Jenny Brown is the founder and executive director of the Family Systems Institute and the Family Systems Practice in Sydney, Australia, where she has a counselling practice and trains mental health professionals and organizations. Jenny has a Ph.D. in Social Science from the University of New South Wales. She has trained and earned academic awards at the University of Sydney and Columbia University, New York. Additionally, Jenny has completed many years of postgraduate education in systems approaches to counselling at Relationships Australia, Sydney; the Family Institute of Westchester, New York; and the Tavistock and Portman in London. Jenny lives in Sydney with her husband (and cocker spaniel) and enjoys the richness of her important relationships, in particular as a wife, mother to adult children and grandmother.

Introduction

Who's willing to work at growing up?

Part 1: Understanding the relationship foundations of adult maturity

1. Becoming a self in our relationships

2. Real maturity or pretend maturity

3. Family ties that bind

Part 2: Maturity for the first half of adult life

4. Leaving home and growing up

5. The single young adult

6. How marriage can grow people

7. Sex for grown-ups

8. Grown-up parenting

Part 3: Being a grown-up beyond family

9. Off to work we go

10. Developing mature beliefs

Part 4: Nurturing maturity in the face of set backs

11. Separation and divorce

12. Symptoms and setbacks

Part 5: Maturity enhancement in the second half of life

13. Midlife

14. Ageing well

15. Old age and facing death

Part 6: Broadening the focus

16. The grown-up helper

17. Society and self

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Summary questions for reflection

Appendix 2: Mature connection and separateness

Appendix 3: What are guiding principles?

Appendix 4: Differentiation of self as a continuum

Appendix 5: How to construct your family diagram

Appendix 6: An overview of human development across the lifespan from a Bowen family systems perspective

Appendix 7: Some Biblical reflections on relationships

Notes

Bibliography and further reading

Acknowledgements

Index