Triangles in families - GenoPro (2023)

According to family therapist Murray Bowen, the basic unit of any emotional system is the relationship between two people. However, the two-person system is an unstable system, as under stress it tends to call on a third party to stabilize itself, creating a three-person system where two against one or two help one. When anxiety gets high enough in one triangle, it spreads to other triangles, spreading further and further throughout the family system. Thus, triangles form when discomfort in a two-person relationship builds and spills over into other relationships in the family, keeping family members together in a series of repetitive interactions and roles. These interactions can become problematic behaviors between the unfamiliar triangle participants. When there is discord between two people, they usually try to ease the discomfort by forming a triangle with a third person. Families repeat. According to Monica McGoldrick in the upcoming third edition of her book on genograms (W.W.Norton, 2007), what happens in one generation will often be repeated in the next; That is, the same problems are often reproduced from generation to generation, although actual behavior can take different forms. [e] Patterns of relationships in previous generations can provide implicit models for family functioning in the next generation. In the genogram, we study functional, relational, and structural patterns that continue or alternate from one generation to the next.

Using a genogram allows us to obtain information about strong family relationships and, given the family's structure and position in the life cycle, to hypothesize about important relationships and boundary patterns in that family. Understanding the triangle patterns in which two family members team up against a third is crucial to understanding family relationships. Detriangulation is an important process by which family members can break free from rigid triangle patterns. (Genograms, 3rd ed., Ch. 1) The presence of relationship triangles can be seen in the Bush family, where family members seem to unconsciously follow the triangulation patterns of previous generations as they form their own families.

George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife, Barbara, had three young children (George W., 6, Robin, 3, and Jeb, a newborn) whom the family named Robin at the time their middle daughter, Pauline Robinson Bush , was diagnosed. Robin is named after Barbara's mother, who died in a car accident (in which her husband was driving) just three months before Robin was born. The parents never told George that she was sick, although they advised him to stop playing with her, his main playmate, because she was getting more and more fragile. During Robin's illness, both parents spent a lot of time away from home in Midland, Texas, taking her to Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, where George's uncle was a doctor. Robin was treated there and her parents stayed at her uncle's apartment. Tragically, despite intensive treatment, Robin died two months short of her fourth birthday. During his illness, George W. and Jeb, as brothers often do when a parent is caring for a very sick child, stayed at home to be cared for by neighbors and relatives (Kelley, 131).

George and Barbara decided not to hold a funeral for their daughter and reportedly spent the day after her death at the Greenwich, CT golf course. Robin's paternal grandmother Dorothy Bush and George's close friend Lud Ashley arranged for and buried Robin on the family estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. George and Barbara did not attend the funeral, just as Barbara did not attend her own mother's funeral three months before Robin was born. In fact, they didn't even talk to young George about his illness and death, which made him feel betrayed as he was mourning his sister, who he felt very close to. His relatives remember that he was very upset after her death, having nightmares and tears (Kelley, 142). Interestingly, in 2000, when George W. Bush was 54 years old, his sister was moved to the same place where they planned to bury their parents in Texas.