Seven Ways That Anxiety Appears in Families
Strategies for moving from active participant to observer of unhelpful communication in your families.
Family systems don't tend to be very flexible. “Especially in Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities that tend to rely on the performance of gender roles and other Christian scripts,” Julia begins in last week’s episode of Sexvangelicals. “This means that you will likely be reckoning with taken for granted expectations or dynamics that may or may not work for you as you re engage your family system.”
Many of us are spending time with families of origin this holiday season, and holidays hold a ton of sentimentality for families. For many folks, it’s a vestige to the ways that things used to be back when our teenagers were toddlers and our adult children were teenagers.
As such, it's common for family members to revert back to the roles they played 10 or 20 years ago, complete with the complex family dynamics that came with that.
Today and tomorrow, we’ll talk about ways that family systems can metabolize anxiety, keeping all family members stuck in roles that may have once worked, but no longer match the needs of the individuals and relationships in said families.
In 1978, Murray Bowen wrote the seminal book Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, where he reflects on common family patterns from his time working in inpatient systems with schizophrenic young people (before insurance companies and the medical model disincentivized therapists from working with families). He writes:
“These families have a low tolerance for anxiety. They fear it, withdraw from it, and treat it as an awful thing to be avoided at all cost. They compromise important life principles for “peace at any price”. The anxiety inhibits every relationship in the family. The parents are afraid to relate spontaneously with each other lest they do something to “hurt” the other. Parents are particularly afraid to relate to the [young person with schizophrenia]. Convinced they did something “wrong” to cause the problem in the young person, they are afraid to touch the young person lest they make the problem worse” (p. 85).
Bowen coins the term differentiation as a process for family members to be able to simultaneously define their own wants and needs and be in tune with the needs of other people. Highly differentiated people experience less reactivity and anxiety because they base their decisions primarily on the implementations of their values, rather than the impulsive responses of their feelings and fears.
Bowen identifies seven key manifestations of anxiety in family systems:
Triangles. When two people have conflict with each other, they will avoid addressing the conflict directly and dump their anxiety onto a third person.
Nuclear family emotional process. A family will navigate the differences between them in one of four ways, with the adult partnership leading the way:
Avoidance and emotional distance
A dependence on conflict
Dysfunction or sickness exhibited by one partner (i.e. substance use)
The development of behavioral or emotional issues by the child, which the parent(s) revolve around. The child’s behavior takes the attention off the dysfunctional communication between the parents.
Family projection process. This is when the child or children become the third part of the triangle.
Multigenerational transmission process. Patterns of ineffective communication replicate themselves from generation to generation. Therapist Mary Jane Wilt explains, “Without understanding how the family projection process occurred in their families of origin, parents are more likely to live out their unresolved attachments from their own father-mother-child triangle.”
Sibling position. Oldest children play similar roles across families, as do youngest children, middle children, etc.
Emotional cutoff. When children become adults, their relationships with their family systems are connected to the amount of anxiety transferred onto them by their parents. Adult children who had high levels of anxiety projected onto them either remain emotionally dependent upon them, or develop a greater emotional and/or physical distance from them.
Societal emotional process. The societal norms around gender, age, class, and race typically impact and mirror the development of the family.
Bowen continues with a stirring advertisement for family therapy:
“Throughout the entire course of family psychotherapy, the therapist maintains an attitude with conveys, “Anxiety is inevitable if you solve the problem. When anxiety increases, one has to decide whether to give in and retreat, or carry on in spite of it.
Anxiety does not harm people. It only makes them uncomfortable. It can cause you to shake, or to lose sleep, or become confused, or develop physical symptoms, but it will not kill you, and it will subside. People can even grow and become more mature by having to face and deal with anxiety situations.
Do you have to go on treating each other as fragile people who are about to fall apart?” (p. 85).
This holiday season, in interactions with your family of origin, Julia and I invite you to be sociologists.
Observers of your families.
Take a step back and pay attention to ways that your family engages with anxiety.
Consider these five questions:
What gets discussed (and how does it get discussed)?
What doesn’t get discussed?
What are strategies that your family uses to avoid discussing important things?
What are the primary triangles in your family?
What are roles and communication patterns that reappear after years of not all living under the same roof?
Let’s heal together!