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Welcome to episode 167 of The Nonanxious Leader Podcast. Today I go through another case study from generation to generation. This time it is a father's self-differentiation from pages 118 to 120 in G to G. So without further Ado, here is episode 167, Interlocking Triangles: A Case Study. A Father's Self-differentiation.

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Phil and Kitty Fogerty's, two sons, had done well, but their daughter was a total dropout from life. A Study in contrarianism the criteria for all her life's choices seemed to be the opposite of what mother did or stood for. Mother was concerned about good grooming. Daughter tended to go barefoot and had gotten a tattoo on her left shoulder. Mother was pleasing and considerate. Daughter was sullen and self centered. Mother was efficient and responsible. Daughter was sloppy, made silly mistakes, and could never be counted on to keep her promises. Father and two older brothers were in a business that had been started by their father. He basically was its mainstay, the partner with the creative ideas and the persistence to make the business expand. He also was extremely kind, very sensitive to his wife's feelings and quick to help anyone in trouble. They had sent their daughter to a psychologist when she was a teenager, but she had made little progress.

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They had also tried counseling on their own, but nothing seemed to work. Even when they first went for systems approach, counseling progress was slow and then a regression took place. After mother learned not to pursue her, daughter, daughter went on drugs. Mother began to work on her relationship with her own mother. Daughter married her pusher. All of mother's efforts to self differentiate herself in the relationship with her daughter seemed to result only and daughter becoming more stubborn. Daughter had all the intelligence and sticktoitiveness of her father and brothers, but it had become totally perverted to a contrary service of the dark side of life. One avenue that had not been tried was to work with father alone to see if he could differentiate himself more in his own family of origin. There was no apparent relationship between Father's position and his extended family and the lack of change in his nuclear family. But where there is a family business, the financial interdependencies often reinforce the emotional interdependencies. It is generally harder to disturb the homeostasis of business families. Okay, let me stop there and work through what we know so far. So what we have here is a classic interlocking triangle.

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The mother and father here, Kitty and Phil Fogerty, have some discomfort in their relationship, and that is because he is focused on the family business. He is locked in to his family business and so the way that triangle then develops from there is that she invests herself in the daughter, which is fine growing up. But as the daughter gets older, she doesn't know how to differentiate herself and so she does it by rebelling. Rebelling is pushing back against a relationship as you are trying to selfdifferentiated, but you don't really know how to do it well. And so you just push back and you rebel. You notice that everything the mother does, the daughter does in opposite. The initial effort in family systems counseling is for the mother to differentiate herself from her daughter, for the mother to stop investing so much in the relationship with the daughter and to work on her own relationship and her own family of origin, in this case on her relationship with her mother. She did this and stopped pursuing her daughter. Now we understand that chronic situations require feedback to persist. In this case, it was the overinvestment or the pursuing of the mother towards the daughter, and then the daughter's feedback through reactivity, through rebelling, through constantly doing things to try to upset her mother.

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But since it takes two to Tango in a chronic condition, what Katie Fogerty the mother did was she decided through her counseling and family systems theory to stop pursuing and focus on her own family of origin. In doing so, the daughter unwittingly feels the pullback emotionally from her mother and engages and sabotage. Now, this is not a conscious reaction, it's a subconscious reaction to the emotional withdrawal of her mother. First she gets involved with drugs and then she marries her pusher. Presumably she's doing these reactions to try to get her mother to pursue her again. And when her mother doesn't pursue her, reactivity escalates her sabotage escalates. I can only imagine the work the family systems counselor would have to do to not get the mother to start pursuing again because this type of sabotage can take over your life. If you're a parent, it can make you want to jump back in and try to save your child. I should also note another principle of family systems theory that we find at the end of this section. When somebody starts to differentiate and the system doesn't change in the way it should, even when the differentiated person is maintaining a nonanxious presence through the sabotage, then you look for another way to break open the system and in this case it's to have father start to work on the triangling and the dependencies in his own family of origin.

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Let's see what happens next. Father was seen alone and coached to change the way he usually operated with his own mother and brothers. Traditionally, he had been the prime mover and his family the one who kept things together. In recent years, his blood pressure had begun to rise significantly. He was asked if he ever thought of striking out on his own and responded that he would love to, but his own father had told him keep the business in the family. It was then suggested to Mr. Fogerty that he goes to his aged, very dependent mother and ask her advice on how to deal with her other two sons. He did, and also told her about Father's message to keep the business and the family. Mother was astounded. She never knew that her husband had said anything like that and added that he had once confided in her that this particular son probably should not be held back by the family business because he had too much promise released, he offered to buy both his brothers out, although he wasn't sure where he would get the money. They responded predictably by guilting him about his selfishness and reminded him that this was a family business.

