The beginning sessions in Bowenian therapy focus on information gathering in order to form ideas about the family's emotional processes, which concurrently provides information to family members about the presenting problem in its systemic context.

The presenting problem is tracked through the history of the nuclear family and into the extended family system.

A multigenerational genogram is a useful tool for recording this information (McGoldrick and Gerson, 1985; Kerr and Bowen, 1988: 306-313).

The therapist looks for clues about the emotional process of the particular family, including: patterns of regulating closeness and distance, how anxiety is dealt with in the system, what triangles get activated, the degree of adaptivity to changes and stressful events, and any signs of emotional 'cutoff'.

Information collected is acknowledged to be extremely subjective, especially when extended family are discussed; but stories about past generations are viewed as useful clues to the roles people occupy in triangles and the tensions that remain unresolved from their families of origin.

If for example, a member of the extended family is described as 'the rebel', the therapist explores what events gave rise to this label, who else has occupied this role across the generations and how triangles formed around family crises involving 'rebellion'.  Calming family members' anxiety in the early stages of therapy might involve helping them to make connections between the development of symptoms and potent themes in a family's history.  Another aim will be to loosen the central triangle that has formed around, and maintains, the presenting problem.  Teaching clients about systems concepts as they operate in their own family is part of therapy at this stage.

This does not mean attempting to convince people to do things differently but to encourage family members to see beyond their biases so that it is possible for them to consider each person's part in the family patterns.