Family Anxiety as an Electrical Current
I like to think of the family as an electrical system, where electricity represents emotional reactivity, or Bowen’s concept of anxiety. Understood this way, we can see how each family member in the family system plays a part in conducting - or taking on and passing along - this electricity throughout the electrical system. As such, when one person is emotionally activated, the rest of the system slowly becomes activated, too.
Over time, this becomes an experience of chronic anxiety - sometimes referred as chronic stress - for the different family members. Not only do family members have to deal with the normal stresses of everyday life - like working, paying bills, traffic, caring for kids, and so on - but they also have the added stress of the family system’s anxiety that they take on. Chronic anxiety can wreak havoc on the body and can lead to a number of physical symptoms and illness. It can also lead to a number of psychological symptoms and illness.
In addition to the health implications of this chronic anxiety, emotional reactivity prevents us from doing our best thinking and making the best decisions in our everyday lives. When we’re frequently emotionally reactive - because we’re taking that reactivity on from our family system - we’re more likely to make quick, reflexive moves based on our conditioned patterns and programming. We’re less likely to slow down, reflect, and make conscious moves in the world. We’re more likely to act on the anxiety of the moment rather than on our values, principles and long-term goals.
This process is especially true when family systems with high degrees of enmeshment, where there is little sense of boundaries between family members and everyone feels responsible for everyone else’s emotional issues:
We take on the emotional problems and emotional reactivity of others.
We get caught up in the family’s constant emotional drama.
We get pulled out of our center and into the family’s electrical field.
A Ground for Electrical System
Thus, when we are doing self-differentiation work, we must learn to ground ourselves emotionally within the electrical field. When we do this, we reduce the strength and intensity of the emotional reactivity passing through the family system because we’re one less body conducting and amplifying it. Most importantly, we protect ourselves from taking on this emotional reactivity which takes us out of our center - our solid self - and leads to the consequences I mentioned above.
Grounding ourselves is no easy task. Our family of origin is where our emotional functioning was shaped and our family system often knows how to trigger our deepest emotional sensitivities. All the old survival patterns we learned as children - caretaking, defending ourselves, shrinking, deflecting - will want to come back into play. Our family will try to get us back into our old role - the one we’ve always played in their emotional drama. They will try to get a rise out of us when they’re activated as well.
Grounding Through the Body
But, we must learn a new way. We must learn to come back to ourselves and get centered in our solid self. As a long-time dancer, yogi, and now somatic educator, I’ve learned that using our mind-body connection is one of the most powerful tools we can leverage in our self-differentiation work.
This is because the emotional system of the family is a biological and physiological experience - we are wired to each other’s nervous system - and there’s an actual felt and visible bodily experience unfolding as we interact with our family member’s and our nervous systems and bodies get activated.
If we notice that our body starts to tense and lean forward to prepare to fight back or get in the middle of a conflict between two people, we can perhaps try:
Leaning back and intentionally relaxing the shoulders and face.
Taking a few deep breaths in while slowing down the breath out.
Engage the core as we exhale and keeping the shoulders relaxed.
Placing the palm of the hand on the belly keeping core engaged and shoulders relaxed.
The intention of this is to come back to our own body by finding a calm and stable center deep inside of ourselves, in our own body, and let others experience their own reactivity. We do not need to get caught up in their electrical field.
If we notice that we begin to shrink back and go numb because someone is projecting their reactivity onto us or a tension in the environment feels overwhelming, we can try:
Opening up our chest and uncrossing our arms while keeping the shoulders relaxed.
Placing our feet firmly flat on the floor and palms down on our thighs.
Lifting our head and chin up, while keeping the face relaxed.
Taking a few deep breaths in and engaging the core as you exhale slowly.
The intention here is to bring your presence back into the room while remaining centered in yourself. Sometimes we grow up in family systems where our role is to shrink while taking on everybody else’s projection. This leads to internalizing everyone’s emotional issues and a depressive personality style. We are still getting caught in the electrical field in this case. We combat this by saying - with our bodies - that we are here and we will no longer take on what’s not ours, we will no longer shrink for the system.
If we notice that our body is getting fidgety or we get really talkative, interrupt others, and try to change the subject, make jokes, or control someone’s reactions, we can try:
Leaning back in our chair and softly closing our lips while relaxing the jaw.
Practicing visual observation of the electricity moving through the field like a storm.
Letting our palms relax face up in our laps while keeping shoulders relaxed.
Taking a few deep breaths in and engaging the core as you exhale slowly.
The intention here is to lean out of the emotional field and to learn the art of surrendering. Sometimes we begin to take on the electricity and become agitated because we want to control or change the way things are happening in the system, but this is still a way of getting caught up in it. The best thing to do in these moments is to control our own response, grounding and centering ourselves inside our own body, and letting the system do what it does.
Final Thoughts
One of the most powerful, yet subtle changes we can make in the system is changing our role within it by not getting caught up in it in the ways that we always have. When we change our role, the system inevitably has to change around us.
It does so not because we are trying to control how it functions. Simply because we are literally being different within it. We are doing the act of self-differentiation in real time in the system. And there are long-term benefits to this that are not always obvious at the moment, but are quite powerful.