Understanding the Emotional Systems in Schools

There is a hidden dynamic in schools that is potent, pervasive, and impacts all aspects of a school’s function. This dynamic exists among those within a school and has the power to propel or thwart improvement efforts, include or exclude new staff members, and be a help or hindrance to the mental well-being of our educators. Revealing this hidden world and understanding its impact is key to moving schools forward. What follows are examples of how our school used a conceptual framework known as Resilient Leadership, based on Bowen Family Systems Theory, to help our team better understand this hidden world as we moved forward. Our school needed a framework to help everyone navigate the emotional tumult that inevitability occurs through the process of improvement.

The Religious and Spiritual Dimensions of Bowen Family Therapy

The topic of spirituality stands out in recent years as being heavily addressed in the field of psychological counseling and guidance. A similar picture also stands out when looked at from the angle of family therapies. When looking at studies made in the field of family therapy, studies addressing the aspect of family spirituality are seen to continue increasing. Bowen’s Family Systems Theory is one of these approaches. Bowen Family Theory handles the family as a system and attempts to solve the individuals’ problems by considering the environment within which they are found. The individual’s surroundings contain many situations, from family to culture, siblings to religious beliefs, from traditions to customs, and from relationships to spirituality. According to Bowen, spirituality is the reflection of the topic of God in relationships, and located foremost within the theory, a spiritual aspect is found in all important concepts, including ego differentiation and triangulations. Encountering religious and spiritual elements is possible in many of the concepts of Bowen Family Systems. This study handles the perspective of spirituality in the Bowen Family Systems Theory as one of the theories of family systems and the place of spirituality within Bowen Family Systems. In this context, first the Bowen Family Systems Theory is briefly introduced, then the study attempts to explain the spiritual dimension of the theory in light of some of its basic concepts. In addition, the Bowen approach is addressed from the Islamic perspective, and a case sample has been presented related to the intervention methods that can be used in this situation.

Anxiety as a Main Cause of Church Conflicts Based on Bowen Family Systems Theory

I propose that an examination of churches with Bowen Family Systems Theory suggests that ineffective handling of anxiety within the church as a system is a main cause of conflicts within congregations. In this paper, by examining two case studies with Bowen Family Systems Theory, I demonstrate that inattention to anxiety within the church as a system is a main cause of conflicts within congregations. I will then propose pastoral strategies to address church conflicts.