Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

Over the years, numerous researchers have furthered the basic ideas of Murray Bowen to further our
understanding of family systems. Part of this process has been identifying different characteristics of
family systems. According to Kathleen Galvin, Fran Dickson, and Sherilyn Marrow, 30 there are seven
essential characteristics of family systems: interdependence, wholeness, patterns/regularities, interactive
complexity, openness, complex relationships, and equifinality.
Interdependence
The term interdependence means that changes in one part of the system will have ramifications for other
parts of the system. For example, if one of the gears in your watch gets bent, the gear will affect the rest of
the watch’s ability to tell time. In this idea, the behaviors of one family member will impact the behaviors
of other family members. To combine this idea with family communication patterns described earlier,
parents/guardians that are high in socio-orientation and low in concept-orientation will impact those
children’s willingness and openness to communicate about issues of disagreement.
On the larger issue of pathology, numerous diseases and addictions can impact how people behave
and interact. If you have a family who has a child diagnosed with cancer, the focus of the entire family
may shift to the care of that one child. If the parents/guardians rally the family in support, this diagnosis
could bring everyone together. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the complete focus of the
parents/guardians turns to the ill child and the other children could feel unattended to or unloved, which
could lead to feelings of isolation, jealousy, and resentment.
Wholeness
The idea of wholeness or holism is to be able to see behaviors and outcomes within the context of
the system. To understand how a watch tells time, you cannot just look at the fork pin’s activity and
understand the concept of time. In the same way, examining a single fight between two siblings cannot
completely let you know everything you need to know about how that family interacts or how that fight
came to happen. How siblings interact with one another can be manifestations of how they have observed
their parents/guardians handle conflict among themselves or even extended family members like aunts/
uncles, grandparents, and cousins.
Holism is often discussed in opposite to reductionism. Reductionists believe that the best way to
understand someone’s communicative behavior is to break it down into the simplest parts that make up
the system. For example, if a teenager exhibits verbal aggression, a reductionist would explain the verbally
aggressive behavior in terms of hormones (specifically testosterone and serotonin). Holistic systems
thinkers don’t negate the different parts of the system, but rather like to take a larger view of everything
that led to the verbally aggressive behavior. For example, does the teenager mirror their family’s verbally
aggressive tendencies? Basically, what other parts of the system are at play when examining a single
behavioral outcome.
Patterns/Regularities
Families, like any natural organism, like balance and predictability. To help with this balance and
predictability, systems (including family systems) create a complex series of both rules and norms.
Rules are dictates that are spelled out. Many children grow up hearing, “children are to be seen and not
heard.” This rule dictates that in social situations, children are not supposed to make noise or actively
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