When the problem isn’t one person — it’s the pattern between all of them.
Overview
Here is what most people get wrong about family problems: they think the problem is a person. The difficult mother. The addicted brother. The teenager who won’t stop lying. And so they show up to therapy — or more often, they send that person to therapy — expecting a clinician to fix the broken part and return it to the family in working order.
That is not how families work. And at ShieldMee, that is not how we work.
Family systems therapy begins with a deceptively simple premise: the family is an emotional unit. Not a collection of individuals who happen to share a last name and a holiday table, but an interconnected system in which every member’s behavior makes sense — makes functional sense — within the logic of that system. The daughter who can’t stop overachieving isn’t just anxious; she’s managing the tension between two parents who haven’t spoken honestly to each other in fifteen years. The son who uses substances isn’t just an addict; he’s the family’s pressure valve, the person whose crisis gives everyone else something to focus on besides the marriage that’s been dead since 2009.
When you see the system, you stop asking “What’s wrong with this person?” and start asking “What is this person’s behavior doing for this family?” That question changes everything.
Who This Is For
We work with adults, couples, and families navigating entrenched relational patterns — the kind that don’t resolve with better communication skills or a weekend workshop. Our family systems work is designed for people dealing with dynamics that have been running for years, sometimes decades, sometimes generations. If you’ve tried other therapy and found that the same patterns keep reasserting themselves the moment you go home for Thanksgiving, this work explains why.
What to Expect
Family systems therapy at ShieldMee is conducted via telehealth throughout the state of Florida. Sessions are 53 minutes. For families actively in crisis, we may recommend weekly sessions initially, tapering to biweekly as the system stabilizes. For individuals working on their own differentiation within a family system — which is the majority of our family systems caseload — weekly sessions are standard.
This is not the kind of therapy where we teach you “I-statements” and send you home with a communication worksheet. This is rigorous, intellectually demanding clinical work. We will map your family system. We will trace the patterns back to their origins. We will ask you questions you have never been asked — and some you’ve been avoiding your entire life.
Investment
Sessions are $188 per session. We are available through Headway for those using insurance, or through private pay. We do not accept other insurance panels for family systems work, because we refuse to let a managed care company dictate the scope and depth of treatment that family systems cases require.
Bowen Family Systems Theory
Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist who did something radical in the 1950s: he moved entire families into the research ward at the National Institute of Mental Health and observed them. Not the identified patient — the whole system. What he documented over years of observation became Bowen Family Systems Theory, which remains the most comprehensive and empirically grounded framework for understanding how families actually function as emotional units.
Bowen identified eight interlocking concepts that describe family emotional processes. These are not personality types or diagnostic labels. They are descriptions of how anxiety moves through a system — how it gets generated, distributed, absorbed, and transmitted across generations. Understanding these eight concepts gives you a map of your family that is more useful than any genogram or family tree you’ve ever drawn, because it shows not just who is related to whom, but how they are related — what emotional processes bind them, and at what cost.
Differentiation of Self
Differentiation of self is the cornerstone concept. It describes the degree to which a person can maintain their own thinking, feeling, and functioning while remaining emotionally connected to others — particularly to their family of origin.
Picture a spectrum. On one end, you have fusion: the person who cannot distinguish their own emotions from the emotions of the people around them. Their mother is anxious, so they’re anxious. Their partner is angry, so they either absorb the anger or react with equal intensity. They don’t have opinions — they have reactions. They don’t make decisions — they manage other people’s feelings about their decisions. On the other end, you have differentiation: the person who can be in the room with a dysregulated family system and maintain their own emotional equilibrium. Not because they don’t care. Not because they’ve walled themselves off. But because they can tell the difference between what they feel and what the system is pressuring them to feel.
Most people are somewhere in the middle, and most people slide toward fusion under stress. That’s the key insight: differentiation isn’t a fixed trait. It’s a capacity that gets tested, and often fails, precisely when it matters most — during conflict, crisis, illness, loss, or any situation that activates the family’s anxiety.
Here’s the clinical example that makes this real: A forty-year-old professional — successful, articulate, runs a department — calls their mother and within ninety seconds is arguing like a fifteen-year-old. They hang up furious, or compliant, or guilt-ridden, and they have no idea how it happened again. That collapse from adult functioning to adolescent reactivity is the differentiation gap in action. The person’s level of differentiation in their workplace, with their friends, even with their own children, may be substantially higher than it is with their family of origin. Bowen would say: that’s because your family of origin is where your differentiation was forged, and it’s where it gets tested most severely.
At ShieldMee, differentiation work is the backbone of everything we do in family systems therapy. We do not try to change the family. We work with the client to increase their capacity to be a self within the family — to hold their position without attacking, withdrawing, or capitulating. This is not a weekend project. Genuine movement on the differentiation scale is some of the hardest psychological work a person can do, because it requires tolerating the discomfort the system generates when one member stops playing their assigned role.
Triangulation
A triangle is the smallest stable relationship unit. Two-person relationships are inherently unstable under anxiety — when tension rises between two people, they will predictably pull in a third person, issue, or substance to stabilize the dyad. That’s triangulation.
