Godmindfamily, Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Power of Faith, Beyond Symptoms

The fact family stress does not need to cause symptoms is demonstrated by Kerr’s observation that heightened chronic anxiety can be expressed via interpersonal conflict instead of symptoms.[i] This occurs in those cases where the individual’s focus is more on anger or other emotions between family members. Where the focus of anxiety is on symptoms, the symptoms worsen.

Bowen and Kerr seem to have independently discovered a form of the symptom imperative – the phenomenon described by Doctor Sarno whereby symptoms can substitute for one another, which I call the symptom substitution. For example, Matthew gets a placebo cure for his back pain from the osteopath and develops tonsillitis the next week. He gets antibiotics from his doctor that begin to cure the tonsillitis. Then Matt develops diarrhoea as a side effect of the antibiotics. As one symptom is removed, another takes its place, because the new symptom is more feared than the original, resolved symptom.

Bowen and Kerr, to their credit, applied the principle of substitution to the arena of relationships; Kerr saw relationship conflict and other dysfunctional behaviours (such as cheating or delinquency) as an alternative outlet to symptoms for anxiety in the family or social system. When we combine Sarno’s symptom imperative with Bowen and Kerr’s insights about the equivalence of symptoms and dysfunction, we have an expanded concept of the substitution principle that I call, the problem substitution.

So yes, Kerr and Bowen are right in that anxiety is a kind of meta-issue, a problem of problems. But anxiety itself is merely a symptom – a mental symptom – and can be healed like any other symptom, by simply believing it will go away and acting accordingly. The same can be said of relationship anxiety, emotional fusion and dysfunctional behaviour (including infidelity, addictions, delinquency, emotional reactivity, etc.).

Almost everyone has some degree of anxiety, but there is a ‘healthy/normal’ level where it isn’t causing problems, which shouldn’t be unnecessarily pathologized or blown out of proportion, due to the risk of nocebo effects. The main thing is not to let anxiety hijack the ego.

Bowen and Kerr would pay more attention to the ‘facts’ of patients’ relationships than what they said about themselves, because they believed that how patients described themselves was often unreliable. So when Kerr assessed a patient’s emotional functioning or differentiation, he paid more attention to their relationship status, their employment status and experience, family history, and educational attainment[ii] – than he did to what they actually said to him. Of course, facts and actions should not be ignored, but to dismiss what someone is saying to you simply because of their lifestyle is the definition of bias. Ironically, going around ranking people’s worth on a scale of 0 to 100 – and devising a scale that puts the scale’s author at the upper end – would be considered a sign of emotional immaturity in anyone other than Murray Bowen by his acolytes.

Kerr and Bowen saw educational attainment as a key marker of differentiation of self, but in the 21^st century UK and US at least, university has been (correctly) regarded as an ivory tower selling largely useless degrees, that keeps people from contact with the real world. So there are some issues with the definition.

Of course, it is unlikely that your lazy cousin Xander who lives with his mother and plays videogames all day would have no anxiety problem, but it is possible, if he deeply expected not to have significant anxiety. If however Xander goes around expecting to get anxious because he lives with his mother, due to something he read or was told – he will definitely be anxious. Likewise, if he expects to smoke or have some other dysfunction as a result of his family situation, he will experience that problem.

Adults who live with their parents tend to have low differentiation because they have a lifestyle that is correlated (albeit imperfectly) with emotional fusion, a fear of responsibility and romantic love and limiting beliefs about what it is possible for them to do. Of course, there are exceptions. An adult who lives with his or her parents can be better differentiated than a married parent, provided the former is able to control their emotions. Murray Bowen noted how difficult it was to maintain self when staying with one’s parents, and how easy it was to slip back into old patterns – accordingly, someone who can avoid fusion while living with their parents would find it easier to maintain high SD with a partner. The family of origin is the ideal training ground for SD.

Getting married and having kids is associated with a higher degree of self-confidence than living with parents, although many married parents are emotional wrecks. Marriage is the classic context for fusion; a lot of people rush into an emotionally fused marriage because they fear being alone and wind up replicating the dysfunctional relationships they had in their family of origin.

It is possible to envisage a high-status degree-educated wealthy married father – who is a psychopathic serial killer with very low differentiation of self. John Wayne Gacy, who raped, tortured and murdered at least thirty-three men and boys in Chicago, is one such example. More common are superficially ‘successful’, well-educated psychopaths who are not violent but are nonetheless emotionally immature, cheating liars and addicts (to sex, power, money, drugs, alcohol etc.) – a look at the upper echelons of the big corporations and the political representatives in pretty much any country will furnish many examples of this type.

By contrast, Siddhartha Gautama, known as Buddha to his followers, didn’t have a home, a formal degree or a high-income job and may therefore have been considered relatively low in differentiation on Bowen’s ‘fact-based’ scale. But of course Siddhartha had far better emotional objectivity and self-discipline than John Wayne Gacy and for that matter, most married parents. Siddhartha is said to have sat under a Bodhi tree for forty-nine days without eating or drinking.[iii] More prevalent are the monks of various religions, who are not generally known for their immaturity or emotional outbursts; there are even indications that monks and priests may have longer life expectancies than the average layperson. Granted, these examples are to some extent atypical, but anomalies are important for the advancement of theory and science.

It’s God’s role to judge people exactly, and he does so on the basis of the extent to which each individual obeyed his will. For example, Matthew 7:21: ‘“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.’ And John 3:36: ‘one who disobeys the Son won’t see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.’ Naturally, what exactly God’s will is differs for each individual, their situation, and their abilities, but it often boils down to how helpful they have been to God and to others (Matthew 25). Kerr saw helpfulness as a marker of differentiation of self,[iv] but he placed less emphasis on it than other factors which may be done well, or sinfully.

For these reasons, the concept of a precise differentiation ‘score’ is dubious, and it can at best be a vague, approximate measure (with e.g. low, medium and high levels) based on differentiation from the (negative) emotional system, rather than being derived from ‘facts’ like educational attainment or relationship status. Being married, well-educated, employed in highly remunerative work, and a parent does not automatically make you emotionally mature. True differentiation of self is about emotional control, from which the ‘facts’ often but don’t always follow.

The level of differentiation is typically determined by the beliefs adopted, the level of confidence and love. Thus it is revealed that emotional fusion and poor self-differentiation are not root causes of anxiety and other problems, but are in fact the products of negative beliefs. The anxiety is secondary to the negative beliefs, because anxiety is generated and abetted by those beliefs. For example, the expectation (or belief) that one will be anxious under certain conditions – say, inside elevators or when public speaking – becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when those people get in a lift or give a presentation. What really matters, then, is actually the extent to which individuals adopt harmful or false beliefs.

These beliefs come from the deceiver, and people’s own Thanatos or destructiveness – the parts of the mind that want to mess people up. They exacerbate negative thoughts and emotions, including anxiety, dysfunctional relationships, sin, symptoms, and even poltergeist activity (for more on this topic, see my book, The Ghost Within: My Experience of the Paranormal and My Steps to Get Rid of ‘Ghosts’, ‘Hauntings’ and ‘Poltergeists’ By Understanding What They Really Are).

The deceiver encourages people’s destructive tendencies. The wars, tyrannies, atrocities, inefficiency, ignorance, malicious and self-sabotaging behaviour in history and the present, as well as the fear, anger, lust, greed, pride, vanity, temptation etc. that dominate most people’s thinking are basically a result of sinful human nature, exacerbated by the deceiver, who also tries to make people sick.

