ABSTRACT
What are the benefits and challenges of trying to bridge emotional cutoffs in a family? This is one of the questions that emerged when I first encountered Bowen theory (Bowen, 1978) and began to apply it toward understanding the concepts of emotional cutoff and multigenerational emotional process. For over twenty years, I had been researching both my own family and those of many others. Drawing my own family’s diagram for the first time made clear to me why I found these two Bowen concepts so intriguing. It immediately became obvious that emotional cutoff was a prominent theme on both sides of my family. From that point on, the research became a laboratory for observing and comprehending the multigenerational process of emotional cutoff, as well as maintaining neutrality in an intense emotional system. Without previously realizing it, I learned that researching my family’s history and managing my response to the facts as they emerged were also strategies I could develop-through trial and error-for bridging cutoffs.
