2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Good afternoon, dear readers!
As a follow-up to my previous post, I want to share some thoughts.
Everyone, of course, knows that one of the characteristic features of the modern urban family is the presence of pets in it. Most pet owners consider them to be real family members. This importance for modern city dwellers is objectively expressed in their willingness to spend large time and financial resources, and to endure the inconveniences associated with the maintenance of the animal.
Such deep connections are mainly explained by the emotional relationship between a person and an animal (receiving missing love, intimacy, affection), or by reimbursing lost social ties, etc. Let's try to look at the importance of a pet for a modern person from the point of view of the family system, where the animal is an element of this system and is involved in maintaining its functioning.
As a rule, the appearance of a pet in a family is determined by the characteristics of the family system at the current time. The animal is embedded in non-verbal communication channels that serve the emotional interactions of family members. Tactile contacts also play an important role (“her coat is so soft and silky”). Moreover, non-verbal communication with a pet and feedback received from communication with him provide emotional security for people. This happens because for a person there is no divergence of messages on the verbal and non-verbal channels. And, most importantly, the peculiarities of communication with a pet allow people to receive "emotional confirmation" ("he is so happy when I come home").
Undoubtedly, one of the main functions of an animal in families is triangulation - Emotional involvement of someone else between two people. In M. Bowen's theory, this is one of the main ways to absorb anxiety in the family system. The appearance of a pet as a triangulated element can occur both to strengthen the family dyad (a young family without children, a family as an "empty nest), and to maintain stability in a large family (" triangles "can include different family members - two spouses and an animal, parent-child-animal, grandmother-child-animal, etc.)
In families, the most often triangulated children are included in the parental relationship; they become a topic for safe interactions between parents, thereby reducing anxiety in intermarital relationships. Confirmation that married couples include an animal in the intersubmarital triangle is that quite often people call a pet "son" or "daughter", it is obvious that animals satisfy their need for love, care and protection.
Often, if there are no children in the family, or they are separated, pets become objects of projection parental expectations, or play the role of the "ideal child". It is not uncommon for parents to keep their daughter's dog for themselves (and they are also unhappy with it), or they accept a puppy from a son who has left (“the son could not cope with him”).
If a teenager in the family is involved in maintaining stability between the parents, then when he tries to separate, the usual processes in the family cease to function. In such cases, the pet became an agent of separation, being a means of emotional distancing of the child from the parents, and thus reducing the intensity of the process.
The pet can also perform replacement agent not only for children, but also for adult family members. So, when parents divorce and the father leaves the family, when emotional stress affects all family members, the mother and child have a pet, and this reduces the level of anxiety.
Animals "support" the family at all stages of its life cycle, this explains the appearance of the pet in those periods of the family's life when, for rational reasons, this should not happen (young people after the wedding, immediately after the birth of the child, when the child is 1 year old, 3 years old or 13-15 years old, etc.). During these periods, the level of tension in the family system increases, which is caused by the transition to the next stage of development, or when the transition has already taken place, and family members are not ready and cannot cope with changing relationships and emotional distances between family members.
So, we examined the positive influence of animals on the emotional state of the family system. But it should be remembered that, like any element of the system, pets obey its laws, and their influence can be both functional and dysfunctional.
Thus, a pet, as a triangulated family member, can interfere with the development of relationships and constructive overcoming of conflicts in a married couple. There are examples when an animal was drawn into an intermarital conflict, "portraying" the area of the desired (a dog is a protector and adorer of his wife with an eternally absent husband, whom the dog does not recognize).
Or tensions in a couple are stabilized thanks to a triangulated pet, and the family does not move to the next stage of the life cycle: does not have a child or “does not let go” of a grown-up daughter and son.
The same situation is possible with the substitution function. A pet that helps to cope with divorce depression by playing what may appear to be a functional role interferes with entering new relationships.
Another example of dysfunctional substitution can be the following, described case: a woman, after divorcing an aggressive husband, gives birth to a dog, in which she provokes aggression, recreating the same pattern of relations - victim-executioner - that existed in her broken marriage. Trainers in such a situation are powerless.
In my opinion, M. Bowen's theory of family systems, as well as possible, shows the patterns of emotional communication within the family system and provides a possible explanation for the causes of emotional attachments, the characteristics of the functioning and destruction of relationships between people and pets. Based on the concept of M. Bowen - on the differentiation of the I, triangulation, projective processes in the family - we are able to analyze and predict the appearance of animals in families and their supposed roles in maintaining the stability of the family system, or, on the other hand, the manifestation of pets deviating from code of Conduct.
Thank you for attention.
All the best!
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