Relational Triangles and 5 Questions to Ask About Them
PLUS - 7 Common Relationship Triangles in Churches
Maybe you’ve heard that 1 is the loneliest number…
Or that two’s a party, and three’s a crowd…
However, according to Murray Bowen, it turns out that a lot of the time,
two isn’t a party.
If you’ve ever been in a serious relationship, worked for a boss you had conflict with, had a co-worker that got on your nerves, or grown up with a sibling…you know that sometimes two can actually be pretty tense.
Sometimes…three is better than two.
This post explains why.
Triangulation and the Church
This is the first post in a series on relational triangles and triangulations.
Over the next few posts we’ll take a look at:
‘Healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ triangles in relationships
Common examples of triangles in churches
Biblical examples of triangulation
How to deal with toxic triangulation effectively
This post is a continuation of a longer series exploring Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory and how it applies to church life.
If you’re unfamiliar with Family Systems Theory, there’s a brief overview which you can find here.
Okay - on to the triangles.
Treats and Triangles
My daughter, Roxie, intuitively understood relational triangles from a very young age.
I don’t think anyone had to teach her about them either, I think they’re just a hard-wired, relational coping mechanism, and a way humans naturally interact in the world.
Roxie loves treats (like most kids do), and, rightly or wrongly, I almost never had them in my family of origin.
In my family growing up, treats were reserved for special, rare occasions. While I didn’t like it as a child, as an adult, it makes sense to me now. Treats on special occasions keeps them special, it allows you to enjoy them instead of taking them for granted, it teaches her the reality of limitations that we all have to contend with, it saves money, and it keeps refined sugar intake to an appropriate level.
To me, treats are something to enjoy, but to enjoy in moderation (sometime I’ll do a post on the relationship between diet and mental health…because there definitely is one).
I feel like this is not too extreme of a position, but I definitely understand parents who disagree with me, and I am open to the possibility that I’m merely passing on my own parents warped relationship with food onto my daughter. I really don’t know. But what I do know, is that when my daughter used to ask me for a treat, I would often say ‘No, not right now’. Roxie would immediately start crying these huge tears. Do you know what she would do next?
That’s right:
Go find mom.
Now, my wife Ashlee also did not grow up with a lot of treats growing up. But for some reason her reaction to not having treats growing up is to rebel against her parents and believe kids should have lots of treats. (To put it most accurately, she would probably not say she thinks they should have lots of treats, just more treats than I think they should have). It’s also worth noting, from the previous posts discussion about togetherness/individuality how treats applies here - I reacted with a sense of togetherness from my family of origin around treats, while my wife reacted with a sense of individuality from her family of origin.
Anyway, Roxie runs up to Ashlee and says, ‘Daddy said I can’t have a treat right now but I want a treat right now’.
My wife is then in a difficult spot:
A part of her believes Roxie should have a treat and that it’s really not a big deal if she has one right now, but a part of her also believes that it’s important for her and I to come across as a unified front and so she also wants to side with me.
Ashlee has been pulled into a relational triangle.
Because my daughter couldn’t deal with the tension between myself and her, she went and hooked in a third person (mom), seeking to form a bond with mom (and get a treat), and stick me as the odd-person out of the triangle.
Bowen and Triangles
For Murray Bowen, the two person relationship (what he calls a dyad) is inherently unstable.
Two people can get along fine as long as the overall tension and anxiety between the two are low.
But, put the dyad in stress (because they have differing ideas about treats for example), and they will hook in a third person to try to feel a sense of connection with the third person and lower their overall tension.
Within a triangle, Bowen noticed that in low stress situations, the person outside of the dyad is always trying to connect with one of the members of the dyad and ‘break in’, pushing someone else to the outside of the dyad. That person on the outside then tries to ‘break in’ by connecting with another member, putting someone else on the outside. This happens in all kinds of low key ways in my family that would be basically unconscious most of the time.