There is a quote attributed to Baudelaire, that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist, and this ignorance of the deceiver has enabled a lot of suffering, but only because people believe in the deceiver’s effects, including symptoms, anxiety and vices. Another trick of the deceiver is persuading people, especially religious believers, that he is some terrifying, powerful force. This is a lie. The devil has no power unless he deceives you into believing that he or one of his effects – perhaps a symptom or worry – has power. That’s why he is called ‘the deceiver’ in Revelation 12:9. The deceiver’s power is given by people’s beliefs and fears and also their ignorance of the demonic. That power is not an inherent property of the deceiver or demons who are intrinsically powerless, because in a sense, they do not even exist. The deceiver is a nonentity who wants to be a somebody and therefore tries to grab people’s attention, to shock and disturb. But these ideas do not really have to be disturbing if you realise that they are just nonsense that can be easily ignored.

The deceiver is basically an illusion that persists until it has been revealed. Demonic ideas – whether they are symptoms, vices or even the idea of the devil – only have power to the extent they are believed in. If the false idea is debunked, you no longer believe in it and it loses all of its power. Then it simply passes from the mind. The deceiver never really existed and resolving him is simply a case of realising that. Demons can be removed in the same way. This is why in a sense, evil is nonexistent. Indeed, the theological doctrine of the privatio boni posits that evil is simply the absence of good. That is why, although the terms devil and demons are theologically valid, I also call them nonentities. Demons are evil spirits with personalities that seek to harm people. It’s helpful to think of the devil as a liar; it’s even better to think of him as nothing. Sinners are ultimately responsible for their mistakes; the deceiver and demons just provided false ideas that they wanted to believe in and act upon due to ignorance, their own sin and the associated guilt, or self-loathing.

Therefore, demons can be disposed of by knowing they are nothing, expecting them to go away and simply ignoring them.

In Godmindbody, I outlined an approach of tackling symptoms by understanding TMS and the deceiver, debunking its arguments on the basis of that knowledge, and, when the mindbody symptoms and anxiety are properly understood, ignoring them and proceeding to engage in normal activities regardless, with confidence.

Although the deceiver’s main mechanism for mischief is via negative emotions, especially anxiety, the intellectual system is not immune to the deceiver’s influence. Cold-blooded psychopaths appear to be well differentiated – they can certainly keep cool under pressure – but are even more hopelessly swayed by the forces of darkness than a psychotic vagrant. Likewise, intellectuals without any love (an emotion) for their neighbour, will be led astray in their reasonings and actions, tempted into Machiavellianism and sin, and their thinking and behaviour will be skewed by selfish motives. Even looking at empirical data with supposed ‘objectivity’ has misled many intellectuals, because observable facts are actually caused by intangible mental and spiritual factors. The British Empire colonists were outwardly emotionally controlled – their upper lips were of unrivalled stiffness – and yet their activities were driven by greed, pride and vanity. As Saint Paul wrote, ‘even if I have the gift of preaching, and fathom all hidden truths and all depths of knowledge, yet have not love, I am nothing!’ (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).[v] Not all emotions are negative.Jesus laid down two commandments for humanity to follow: love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as you love yourself (Matthew 22:40); such was the importance that he placed upon love. Indeed, ‘he who doesn’t know love doesn’t know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4:8). The Greek word for love used by John in that letter and Jesus in the gospels is agape (and its derivatives). The world was created by God partly out of love for his creations.

Agape is the altruistic, charitable love of God for humanity, and humanity for God, and other people. Agape is about action as well as feeling; agape is a love that makes sacrifices to do what is best for someone. The ultimate expression of agape was Jesus’ death on the cross for the salvation of his sheep. ‘Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.’ (John 15:13). The story of Jesus on the cross is meant to inspire a reciprocal love for God in the reader or listener. Of course, perfect love sometimes involves disciplining the one God loves, so that they learn not to hurt themselves and others, the way a loving parent will stop his children from playing around in the street, whereas an unloving parent may be more permissive but wouldn’t care as much if his kids were hit by a car.[vi]

In the Greek language, agape is contrasted with the other kinds of love: eros, romantic love; philia, brotherly love or friendship; storge, a natural or instinctual affection, especially between family members such as parent and offspring; and philautia, self-love. The different types of love can overlap or conflict. For example, a husband can love his wife romantically and also care for her wellbeing. In fact, these two often go hand in hand; eros can definitely fuel agape, but it is better for agape to be dominant. Eros tends to be obsessive and is typically driven by lust. A psychopath’s one-dimensional sexual desire and self-love can lead him to neglect agape completely, through the single-minded pursuit of money with which to impress his girlfriends and indulge his own luxurious tastes. However, psychopaths don’t really love anyone, least of all themselves – their sins are just ways of ensuring their own eventual punishment, acts of self-hatred disguised as sadism.

Agape is the main force keeping people from sin, since sin is caused by lack of love. Saint Paul described this divine love, how it differs from other debased forms of love and how it wards off sin: ‘Love is patient, love is kind; love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails….Now I know in part, then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known. But now faith, hope and love remain – these three. The greatest of these is love.’ (1 Corinthians 13:4–13).1 John 4:18: ‘there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear. He who fears is not made perfect in love.’ Fear is a sin, just as much as lust or unrighteous anger, and anxiety obviously engenders other sins, as Bowen observed: that’s why Jesus said, ‘therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life’ (Matthew 6:25). Fear of death and persecution have led people to denounce innocents, murder, steal, lie and cheat. Cowards can be just as sinful as the obnoxious. God is not only patient and kind – he is very bold – without any fear. It was in large part Jesus’ love that gave him the courage to stand up to the Pharisees and die on the cross. In other words, fear and love war for control of the heart, and the more perfect love there is, the less fear, and vice versa. God’s love is primarily agape, but it is not solely agape, since he clearly has paternal love for mankind and love for his Son, which is love for himself and his holy name.Without love, sin is difficult to avoid, because most people are seen as obstacles and nuisances, with few or no redeeming qualities – such an attitude makes it hard to help them, and all-too easy to disrespect or trample on them. Knowledge comes in second place, because the degree of knowledge someone possesses is a function of how badly they want to know what is right, itself driven by the level of love one has for God and others. Knowledge will only get you so far, as Saint Paul observed. Love, an emotion, is useful for driving you to acquire beneficial knowledge, believe in that truth, and put it to good use. Without emotion, there is no motive force to do things or change. Something has got to get you out of bed in the morning.In a sense, all love comes from the same wellspring, as is captured by the generalised English word, love. In another sense, distinctions can be made, because there are different aspects or faces of this primordial drive, this ur-love. Agape has eight components and two categories.

Category A: the love of God.

1) the feeling of loving God.

2) the feeling of being loved by God.

3) the action of loving God through serving him.

4) the action of being loved by God through being helped by God.Category B: the love of people.

Category B: the love of humanity.

1) the feeling of loving one’s neighbour.

2) the feeling of being loved by one’s neighbour.

3) the action of loving one’s neighbour by helping them.

4) the action of being loved by one’s neighbour, through being helped by them.

