The 33 Strategies of War (73 page)

Understand: the perfect allies are those who give you something you cannot get on your own. They have the resources you lack. They will do your dirty work for you or fight your battles. Like the Swiss, they are not always the most obvious or the most powerful. Be creative and look for allies to whom you in turn have something to offer as well, creating a link of self-interest. To lose such allies of convenience will not destroy you or make you feel betrayed. You must think of them as temporary tools. When you no longer need such tools, there is no love lost in dumping them.

The forces of a powerful ally can be useful and good to those who have recourse to them...but are perilous to those who become dependent on them.

--Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
(1513)

FALSE ALLIANCES

In November 1966, Murray Bowen, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Georgetown University and one of the world's most influential family therapists, faced a brewing crisis within his own family back home in Waverly, Tennessee. Bowen was the oldest of five children. His family had operated an important business in Waverly for several generations. The third-oldest sibling, a brother nicknamed June, had been running the business for some time. Continually overworked and feeling under-appreciated, June was now asking for a controlling interest in the business. Their father supported him, their mother did not. Members of the extended family were taking sides. The situation was tense.

At the same time, a death in the family of June's wife had made her so despondent that it was beginning to affect her husband's health. A ripple effect was spreading to the rest of the family, and Bowen's sister, the second-youngest and most unstable sibling, was beginning to display all kinds of nervous symptoms. Bowen feared most, though, for his father, who had a weak heart. As a family therapist, Bowen had studied a phenomenon he called an "anxiety wave," in which a peripheral event could spark enough emotional turmoil to lead to the death of the family's oldest or most vulnerable member. Somehow Bowen had to find a way to defuse this anxiety wave in his own family.

Heracles had performed these Ten Labours in the space of eight years and one month; but Eurystheus, discounting the Second and the Fifth, set him two more. The Eleventh Labour was to fetch fruit from the golden apple-tree, Mother Earth's wedding gift to Hera, with which she had been so delighted that she planted it in her own divine garden. This garden lay on the slopes of Mount Atlas, where the panting chariot-horses of the Sun complete their journey, and where Atlas's sheep and cattle, one thousand herds of each, wander over their undisputed pastures. When Hera found, one day, that Atlas's daughters, the Hesperides, to whom she had entrusted the tree, were pilfering the apples, she set the ever-watchful dragon Ladon to coil around the tree as its guardian....... When at last Heracles came to the Po, the river-nymphs, daughters of Zeus and Themis, showed him Nereus asleep. He seized the hoary old sea-god and, clinging to him despite his many Protean changes, forced him to prophesy how the golden apples could be won....... Nereus had advised Heracles not to pluck the apples himself, but to employ Atlas as his agent, meanwhile relieving him of his fantastic burden; therefore, on arriving at the Garden of the Hesperides, he asked Atlas to do him this favor. Atlas would have undertaken almost any task for the sake of an hour's respite, but he feared Ladon, whom Heracles thereupon killed with an arrow shot over the garden wall. Heracles now bent his back to receive the weight of the celestial globe, and Atlas walked away, returning presently with three apples plucked by his daughters. He found the sense of freedom delicious. "I will take these apples to Eurystheus myself without fail," he said, "if you hold up the heavens for a few moments longer." Heracles pretended to agree, but, having been warned by Nereus not to accept any such offer, begged Atlas to support the globe for only one moment more, while he put a pad on his head. Atlas, easily deceived, laid the apples on the ground and resumed his burden; whereupon Heracles picked them up and went away with an ironical farewell.

T
HE
G
REEK
M
YTHS
,
VOL
. 2, R
OBERT
G
RAVES
, 1955

The problem for Bowen was that he was also going through a kind of personal and professional crisis at the time. One of his most influential theories held that members of a family were healthy to the extent that they could differentiate themselves from their siblings and parents, establishing their own identity, being able to make decisions on their own, while also being integrated and actively involved with the rest of the family. He saw this as a difficult psychic task for anyone. A family has a kind of group ego and an interlocking emotional network; it requires a great deal of effort and practice to establish autonomy outside this system. Yet doing so, Bowen believed, though crucial for everyone, was also professionally necessary for family therapists, who could not properly help others if they had been unable to differentiate themselves from their own families. They would carry their personal problems into their practice.

And indeed here was Professor Bowen, a man in his early fifties who had worked for years on his relationship to his family but who found himself sucked into the group dynamic, regressing emotionally, unable to think straight, every time he went home to Tennessee. That made him feel profoundly frustrated and depressed. The time had come, he decided, to attempt a radical personal experiment on his next visit home.

In late January 1967, June Bowen received a lengthy letter from his brother Murray. The two men had not written to each other for some time; in fact, June resented his brother and had avoided personal encounters with him for several years, for he felt that their mother always took Murray's side, even though it was June who was running the business. In the letter Murray passed on many gossipy stories about June that family members had told him over the years, always careful to add that Murray had better not let his "sensitive" brother hear them. Murray said he was tired of these stories and of being told how to manage his brother. It would be better, he thought, to communicate with June directly. He ended the letter by saying it would be unnecessary for the two of them to see each other on his next visit home, since he had told him everything he wanted to say. He signed the letter "Your Meddlesome Brother."

