Doctor. Murray Bowen invented what has come to be known as “Bowen Theory” or Family Systems Theory. Doctor. Rabbi Friedman put Bowen’s theory to work for rabbis, pastors and other christian professions in Generation to Generation and his posthumous work Failure of Nerve.
This theory of family Munchkin kittens behavior is based on several key concepts about why people work like they do in groups, not based on mechanistic roles but on what people in groups act emotionally. This theory thinks in terms of emotional processes and not in hierarchies or intelligent terms.
This article has a look at why most people love cats as an approach to explain some of the main ideas in Murray Bowen’s theory of Family and Societal Systems.
We irrationally love cats–those of us who do. Those who hate cats hate them irrationally. Why all the emotions about cats? Because they expose the truth about human emotional systems by introducing catlike emotional behavior!
The cat, any cat, introduced into the human emotional system, will cause the human emotional system to rearrange. Not because the cat does not because of how the cat is emotionally.
- Cats Tend to be Emotionally Self-Differentiated
Self-differentiation is the goal and high water mark of maturation for the Bowen Theory. Cats obtain it.
They know what they like. They know who they like. They know what they will and will not do and refuse to learn. They have no desire to win approval but seek emotional support (petting) when they are interested and from whom they want it.
Most humans call this independence or detachment. It is really the positioning of self-differentiation to which we all aspire. We admire cats for being able to be aloof and standoffish. What we truly admire is their ability to shamelessly self-differentiate.
Those who hate cats most likely are uncomfortable with others who refuse to participate in emotional hubbub in the human system too.
- Cats Do not Accept Anxiety from Others
When there is “drama” between humans, cats usually run off or keep out of the arena by hissing and doing fend-off defensive mode until they can escape. Cats refuse to accept anxiety from others.
They may choose to purr around you when you are upset, but that, we all know, is pure coincidence. Cats take care of their own emotional distress. It doesn’t ask for help. They fight their own matches and never seek to recruit the “gang” or “herd” effect as humans do.
- Cats Discovered a perfect Balance Between Friendship and Distance
Cats never become so attached that they cannot do without you but never so removed they don’t look for you after you have been gone a while.
They have found the perfect balance of distance and friendship that humans rarely find. Most humans become so close to one another they merge either by loving or fighting. Or humans distance from each other in respond to anxiety thus keeping the blend on a distance level.
Not cats.
If you are gone a year or an hour it makes no difference. They will react the same to your return in predictable patterns. The longer you are gone the less they may react upon your return.
Most humans respect the bounds of a cat much more than the emotional bounds of other humans!
- Cats Are Removed but Connected
They never “leave” the machine. They do their own thing and then, suddenly, it seems, they will arrive into the emotional system with purring and a desire to be petted on their own terms. Try to coax them and you will only get disdain and disinterest. Try to stop them when they WANT strokes and you will have to get out a broom.
- Cats Learn This Behavior From Parents
While kittens, they show no self-differentiation except when they will pitilessly hide the runt out of the way to get the last stink of milk even though the runt may be bankrupt to death.
Cats are social animals like humans, but even mom is self-differentiated. She passes when she feels it and guards the litter if she is in the mood.
Humans are keen on this closeness/distance balance but we admire it too.
The kittens learn it from their parents. The father stands off aside as a sometimes protection of the litter and the mother attends which could ones without asking a thing more from the father.
If a cat acts up, mom never threatens the kittens with the return or retribution of the father: she does the swatting herself.
- Cats May Feel Anxiety During Times of Change but they Handle Their own — It doesn’t Triangle
In Bowen’s theory, humans always triangle. We cannot handle the common fears of life and so we seek out anyone to share our anxiety. The anxiety producer–whether it is a situation or a person or a pressure–is always the third person in the triangle.
Cats do not do this. They handle their own anxiety like the parent leader of a lion Pride. When the young lion challenges the Pride leader leading the way may put up a ceremonial fight but handles the anxiety. He does not seek to share with you the anxiety with anyone. He goes off into the distance and watches the Pride move on without him.
Humans admire this and fear it at the same time. Someone who is self-differentiated is frightening to those who are not. The reason for this is because humans tend to be a herding species, especially when there is change or upset in the “normal” way anxiety is handled in the system.
- Cats Are nourished by Herds They Never Form Herds
Cats eat from panicked herds. It doesn’t form herds. They form Prides. Even the name suggests independence and positive attributes.
When humans experience anxiety, they tend to herd together to get rid of the anxiety by attacking it or running from it instead of dealing with it.
For instance, think of the horrible images on the television documentaries of lions eating water buffalo grass or gazelles. Notice, if the herd suddenly turned on the cats, the cats would lose. Even if several, maybe just a handful, of the thousands-of-pounds monsters turned on the cats, the limber but vulnerable-to-stomping cats would flee in panic.
Herds “group think” and panic. They run from anxiety or mindlessly attack each other trying to find the panic-making the most likely culprit, but they rarely attack the real predator which has been harassment them for days.
They fail to see the real danger: the cat in the room.
- Cats Can Switch Prides Based on their own Self-Interest
Cats can go from owner to owner, Pride to Pride, without loss of self-differentiation. Give a cat away and it will adapt immediately to the new situation because it was not emotionally fused with the last one!
Humans may experience this as selfishness on the part of the cat or self-absorption. In fact, it is adroit emotional difference. Some cats will leave one household and adopt another with secured in a dark no regrets if the new situation is in the best interest of the cat. And the cat knows.
Selfishness and self-differentiation are not the same and cats discover a method to understand this. Cats are not selfish. They share when they decide to share. They show affection when they want to and not when they must.
They don’t NEED humans. They can hunt if they have to. If they do choose to hunt, they generally bring poor people animal to their humans to supplement the food products the humans gather from God knows where.
- Cats Can Work like Kittens if they Feel like It
Cats can, wonderfully, from time to time suddenly work like a cat! –Playing with lite flite and dancing after laser lights moving from a human penlight. Cats can regress when they feel playful or curious.
This ability to regress is not emotional a weakness but the openness to be emotionally open when they feel like it. There is the key: when they feel like it.
Their unpredictability is delightful to the majority of humans. Some humans hate cats. They aren’t needy enough. They don’t merge. They are worthless anxiety receptors. An angry human may kick a dog and the dog will cower. Kick a cat and see when there is. They do not share your anxiety.