Emotional Cutoff

Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives

Peter Titelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780789014603
• eBook ISBN: 9781317788652
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Widen your therapeutic focus and help your family therapy clients learn to bridge generational separation!

This book delivers professional insights on one of the least understood but most important of Bowen's conceptsemotional cutoff. The first book on this subject, Emotional Cutoff: Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives examines this aspect of Bowen family system theory and shows how emotional cutoff can be understood and addressed in therapy.

Emotional Cutoff also provides beneficial case examples, empirically based studies, helpful figures, and family diagrams. This information-packed volume includes a chapter by the developers of Family of Origin Response Survey (FORS)an instrument that measures the degree to which one is emotionally reactive to their mother or fatherthat outlines the process and its scoring methodology and demonstrates its reliability. The book also includes chapters on emotional cutoff and societal processesand even how emotional cutoff manifests in the animal kingdom!

From the editor: In this book, the phenomenon of emotional cutoff is explored from many perspectives. The contributors have illustrated the presence of cutoff in non-human species, in relation to evolutionary theory, brain physiology, reproduction, in the lives of therapists and the individuals and families they work with in clinical practice, and in societal emotional processin a variety of contexts. In addition, the development of an instrument for measuring emotional cutoff is presented.

Emotional Cutoff is a comprehensive examination of this fascinating aspect of Bowen family systems theory, including:

• a theoretical overviewas well as a look at cutoff in various animal species and an examination of the way the physiology of the human brain is related to the phenomenon of emotional cutoff
• bridging emotional cutoff in the therapist's own family, as related by three Bowen systems therapists and a genealogist who is trained in Bowen theoryessential reading for all therapists!
• research and clinical applicationsincluding interventions you can put into practice right away with clients who are dealing with divorce, depression, domestic violence, or child abuse
• societal applicationsa look at emotional cutoff and societal process in Russian citizens, in Holocaust survivors, in immigrants, and in Israeli/Palestinian relations

Emotional Cutoff: Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives provides exciting possibilities for treating emotional cutoff in people trying to manage their unresolved issues. It is an essential resource for family therapists, counselors, pastoral counselors, family-oriented psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and psychiatric nurses.

PART I:
THEORY

Chapter 1

Emotional Cutoff in Bowen Family Systems Theory: An Overview

Peter Titelman

INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides a historical and theoretical overview of the concept of emotional cutoff in Bowen family systems theory. It presents a description of cutoff and its place in Bowen theory. In the 1950s, Bowen’s research on families with schizophrenic offspring provided a unique description of the emotional process of separation between the adolescent and his or her parents, culminating in the failure of the schizophrenic offspring to leave home. In retrospect, this early research provided the understanding of how “cutting off” provides a pseudosolution for the adolescent or young adult who is unable to manage the unresolved attachment to his or her parents.

From the late 1960s, Bowen (1978) used the term “emotional cut-off” or simply “cut-off” to refer to emotional distancing (p. 535). In 1975, emotional cutoff became the last of the eight concepts (differentiation, triangles, nuclear family emotional process, family projection process, multigenerational transmission process, sibling position, societal process, and emotional cutoff) that Bowen (1978) formally added to his family systems theory after being a “poorly defined extension of other concepts for several years” (p. 382). At that time, Bowen wrote:

It [emotional cutoff, now spelled as one word, dropping the hyphen] was accorded the status of a separate concept to include details not stated elsewhere, and to have a separate concept for emotional process between the generations. The life pattern of cutoffs is determined by the way people handle their unresolved attachments to their parents. All people have some degree of unresolved attachment to their parents. The lower the level of differentiation, the more intense the unresolved attachment. The concept deals with the way people separate themselves from the past in order to start their lives in the present generation. Much thought went into the selection of a term to best describe this process of separation, isolation, withdrawal, running away, or denying the importance of the parental family. (1978, p. 382)

This chapter illustrates two perspectives that informed Bowen’s understanding of emotional cutoff: (1) the continuum of cutting off within the framework of the emotional process of separating between the adolescent or young adult and his or her parents and (2) the continuum of cutoff in the emotional process between the generations. This expresses the way individuals handle their unresolved attachment to their parents through their life patterns. Both these frameworks are based on understanding cutoff as embedded in multigenerational family emotional processes.