You can make yourself help others without feeling love for them, though of course it is easier to perform the practical actions of agape if you feel agape. It is also obviously easier to: take care of yourself if you actually feel love for yourself; and to socialise with acquaintances if you actually like them. If you don’t feel love for your neighbour, it is hard, but not impossible, to help them. If you don’t feel philia for your peers, it is challenging, but not impossible, to socialise with them. It will just be very boring.In sum, actions can be forced. But most people cannot force or fake the feeling of love. The feeling aspect of agape is generally improved by loving and being loved. Jesus did not die for everyone; he died for his friends – the friends he had during his First Advent, and those who would become his friends. Jesus prayed, ‘I don’t pray for the world, but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours’ (John 17:9). The problem is, unless God reveals it to you, you don’t know who will be saved and who will be damned – hence the general rule, love thy neighbour. Loving and being loved by good people (in for example a family context) can make it easier to love your enemies, as Jesus instructed us to do (Matthew 5:43–44); that baseline love is a protection from sin, that weakens the deceiver and the destructive impulse. Ideally, the family builds up a storehouse of love, reserves of love, that can be drawn upon in tough times. You can also pray to God for more love.

The love of God is more important than the love of humanity, because you cannot effectively or consistently love your fellow man without loving God. The action component of agape is more important than the feeling part, though the two are interrelated, as the following story illustrates.

Billy is stuck down a hole. Sally is Billy’s girlfriend. She feels a great deal of sympathy for Billy when she learns he is in the hole. She cries for him. Roger doesn’t like Billy, they have had arguments in the past, but Roger is a fireman, and it is his duty to save people from situations like this. So Roger grabs his rope and throws it down the hole and hauls Billy out. Who do you think Billy is more grateful to? What was more useful – Sally’s feeling – or Roger’s action? Sure, Roger did not love Billy, in fact he did not even like him, but does that not make his action the more creditworthy? ‘But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you…if you only greet your friends, what more do you do than others? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same?’ (Matthew 5:44–47). Of course, Roger’s credit would be even greater in God’s eyes if he felt agape for Billy, as well as rescuing him, despite their prior acrimony. But ultimately, the Bible says that people are judged ‘according to their works’ (Revelation 20:12) and by whether or not they helped Jesus’ sheep (Matthew 25).

Love is indeed the missing piece of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Not all emotion is the enemy of functional family relationships (although Kerr distinguished between feelings and emotions, that is a distinction that is difficult to make in practice, and one I do not recognise). A family that really loves each other – in the sense of agape, as well as storge – is not a dysfunctional family. Emotionally fused love may be eros, storge or philia, but it is not pure unalloyed agape. A truly loving family will not argue or complain about each other too much because they will feel a relatively low desire to do it.

One reason roughly similar levels of differentiation ‘run in families’ is that families condition each other in the home and transmit their limiting beliefs about emotional functioning intergenerationally via further conditioning, which is partly unconscious. This is good news, because it means that the only upper limits on your self-differentiation are the beliefs that you hold about your own SD and the strength of your desire to develop emotional maturity, factors which are themselves largely affected by the degree of love in your heart. In practice, most people do not significantly improve their self-differentiation – which is why Bowen was sceptical about the possibilities for progress in people with low SD – but this is only because they don’t really want to do so and lack the beliefs, drive and knowledge necessary for a better outcome. Under God’s guidance, real love can still be found, even in a world where the sexes have been largely but not completely alienated from one another. The main obstacles to love are usually internal. The fear of love is huge and often justified, especially in our era of widespread sinners who reject and abuse trust. Another obstacle is that people do not feel worthy of love, or untainted love, because of their sins and because they have received so much abuse (verbal or otherwise) from other people. Again, doing good works and becoming a better person can make you feel more deserving of love. It is true in many cases that the more you love, the less you fear and hate, and that the psyche is in a way a battlefield between agape and darker emotions.

Genesis 2:24 says: ‘Therefore a man will leave his father and mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.’ Then there is the commandment to ‘be fruitful, multiply’ (Genesis 1:28). But there are qualifications and exceptions: the part about it being better to be celibate so that you can serve God wholeheartedly (1 Corinthians 7), and Jesus’ statement that some should abstain for the kingdom of heaven’s sake (Matthew 19:12). So we are left to conclude that of course getting married and having children is the right thing for most people, but it is not ideal, and it is not for everyone at every stage of their lives. For example, the time demands and responsibilities of starting a family are not ideal if there is an important task to accomplish, that requires total focus. Once the mission is complete, the situation may change.

‘For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God’s angels in heaven.’ (Matthew 22:30). This means that there won’t be marriage and reproduction in the new earth, because people’s bodies will be different. It also means that marriage is not an ideal or eternal state, but a temporary one, and a mechanism for bringing new souls into a fallen world via reproduction. Sex is addictive and lust leads to many other sins, such as envy, infidelity, idolatry and murder. That is why Jesus said, ‘I tell you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Matthew 5:28). It is also why part of the tenth commandment is: ‘You shall not covet your neighbor's wife’ (Exodus 20:17). Make no mistake, sex is basically evil, but it is tolerated in the context of a loyal, monogamous marriage, because that protects people from sexual sins. As Saint Paul wrote, ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But, because of sexual immoralities, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband.’ (1 Corinthians 7:2). Paul told husbands and wives: ‘Don’t deprive one another’ – of sex – ‘unless it is by consent for a season….that Satan doesn’t tempt you because you lack self-control.’ (1 Corinthians 7:5). He also wrote: ‘but if they don’t have self-control, let them marry. For it’s better to marry than to burn’ (1 Corinthians 7:9). The apostle clarified that marriage is not a sin (1 Corinthians 7:28), for those reasons.

Eve was told ‘your desire will be for your husband, but he will rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16), meaning that she would want to control her husband, but he would ultimately be in charge. This pretty much summarises most male-female relations since the fall, with the exception of the past 20 or so years when women have arguably – and there have been many arguments! ­– had more power than men. But it is true that the very richest people in the world remain mostly male, which raises interesting questions about why exactly these wealthy men would want to actively promote or at least enable female empowerment – out of the good of their hearts, or for some other reason?Jung believed that women’s desire for power over men was a function of their possession by their unconscious inner masculine side, the animus. Freud believed that females experienced penis envy and a partial desire to be male, that was normally resolved by imitating the mother.

Jung posited that men’s touchiness and oversensitivity was a result of their anima possession.[vii] He thought that making the anima/us conscious could free certain men and women from their archetypal possessions and lead to less fraught relationships. There is something in Jung’s ideas, but he missed or underestimated the deceiver, which generally seeks to distract people from the truth. The deceiver is the one who plays the sexes (and other groups) against each other on the familial and societal levels, as first evinced by the serpent using Eve to manipulate Adam into eating the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:12). These were the opening salvoes of the divide and rule strategy that the deceiver has used on society as a whole with increasing regularity, via modern ideology, technology and media. ‘The oldest trick in the book’ is the deceiver manipulating the sexes to tempt each other into sin, but the sin only occurs because of human ignorance and destructiveness.

Bowen and Kerr observed that a lot of dysfunctional families had a passive father and a dominant mother who tended to mollycoddle a ‘problem child’ with low differentiation, while other children turned out better. In family therapy, when Bowen got the fathers to be more assertive in loosening the fusion between mother and child, and the parents consequently focussed more on each other than their children, especially as the kids transitioned into adulthood, the family as a whole usually functioned better.[viii]And yet, as society has decayed, there are more and more single parents, most of whom are mothers.[ix] When either one of the two parents is absent via death, abandonment, misfortune, irresponsibility, infidelity, divorce or rejection, that will have consequences for the family and the children, typically negative ones.[x] Lacking a father does not mean the family cannot function at a high level of differentiation – some fatherless families are well differentiated – but there are extra challenges when one parent is absent.

