Cracking Open a Closed Relationship System

How to help your family or organization solve problems, without trying to fix anyone.

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When people talk to me about the challenges in their family or organization, I ask questions to get a sense of how open or closed the system is.

Questions like, how much contact do people have with each other? Is the contact substantial, or mostly superficial? Do you have a good understanding of how each family member or team member thinks about a particular problem? Or are you mostly guessing or uninterested?

In a closed relationship system, people:

• Have less contact.

• Have more superficial contact.

• Don’t know people’s thinking about important issues.

• Rely on mind reading or gossip about what others think.

• Keep secrets from each other.

• Do not tolerate differences in thinking. 

When you look at this list, you can imagine what eats up people’s energy. In a closed system, people spend a lot of emotional energy avoiding each other, triangling other people in to deliver messages, or wondering what people think of them. Energy that could have been used to solve problems is spent trying to manage the anxiety. Anxiety which could be reduced, to a large degree, through regular, substantial contact. Contact that helps us see each other as humans, not simply people to blame or avoid.

What are the qualities of an open relationship system? To start, more people have a higher number of person-to-person relationships with each other. They’re talking about important challenges they face, not just the weather or the weekend.

To open up a relationship system,* try:  

• Increasing the frequency of contact.

• Increasing the quality/authenticity of contact.

• Sharing thinking about important issues.

• Getting other people’s thinking about important issues.

• Striving to get a sense of how people understand the world.    

• Respecting differences in thinking. (Yes, I know there might be exceptions.)

I love this list because it gives me something to do with my energy, energy I’m likely to use trying to change others rather than changing myself. Getting access to people and their thinking is a doable thing. Yes, it’s time-consuming. But so is lying awake at night wondering whether Bob from accounting hates your guts.

When we can make decisions based on people’s actual thinking, not our best guess, a group is more likely to meet its goals. It can direct its energy towards meeting goals, not solving the hypothetical relationship drama our brains conjure in a closed system.

Yes, one person can only do so much. Yes, people in leadership positions may make a bigger difference by taking on these efforts. But this doesn’t mean that one person chugging towards greater maturity, building person-to-person relationships, doesn’t make a difference in the functioning of the system.

Your exercise: On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most open system, how would you rate your family right now? Your workplace? Another group you care about? How would you rate the pre-pandemic openness level?

Your assignment: This week, think about where you’d like to crack things open a bit. With whom do you need to have more frequent contact? More substantial contact? Where could a quick coffee or phone call have saved you a month of anxious ruminating? Whose thinking do you never stop to gather, because you assume you know it? Because you know you’ll disagree with it? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Opening things up does not eliminate all relationship problems. In the short term, these efforts may create more problems and more anxiety. But when you have access to people and their thinking, you’re helping the group learn to do what it was built to do—set goals, solve problems, and reduce tension. To cooperate, survive, and thrive in ways far beyond what we can accomplish by ourselves.

*This list comes from an article written by Dr. Dan Papero about developing a systems model for assessing a family’s functioning. For those who want to dig deeper into Bowen theory, I’d recommend giving it a read.

News from Kathleen

Is it just me, or does fall feel like a new semester whether you’re in school or not? This September I’m looking forward to guest speaking at a church retreat (something I’ve never done before) and attending the Bowen Center’s Fall Fundamentals conference on cutoff. Also looking forward to the days the mosquitos disappear, though I suspect they’ll be with us until Halloween in DC.

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