When parents turn to a psychologist about their child, they usually say something like this: my child has problems, he doesn’t listen, he behaves badly, he’s rude, he’s aggressive , does not know how to communicate - do something so that this does not happen again. It is important to understand that a child who behaves “badly” is a child who needs understanding and help, and not “fixing”. A child’s “bad behavior” is just a symptom of a deeper problem that does not lie on the surface. It is impossible to consider a child separately from the family system. The child's troubles signal the troubles of the family as a whole. Therefore, not only the child, but also the parents need psychological help. When a person comes to a psychologist’s office, members of his family and even his ancestors are invisibly present next to him. The family is present in us in the form of the roles that it prescribes for us, in the form of parental attitudes that we learn very early and do not question, in the form of the experience of love/rejection/indifference that we received in childhood and reproduce in our own “adults.” » families. A family is not just individual people, it is something more. Family is a system. And it is controlled not only (and not so much) by explicit communication. Family is, first of all, an emotional field, which consists of non-verbal signals, fears, thoughts, hopes, expectations, family myths, secret desires. The family exists according to its own public and unspoken rules. The child is part of this system, and the most dependent on it. The influence of family relationships is especially noticeable on children. The emotional field of the family has two poles: on one pole there is complete fusion, the unity of everyone and everything in the family, on the other there is loneliness and isolation. The most prosperous families find a flexible balance between these two opposing tendencies. After all, it is important for any person to feel a kinship with loved ones, and at the same time to recognize oneself as a separate person, to maintain one’s autonomy, integrity and inviolability of the inner world. But quite often families are biased towards one of these poles. Murray Bowen (American psychotherapist and psychologist, one of the founders of systemic family therapy) identified two main parameters of the family system. This is the level of anxiety and the level of differentiation I. Level of anxiety. Quite a large amount of anxiety can accumulate in the emotional field of the family. This is the tension that appears in the process of interaction between family members, unresolved problems, unreacted emotions. The more anxiety there is in a family, the more family members strive to develop strategies to reduce it. The most commonly used are the following: marital conflict, distancing from each other (alienation from each other), projection of problems onto the child (redirection of feelings intended for the spouse onto the child), symptomatic behavior of one of the family members (one who cannot withstand the level of tension , gets sick). What all these strategies have in common is that they are aimed not at solving problem situations that lead to increased anxiety, but at reducing the level of tension (by analogy: not treating a disease, but lowering the temperature). Level of differentiation of the self. The less ability for reflection (awareness of one’s own behavior ), the lower the level of differentiation. This is not about the predominance of reason over emotions, but a person’s ability to realize the reasons for their emotional reactions, control their behavior even at the moment when they are experiencing stormy feelings, and calmly perceive their feelings and the feelings of other people. Also, non-differentiation means that a person easily enters into emotional fusion with other people. Such a person has difficulty separating his emotions from the emotions of others, especially significant others; he becomes infected and “charged” by the emotional atmosphere of the family, without even realizing it. How does this manifest itself in practice? Scandals of the same type: just a reproach from the spouse is enough, the second partner gets worked up and - forward, according to the usual family/377486/