Bowen Theory – like Sarno’s work – is grounded in evolutionary theory and the presupposition that humans evolved from animals by means of natural selection. The problem with this is that humans did not evolve from animals, they were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), but that is a different subject that I will briefly touch on here.Neo-Darwinian adherents are advised to look at the Cambrian explosion, the sudden, simultaneous emergence of various new classes of organism around 530 million years ago, with a lack of apparent antecedents. This is a major hole in Darwin’s theory, which posits the very gradual evolution of new species via natural selection.[xi]

What we have in terms of actual evidence is a fossil record of various different organisms. Some of the forms are similar looking, but not identical, and some are older than others. Darwinists look at that evidence and see a gradual evolution of species via natural selection, the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the less well adapted forms. Creationists look at it and see different forms created by the same God (hence the similarities) at different times, with some limited evolution going on within basically fixed species categories. That doesn’t mean Darwinism is proven; creationism fits the data better, because it does not require the leap of believing in millions of new species evolving.

There are a few rare cases that arguably constitute empirically observed speciation, but these are unspectacular and very similar to the original species, if not merely variations within that species. For example, some hawthorn-feeding fruit flies adapted to eat apples[xii]…and some finches emerged on the Galapagos islands that were slightly different from other finches on those islands…my mind is not exactly blown by this supposed ‘evidence’. In any case, the few instances of alleged natural ‘speciation’ that have been witnessed are nothing like the emergence of the plethora of wildly divergent life forms we see before us in nature. Ironically, people who call themselves ‘sceptics’ take huge leaps of faith, albeit erroneous ones.[xiii] If natural selection were correct, we would find a wider variety of intermediate forms in the fossil record, and that is not the case.[xiv]

The fact hybrid offspring with parents from different species – such as mules – are almost always sterile, demonstrates the rigidity of the species categories and the improbability of so many new species appearing as a result of natural selection alone.[xv]Moreover, neo-Darwinian explanations for how significant new organs evolved gradually over many successive generations, and yet provided a survival advantage, are contradictory and make no sense. For example, imagine the evolution of a wing on a bird over long stretches of evolutionary time. The wing would start out as a useless hump, that would not enable flight, that would therefore not be adaptive, and would be unlikely to be preserved or passed on to the next generation, according to natural selection.[xvi] The theory contradicts itself and we do not see these kinds of emergent semi-organs in nature.

In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin theorised that humans evolved from primates. This theory is wrong and lacks evidence. Nothing in nature is comparable to man’s capacity for speech, imagination, spiritual advancement (including miracles), creativity or making excuses.[xvii] Just because apes have some superficial similarities to humans – bipedalism, etc. – does not mean humans evolved from apes. The hominids Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis, were not Homo Sapiens. If there were hominids before Adam and Eve, they weren’t human (Homo sapiens), and of course a degree of interbreeding between two similar looking species is possible.

The real descent of man is the moral descent caused by millions believing they evolved from animals, and therefore disbelieving in a Creator, which has had a terrible impact on the human psyche, eliciting more animal-like behaviour as the theory has been adopted over time. Humans have not altogether become animals, so Darwin’s is not a belief that has completely fulfilled itself, but their behaviour has certainly become more animalistic – selfish, materialistic, faithless and amoral – to the extent they have believed in his falsehoods. For example, Hitler was influenced by Darwin’s theories, and used them to justify his atrocities.

The fact the earliest humans have not been found can be attributed to the catastrophic devastations of the Great Flood, for which there is abundant cultural evidence – flood stories featuring similar Noah figures and arks across cultures separated by oceans and deserts – and some geological evidence, too, including marine fossils on mountains[xviii] and mass fossil graveyards suggesting sudden catastrophic deaths.[xix] The bones of most pre-flood humans may have been destroyed with the antediluvian civilization in the days of Noah.

The neo-Darwinian theory of how the first organism emerged from matter in some ‘primordial soup’ is also lacking in evidence; it is based on the Miller-Urey experiments, which merely found that amino acids could form from inorganic chemical precursors. To go from there to say that life itself developed from those precursors is an irrational leap.[xx]

To be sure, there are certain similarities between humans, animals and other living systems, but this is due to the logical constraints of creation under the conditions of a fallen world, and the shared influence of a common author.[xxi] The human family system originates from God, our Creator, and his family relationship with his Son.

The anxiety in human families is not a function of evolutionary mechanisms gone awry, it is a consequence of the Fall – itself brought on by human disobedience to God’s will in the Garden of Eden, specifically the eating of the fruit from the tree of forbidden knowledge, because to gain the knowledge to become ‘like God’ (Genesis 3:5) necessitates suffering. The dysfunction and emotional fusion Bowen witnessed in families is obviously not adaptive for survival – nor is much human behaviour, and humans are supposedly the best adapted organisms going. The ancients called certain negative emotions demons, and many negative emotions, dysfunctional relationships and symptoms are coordinated by an inner personality – there is no other way to explain certain phenomena such as the symptom imperative shifting towards the most feared areas of a patient’s body, and TMS sparking off at the site of a previously unknown injury.

The world of observable physical facts is caused by less easily observable mental and spiritual factors. That’s precisely the reasoning behind unidisease, GMB, TMS and even an implication of the Big Bang Theory. Bowen’s semi-materialistic worldview was not entirely consistent with the supernatural phenomena and the power of belief he observed, which is probably one of the reasons why he never really developed that part of the theory. It also would have caused his theory to be regarded as less scientific.

There is greater potential to improve differentiation of self than Kerr or Bowen realised, though this requires a less rigid definition which does not depend so much on immutable family history…but would nonetheless be based on emotional control under pressure, helpfulness and health. Not making one’s entire sense of self-worth hinge upon a relationship or a job – a potential interpretation of Bowen’s SD definition – is a better foundation for starting a relationship or getting a job and a better insurance policy against a shift in circumstances. One can improve self-differentiation via belief, a strong desire to do so, ignoring the deceiver and above all, union with God, but in the latter case it is technically not differentiation of self and a different term would have to be used (salvation). Or you could call it differentiation of self from everyone except God.

This doesn’t entirely negate the responsibility many have to act (get married, work, be useful etc.) but it does help strengthen the foundational ability for action. If lazy cousin Xander wanted to pull himself together, get a job, a wife and have kids, he’d be better equipped to do so with the above mindset rather than thinking he can only achieve modest things and will always get angry when people don’t agree with him 100% because he lived with his mother for so long and played too many videogames. I’m sure many of my readers know how important confidence is when dating and dealing with people in general.

Put differently, the knowledge belief works feedback loop of Godmindbody applies to TMS, sanctification, and differentiation; acting on the knowledge and the belief successfully strengthens knowledge and confidence in a virtuous cycle. ‘Knowledge’ in this context would be Bowen Theory, the relevant passages of scripture, the Godmindfamily perspective, and how it applies to the individual’s family situation.

