Focusing on Your Family’s Emotional Unit

Have you ever noticed that when one person in your family is having a bad day it can affect everyone in the household. Your emotional interdependence with those closest to you is something you cannot ignore if you are trying to move toward better mental health. Focusing on your family’s emotional unit can help you understand the external influences on your inner emotional state, and help you improve your existing family dynamic. 

Looking at the Family as an Emotional Unit

What happens to one in the household happens to all. Family units (biological or otherwise) develop strong emotional bonds that result in intense connections between family members. Members of the same household often look to one another for attention, approval, and support. But they also can be affected by each other’s needs, expectations, and emotional reactions.

When one member of the family experiences an upset, like a stressful time at work, job loss, or significant health diagnosis, it can throw off the balance in the household, and threaten the group stability as a whole.  

The way you react to your family’s stress is often not based in logic or reason. Your deep emotional connection with your family means that you will respond emotionally first, often in ways that reflect your role in the family dynamic, for better or worse. As stress continues to escalate, you and your family members will likely feed off one another’s anxieties, further increasing the disruption in your family’s emotional unit. Only by focusing on the family as an emotional unit, and acknowledging that interdependence, can effectively resolve conflict and improve your family dynamic. 

How Your Family’s Emotional Unit Affects Your Mental Health

When family bonds are healthy, they provide support and comfort when they are needed most. Having family members you can trust makes it easier to take risks, knowing someone will be there to support you if things go poorly. A strong family emotional unit helps you face life’s challenges, making it easier to be resilient in the face of adversity.

But when the family’s dynamic is less than healthy, it can have a real impact on members’ mental and emotional health. Growing up in a hostile or dysfunctional family environment can sometimes lead to:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Bipolar disorder
• Personality disorders
• Alcohol or substance abuse
• Eating disorders
• Relationship difficulties
• Interpersonal challenges

You may also internalize the unhealthy family dynamics you learned in your family of origin, carrying them with you into your own marriage or parent-child relationships. Focusing on your family’s emotional unit and how it affected you growing up can identify the underlying source of conflict in your current relationships, and help you break unhealthy intergenerational patterns.

Working with a Family Systems Therapist

Family systems therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on  your family’s emotional unit. The approach looks at your family as a single unit. The goal in this type of therapy is to identify the family dynamic, address unhealthy patterns, and resolve interpersonal conflict and resentment that arises within those structures. 

The Eight Key Principles of Family Systems Therapy

Family systems therapy is built on 8 key principles:

• Differentiation of Self: Developing your individuality apart from other members of your family group.

• “The Triangle”: Looking at the relationship dynamic between any three people in your family unit and how it influences others in the household.

• Nuclear Family Emotional Process: Identifying the patterns of familial interactions, including healthy and unhealthy family dynamics and emotional distance. 

• Family Projection Process: Considering how one family member may displace feelings, expectations, or anxieties on others within the family emotional unit.

• Multi-generational Transmission: Looking at how small differences in differentiation between parents and children can become exaggerated over time within the larger family circle.

• Sibling Position: Considering how sibling interactions and birth order affect parental expectations, sibling dynamics, and other family interactions. 

• Emotional Cutoff: Examining the effect of unresolved family conflict, including going “low contact” or “no contact” with some or all of your family of origin.

• Emotional Processes in Society: Reflecting on how your family’s emotional unit has prepared you or hindered you in your broader interpersonal interaction in society, including societal and cultural forces. 

Using Family Systems Therapy to Heal Your Family’s Emotional Unit

Engaging in family systems therapy with the help of a trained psychotherapist, either as an individual or with your spouse in couples’ therapy, can help you recognize the patterns and principles that affect your family’s emotional unit. You can identify unresolved conflict and unpack how your positions within the family affect how you respond to stress. 

Then you can challenge the status quo within your family’s emotional unit. Your psychotherapist can help you navigate conflict resolution, providing a safe space to express the resentment, negativity, or other feelings that are negatively affecting your connection to other family members. Together, you can work to rewrite the patterns in your household, intentionally making healthier choices in how you respond to one another day-by-day. By developing new tools for listening, communicating, and responding to one another’s needs, you can move toward a healthier family dynamic that is better able to provide the love and support everyone in your household needs. 

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 35 years of experience. He helps adults, and couples, recognize their role in their family dynamics and learn better ways to connect with their loved ones. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.