A conference on emotional cutoff in the family will be held on Friday, July 26, at the Carleton Hotel in Oak Park. Hosted by the Center for Family Consultation, this will be a day of exploring the Family Systems Theory developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. A leading scholar of Bowen theory, Dr. Anne McKnight will lead the conference. She brings four decades of practice as a family therapist to her knowledge of the emotional process in families. This conference is open to the public. Information on registration can be found on this website: https://thecenterforfamilyconsultation.com/summer-conference/2024-summer-conference.
Bowen defined emotional cutoff as “the process of separation, isolation, withdrawal, running away, or denying the importance of the parental family.” Growing up and becoming a relatively autonomous individual is a challenge that brings one face-to-face with the degree of one’s emotional attachment to one’s parents.
For those who can address this with emotional maturity, the process of gaining autonomy and separating emotionally from parents occurs gradually from childhood and goes smoothly in young adulthood. When the level of stress and emotional reactivity in the family is more intense, the process is more difficult. For some young adults, cutoff may be seen as the only way to preserve self and gain independence. Parents are seen as the problem and getting away as the solution. Some deal with the discomfort by isolating themselves emotionally while still living at home or close to the family; others need physical distance to achieve a degree of emotional distance. Most people use a combination of internal and physical cutoff.
Moving into a new relationship that promises freedom often seems like the solution. However, one does not gain emotional maturity by cutting off from parents. People bring their immaturity with them into new relationships and will predictably replicate or intensify the relationship problems they have tried to escape. At this point, partners will often wonder how, despite their efforts to leave their problems behind, start over and do better, they are having as many or more problems than they had in their parental families.
Cutoff in one generation begets cutoff in the next, as children who grow up in more intense family emotional climates are likely to replicate the pattern as a way of managing relationship tensions. Over generations, emotional cutoff is costly to individuals and families. It takes a broad perspective to see this. In the midst of cutting off, people are relieved to get away from a difficult relationship; they do not see that they are leaving behind valuable resources available in an extended family.
In Bowen’s words: “In general, the greater the cutoff with the past, the more likely the new family is to become a ‘cocoonized’ family fragment, and the more vulnerable the family is to disabling symptoms in the future.” In the longer term, as cutoffs beget more cutoffs, whole branches of families lose contact with one another and the fabric of the family is weakened. A lifetime of successive cutoffs is likely to end in loneliness and isolation.
Cutoffs can be bridged, contact can be re-established, and people can reclaim to a significant extent the emotional connection that has been lost through cutoff. Study of one’s family and moving toward a more objective and systemic view are first steps. With an enlarged perspective, one begins to see cutoff as a product of the family emotional system and to see one’s own part in the reactive family patterns. As described by Bowen: “The study requires that the researcher begin to gain control over his emotional reactivity to his family, that he visit his parental family as often as indicated, and that he develop the ability to become a more objective observer in his own family.” With this view, possibilities for change open up. It is a well-proven avenue for growth in one’s own maturity.
Stephanie Ferrera is a family therapist, and partner in Center for Family Consultation.