This chapter is divided into the following sections: (1) The Origin and Evolution of the Concept of Emotional Cutoff in Bowen Theory; (2) The Theoretical Context for the Concepts of Fusion and Cutoff; (3) The Concepts of Emotional Fusion and Emotional Cutoff in Bowen Theory; (4) The Relationship Between Emotional Cutoff and Other Concepts in Bowen Theory; (5) Symptom Formation and the Continuum of Emotional Cutoff; (6) Bridging Emotional Cutoff; and (7) Summary.

THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF EMOTIONAL CUTOFF IN BOWEN THEORY

The Origin of the Concept

Bowen’s first papers describing schizophrenia and the family were presented and originally published between 1957 and 1961. Every concept and idea that eventually crystallized in Bowen theory can be found, at least in its nascent or embryonic form, in his early research and writing. Very early on, Bowen seemed to have a preliminary sense of most of the form his fullblown theory would ultimately take. His earliest papers contain harbingers of what would become the final concept in Bowen theory: emotional cutoff. These papers are collected in the first section of Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (Bowen, 1978), Part I. Schizophrenia and the Family. The following papers provided the clues for understanding wherein the roots of cutoff can be traced: “Treatment of Family Groups with a Schizophrenic Member” (1957), “The Role of the Father in Families with a Schizophrenic Patient” (1959), “Family Relationships in Schizophrenia” (1959), “A Family Concept of Schizophrenia” (1960),“ Family Psychotherapy” (1961), “Outpatient Family Psychotherapy” (1961), and one additional chapter from Part II: Family Systems Theory, “Interfamily Dynamics in Emotional Illness” (1965).

Drawing from these early papers, this section documents that emotional cutoff was already an implicit part of how Bowen understood family functioning prior to the thematic development of the concept of cutoff at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. Using other terms and other concepts, he described the process and variation through which people “separate themselves from the past in order to start on their lives in the present generation” (Bowen, 1978, p. 382). This chapter also documents how the concept of cutoff is derived from the nascent concepts of the triangle and multigenerational emotional process.

In his work at the National Institute of Mental Health, 1954 through 1959, Bowen started by hospitalizing the schizophrenic patient and the mother, then moved to hospitalizing the schizophrenic patient, both parents, and the nonsymptomatic sibling. The observations and conclusions regarding these families served as forerunners of Bowen’s later conception of emotional cutoff, as it refers to the immature emotional process of separation between the generations. Following are a summary of some of Bowen’s observations:

1. Schizophrenia is an outcome of a multigenerational process, taking at least three generations to develop (later Bowen revised it to many generations).

2. The parents of the schizophrenic have lower levels of differentiation than, for the most part, their respective siblings.

3. The parents’ are characterized by what Bowen termed emotional divorce, his description of the emotional distance between the parents. There exists a prerequisite overadequate-inadequate reciprocity between the spouses, with the mother usually being in the overadequate position and the father in the passive inadequate position both in regard to issues between themselves and as parents.

4. The symbiotic relationship between the mother and the schizophrenic offspring includes an intense projection process. In this process the mother’s anxiety is transferred to the schizophrenic child and the mother then becomes an overfunctioning caretaker. Simultaneously, the patient is taking care of his or her mother by being functionally helpless so that the mother can take care of her or him in order to be less anxious.

5. The mother, father, and schizophrenic child function as an interdependent triad (this was the early term for triangle).

6. In adolescence or young adulthood the patient “tears self away” and creates a “pseudo self” by going through a “pseudo separation” and then often collapses into psychotic withdrawal when having to return home, a form of internally cutting off.

Later Bowen would see the characteristics of families with a schizophrenic offspring in all families, with a range of intensity based on variation in level of differentiation.

In 1957, Bowen (1978), in a paper titled “Treatment of Family Groups with a Schizophrenic Member,” characterizes the unresolved symbiotic attachment between the schizophrenic offspring and the mother in the following statement:

… the process is initiated by the emotional immaturity of the mother who uses the child to fulfill her own emotional needs. The mother feels guilty about this use of the child. While she covertly does things to block the child’s development, she simultaneously tries to force the child to achievement. The child, once entangled, tries to perpetuate the symbiosis along with the opposite effort to grow up. The father passively permits himself to be excluded from the intense twosome and marries his business or other outside interests. Symbiosis was seen as developmental arrest which at one time was a normal state in the mother-child relationship. (p. 4)

Bowen (1978) offers many descriptions of emotional divorce or emotional distancing (which involve some of the reactive behaviors such as withdrawal and isolation that would be a part of the later developed concept of emotional cutoff) which he observed between the parents of the schizophrenic patient and the father’s functioning in this triangling process. In 1959, in “The Role of the Father in Families with a Schizophrenic Patient,” Bowen writes:

The family members, particularly the father and the mother, function in reciprocal relation to each other. They are separated from each other by an emotional barrier which, in some ways, has characteristics of an “emotional divorce.” Either father or mother can have a close emotional relationship with the patient when the other parent permits. The patient’s function is similar to that of an unsuccessful mediator of the emotional differences between the parents. (1978, p. 22)

Bowen (1978) describes how the family functioning can change to allow the schizophrenic patient to separate and grow away from the family in the following passage:

When the parents can maintain a closeness in which they are more invested in each other than either is invested in the patient, then the patients have made rapid gains. When either parent becomes more invested in the patient than in the other parent, the psychotic process becomes intensified. (p. 21)

In the paper, “Family Relationships in Schizophrenia,” originally published in 1959, Bowen notes that the emotional divorce between the parents of the schizophrenic can involve either or both physical and emotional distance: “Most parents use combinations of controlled positiveness and physical distance” (1978, p. 27). Bowen uses the term controlled positiveness to describe a form of internal distancing.

Bowen (1978) went on to describe how working with the hospitalized family brought about change that reflects his incipient understanding of the process of emotional cutoff:

The emotional divorce was resolved [the father was able to take and maintain an I-Position in the presence of the wife’s anxiety and the latter subsided] and the father and mother were as devoted to each other as a teen-age couple in love for the first time. They were so much invested in each other that neither was overinvested in the patient. Both were then able, for the first time, to be objective toward the patient. At this point, the schizophrenic daughter began some significant changes toward more adequate functioning. (p. 29)

Bowen’s ( 1978) early description of the course of outpatient psychotherapy with a schizophrenic patient and the family provides an example of the way he implicitly understood how emotional cutoff operates, how one generation separates from another and attempts to moves into the future.

The family consisted of two parents in their fifties. An elder daughter, in her twenties, had been overtly psychotic for six years. There was a second daughter, three years younger than the first daughter. The father was completely involved in his business, and the mother devoted herself to her children and the home. The mother’s functioning position was that of an over-adequate decision maker, while the father’s functioning position placed him on the periphery of the family’s life. The older daughter’s functioning position was that of the “helpless inadequate one.” The other daughter had been more outside the emotional projection process. She had separated smoothly after college and made a good adjustment to independent life.

During the pregnancy the mother had worried about her baby, the identified patient. She worried about birth defects and stillbirth. Her worries would decrease when she was emotionally closer to her husband. The mother’s overinvestment in her firstborn daughter continued over the years. The other sibling was freer of the projection process. The father and mother became increasingly distant from each other. When the identified patient became a teenager she tried to be “grown up.” She looked forward to college and living away from home as a way of gaining emancipation from the family. She was vaguely aware of her dependence on her mother. This girl had her first psychotic break while she was away at college. This was the beginning of six years of active psychosis (pp. 30-32).

Bowen’s description of this psychotic daughter and her parents’ relationship suggests the following four steps in the evolution of emotional cutoff and the failure of separation between the generations:

1. Symbiotic dependence between the daughter and her mother

2. Pseudoindependence from the parents when the daughter went away to college

3. The outbreak of psychosis as a way of expressing the severe unresolved attachment to the mother

4. A return to the family when the separation could not be maintained

In a paper, “A Family Concept of Schizophrenia,” originally published in 1960, Bowen described the continuum of unresolved attachment, the outcome of varying levels of differentiation, that lead to varying forms and varying degrees of intensity in the separation process between the generations. He would later incorporate this process into the term emotional cutoff:

I believe that unresolved symbiotic attachment to the mother can vary from the very mild to the very intense, that the mild ones cause little impairment, and that schizophrenic psychoses develop among those with the most intense unresolved attachments. There are a number of ways in which the individual with an intense attachment may find some solution to his dilemma. Certain individuals are able to replace the original mother with mother substitutes. The functional helplessness may find expression in somatic illness. The person with a character neurosis can use a flight mechanism to deal with the helplessness. The patients in our families attempted to find distant relationships. The psychotic collapse is seen as an effort at resolution that failed. (1978, p. 66)

In “Out-Patient Family Psychotherapy,” originally published in 1961, Bowen (1978) described the range of differentiation and how this has an impact on the development of schizophrenia as a multigenerational process. He described how the process of separation between the generations varies along a continuum that leads to a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theroy
• Part II: The Therapist's Own Family
• Part III: Research and Clinical Applications
• Part IV: Societal Applications
• Appendix A: Key for the Family Diagram Symbols
• Index