Family systems and attachment work explores how your earlier relationship dynamics continue to influence your present emotions, beliefs, habitual choices and relationships. You have clearly physically left your early family environment, but could still be responding according to roles, rules and emotional patterns learned during childhood.
Family systems and attachment approaches can be very effectively combined with Clinical Hypnosis. Family systems work helps you to understand your relationship patterns and how these patterns evolved. Hypnosis is used to change the unconscious beliefs, emotional responses and automatic reactions that help to maintain the problem.
The work takes place during individual therapy, other family members do not need be involved. This is not “family therapy”. Depending on your individual needs, family systems and attachment work may also be combined with EMDR, Ego States Therapy, NLP, Timeline Therapy or cognitive behavioural methods.
As a therapy lecturer, this is one of the topics that I have developed into one module of the APDIP (Advanced Diploma in Integrative Psychotherapy).
What is family systems work?
Family systems work considers early family dynamics, current family dynamics and other important relationships. Issues often don’t develop because of one person or one event. They may develop through repeated interactions, repeated decision choices, family expectations, unresolved conflicts, emotional tendencies and roles habituated over many years.
As a child you may for example, have learned that keeping other people happy was necessary to remain safe or accepted. You may have become responsible for managing conflict, caring for a parent, protecting a sibling or hiding your own feelings. These responses may have helped you cope at the time, but can create problems when they continue into your adult life.
The purpose of family systems work is not to blame your family for all of your issues. It is to understand how the system operated, recognise what you learned from it and decide what you now want to change.
How can family roles affect adult life?
Family members often develop roles that help them to function. These roles are not always openly discussed; they gradually become part of how each person is expected to behave.
You may have become:
- The responsible person who looked after everyone else
- The peacekeeper who attempted to prevent conflict
- The high achiever who gained approval through success
- The scapegoat / black sheep who was blamed for wider family problems
- The invisible person who avoided attention
- The rescuer who repeatedly solved other people’s problems
- The emotional container that absorbed other people’s distress
- The dependent person who was discouraged from becoming independent
These roles can continue long after the original circumstances have changed. You may still feel responsible for other people’s emotions, guilty when saying no or anxious when making independent choices.
Therapy can help you separate your present identity from the childhood role you learned to occupy.
Where there is disruption of the crucial bonding process between a baby or child and their primary caregiver this can result in Attachment Trauma. This can lead to compromised interpersonal relationships typified by preoccupied, dismissing or fearful attachment styles.
What is attachment trauma?
Attachment trauma can develop when the person you depended upon for safety was also unavailable, frightening, unpredictable, rejecting or unable to respond consistently to your emotional needs.
It may also follow significant separation, loss, neglect, repeated criticism, family violence, parental addiction, emotional instability or being expected to manage adult responsibilities while still a child.
The trauma may involve specific events. It may also develop through repeated experiences that taught you that your needs were unwelcome, relationships were unsafe or closeness could suddenly be withdrawn.
Possible effects can include:
- Fear of rejection or abandonment
- Difficulty trusting other people
- Strong reactions to criticism or withdrawal
- People-pleasing and excessive responsibility
- Difficulty identifying or expressing personal needs
- Emotional detachment or withdrawal
- Jealousy, reassurance-seeking or relationship anxiety
- Shame, low self-worth or feeling fundamentally unacceptable
- Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries
- Alternating between seeking closeness and pushing people away
These reactions are often learned attempts to prevent further emotional harm. Therapy helps you understand why they developed and create responses that are more appropriate to your present life.
What are attachment styles?
Attachment describes the way we learn to seek safety, reassurance and emotional connection within important relationships. Early experiences can influence what you expect from other people and how you respond to closeness, disagreement, rejection or separation.
Attachment styles are commonly described as:
- Secure attachment: closeness and independence can usually be managed without excessive fear.
- Anxious attachment: relationships may involve a strong need for reassurance and a heightened fear of rejection, abandonment or withdrawal.
