“Ritornello” by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire
Some couples deal with their own chronic anxiety by focusing on one of their children. The family projection process, as Psychologist Murray Bowen called it, develops unintentionally.
A couple concentrates their attention on a child with a learning disability, asthma, or any disability—real or perceived. By focusing on the child, they neglect something else in their life, such as facing their own wounds or marital problems. Over time the child senses how important it is to accept and even foster this attention, to avoid the alternative, as for example, the underlying tension of an increasingly-afflicted marriage.
Unfortunately, this kind of mutual projection of the parents’ fears onto the child reinforces the disability in the child. When parents focus their anxiety on the child, the child becomes more anxious and less able to function. What may have been a mild or non-existent problem can grow into a real and significant problem.
The family projection process not only amplifies any small existing problem the child may start out with, but it also prevents the parents from dealing with their own problems and nurturing other relationships. The parents alleviate their own anxiety about the marriage by sharing the projection that the problem is “out there in our child, not in us.” They continue to look away from their own frightening shadow a little longer, until it looms over them so ominously that they can no longer escape from it. This will often occur after the children have left the nest, if they are capable of doing so.
Solution
Parents do need to deal with their children’s real problems with matter-of-fact kindness and appropriate action. However, it is important to refrain from focusing excessively and needlessly on them. Instead, encourage maximum ability to function in all family members by balancing your focus on your child’s illness or disability with focus on your own challenges and other relationships .
The psychological development and the health of a child are better served when parents focus on their own individual functioning first. A well-functioning household is the best environment for an emotionally-healthy child, as the child will be less likely to function purely in reaction to the parents’ anxiety.
by Alison Poulsen PhD
Recommended: Kerr, M. & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation: The role of the family as an emotional unit that governs individual behavior and development. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York.
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This is one way in which family projection happens. But the most common way is that in irder that the parents don’t have to deal with each other and themselves (the fact that they are wounded and emotionally immature – NO MATTER how educated or intelligent), they make one child the scapegoat.
The parents focus on this child who is usually actually the most strong, capable, loving etc (that’s WHY they choose her) and deem that child as “the problem”. Thus, the marriage can come together again “in an effort to ‘help’ the ‘troubled’ child”, who BECOMES troubled due to this dysfunctional, close-minded system of denial.
Know that role very well. Horrible.
Yes, often that’s the case sadly for everyone involved.