Complaining, arguing, nagging, moodiness, emotional distancing, oversensitivity etc. are conditioned responses – as is overdependence itself. That is, they are habits, learned reactions to a once neutral stimulus that now elicit specific behaviours. For example, every time Xander tries to do something difficult (stimulus), he gets frustrated and calls for his mother to help (response). And conditioning relies on expectation to persist – the expectation that the stimulus will trigger the response. Expect the stimulus not to trigger the conditioned response, and it won’t. Conditioning patterns of relationship and behavioural dysfunction become associated with a certain person – a parent, a spouse, a partner, a child, a sibling, etc. Conditioning largely explains why there is typically more emotional reactivity in the family of origin and why emotional dysfunction often worsens over time in marriages and new families, after a relatively brief ‘honeymoon period’. More time = more chances for the deceiver to attempt to instil negative expectations and false associations of stimulus and reaction, although people do not have to fall into these perceptual traps.

For example, Martha’s mother pestered her father mercilessly. Martha comes to associate a feeling of annoyance with every time her husband Jim comes home slightly drunk on a Friday night. The conditioned response grows each time Jim returns inebriated and becomes consciously or unconsciously expected until Martha starts complaining about Jim, and finally she gets furious with him, leading to massive arguments (and for his part, Jim responds defensively). By contrast, when a random stranger next to her on the subway gets drunk, Martha is less irritated than when her husband does it, because over the months and years Jim has become associated with the exaggerated emotional response, and she has made a habit of getting angry at him for it, a habit that can be broken by an understanding of what has occurred, and the belief that she will not be irritated the next time Jim returns home a bit drunk. This in turn will help break Jim’s pattern of defensiveness.

I’ll provide another, all-too common example. Miranda’s father was disloyal to her mother, and they divorced. Miranda’s last boyfriend Mike cheated on her with her sister. She is now jealous and paranoid about her husband Bill having an affair, which makes her less attractive to Bill. Each time she makes a paranoid comment or invades his privacy by checking his phone, Bill becomes more distant, which fuels Miranda’s jealous fantasies, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, Bill is so fed up that he starts cheating on Miranda with his co-worker, Phyliss. Miranda finds out and files for divorce. The marriage could be repaired if both parties understood what had happened, and decided to believe the problems on both sides would cease and acted accordingly; or at least their new understanding could lead to a better outcome in Bill and Miranda’s subsequent relationships with other people.

Robert Merton also came up with the term ‘role model’, to describe how people emulate the behaviours of people they admire or want to be like, typically selected from the reference set: a social group the individual is not necessarily part of, but compares himself or herself to.[xxii] The concept of the role model also engenders numerous self-fulfilling prophecies, in which people consciously or unconsciously expect to be like someone else, and thereby end up like their role model. This often happens in families. Role models can be good or (more often) bad.

People usually more or less replicate their parents’ life patterns because their parents are their main role models, and on a deep level, they expect to behave like their parents and experience similar outcomes. They have been conditioned to do so by witnessing and experiencing their parents’ behaviours for years while growing up. In addition to the conditioning, there is also an element of misplaced revenge, especially when it comes to cycles of abuse (verbal, physical or otherwise), and that is driven by a deep repressed anger at the original abuse, which can be ameliorated sometimes by becoming aware of it. The belief in the deterministic power of genes is an important factor here, that may to some extent become a self-fulfilling prophecy in family dysfunction, addictions and other hereditary illnesses.

Mark is getting bullied at school by a boy called Brandon and his cronies. His father was a mathematician who was pushed around at school and college. Mark is terrified of Brandon. He comes to expect mockery, a beating or a prank every time he sees Brandon, and Brandon largely obliges. The pranks and beatings get worse. Mark ends up getting his head stuck down the toilet. Brandon gets expelled for trying to drown Mark, then another boy called James transfers from a different school, picks up where Brandon left off, and Mark continues to live in fear. If Mark understood that his anxiety and the expectation that he would be preyed upon was actually contributing to the problem (psychopaths feed on fear and suffering), he would go to the gym, bulk up, learn self-defence, be more confident with other boys and stand up for himself without fear. He would thereby significantly increase his odds of deterring the Brandon’s and James’s of this world…

Further information about intergenerational curses is shared in Exodus 20:5, ‘I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me’, which reveals the intergenerational after-effects of grievous sins, including via self-fulfilling beliefs, although this divine proclamation was made in an earlier dispensation, before the covenant of Jesus’ blood (Luke 21:20), which enables forgiveness of sins to all who drink that blood (and sometimes, their families). The belief that many sons adopt, that they share the same fate as their fathers, their primary role models, similarly drives their fates. Thus the plasterer’s son becomes a plasterer, the soldier’s son a soldier, the fishmonger’s son a fishmonger, the criminal’s son a criminal, the Christian’s son a deacon, the abandoned an abandoner.

Freud and Bowen both described triangles in which one child is fused with the mother and the father is in the outside position. Both psychologists observed that people often marry those who remind them of their opposite sex parent. The two theorists came up with different explanations for these behaviours. Bowen chalked it up to the family projection and multigenerational transmission processes, whereby parents project their own unresolved anxieties and issues onto their children, who unconsciously replicate the relationship patterns of their parents, from whom they have inherited similar levels of self-differentiation. Both factors play roles, but above all, simple conditioning is the key. That is, people act on the basis of expectations, their parents’ marriage is the template for marriage that they are most familiar with, and so, consciously and/or unconsciously, they expect something similar of their own marriage. After all, conditioning consists of self-fulfilling prophecies. A (marriage) co-occurs with B (dysfunction taking specific forms) so many times that when the subject is exposed to the stimulus A, he deeply expects B, so he gets B.

As the famous line from Tolstoy’s (1877) Anna Karenina states, ‘all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. This became known as the Anna Karenina principle, which states that success requires that certain criteria are met, and when those conditions are all satisfied, the results are to some extent alike. As Jesus said, in the context of salvation (eternal life) and destruction, more than 18 centuries before Lev Tolstoy learned how to write: ‘Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way, that leads to life. Few are those who find it.’ (Matthew 7:13).Bowen’s genius was to spot the order in the disorder of different kinds of family dysfunction, especially with his concept of fusion. The risk of intergenerational self-fulfilling prophecies is why we shouldn’t make assumptions about people’s emotional functioning based on their family history – or any of their history. History already has enough of a noted tendency to repeat itself without psychiatrists giving it a helping hand. What you thereby lose in empirical precision, you gain in room for improvement. Obviously, people’s wellbeing should be of higher priority than how scientific the theory is. We cannot measure something without influencing it. If this is true of inorganic particles, and we know from the observer effect that it is, then how much more true is it of people?

The Hitler family is one of the most dysfunctional in history, chiefly because its scion, Adolf, was arguably the biggest sinner in history. A psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), America’s wartime espionage agency, by the therapist Walter Langer, revealed the basic psychological dynamic of Hitler, based on his early family upbringing. The profile arguably correctly predicted that he would commit suicide, and Langer was a respected expert, so it is not to be lightly dismissed.Hitler’s father Alois was an Austrian civil servant, a uniformed customs official who was a heavy drinker and a womaniser. His mother Klara was a domestic servant and then a homemaker. She was Alois’ third wife, his first cousin once removed and 23 years his junior. Just reading that sentence alone should make some sense of Hitler’s subsequent career. Alois had many children. Hitler’s cousin on his father’s side was institutionalized for schizophrenia. The family was definitely what Murray Bowen would call ‘low SD’ across generations.

