African American Maroons (people who permanently self-removed from enslavement) and indigenous Americans founded a novel society in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia beginning with the rise of colonialism in the Mid-Atlantic region. After over a decade’s work on several sites in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, archaeology is showing how these resistant and defiant people formed communities that lasted over 250 years, what their communities were like, how they dealt with the seemingly harsh swamp environment, and how their world differed from the one they left behind. This presentation will outline what we know about this very under-recognized society and why this history matters today. Daniel O. Sayers, PhD is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on April 19, 2017.

Twenty-eight years of leadership in the Episcopal Church has provided an opportunity to think about and practice leadership principles. Bishop Stacy F. Sauls says he may have learned a thing or two, some painfully, about the relationships among responsibility, authority and power; the destructiveness of secrets; and the supreme importance of the moment of asking whether you, the leader, might be the one who is crazy. The Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls is the Chief Executive Officer at Love Must Act in New York, NY. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on March 9, 2017.

Can science tell us whether blood is thicker than water? Are we particularly nice to our blood kin and, if so, why? In The Altruism Equation, Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin tells the story of the fierce debate about altruism and kinship among evolutionary biologists, Before the debate was over, politics, philosophy, even religion, would enter the fray, complicating for close to a century attempts to find and settle on a scientific answer to a scientific question. Today that answer is known as “Hamilton’s Rule,” which states that relatives are worth helping in direct proportion to their genetic relatedness. The engine of goodness, Hamilton’s Rule suggests, lies in the family unit. This rule has been as influential on evolutionary biology as Newton’s Laws of Motion have been on physics. Lee Alan Dugatkin, PhD is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Biology at The University of Louisville. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on February 10, 2011.

In her recent book, The Beauty of What Remains, Dr. Susan Hadler reveals the details of her journey to break through barriers of absence, silence and prohibitions. This effort was an opportunity to gain strength and support to persevere in the face of reactivity to find the lost, to bridge cut-offs and to bring her shattered family together. Her husband, The Rev. Jacques Hadler, journeyed with her using his awareness of Bowen theory through his learning experience with Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Dr. Hadler will talk about her journey and The Rev. Hadler will describe how Bowen Theory was an influence in this process. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on February 9, 2017.

The development of higher cortical systems involved in the ability to manage self is embedded in the relationship circuitry of the family. The differentiation of the intellectual system and its relationship to the family will be discussed in its developmental and evolutionary contexts. *Please note that there were some technical difficulties in this recording of this presentation. At about 48:45 there is a period of silence where we switched to a back up recorder. This lecture was recorded live at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC on January 12, 2017.