- Avoidant attachment: emotional closeness may feel uncomfortable, unsafe or restrictive, leading to withdrawal or excessive self-reliance.
- Disorganised or fearful attachment: closeness may be strongly desired while also producing fear, mistrust or an urge to escape.
An attachment style is not a diagnosis or a permanent description of your personality. You may respond differently within different relationships. These patterns can change as you develop greater awareness, emotional regulation and safer ways of relating.
Complete this Attachment Style Questionnaire to learn what your attachment style is.
How can family patterns pass between generations?
Beliefs, fears, coping strategies and relationship patterns can pass from one generation to another through behaviour, communication and family expectations. This is sometimes described as an intergenerational pattern.
For example, a parent who experienced abandonment may become emotionally distant, highly anxious or excessively protective. Their child may then learn that relationships are unsafe, separation is dangerous or personal independence causes distress.
The original experience may never be openly discussed, but its emotional effects can continue across later relationships.
A family map, sometimes called a genogram, may be sometimes be used to identify important relationships, losses, conflicts and repeated patterns across several generations. This can help clarify where particular beliefs, fears or roles may have developed.
Understanding where a pattern came from does gives you the opportunity to stop perpetuating the pattern.
How can family systems and attachment work help me?
Family systems work helps you see the wider relationship pattern rather than treating each reaction as a separate problem. Attachment work helps explain why particular situations produce strong emotional responses.
Therapy may help you:
- Recognise the roles and rules learned within your family
- Understand your attachment responses
- Separate present relationships from earlier experiences
- Reduce excessive responsibility for other people
- Develop clearer emotional and practical boundaries
- Express your needs without excessive guilt or fear
- Respond differently to disagreement, criticism or separation
- Choose relationships according to your present needs
- Develop a more secure relationship with yourself and other people
The objective is not to remove every emotional response. It is to give you greater choice and control over how you respond.
How does hypnosis connect with family systems and attachment work?
Family systems work identifies the relationship pattern. Attachment work identifies how safety, closeness and separation have become emotionally organised. Clinical Hypnosis provides a direct way of working with the unconscious learning that continues to maintain those responses.
You may consciously know that a present relationship is safe while still feeling threatened by disagreement, distance or uncertainty. This happens because emotional responses are not maintained by conscious thought alone. Earlier learning can continue as automatic feelings, physical reactions, expectations and protective behaviours.
During hypnosis, your attention becomes more focused while you remain aware of what is happening. This can make it easier to access inner resources, reconsider earlier conclusions and mentally rehearse healthier ways of responding.
Hypnosis may be used to:
- Reduce the emotional intensity connected with earlier relationships
- Change unconscious beliefs about rejection, responsibility and personal worth
- Strengthen appropriate boundaries
- Reduce the need to please, rescue or control other people
- Develop feelings of internal safety
- Separate present relationships from earlier family experiences
- Resolve conflicts between different emotional parts of yourself
- Rehearse assertive communication and healthier relationship choices
Hypnosis is therefore integrated with the family systems and attachment work. It is not a separate relaxation exercise added to the session. It is used, when appropriate, to change the deeper emotional patterns and unconscious responses identified during therapy.
What issues can this approach be used for?
Family systems, attachment work and hypnotherapy may be appropriate when present issues appear connected with earlier relationships, learned family roles or attachment trauma.
The approach may be used when working with:
- Relationship anxiety
- Fear of rejection or abandonment
- People-pleasing
- Excessive responsibility for other people
- Difficulty saying no
- Weak or rigid boundaries
- Low self-esteem and shame
- Repeated unhealthy relationship choices
- Conflict avoidance
- Emotional withdrawal
- Jealousy or reassurance-seeking
- Perfectionism
- Childhood emotional neglect
- Parentification, where a child was expected to take adult responsibility
- Family estrangement
- Adverse childhood experiences
- Attachment trauma
- PTSD or complex trauma
Different issues require different therapeutic approaches. Family systems, attachment work and hypnosis will only be used when they are appropriate to your needs and therapeutic objectives.