Emotional Cutoff as a Healthy Choice from Toxic Families

Bowen Family System Theory

His view is that a family is an emotional unit that uses system thinking to describe the complex interactions in that unit. The very nature of family is that the members are intensely connected to each other emotionally. It is as if they are living under the “same emotional skin”. Each member solicits each other’s attention, approval, and support by reacting to each other’s needs, expectation, and distress. This interconnectedness makes them interdependent often extremely dependent on each other well into adulthood.

 There is a high degree of reciprocal changes in the functionality of one member in all the others. This emotional interdependence presumably develops as to promote the cohesiveness and cooperation families require protecting, shelter and feeding their members. As the internal anxiety rises within the family, the emotional connectedness of the family members may at times become more stressful than comforting. Eventually, one or more of the members feel overwhelmed, isolated and no longer able to cope with the family’s collective toxic family dysfunction. These are the very people who have accommodated the most to keep the peace and to reduce tension in others crippled family members.  There is always one family member single out by the toxic parent to care for all the other dysfunctional in immature family members well after they are gone.  

This is when a member will take too much responsibility in the care of one or more of the other in the family creating unrealistic expectations. The most accommodating member literally “absorbs the other member’s pathology” and this is the family member most vulnerable to their own mental health issues.

Dr. Murray Bowen – Had as his core assumption that the family is the core emotional system that took millions of years to evolve in which to control, understand, regulate and govern human relationships within that family system. The “thinking, emotive brain” developed an entire communicative system to transmit this behavioral culture from one generation to another.

The emotional system affects most human activity and is the principal driving force in the development of clinical problems. Knowledge of how the emotional system operates within the family of origin, at work sites and other forms of social systems reveals new and more effective ways and options for problem-solving in each of the member's individuals lives.

Emotional Cutoff

Term to describe when a member of a family attempts at managing their unresolved emotional issues with parents, siblings, and other family members by reducing or cutting off all emotional contact with them. The typical strategy most often seen is moving away from the members of the family who the struggling individual have a serious conflict with and visiting only very rarely. Or it can be just the opposite,  by living in near physical contact, but instead of using a variety of avoidant maneuvers to ward off highly emotional charged issues all issues are avoided,  buried and repressed and of course unresolved. These individuals over the long run become emotional stuck, immature, repressed. People who cut off family members are the healthier as they will create substitute families within their social and work life relationships. In severe cases, a member has no option but elect for 100% emotional cutoff to regain and maintain his own mental health and the health of his marriage and children when living within or near their highly toxic birth families.

 The well-differentiated person resolved these issues usually at midlife. Emotional Cutoff from his toxic family is one of the highly effective ways to resolve these family issues.  These individuals are highly motivated to live healthy lives.

 Poorly differentiated individuals will have trouble or never resolve these conflicts and emotional baggage within their first families and will perpetuate these conflicts into the next generation through their children causing yet another generation of dysfunctionality. These individuals never resolve these issues and stay immeshed, stuck in the abusive ‘fog’ of their original toxic families. Each has unresolved attachment issues with each other and their own children if they ever were able to marry and have children.  

Any Homecomings or reunions are usually superficial. All unresolved attachment issues will within hours of arrival will surface. The surface harmony with all the powerful emotional undercurrents with is exposed. Members leave in disgust as the family as a unit become so collectively anxious and reactive when the member is home that they are relieved when they leave.

Siblings of a highly cut off member will often become furious at him when he is home and blame him for upsetting the parents, and in general, these individuals become the family scapegoat for all the problems within the toxic family, and the remaining members.

 The real truth is that they, all of them simply have never been previously comfortable except very superficial shallow contact with each other in the family. Combined this with complete ineffectiveness and dysfunctionality resolving any interpersonal conflict either within or outside of the family and it's easy to understand why these families remained crippled, divided, toxic and dysfunctional.