The more June thought about this letter, the angrier it made him. Murray had deliberately churned up division between June and his family. Then, a few days later, the two men's younger sister also received a letter from Murray, saying he had heard about her emotional distress and had written asking June to take care of her until he got home. He signed the letter "Your Worried Brother." This letter was as upsetting to the sister as June's letter had been to him: she was tired of people treating her as if she were sick--that only made her more anxious than she already was. After another short interval, Murray sent a third letter, this time to his mother. He mentioned the letters he had written to the others. He was trying to defuse the family crisis, he said, by attracting all attention to himself. He wrote that he had wanted to get his brother all roiled up and that he had the material to push even more buttons if necessary; but, he warned, it is never wise to share intelligence with "the enemy," so his mother should keep all this to herself. He signed the letter "Your Strategic Son." Thinking he had lost his mind, his mother burned the letter.

News of these letters passed quickly through the family, stirring up a hornet's nest of accusations, concerns, and anxieties. Everyone was in a tizzy about them, but June was the center of the storm. He showed Murray's letter to his mother, whom it greatly disturbed. June promised that on Murray's imminent visit home he would not only not avoid him but would confront him and really let him have it.

Murray arrived in Waverly in early February. On the second night of his visit, at a dinner at his sister's, June showed up with his wife; the brothers' father and mother were also present. The encounter lasted some two hours, its main participants Murray, June, and their mother. It was a bitter family confrontation. A furious June threatened a lawsuit over Murray's scurrilous stories and accused his mother of conspiring with her favorite. When Murray confirmed that he and his mother were in cahoots, that it had all been plotted years ago between him and Mom, she was outraged, denied knowledge of any plot, and said she would never tell Murray anything again. June told his own stories about his professor brother; Murray responded that they were amusing, but he knew better ones. The entire conversation centered on personal issues, and many repressed emotions came to the surface. But Murray remained strangely detached. He made sure he took no sides; no one was quite happy with what he was saying.

The next day Murray showed up at June's house--and June, for some reason, was happy to see him. Murray told more gossipy stories, including one he had heard about how well June was handling the situation considering all the stress he was under. June, feeling quite emotional, started to open up to his brother about his problems: he was really worried about their sister, he said, even thought she might be retarded. Later that day Murray visited the sister and told her what June had said about her; she was more than able to take care of herself, she replied, and had had enough of the family's intrusive concern. More visits followed with other family members. In each case, whenever someone tried to pass along some gossip or get Murray to take his or her side in the family constellation, he would either deflect the attempt with a neutral comment or pass it along to the person involved.

The day Murray left, everyone came to say good-bye. The sister seemed more relaxed; so did the father. The family mood was noticeably altered. A week later Murray's mother sent him a letter that ended, "With all its ups and downs, your last trip home was the greatest ever." June now wrote regularly to his brother. The conflict over controlling the family business was defused and settled. Murray's visits home now became things everyone looked forward to, even though he was still up to his old tricks with stories and such.

I regarded most of the people I met solely and exclusively as creatures I could use as porters in my voyages of ambition. Almost all these porters sooner or later became exhausted. Unable to endure the long marches that I forced on them at top speed and under all climatic conditions, they died on the way. I took others. To attach them to my service, I promised to get them to where I myself was going to that end-station of glory which climbers desperately want to reach....

T
HE
S
ECRET
L
IFE OF
S
ALVADOR
D
ALI
,
S
ALVADOR
D
ALI
, 1942

Murray later wrote about the incident and incorporated what it had taught him into his training of other family therapists. He considered it the turning point in his career.

Interpretation

Bowen's strategy in the experiment he conducted on his family was simple: he would make it impossible for any family member to make him take sides or hook him into any kind of alliance. He would also deliberately cause an emotional tempest to break up the stale family dynamic, particularly targeting June and his mother, that dynamic's centrifugal forces. He would make his family see things anew by getting them to talk about personal matters rather than avoiding them. He would work on himself to stay calm and rational, squelching any desire either to please or to run away from confrontation.

And in the midst of this experiment, Bowen experienced an unbelievable feeling of lightness--a near euphoria. For the first time in his life, he felt connected to the family without being submerged by its emotional pulls. He could engage, argue, and banter without either regressing into childish tantrums or striving to be falsely agreeable. The more he dealt with the family this way, the easier it became.

Bowen also noticed the effect his behavior had on others. First, they could not interact in their usual way: June could not avoid him, his weak sister could not internalize all the family's problems, the mother could not use him as a crutch. Next, they found themselves drawn to him. His refusal to take sides made it easier to open up to him. The stale family dynamic of gossip, secret communications, and irritating alliances was broken up in one visit. And, according to Bowen, it stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Bowen transferred his theory and practice beyond the family. He thought about his workplace, which had a family-like group ego and emotional system that infected him every time he was there: people would pull him into alliances, criticize absent colleagues, make it impossible for him to stay detached. Avoiding these conversations solved nothing; it meant he was still affected by the group dynamic, just unable to deal with it. Listening patiently to people's gossip while wishing they would stop was equally frustrating. Bowen had to take some kind of action to disrupt the dynamic--and he found he could apply the same tactics he had used on his family, to great success. He purposefully stirred things up while staying free of alliances. And, as with his family, he noticed the tremendous power his autonomy gave him in the group.

No one can get far in life without allies. The trick, however, is to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones. A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. It requires that you give up something essential about yourself and makes it impossible for you to make your own decisions. A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else's emotional needs. It allows you autonomy.