Emotional cut-off

A second condition of emotional imbalance is the one determined by an emotional cut-off, that is, by that affective situation in which an abrupt interruption of the parent-child relationship has occurred, with no gradual process of separation. In such a case, the adult ends up building a distorted image of himself, like that of someone who, cutting the bond with the family group he belongs to, has to “fill a bag full of holes”. He will constantly, and very often feverishly, be in search of compensatory bonds, but he will hardly manage to find peace if he does not manage to stop and to seek to reconnect where the cut-off occurred.

What is at stake, then, is a process of rebuilding the original bonds, which does not mean filling gaps that very often go back twenty or thirty years, but rather untangling a skein in the present in order to find the original threads in it: therapy with the family will then be a work of rebuilding bonds and of actively working through the loss; the loss will no longer be felt as such once one has entered into it and faced it, instead of denying it and covering it over with further bonds. We shall find a fairly significant example of this mechanism further on, when we speak of the Vianini family.

The state of partial – or at times total – uprooting very often produces an existential unease that affects and complicates not only family relationships, but friendships as well.

In the course of the research, we gathered a great deal of information on this theme, and most particularly on the meaning and the impact of the meetings with the respective families of origin within couple therapies.

As has already been described in other works, the shift from the couple’s “NO” to the intergenerational “NO” is a high-voltage therapeutic experience: the tension rises when one better understands the basis of the couple’s rejections and idiosyncrasies, seeking out their matrix in early “emotional cut-offs” that took place in the respective families of origin. And it is by going back over the founding moments that one can return to the present with a different perception of oneself and of current relationships. In the follow up, these experiences are very often described as fundamental for being able to embark on new relational paths.

Time leaps and procedural memory

It is striking to experience the transformative potential emanating from even a single meeting, in the course of a session bringing together the three generations, and even more so to observe how the historical memory of these meetings is consolidated over time.

To the question (asked eight, ten or twelve years later): “… what do you remember of the meeting with your family of origin?”, we were surprised not only by the answer of the person questioned, which allowed a glimpse of the changes that had occurred over time, but also by the overall sense of something very close at hand, like a very recent experience, lived a few weeks earlier and not described as an event that had taken place many years before. But then, what lies at the basis of these memories of the past that seem so alive in the present?

These time leaps, so typical of the internal processes of change in the individual and characteristic of genuine relational disorders, must be read within a complex perspective in which there is a constant interaction between different systemic levels – individual, family, cultural – along two temporal dimensions: one vertical, historical time, and the other horizontal, the time that comes to light in the present. One might say, as Bergson and Roberts (1991) argue, working on the “life course perspective”, that in order to understand change one must keep in mind three aspects of time: ontogenetic time (the individual), generational time (the family) and historical time (the sociocultural context).

What surprised us in a positive way was to observe that the therapist too, when subjected to the same questions – “What do you remember most about this therapy? Is there an image or a metaphor of the therapy that has stayed engraved in your mind? What did the meeting with the family of origin of family X represent for you?” –, reported a very vivid and very present experience, with a memory close at hand of facts and situations lived with a particular family many years earlier. There is no doubt that, for the family as for the therapist, the memory was more vivid in all those situations where the enlarged meetings with the families of origin had been “marked” by images, dramatisations (sculptures, etc.) or metaphorical objects, capable of grasping “the family fabric” in a concrete and tangible way.

The above brings out how much, in all these situations, factors of an emotional nature come into play, on the side of the family or the couple as on the side of the therapist, factors that bear witness to the nature and the contents of the therapeutic relationship. In the description of what happened in the course of a particular therapeutic process, indeed, what emerged was not only an episodic account of facts: it was almost constantly accompanied by emotional experiences. Even when no explicit reference was made to them, these emotional experiences could be grasped in the facial expressions of the interlocutors; they almost always appeared decisive in the evocation of events, as if the emotion linked to the situation represented the most important stimulus for their reconstruction.

All of this can be related to what neuropsychologists call procedural memory, that is, the memory of past facts, linked not so much to their episodic unfolding as to the sensations that accompanied them and to the quality of the relationships they referred back to.

In all the evocations of episodes that seemed to have taken on a particular meaning for the family, for the therapist or for the persons taken individually, the underlying emotion involved turned into the engine of the memory and into the element around which each person’s interpretation of the reality they had lived was reorganised. This confirms the thesis we have always defended of the centrality of the therapeutic relationship in the process of change: indeed, even at a distance in time, it appears that the therapeutic bond is built around a series of emotions shared between the therapist and the patient, resonances that constitute the fundamental points at which the personal historical paths of each interweave.

Emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, Rapson, 1977), therapist-family or therapist-patient, far from being considered only as an obstacle to be avoided in the relationship, can become an essential part of it, a resource that allows us to enter into the individual history and to make others feel that they can “rely on” what the relationship offers. On the other hand, the observation of these emotional components has very often allowed us to perceive, over time, the therapist’s underlying ideology and the subtle influence it exerted on the unconscious alliances that formed between him and one or another member of the family (see the Fabietti couple). It has also made us see how difficult it is to pass judgement on the effectiveness of interventions: for what we observe over years is the historical product of many factors that have been at work over time, adding themselves to the therapeutic intervention. What we have before us is only the final product, in which the facts and their interpretation are assembled under the influence of the present context. The emotion linked to the emergence of everything that has happened organises the memories, no longer according to the context in which the person was living at the time, but according to the one in which they live today, which has already inserted them into a different frame, built on the experiences accumulated in the meantime.

The theory of family stress and of the coping system

One aspect that recurs in the cases presented in this book is that of the activation of family resources in the face of stressful and traumatic events that occurred over time, after the end of the therapy. As if the therapy had served the whole family to build itself a system of antibodies in order to face the new problem-events of life with more strength and more competence.

In order to interpret the phenomenon, the theory of family stress and of the coping system (that is, of the ways in which a problem is faced), in the re-examination made of it by Scabini (1995), may be useful to us. Having overcome or faced the family difficulties that had led to the request for a family therapy intervention seems to have set in motion resources that made it possible, over time, to overcome further stressful events: “for a family, the effects of a crisis are not necessarily negative… on the contrary, the experience of stress can strengthen the strength of individuals and of the family” (Scabini, 1985).

The question is not so easily reduced: on the one hand, there is the importance of the meanings that the family and the individuals attribute to the stressful event; on the other, one verifies the presence of family capacities adequate to the event.

The strength of the marital couple, effective communication and the sense of belonging to the family group, in addition to the support of the wider social network, are factors that increase the effectiveness of the coping strategy, insofar as they intervene as “stress modulators” (Scabini, 1995)…

Notes