How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 117
7. Emotional Cut-off
This refers to an extreme response to The Family Projection Process. This entails a complete or almostcomplete separation from the family. The person will have little, if any, contact, and may look and feel
completely independent from the family. However, people who cut off their family are more likely to repeat
the emotional and behavioural patterns they were taught.
In some cases, they model the same values and coping patterns in their adult family that they were
taught in their childhood family without realizing it. They do not have another internal model for
how families live, and so it is very hard to "do something different." Thus, some parents from
emotionally constrained families may resent how they were raised, but they do not know how to be
"emotionally free" and raise a family as they believe other families would.
In other cases, they consciously attempt to be very different as parents and partners; however, they
fail to realize the adaptive characteristics of their family and role models, as well as the
compensatory roles played in a complex family. Thus, some parents from emotionally constrained
childhood families might discover ways to be "emotionally unrestrained" in their adult families, but
may not recognize some of the problems associated with being so emotionally unrestrained, or the
benefits of being emotionally constrained in some cases. Because of this, Bowen believed that
people tend to seek out partners who are at about the same level of individuation.
The concept of emotional cut-off describes people managing their unresolved emotional issues with parents,
siblings, and other family members by reducing or totally cutting off emotional contact with them.
Emotional contact can be reduced by people moving away from their families and rarely going home, or it
can be reduced by people staying in physical contact with their families but avoiding sensitive issues.
Relationships may look "better" if people cut-off to manage them, but the problems are dormant and not
resolved.
People reduce the tensions of family interactions by cutting off, but risk making their new relationships too
important. For example, the more a man cuts off from his family of origin, the more he looks to his spouse,
children, and friends to meet his needs. This makes him vulnerable to pressuring them to be certain ways for
him or accommodating too much to their expectations of him out of fear of jeopardizing the relationship.
New relationships are typically smooth in the beginning, but the patterns people are trying to escape
eventually emerge and generate tensions. People who are cut off may try to stabilize their intimate
relationships by creating substitute "families" with social and work relationships.
Everyone has some degree of unresolved attachment to h