Alois beat Adolf Hitler, while Klara doted on him: he was her only son, while Alois had other children with other women. Alois died of a cardiovascular condition when Hitler was thirteen. Klara died of cancer when he was 18, a devastating blow for Hitler, who went to study art in Vienna but was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, and instead subsisted for a while off his modest inheritance and became a homeless painter. His later career is the best-known train wreck in history. Hitler loved his mother and most likely hated his father.[xxiii] Hitler’s paternal grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber was married by his grandfather Hiedler years after their son Alois was born. This irregularity led to rumours that Hiedler was not Hitler’s grandfather – Hitler’s paternal grandfather remains officially unknown – and that Maria Anna was made pregnant by a Jewish man. Hitler’s half-nephew William Patrick Hitler (later known as William Stuart-Houston) successfully blackmailed the dictator, when he threatened to claim that Adolf’s grandfather was a Jewish man.[xxiv] Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, said he saw proof of this assertion.[xxv]

Langer’s OSS profile seriously considered the allegations that Maria Anna was employed as a servant of Baron Rothschild when she conceived, that Hitler’s grandfather was a Rothschild, and that a file containing evidence to this effect was compiled by the Austrian government under Dollfuss to blackmail Adolf Hitler. Langer thought the hypothesis ‘very intriguing’ and believed it would very easily explain a lot about Hitler.[xxvi]

It should be noted, however, that there is no proof that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish. Hitler definitely associated his father with the old multiracial Habsburg Empire that Alois loyally served.[xxvii] By contrast, Adolf Hitler associated his much younger, beloved mother with the German people because she was clearly an Austro-German, and the German nation was much younger than the Habsburg Empire: thus Hitler despised the Habsburg Empire and became a Pan-German who wanted to unify all the Germans in Europe.The issue with this, psychologically speaking, is that Hitler more closely resembled his domineering father than his gentler mother, in terms of his personality. After all, his father was officious, abusive, angry, tyrannical and often wore a uniform: traits Hitler went on to replicate.[xxviii] Hitler identified with his abuser.[xxix] This increasing resemblance to his father led to Hitler’s enormous self-loathing; by becoming Germany’s dictator, he became what he despised on a large scale, boosting his self-hatred to amazing levels that expressed itself in irrational strategic decision making guaranteed to result in defeat, and also in massive intense projection onto others. Hitler routinely accused his targets of evils that he himself was committing on a vast scale, such as lying constantly, plotting world domination and destroying civilization – a classic example of psychological projection.

The Hitler case is noteworthy not only because it explains the most destructive man in history, and indeed the psychological antecedents of World War Two, largely a one-man show in terms of causation, but also because other people have similar psychological dynamics when it comes to their self-loathing – just not on quite the same scale. They hate an abusive family member (an older brother, a father, a mother, an uncle etc., sometimes unconsciously) then take out their rage on a more vulnerable victim who is less contentious and unable to fight back – a child, a younger sibling, or a peer outside the family – as the anthropologist René Girard described. They thus come to resemble the object of their rage: they become what they hate. They repress this self-loathing into the unconscious where it manifests in self-defeating behaviour more often than suicide. Adolf Hitler was obviously beyond redemption, but many others who are self-loathing sinners on a smaller scale, would be best advised to repent and start doing some good with their lives, which will reduce their psychological need for self-sabotage and suffering. The key is to not be like the abuser, to differentiate oneself from the abuser and to do so by means of self-awareness of the traumas inflicted, rather than repressing them. ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy) involves violence fantasies in which traumatic memories are rewritten to purge repressed anger; actual violence is not condoned as part of the therapy. Placebo effects are an issue with this kind of work but it has been successful in some cases. Finally, do not act like the abuser, by breaking the cycle and doing good deeds.

Hitler was very obviously influenced by demons. His policies and actions were dictated by an ‘inner voice’. Hitler said, ‘I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.’[xxx] Hitler’s self-hatred explains why he embarked on a self-defeating two-front war against Russia, Britain and America, that he could not possibly win. It was basically suicide by cop. That self-destructive streak led Hitler to adopt the insane and fanatical beliefs – especially his fatal lust for lebensraum in Eastern Europe – that ultimately demolished the Third Reich, and his political career, if not his life.

There are numerous biblical examples of prophecies, which, though made by God and his servants the prophets, were mediated in their fulfilment by human expectations. For example, Joseph dreamed that his father, mother and brothers would bow to him (Genesis 37:9–10). His brothers sold him into slavery (Genesis 37:28) in a failed attempt to prevent the realisation of this prophetic dream. But Joseph’s slavery took him to Egypt, where he climbed the social ladder to become Pharaoh’s second in command. His brothers, struck by famine, came to Egypt looking for food, and found themselves at Joseph’s mercy. He forgave them and fed his family through the famine. Thus Joseph’s prophetic dream motivated his brothers to inadvertently fulfil the dream. Joseph was also a type of Christ, who was similarly betrayed for money by Judas (named after Judah, Joseph’s brother who suggested selling him into slavery), forgave those who wronged him (Luke 23:34), and will assume a position of worldly dominance following the Second Coming.

In another biblical example, King David was prophesied by God to be the future King of Israel (1 Samuel 16). The incumbent king, Saul, became jealous of David upon hearing the prophecy and seeing David’s growing popularity (1 Samuel 18). Saul tried to kill David on numerous occasions (1 Samuel 18–26). His obsession with hunting David meant that he ignored the threat posed by the Philistines, leading to his defeat in battle by the Philistines (1 Samuel 31), and his suicide, and David’s formal ascension to the throne of Israel (2 Samuel 5).

The ultimate examples of faith and prophecy in family life are to be found in the holy family. The holy family was brought about by God’s will, obedience to that will, and faith in God. This began when the angel Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary, who at that time was betrothed to Joseph of the House of David. The angel called her ‘blessed among women’ (Luke 1:26) and advised her ‘don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb, and bring forth a son, and will call his name ‘Jesus’. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. There will be no end to his kingdom.’ (Luke 1:30–33).

Mary asked how this could be since she was a virgin. Gabriel replied, ‘“The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God.’ (Luke 1:35).Mary responded, ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it to me according to your word,’ (Luke 1:38). It was because of this obedience and faith that Mary was called ‘blessed’ (Luke 1:42). When Joseph heard that Mary was pregnant, though they had yet to be married and sleep together, he wanted to break off the engagement quietly, so as not to shame her. But Joseph was visited by the angel, who told him not to doubt Mary, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20–24), not a man. When Herod began massacring the innocents in an attempt to kill the rightful king, the angel told Joseph to flee for Egypt, and he obeyed (Matthew 2:13–14), saving the life of Jesus. In the fullness of time, Joseph also followed his orders to return to Israel (Matthew 2).

This prophecy of Jesus the Son of God, conceived of the Holy Spirit, was the will of God, but it was facilitated at several key junctures by the faith and obedience of Mary and Joseph. Although there was no way they wouldn’t believe the prophecy and follow divine commands, because of predestination, their belief is no less a credit to them on that account, it was no less potent at the time, and it is no less instructive as an example now. That is, as an example of a successful family: the most successful family.Joseph’s obedience and faith is contrasted with the doubt of Zecharias the priest, John the Baptist’s father, whose wife Elizabeth was barren. An angel appeared to Zecharias in the temple and told him that he would have a son by Elizabeth, who would have the Holy Spirit even in the womb. Zecharias said to the angel, ‘How can I be sure of this? For I am an old man, and my wife is well advanced in years.’ (Luke 1:18). For his lack of belief, Gabriel punished Zecharias by making him mute until his son was born (Luke 1:20).

