Triangulation

The most confounding distance between two people is someone else

Triangulation, a cornerstone of Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory, was one of my favorite things to geek out on in grad school. Intuitively, we know: triangles are everywhere: Katniss, Gale, and Peeta; Lucy, Ethel, and Ricky; Janet, Chrissy and Jack, Justin, Selena and Hailey; and let’s not forget, you, and your parents.

Many great explanations of Bowen, Family Systems Therapy and triangulation exist online, some that I will link to, but; in short, triangulation in psychology rests on the principle that a triangle creates stability. Think of a two-legged table that falls over and is remedied by the addition of a third leg. A two-person relationship is a system, but that third leg of the table creates a structure where that two-person coupling exists within other systems and gains and relational complexity. A relationship between two individuals is intense in nature, and often brings in a third (person, diversion, or focus) to balance the energy of the system.

It’s natural to triangulate to some degree. When you’re dating someone, it both changes the dynamic and makes the relationship more real when you introduce your significant other to a best friend or trusted family member. That’s a beneficial function of triangulation. So is bringing a third person as a witness in a very contentious meeting with your boss.

Where triangulation gets sticky is in dysfunctional family systems, which Bowen defined as families with low levels of differentiation (between their own thoughts and feelings as well as between Self and Other.) Another word for low-differentiation is enmeshment or fusion, which you can think of as cousins to co-dependence.

Differentiation is a lot like the Jungian concept of individuation, but with an added relational element. It is a process that we all embark upon in varying degrees as we become mature, independently thinking adults.

Let’s say that my middle-school child doesn’t want to ask the teacher to clarify an assignment, so she asks a classmate. Or, my brother-in-law wants to surprise my husband with a gift, and asks me what my husband might like. Those are benign and functional uses of triangulation. But, imagine that my child asks a frenemy to clarify the assignment, and the kid accidentally-on-purpose forgets to mention something. Or, say I’m mad at my husband, and send a snarky text that is misunderstood for sincere, ending up with my husband being gifted with something he actively hates. Not so benign, not so functional.

Healthy development and differentiation occur when the kid gains the skills to have an anxiety producing conversation with a worn-out teacher. Or when my husband and his sibling have more authentic, revealing conversations and more practice with thoughtful gifting.

Learning about Bowen and Family Systems in graduate school was a crisis point in my own differentiation. In this model, therapist and client create a genogram-a map of the client’s family tree with symbolic shorthand that details the family’s history, including significant events, illnesses, relationships, and types of traumas. The intense triangulation, positive and harmful, between family members is mapped right onto the family tree. We students had to make one.

There was nothing like creating that genogram to see the interworking of trauma, neglect, substance abuse, violence, shame and lack of differentiation in my family of origin, many generations back, to really wake me up to the pain of it. Oof.

That began a long process of evaluating old experiences in a new light, calling my mom a lot, and working through my feelings about it in therapy. Once the veil was lifted, I couldn’t un-lift it. I was left with questions, and worse; answers. I didn’t feel loved and supported by my siblings. I kept looking for evidence that they did indeed love and want good things for me, but I couldn’t find it, and what I did find was more evidence that they harbored resentment and were happy when I failed. Then I looked at the scraps of affection they sometimes offered me and felt guilty.

Even though I clearly understood why Bowen says that we differentiate mainly by refraining from triangulation and having person-to-person relationship, conversation, and conflict; I was too chicken-shit back then to confront any of my siblings with the anger I felt towards them for the way they treated me.

Which is odd, because I was mostly brave, if not so polished, when I needed to confront other people in my life and have tricky conversations with them.

In those tear-soaked, angry phone conversations with my trying-to-be-patient mom, the thing she repeated was the thing I’d heard all my life: They’re just jealous.

That’s such a mindfuck. My father said it too, but indirectly. If my parents were right and my siblings were jealous of me, that must mean I either am better than them in some ineffable way or I have it better than them.

The trick my parents had was to not define which it was, and to let me swim in my own anxiety.

Either way, I felt guilty and cowed and disempowered to talk to my siblings and wished my parents would stand up for me.

