In families, a process takes place that is automatic and outside awareness. It is known as the family projection process and it exists in virtually every family.
The Nuclear Family Emotional Process
In the Nuclear Family Emotional System, one parent (or both) impairs a child’s functioning without realizing it. When a parent’s level of Differentiation of Self — which can sometimes be thought of as “responsibility for self” — represents the lower end of the emotional continuum, often a child pays the price.
It usually begins within the triangle that is the mother, father, and child. In today’s families that could include two functioning, financially responsible same-sex individuals and the child they are rearing. The projection is the same.
An Unintentional Spotlight
Once again, the projection process is not intentional.
It is unreasonable for thinking humans to purposely engage in a process that eventually backfires, causing them more problems than they had before.
Kathleen Kerr, faculty member at the Georgetown Family Center, says, “A common way of dissipating anxiety in oneself is to focus on the other, particularly on the other’s problems or needs.”
When persons become anxious, the response is usually to stabilize their own uneasiness by transmitting their worried focus to someone else. In the nuclear family, too often that happens to be a dependent child. Sometimes, it’s the family pet. In any case, the autonomic response that occurs is beyond that person’s ability to see what they are doing in the moment.
The Projection Can Be Positive or Negative
The transmission from parent to child can also be an over-focus on the child’s positive attributes — her looks, his high I.Q., her magnificent piano skills, his incredible throwing arm, etc. Roberta Gilbert writes, “The focus may be over-negative, (angry or worried) neglectful, or over-positive. The valence (positive or negative) doesn’t seem to matter.”
Irrespective of the focus, the problem behind the focus is the key.
The Genesis of Transmission
Regardless of the group in question — family, church, workplace, classroom — the origin of the projection process can be found in the mother-child union. Dan Papero, Ph.D., faculty member at Georgetown, makes this clear, saying, “It concerns a mother’s emotional sensitivity to a child that is greater than that to her spouse. The husband is sensitive to his wife’s anxiety and supports her involvement with the child or children.”
If this is true, then humans owe the many transmissions of a worried focus to the multiple generations (the current one included) that are guilty of perpetuating familial projection that in turn become community and then societal projections.
Sources:
- Family Systems: A Journal of Natural Systems Thinking in Psychiatry and the Sciences. Vol five, number one. Washington, D.C. Georgetown Family Center, 1999.
- Gilbert, Roberta. The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory: A New Way of Thinking About The Individual and The Group. Falls Church: Leading Systems Press, 2004.
- Papero, Daniel V. Bowen Family systems Theory. Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon, 1990.