In the three former examples, God, knowing the power of belief over fate, used the power of the concerned parties’ expectations to help manifest his own will as stated in the prophecies. Zecharias was punished due to his lack of faith in God’s messenger, for several reasons. Number one, John was born of Elizabeth anyway, demonstrating that Zecharias’ faith was not a necessary condition for the fulfilment of the angel’s prophecy, since God’s will alone is sovereign over the fates of humans. Number two, for the chastisement and improvement of Zecharias, that he, an otherwise holy and obedient man, should learn an important lesson about faith, particularly in relation to God and the family, by means of a relatively mild punishment. Number three, to encourage others to emulate the example Mary and Joseph, and avoid that of Zecharias, by way of a contrast.

The concept of history repeating itself was first expounded in the Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes 1:9: ‘That which has been is that which shall be; and that which has happened is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ Karl Marx elucidated a modern variant to explain the similarity of Napoleon III to his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, both of whom became Emperor of France following a revolution, and met similarly dire fates: ‘history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’[xxxi] The phenomenon is found throughout history, including the talented conqueror and politician Gaius Julius Caesar and his hapless great-great grandson, also called Gaius Caesar, better known to history as Caligula. Caligula had incestuous relationships with his sisters, killed many among the Roman elite, made his horse a consul and was slain by his bodyguard, whom he had unwisely mocked.[xxxii] The First World War was followed 20 years later by the Second World War, involving broadly similar alliances of combatants, with a comparable outcome: a two-front war and consequent defeat for Germany and Austria.Freud saw these recurrences in the lives of individuals and called it the repetition compulsion, which he defined as an unconscious impulse to re-enact dysfunctional relationship patterns and past trauma, by choosing spouses with similar traits to parents or previous poorly chosen partners and engaging in other forms of self-sabotaging behaviour.[xxxiii] Freud attributed this tendency not only to the self-destructive death instinct, but also to a desire to rewrite prior events with a more favourable outcome, to thereby demonstrate a kind of mastery over the unchangeable past. The best way to rewrite the past favourably through a new iteration of an old pattern is to do so under God’s guidance.

The tendency for similar symbols, persons and events to recur is called typology in theology. It extends beyond the Bible to affect the lives of nations, families and individuals.

A typology is a category of events or persons that are similar, and are repeated throughout the Bible (and history) like motifs, with multiple instances of the type foreshadowing a greater, later fulfilment called the antitype. It would be idle to suppose that the general laws of history laid down in the Bible end there. For example, the archetype of the oppressive idolatrous ruler is either King Nimrod or Pharaoh in Exodus, who tried to keep the Israelites enslaved, and was ultimately beset by the divinely ordained plagues of Egypt. The type recurs with Nebuchadnezzar II, who sacked Jerusalem and burned the temple (2 Kings 25:9), and Antiochus Epiphanes, who erected an idol in the temple, and was defeated by the Maccabees (1 and 2 Maccabees). There have been other typological instances outside the Bible, notably Titus, who sacked Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70, Saddam Hussein, who partially rebuilt ancient Babylon, and Adolf Hitler, who obviously persecuted Jews. The typology will culminate in the Antichrist, who will commit the final ‘abomination of desolation’ (Matthew 24:15; Daniel 9:27) and removal of the regular burnt offering in a rebuilt temple, where he will sit and falsely call himself God (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4), before being beset by the wrath of God and killed by Jesus in the Second Coming (2 Thessalonians 2:8). In the case of the idolatrous ruler typology, it is God’s will to foreshadow the Antichrist, in an effort to warn as many people off worshipping him when he appears.When it comes to other examples of historical repetition, we are looking at divine will mediated by human expectations. That is, God allowed people’s conditioned expectations to become self-fulfilling prophecies – even when they were false expectations. History cannot be understood without it. Although Saint Augustine was right in that history is ultimately a linear progress from fall to the redemption of mankind, it is only a portion of humanity that will be saved, there are different dispensations[xxxiv] and typological repetitions within that process, and morals have declined and will continue to decline as the church age goes on, culminating in the utter degeneracy of the last days, which we are currently in.

Although animals can also be conditioned, they cannot use the power of belief to break their cycles in the way humans can (although animals can be de-conditioned, this takes longer and generally requires human oversight), another factor that separates human family systems from animal systems. We thus come to the realisation that emotional fusion and the associated tetchiness, neediness, distancing etc. are the product of conditioning, negative beliefs and fears, just like symptoms, and like symptoms, these problems can be healed in the same way. Healing symptoms and diseases via TMS methods and/or miracles requires firm belief in a good outcome and the ability to shut out counterproductive anxiety. These skills are transferable to the realm of family and relationship dysfunction. In fact, it may be easier to heal a dysfunctional relationship than it is to heal a serious disease, because there is more fear and danger to overcome with the latter than the former, and worse consequences for failure.

As the examples above demonstrate, how others react to us is largely determined by our conditioned expectations of them based on prior behaviour, cultural depictions and our family histories, due to the creative supremacy of mind over matter. Part of this is obvious, as in the case of Miranda and Bill. The other part is less obvious and more supernatural; as the Law of Attraction states, our beliefs can attract success or failure in ways that are beyond normal materialistic explanations – witness Mark’s prodigious ability as a magnet for juvenile delinquents. Of course, if negative beliefs such as 'nobody loves me' have destroyed or tarnished relationships, then the good news is that constructive, healthy beliefs can heal them or build better ones. Combine positive beliefs with knowledge and prayer backed by faith and those beliefs get far more powerful.

Indeed, the power of self-fulfilling prophecies can be harnessed for good within the family, especially when an individual comes from a functional and loving family background. I am reminded of the verse: ‘having been reminded of the utmost faith that is in you; which lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and, I am persuaded, in you also’ (2 Timothy 1:5). Paul here demonstrates that faith can be transmitted intergenerationally, too. That is why parents are encouraged to be good Christian role models for their children by walking the walk, and living with integrity, not merely preaching to them – which, by the way, they are also exhorted to do in Deuteronomy 6.

1 Timothy contains advice on how to raise a family. ‘The overseer therefore must be without reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, modest, hospitable, good at teaching, not a drinker, not violent, nor greedy with money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, nor covetous; one who rules his own house well, having children in subjection with reverence (but if a man doesn’t know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the assembly of God?)’ (1 Timothy 3:2–6). These verses clearly state that the father should be a virtuous head of the household, with children who are willingly subordinate, because they revere him. The means for achieving this are given in Hebrews 12: disciplining the children out of love, for their betterment, like the Father does with his children. Moreover, the leadership of the family is a proving ground, in which the individual demonstrates he is fit to lead the larger organisation of the church, with the implication that if a man cannot successfully manage his family, he cannot manage a church and is not fit for high office. ‘But if anyone doesn’t provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.’ (1 Timothy 5:8). This verse demonstrates the responsibility people generally have to look after their own families financially and spiritually.

Bowen and Kerr acknowledged that fusion with religion was often beneficial, but they did not understand union with God as a result of eating the Body of Christ, the bread of life (John 6). This union is not the same as Bowen’s concept of fusion. All fusion is the result of fusion with negative emotions and the deceiver, who tempts people into maladaptive fusions with others via fear, limiting beliefs and desire. Bowen’s idea of differentiating the intellectual system from the emotions came close to this concept, but there was too much emphasis on family history, and without a framework for receiving help from God, his theory has limited utility, like almost all psychological models.