I triangulated my mom and also my pop to serve as intermediaries with older siblings, as many kids do, especially with the huge age differences I had with mine. That lasted way too far into adulthood because I didn’t learn the skills to have a person-to-person relationship with my siblings, and neither did they, which my parents encouraged. It did not occur to me for a long time that my parents could have taught and modeled for all of us to communicate and support each other.

If I had to guess, I’d say my mom triangulated each one of us with the others to keep all of us kids straight in her mind—but she did nothing when she saw that it was harmful for our sibling relationships, and possibly knew that she benefitted.

My father straight up pitted us against each other for entertainment.

As the youngest, I coped by not making waves; keeping my opinions, thoughts, achievements, joys, relationships, and activities to myself or secret from my siblings. I triangulated a parent to either protect me outright, or more likely provide cover.

After all, I learned it from them. Both parents would take turns confessing their marriage problems to me, which was totally coincidental to my becoming a marriage counselor as an adult.

Because interacting with siblings gave me irrational, heart-pounding, feeling-five-years-old-again-anxiety, I kept up the parental interface as I got older. And they did with me, too. I can only imagine that they aired their gripes about me to our parents too, and that there was a whole aspect of the system I wasn’t privy to. Maybe they also got told that I was jealous.

I did try, on breaks and holidays, to talk to my siblings, person-to-person. I’ll never forget the time, during grad school, when I attempted a more person-to-person connection with my brother and, after me trying to initiate us catching up on each other’s lives, he said, “I don’t really need to know anything about you. Mom has already filled me in.”

Even when one or another sibling said things I thought were racist, sexist, homophobic, or shitty, I regrettably kept my mouth shut. When they made fun of me I pretended I didn’t hear, or understand the joke, and tried to be the “bigger person.”

And so, I went from a child uncomfortable around them to an adult uncomfortable around them. Until my parents died. And they started to mess with me, my sanity and the adult life I worked so hard to build, and worst of all: my daughter.

Nobody messes with my kids.

So I lit the bridges between us on fire and turned the burning bits into molotov cocktails of anger that I systematically lobbed at them.

(This is why I need to have both the personal narrative voice and my clinical voice represented in this newsletter, because how in good conscience could I sit here as a clinician and a professional and be like, “You know what would really be great right now? If next time you wake up enraged, you sent them an angry text at say, eight am?That would really enhance The Work.” But…that’s what I did.)

Bowen expressly states that moving away from your family of origin will not help you differentiate (dammit, Murray!) if you haven’t established adult, person-to-person, mostly untriangulated relationships with the individual members. He gives his own life, where he strengthened communication with his parents and siblings, as an example.

Bowen was an oldest child. And to my knowledge, didn’t have a blended family. (So give me an effing break Murray! I didn’t learn about you until my thirties.)

While in some ways simplistic and drawing valid criticisms, Bowen’s Family Systems theory has great nuggets, and in a family with more health and innate functionality than I had, really helps people. We can all think of an instance in our own lives where it would be better to have a direct conversation with someone than the triangulation we’ve been doing. Furthermore, the ability to have those direct, grown-up conversations are an excellent litmus test of what relationships you have outgrown and which are still workable.

For those of us living our best lives after the estrangement, we set up new family systems and do our best to avoid triangulation and repetition of dysfunctional family-of-origin patterns in said new systems.

And that, along with social and psychological supports, is I believe is how we differentiate when there is no means of repair.

The therapist, according to Bowen, serves as that third functioning leg of the wobbly table when a family or couple comes in for therapy. The couple naturally triangulate the therapist, who models healthy communication and appropriate boundaries, until their own person-to-person communication is sufficiently strengthened to keep up the process on their own.

In math, triangulation creates a more stable geometric structure. In cartography, triangulation helps us orient ourselves and map a territory. Good therapy with a skilled therapist can help your family become more stable and oriented as our differentiated selves within an interconnected relational system. So can healthy boundaries, self-awareness, and respectful, direct communication.
While uncomfortable, this type of communication would have done wonders for my family of origin, had it been possible. It has and continues to do wonders for my family of choice.