About MJ

She often wonders: “Had my family known about BFST when I was a child, or if I had come across it before embarking on my own adult life, would it have prevented years of tremendous pain, suffering and struggle?” While she believes that all family leaders will benefit by the curriculum she has designed, MJ most wants to reach families like her own family of origin. In addition to her background, her experience as a private practice clinician, her doctoral training as a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) and her master’s level training as an educator also equip her to do this research and work.

MJ’s personal and professional accomplishments have been hard won, mostly after the events contributing to her high ACE score eventually caught up with her. Just six years into her marriage, divorce loomed on her horizon. Fortunately, her high school teaching position came with good mental health coverage, and she sought help to process through the trauma of her childhood. Ten years of personal psychotherapy and two masters degrees (education and counseling) later, MJ still felt her worldview was missing an elusive piece.

Immediately, MJ began to apply BFST principles in her personal relationships and found that everything Bowen said would happen did happen, exactly as he described. So MJ began presenting the principles to her clients in her private practice, as well. There, too, those who gave the theory an honest try found it intuitive and empowering, although challenging. As Bowen predicted, when clients tried to change themselves in their relationships, they encountered resistance from within and without, but as they were able to push through their internal tension to remain true to themselves in the face of opposition, their relationships eventually absorbed the new way of being, elevating their dynamics to a more emotionally mature level of functioning.

A Most Challenging Test

After practicing BFST for several years, MJ decided she needed to take her personal healing up a notch by moving back across the country to the area where she had grown up (and from where she’d escaped 30 years before). When MJ gets something in her mind that she believes in, she pursues it wholeheartedly. For three years, she lived in close proximity to her remaining family members, conducting her own personal research project. She found that practicing BFST from 3000 miles away is much less challenging than practicing it in situ, but MJ looks back on this time with gratitude for how she and her family relationships changed during this time.

This is precisely why MJ pursued a doctoral degree at NCU. When she conceived of Family School, MJ wanted expert guidance putting together a research project to begin collecting an evidence base. Where better to do this than in a doctoral program? she thought.

Although MJ had been practicing psychotherapy almost 20 years, her master’s degree program in counseling had specialized in trauma recovery training, not on family systems principles. While she and her clients were doing solid trauma recovery work, it wasn’t complete without the systemic component.

One cannot overstate the challenge of effectively leading a family, and there are few social services to support parents. MJ is passionate about taking powerful family systems material outside the clinical setting, because many parents are unable to afford family therapy or avoid formal clinical intervention due to cultural stigma or barriers to treatment access. However, MJ wants to help parents craft an optimal environment for their children by providing a framework that can help parents think differently about leading, focusing on their own character development as highest priority so that they can react less and respond more.