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He answered only that he had been thinking about the family since he was born, maybe before, and now he would start thinking about his own. Both brothers came to realize that they really needed him, and neither seemed to have the motivation to replace him. Eventually, an agreement was struck, giving Mr. Fogerty several years to pay them off. Sometime during this period, daughter called Mother for lunch, perhaps for the first time since she was in high school, and the two women began to go shopping together. She was still on heroin. Then suddenly the daughter's husband overdosed and the young widow came back to live in the family apartment. Okay, let's stop there and unpack what's happened next. Father is convinced to work on his own family of origin, and he finds, as he thinks about this, that he's the one who's been holding the family together. And when you are holding a system together, typically you are in multiple triangles because you're always trying to get people to get along rather than letting them deal with each other. And since he was the glue that held the family together, he was locked in all of these triangles and he was stuck.

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He really did want to be free from this, but his father had told him to keep the family business together. Talk about surrounding togetherness pressure. When the family systems therapist advised Mr. Fogarty to go talk to his mother, it wasn't because they knew that the father had actually said that the family business would hold Mr. Fogerty back. It's only because of the theory that as you move closer to members of your family, especially your parents, you end up unlocking things that hold you back. The other principle at work here is that presumably Mr. Fogerty was in triangles with his brothers and his mother, but always on the brother's side of the triangle, always trying to help the brother get along with the mother. The brothers get along with each other, and by going to his mother to ask about his brothers, he was putting himself on the other side of the triangle. This is paradoxical because it doesn't really make sense what's going to happen, but what we believe in family systems theory is by getting on the other side of a triangle. It shifts the relationship and opens the possibility for change. And that's exactly what happened here.

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Mr. Fogarty finds out that his dad actually thought the family business would hold him back. He gets the courage to try to buy out his brothers. And then he withstands their sabotage when they try to guilt him by saying he's selfish. Mr. Fogerty takes a non anxious stand by saying that he's been thinking about the family since he was born, maybe even before. And now it was time for him to start thinking about his own life. Notice what happens when Mr. Fogerty differentiates from his own family of origin. All of a sudden, his daughter starts to reconnect with her mother with Mrs. Fogerty. The important point about all of this is that in systems theory, we don't know exactly how to change the system. Sometimes one person differentiating can cause a system to be disrupted. But it doesn't make the change that needs to happen. And so somebody else needs to selfdifferentiated and helping people to do their own work, to work in their own family of origin, to become more selfdifferentiated eventually can unlock a system. This was a particularly tough system, and it took first Mrs. Fogerty selfdifferentiation and then Mr. Fogarty to self differentiate before any real progress was made.

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Now back to the case study. Several weeks after the daughter moved back into the family apartment. After a crisis filled night of attempted withdrawal, during which father stayed painfully awake, fearing her suicide but refusing to let her sustain the kind of habit that he said would turn her into a whore. Father offered her a position in the business if she would work seriously to detox daughter agreed. She entered a methadone program, eventually licked her habit, went to her own counselor, and as the basic strength natural to her oldest position came out, entered the family business. There is no way to show in simple cause and effect ways how father's selfdifferentiation from the triangles of his own family of origin unlocked this nuclear system. Although family theory predicts that it should happen that way. In addition, the personal qualities of this father made a difference. Mr. Fogarty had an uncommon capacity for persistence mixed with a rare ability to step back and look again. But the finest character traits can always be countered by the triangular forces in a system father's blood pressure was doing him in. Despite his strength of character in all events, when Mr.

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Fergundy went for his next annual checkup, his blood pressure had gone down. Once again, the cause and effect chain may be impossible to verify here. That's the end of the case study. And I think the point here is twofold. One is that being involved in triangling takes its toll. It took its toll on Mr. Fogarty because his blood pressure went up. And although it says that you can't make a direct correlation. Just think about the pressure that's involved in keeping a family system together. Where there's a family business and you're the one that's holding it all together. Think about the pressure when you have these interlocking triangles with your wife and your daughter and your daughter is rebelling, it can take its toll on a person. Of course, it certainly took its toll on Mrs. Fogarty as well. And as she started to self differentiate herself, things got even worse. But the system did not change. And that's the second point which I already alluded to, which is we don't really know exactly how to change the system. It is not a science. It's more of an art. But focusing on self differentiation. Whether it's mother, father, whether it's leader or co leader or somebody else in the system.

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Always when people self differentiate, it will potentially change the system. But sometimes it takes more than one person to do that. And so if you're in a system that is very stuck, start to look at the interlocking triangles. Let's take a congregation for example. Look at the interlocking triangles in the congregation and then the triangles in the lives of the individuals who are in those stuck positions. Then if you are the pastor, if you are the leader, as you are self differentiating, try to find one of those people who are in interlocking triangles who might be motivated to change, who might want to start to work on their own family of origin. Connect with them, talk through with them what's going on with them, coach them, help them to do their own work and to self differentiate. And between the two of you, you may end up opening up the system for change again. This is not science, this is art. But we know the general principles are self-differentiation moving closer to others, getting on the opposite sides of triangles and remaining a nonanxious presence. It might not always work, but it is your best chance for leading lasting change.

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That's it for episode 167. You can connect with me at nonanxious Leader.com and you can find a transcript of this episode at nonanxious leader.com. One, six, seven. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.