The ‘out’ person in the triangle is always shifting and changing, and in a low stress situation, it doesn’t really affect people much, it’s just something interesting to witness and be aware of. For example, imagine my wife and I having a conversation at dinner (inside the connecting dyad) and my daughter comes and sits on one of our laps to try to break in and form her own connecting dyad with one of us, puting the other parents temporarily on the outside. These things are always happening, going on around us, without much awareness…and without making too much of a difference in low stress situation amongst relatively emotionally healthy people.
However, if you raise the tension and anxiety too much within the triangle, then instead of the ‘out’ person trying to break into the triangle, people will actually try to be the outside person.
You can imagine a (theoretical) situation where, if tension was high, I would yell at my wife when Roxie asked for a treat and say ‘you always give in to whatever she wants and you’re treating her bad habits’ (willingly putting myself as the odd person out of the triangle).
My wife may respond (again, can’t stress this enough: THEORETICALLY) ‘fine, I don’t care what you do, don’t give her the treat, I try to do one nice thing and this is what happens’ (trying to put herself as the odd person out).
At which point, Roxie would likely be unable to appropriately process the level of intensity in the room and she would run away from us as we fought, leaving the two of us as the dyad fighting, and her as the out person in the triangle.
And that’s with just one triangle with three people.
If you have a two parent, two child household, 4 triangles exist in the household:
parent A - parent B - child A
parent A -parent B - child B
child A - child B - parent A
child A - child B - parent B
Every group - small to large - at a church: church staff, bible study, choir, worship band, or leadership team, the entire congregation - has a bunch of triangles shifting and adjusting all the time.
People are moving each other to the outside of the triangle, and others are trying to move back into the connected side.
5 Questions to Ask + 7 Common Church Triangles
Triangles and pulling tension around when it’s too great within the dyad is just a part of being human, and, like the case of my daughter sitting on a parents lap to get affection, doesn’t have to be a big deal or a sign of something nefarious. And, once you look for triangles, you can see them all over the place.
If you notice a triangle, it’s probably because there’s some amount of tension arising within it.
Because here’s the deal -
we can justify our actions in all kinds of supposedly rational and logical ways…but noticing triangles tells the truth about who is being included and who is being put to the outside.
Here are some questions you might consider asking yourself:
5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Relational Triangles
Who is frequently inside of the dyad, and who is the outsider trying to break into the dyad?
What is the tension level within the triangle?
Is the tension level within this triangle spilling out into the larger system and affecting other triangles within the larger church/family/work/system?
How do the dynamics in the triangle mirror/differ from triangles in your family of origin?
How do the dynamics in the triangle mirror/differ from triangles in your current family?
While there are countless triangles at work within a church…there are some that pop up over and over again as places of tension. Do any of these sound familiar to you?:
7 Common Church Triangles
Pastor - Church members political party - Church member
Pastor - Pastor’s spouse - Congregation/Church leadership/Church Matriarch/Church Patriarch
Pastor - Pastor’s family/kids - Congregation
Pastor - Associate pastor (or any other staff position) - Congregation/Church staff
Pastor - Contemporary worship leader - Traditional worship leader
Pastor - Pastor’s spouse - Pastor’s in-laws
Pastor - Denominational hierarchy - Congregation/Church leadership/Church matriarch/Church patriarch
The next several posts in the series on Bowen’s Relational Triangles do the following:
Look at the difference between triangles, and ‘toxic’ and unhealthy triangulation.
Dive into some scripture and look at some really interesting Biblical examples of triangulation.
Talk about how to handle triangulation if you find it happening to you
That’s when we get into the really good stuff!
It really can help just to begin to be consciously aware of what’s happening around us and to us. Even if you don’t know how to handle it or what to do about it…the first step is just to begin to witness it.
Do you notice any common triangles in churches, families or work life that I forgot to mention? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for Reading!
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About the Author
Travis Jeffords is a National Certified Counselor and Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate in North Carolina. He holds a Master of Science degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a Master of Divinity from Christian Theological Seminary. Travis writes on the intersection of faith, spirituality, the church, and mental health.