How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 109

4. The Family Projection Process This is an extension of The Nuclear Family Emotional Process in many ways. The family member who "has" the "problem" is triangulated and serves to stabilize a dyad in the family.   Thus, the son who rejects his mother's pessimistic view may find his mother and sister become closer, as they agree that he is immature and irresponsible. The more they share this view with him, the more it makes him feel excluded and shapes how he sees himself. He may act in accord with this view and behave more and more irresponsibly. He may reject it, constantly trying to "prove" himself to be mature and responsible, but failing to gain his family's approval because they do not attribute his successes to his own abilities ("He was so lucky that his company had a job opening when he applied..." or "It's a good thing the loan officer felt sorry for him because he couldn't have managed it without that loan..."). He might turn to substance abuse as he becomes more and more irresponsible, or as he struggles with never meeting his family's expectations. Similarly, the daughter who faces harsh economic times and is more fiscally conservative than her father is seen by the parents as too rigid and dull. They join together to worry that she'll never be happily married. She might accept this role and become a workaholic who has only superficial relationships, or reject it and take wild risks that fail. In the end, she may become depressed as she works more and more, or as she fails to live up to her father's reputation as a creative and successful business person. The family member who serves as the "screen" upon which the family "projects" this story will have great trouble differentiating. It will be hard for the son or daughter above to hold their own opinions and values, maintain their emotional strength, and make their own choices freely despite the family's view of them. The family projection process describes the primary way parents transmit their emotional problems to a child. The projection process can impair the functioning of one or more children and increase their vulnerability to clinical symptoms. Children inherit many types of problems (as well as strengths) through the relationships with their parents, but the problems they inherit that most affect their lives are relationship sensitivities such as heightened needs for attention and approval, difficulty dealing with expectations, the tendency to blame oneself or others, feeling responsible for the happiness of others or that others are responsible for one's own happiness, and acting impulsively to relieve the anxiety of the moment rather than tolerating anxiety and acting thoughtfully. If the projection process is fairly intense, the child develops stronger relationship sensitivities than his parents. The sensitivities increase a person's vulnerability to symptoms by fostering behaviours that escalate chronic anxiety in a relationship system. The projection process follows three steps: (1) the parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child; (2) the parent interprets the child's behaviour as confirming the fear; and (3) the parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with the child. These steps of scanning, diagnosing, and treating begin early in the child's life and continue. The parents' fears and perceptions so shape the child's development and behaviour that he grows to embody their fears and perceptions. One reason the projection process is a self-fulfilling prophecy is that parents try to "fix" the problem they have diagnosed in the child; for example, parents perceive their child to have low self-esteem, they repeatedly try to affirm the child, and the child's self-esteem grows dependent on their affirmation. Parents often feel they have not given enough love, attention, or support to a child manifesting problems, but they have invested more time, energy, and worry in this child than in his sibli