Amy got to the point where she dreaded picking her son up from pre-school. When Tim saw Amy coming to get him, he would run away shrieking, or throw a tantrum on the floor.

In the supermarket together, he would ignore his mother’s orders. When she tried to discipline him, he would make a scene in front of the other customers. Amy just didn’t know what to do anymore. Her husband criticized her efforts, and she would alternate between sobbing despair and furious screaming at Tim. Sometimes she felt like running away from him—like she didn’t even want him as her son. The distance between them seemed to be growing, and she decided to call a child psychologist.

Why does one of our kids always seem to act out, even when we give them so much love and attention? As parents, our worst nightmare is to pass our baggage onto our child. But that’s exactly what we will do unless we learn to spot what psychiatrist Murray Bowen called the Family Projection Process. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it “projecting our baggage onto our kids.” The main thing we need to remember is, when it seems as though there’s a problem with our child, the real problem is between the two parents.

Before I give you an example, note well that this theory is based on the premise that human beings are mammals. It is the female mammal who gives birth to and nurses the young, and there tends to be a stronger bond between mother and offspring than between father and offspring. If you forget that we are mammals, the following will sound anti-feminist to you:

In most couples, one spouse tends to blame the other for problems that arise in the household. The other spouse already tends to blame his or herself for these same problems. If the self-blamer happens to be the mother, then we know that she already has feelings of inadequacy & anxiety, which are exacerbated each time her spouse blames her for something. However, these feelings are too ugly and painful to look at, so the defense mechanisms of denial and projection take over. The self-blamer (unknowingly) looks outside herself for something to take her mind off herself.

This is where projection begins.

Her mothering and protective instincts are already high for her child. Add anxiety to the mix, and you have an over-reactive, over-attentive mommy, who can make any molehill into a mountain. She may nit-pick for small defects in the child’s health, or faults in his behavior. She then focuses obsessively, which enlarges and exaggerates the child’s defects into major deficiencies. The mother then perceives the deficiencies as emergencies, requiring urgent worry, focus and attention. Strangely however, these problems don’t seem to respond to treatment—which only increases the sense of crisis. In essence, the mother has unintentionally created a self-fulfilling prophecy of her own worst nightmare.

Let’s use a real-life example to break down the process of projection into three steps:

Betty was a full-time mom. One night she was lying awake, worrying about family finances, and feeling guilty because she was not contributing any income to the household. Suddenly, her son coughed. This is Step 1, the Feeling-Observation stage. Betty was feeling feelings of guilt, and observed that her son coughed.

If Betty had been asleep, she may not have even heard her son cough. But, she was awake with anxiety, so in a split second, Betty arrives at Step 2: the Examining-Labeling step. Her mind has already convinced her that these symptoms are significant. She decides this cough must be serious, and some action must be taken.

Step 3 is the Treating step. The mother seeks treatment as if her diagnosis were self-evident. Betty got up, woke her son up, gave him cough medicine, went back to bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.

Notice that her son did not wake up from his cough, or even complain about his cough.

His mother completed all three steps of projecting her baggage onto the child in less than four minutes. Now that her anxious, self-blaming guilt about not earning an income had been projected onto her son’s “serious” cough, she went to sleep almost immediately. Remember that she is completely unaware of this projection process, and she did what she did with only the best of intentions for her child.

But at what price? Her anxiety is now focused on an external problem in her child, and odds are good that the pattern will not only repeat itself, but also escalate. This time, her projection was only a cold-diagnosis. Next time, it could be her son acting-out in nursery school, or the supermarket. Betty (and her family) end up feeling much more pain regarding her child’s self-fulfilling defect than if she simply faced her own feelings of inadequacy in first place.

The good news is that the projecting mother is not to blame. The bad news is that the cause of a child’s chronic acting-out, or illness, may lie in the parents’ relationship. Initially, this will be almost impossible for the parents to spot on their own. The only way out of this vicious cycle is self-awareness. We can train ourselves to see a physical or social symptom in our child as an indicator of a problem in our marriage. Overcoming denial and projection is a difficult process, but it pre-empts the creation of our own worst nightmares in our children. Long-term pain equals long-term gain, both for your child and your marriage.

---

Leave a Reply

---

Name (required)

Mail (not published) (required)

Website