Marriage Counseling San Diego: Five Favorite Quotes From Dr. Murray Bowen

As a marriage and family therapist in San Diego, I practice couples therapy and individual therapy using an intergenerational perspective. I specialize in helping couples and individuals live more meaningfully in their most important relationships. Relationship counseling and individual counseling is better to seek sooner rather than later when one experiences chronic challenges in relational functioning. Research has shown that couples typically wait 6 years before seeking couples counseling. It is wiser to get help earlier and before problems fester, causing resentments to harden and become more resistant to treatment.

Dr. Murray Bowen was a pioneer of marriage and family therapy.   He believed that human beings live in interdependent emotional systems. His insights are profound. I am guided, in large part, by his ideas. James Framo, another early MFT leader, observed that clinically, Bowen’s ideas address the basic question of how one can deal with one’s family’s nuttiness without cutting off from the family. Just as Socrates urged people, “Know thyself,” Dr. Bowen encouraged people to “Know your family.”  Such an effort can enhance one’s ability to live in a more fulfilled way in one’s current relationships. Below are *five quotes that typify Bowen’s deep and unique  level of understanding of the human condition:

“Schizophrenia is made up of the essence of human experience  many times distilled. With our incapacity to look at ourselves, we have much to learn about ourselves by studying the least mature among us.” -M. Bowen

“One of the most important aspects of family dysfunction is an equal degree of overfunction in another part of the family system. It is factual that dysfunctioning and overfunctioning exist together.” -M. Bowen

“The overall goal [of counseling] 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.” -M. Bowen

“The basic building block of any emotional system is the triangle.” -M. Bowen

“The ‘Emotional Shock Wave’ is a network of underground ‘aftershocks’ of serious life events that can occur anywhere in the extended family system in the months or years following serious emotional events in the family.” -M. Bowen

Dr. Cunningham specializes in seeing couples and individuals in her office in the heart of San Diego. To learn more about her insight-based, intergenerational model of practice and get some tips just for stopping by, visit her website at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com

You may also receive a complimentary telephone consultation by calling her at 619 9906203.

*Five quotes from Dr. Murray Bowen are cited within a book entitled FAMILY THERAPY IN CLINICAL PRACTICE (1978) by Murray Bowen (Jason Aronson: Northvale, NJ).

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