Moreover, differentiation from the emotional system is more important than differentiation from other people, because the former generally entails the latter, and the inner usually determines the outer. When it comes to handling dysfunctional relationships within or outside the family, the key variable is differentiation of negative emotions, especially anxiety, from negative emotions – if you are able to manage your emotions properly, and reject limiting beliefs, you will be able to confidently and competently handle others. The only way to seriously differentiate from the deceiver, and thereby see the truth clearly, is to enter into union with Jesus, who is far stronger than the deceiver. ‘But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, then God’s kingdom has come upon you. Or how can one enter into the house of the strong man and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then he plunders his house.’ (Matthew 12:29). Once this salvation has taken place, the journey of sanctification begins, in a progressive deepening of the individual’s alignment with God’s will.

If you drink the blood of Christ – and I’m not necessarily talking about communion wine – you enter into a family relationship with God, who becomes your father. In John’s (12:36) gospel, Jesus exhorts people to become ‘sons of the light’, and in 1 John 3:2 Christians are called ‘children of God’. You thereby change your family history and a new nature comes with it, not perfect to be sure (and reliant on God for virtue) but more capable of positive development or sanctification and freer of negative emotions than you were previously. If you don’t like the cards you’ve been dealt, make friends with the dealer.

Salvation is a fact, a real physical experience with real-world effects including miracles and selfless behaviour. Salvation requires belief in Jesus to occur, which can be developed via knowledge of Scripture and evidence. The relationship with God (and serving him) is of greater importance than any relationship with people, because it enables eternal life, but as I mentioned, it is God’s will in most cases for people to marry etc. It is however preferable to connect with God before marrying and starting a family, because then better choices of partner can be made under divine guidance, and God can help with the responsibilities and provide the tools to better cope with them, without neglecting one’s duty to serve the Lord and help others outside the nuclear family unit; ‘for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same?’ (Matthew 5:46).

[i] Ibid.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ñānmoli Bhikku. 2020. The Life of the Buddha: According to the Pali Canon. Pariyatti.

[iv]Ibid.

[v] https://openenglishbible.org/oeb/2025.6/read/b046.html

[vi] John Rich on Diddy, demons, The Antichrist, How to Hear God, and his War on Child Predators. Tucker Carlson. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG-Ps4E--n8

[vii] Jung, C G HG Baynes Cary Baynes trans. 2014. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Martino Fine Books; illustrated edition.

[viii] Bowen, M. 1993. Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aaronson Inc.

[ix] Chamie, J. 2025.  America’s single parent households and missing fathers. NIUSSP. https://www.niussp.org/family-and-households/americas-single-parent-households-and-missing-fathers/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%2040%25%20of%20all,to%20drop%20out%20of%20school.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Meyer, S. 2013. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. HarperOne.

[xii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_maggot#:~:text=forelegs%20and%20pedipalps.-,Evolution,new%20races%20among%20its%20parasites.

[xiii] Mauro, P. Charles, D. 2019. Darwinism Debunked: Two Classic Apologetics for Creationism in One Volume. Tole Publishing.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Snelling, A. 2021. Global Evidences of the Genesis Flood. https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/global/evidences-genesis-flood/#:~:text=Fossils%20are%20one%20of%20the,Himalayan%20mountains%20we%20see%20today.

[xix] Morelle, Rebecca. 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k3x8lmje1o#:~:text=19%20May%202025,describes%20as%20%22palaeo%20gold%22.

[xx] Uncommon Knowledge. 2024. Beyond Evolution: Unraveling the Origins of Life with Stephen Meyer and James Tour. Hoover Institution. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCBHNDTEgWk&t=1501s

[xxi] Mauro, P. Charles, D. 2019. Darwinism Debunked: Two Classic Apologetics for Creationism in One Volume. Tole Publishing.

[xxii] Merton, R K. 1957. The Role Set: problems in Sociological Theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 8.

[xxiii] Langer, W. 2011. A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend. www.all-about-psychology.com.

[xxiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston#:~:text=William%20was%20dissatisfied%20with%20the,and%20William's%20salary%20was%20doubled.

[xxv] Sax ,L. 2019. Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather. Journal of European Studies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0047244119837477#:~:text=Abstract,father%20Alois%20Schicklgruber%20was%20conceived.

[xxvi] Langer, W. 2011. A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend. www.all-about-psychology.com.

[xxvii] Langer, W. 2011. A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend. www.all-about-psychology.com.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] Ibid.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Marx, K. 1852. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

[xxxii] Suetonius. Graves, R. Rives, J. 2007. The Twelve Caesars. Penguin.

[xxxiii] Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

[xxxiv] A dispensation is a divinely dispensed set of instructions for humans to follow, coterminous with a specific era in history. The dispensations are as follows: 1. Eden, a paradise. Adam and Eve’s disobedience resulted in the fall (Genesis 2;3). 2. The Fall – death, labour, sex and childbearing pains introduced (Genesis 3), a time leading up to the Flood, God’s punishment for widespread sin (Genesis 6). 3. Human Government, from the time of Noah to the time of Babel, which led to Nimrod’s sinful attempt to create a one world government without God, punished by the confusion of the languages (Genesis 11). 4. Abrahamic Covenant – God’s promises to Abraham (Genesis 17), Isaac and Jacob (Genesis 28) of land for them and their offspring.

5. Mosaic Covenant (Exodus; Numbers; Leviticus), from Moses to the First Advent of Jesus, defining sin (what is wrong), disciplining Israel under the law and achieving limited atonement via animal sacrifice.

6. The first (1 Kings 6–8) and second temples (Ezra). The institution of one physical location as a hub for prayer, sacrifice and worship in Judaism: the temple, God’s dwelling place on earth, which he eventually vacated due to disobedience and idolatry (Ezekiel 10). This dispensation was temporarily abolished with the destruction of the first (1 Kings 25), then the second, temple.

7. The current church age, dating from the Pentecost, when the apostles received the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1–4), until the Second Coming, during which salvation can be had via eating the Body of Christ in faith. Jesus’ body, and the human body that contains him, is the new temple (1 Corinthians 6:19).

8. The millennium – following the destruction of the Antichrist and his followers, and the binding of the deceiver (resulting in much longer lifespans and vastly reduced sin), a future reign of Christ and the saints on earth will be instituted for a thousand years. The Temple and modified mosaic law animal sacrifice and festivals will be reinstated, so that the Mosaic Covenant, honoured by God via the deliverance of Israel during the Second Coming, will also finally be consistently honoured by Israel for that millennium, as Moses prophesied in Deuteronomy 30:6. There will be some tweaks however, due to vastly different conditions in the millennium.

9. The New Jerusalem, following the Last Judgement, that will see the destruction of sinners, Hell, death, and the removal of the devil. The New Jerusalem is an eternal state in which everyone who is left has immortal bodies, the saved live with Christ and God in the city, and death and suffering are no more (Revelation 21:4). Each consecutive stage in the unfolding of his plan of redemption involves an increase of available knowledge about God, which some learn, and others don’t, and each successive dispensation since the fall brings us closer to the New Jerusalem, but that doesn’t always look like a linear improvement in morals, and involves periods of immense backsliding, precisely because paradise cannot be paradise with sinners in it and tribulation pushes others to seek salvation from God.

Read the next chapter here: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindfamily-chapter-6