The classic example: A married couple has an unresolved conflict. Rather than address it directly, one parent becomes intensely focused on a child’s behavior — grades, attitude, screen time, whatever serves as the vehicle. Now the couple has something to argue about that isn’t their marriage. Or they have something to unite around — “We need to deal with our son’s behavior” — that creates the illusion of partnership while the real issue remains untouched. The child, meanwhile, absorbs the anxiety that rightfully belongs to the marital relationship and develops symptoms: acting out, anxiety, depression, academic failure. The family then identifies the child as the problem and sends the child to therapy. The triangle is complete. The marriage is preserved. The child pays the price.
Triangles aren’t limited to parent-child dynamics. Siblings triangulate through parents. Adult children triangulate through their own children. In-law conflicts are almost always triangles involving one partner’s family of origin. Affairs are triangles. Addictions function as the third point in a triangle. Even a therapist can become the third point — which is why we are rigorous about monitoring our own position in client family systems.
In our work, we make triangles visible. We use Socratic questioning to help clients identify when they’re being pulled into a triangle, when they’re creating one, and what anxiety they’re trying to manage by doing so. The goal isn’t to eliminate triangles — they’re a universal human phenomenon. The goal is to stop being governed by them unconsciously.
Nuclear Family Emotional System
The nuclear family emotional system describes four patterns through which anxiety gets managed within a single-generation family unit: marital conflict, dysfunction in one spouse, impairment of one or more children, and emotional distance.
These are not four different families. These are four channels, and most families use more than one simultaneously. Consider a family where the parents fight openly about money (marital conflict), the father drinks three bourbons every night to manage his stress (dysfunction in one spouse), the youngest child has severe anxiety and school refusal (impairment of a child), and the mother and father haven’t had an actual conversation — not a logistical exchange about who’s picking up whom, but an actual conversation — in four years (emotional distance). That family is running all four channels at once, and every member’s symptoms make perfect sense when you see the system.
What most people don’t understand — and what Bowen documented exhaustively — is that these patterns are not choices. They are automatic anxiety-management responses that emerge from the family’s level of differentiation. A family with higher collective differentiation has more capacity to manage anxiety without routing it through symptoms. A family with lower differentiation has less capacity, and the anxiety has to go somewhere.
In session, we map which channels are active and trace the anxiety back to its source. Frequently, the presenting problem — the child’s symptoms, the substance use, the marital conflict — is not the source of the anxiety but the family’s solution to an anxiety that originated elsewhere in the system. Treat the symptom without treating the system, and another symptom will emerge. The anxiety doesn’t disappear. It just finds a new channel.
Family Projection Process
The family projection process describes how parents transmit their own emotional immaturity and undifferentiation to one or more children. This is not about bad parenting in the conventional sense. It’s about an automatic, usually unconscious process in which a parent focuses their anxiety onto a particular child, that child absorbs the anxiety and becomes symptomatic, the parent then focuses more intensely on the symptomatic child, and the cycle escalates.
The child selected for this process is not random. It’s typically the child the parent is most emotionally fused with — which, counterintuitively, may be the child the parent is most worried about, most attentive to, or most identified with. The child who gets the most parental focus may actually develop the lowest level of differentiation, while the siblings who received less attention — and therefore less projection — may emerge with higher functioning.
Here’s an example: A mother who has unresolved anxiety about her own competence becomes hyper-focused on her middle child’s academic performance. Every grade is scrutinized. Every teacher conference is a crisis. The child begins to develop test anxiety — which is the mother’s anxiety, absorbed and internalized — and the mother’s response is to increase monitoring, hire tutors, and express escalating concern. The child’s functioning deteriorates. The mother concludes: “I was right to be worried.” The projection is confirmed, and the cycle deepens. Meanwhile, the older sibling, who flew under the radar, has higher differentiation and better overall functioning — not because of superior parenting, but because of less parental projection.
We address this by working with parents to recognize the projection process in real time — to notice when their anxiety about a child is actually their own anxiety being managed through the child. This is uncomfortable work. No parent wants to hear that their intense focus on their child’s problems may be contributing to those problems. But Bowen was clear: the family projection process is universal. The question is not whether it’s happening but how intensely and toward whom.
Multigenerational Transmission Process
This is where Bowen’s theory becomes genuinely unsettling for most people: the multigenerational transmission process describes how levels of differentiation are transmitted across generations. Not through genetics, though there may be genetic components. Through the family emotional process itself.
The mechanism is straightforward: each generation produces children with varying levels of differentiation, depending on the intensity of the family projection process. The child who received the most projection tends to select a partner with a similar level of differentiation (we consistently choose partners at our own differentiation level, not higher or lower), and together they produce children, some of whom will receive more projection and emerge with even lower differentiation. Over multiple generations, this process can produce progressively lower levels of functioning along one branch of the family tree.
Consider a family in which the grandfather was a functional but emotionally distant man, the father was an anxious overachiever who medicated his anxiety with work, and the grandson has been through three treatment programs for substance use by age twenty-five. This is not a decline caused by social factors or generational weakness. This is the multigenerational transmission process in action — each generation’s emotional patterns creating the conditions for the next generation’s patterns, with differentiation eroding incrementally along one family line while potentially remaining stable or increasing along another.
This concept is essential to our work because it removes blame. When a client can see that their family’s patterns didn’t start with their parents, or their grandparents, but are the product of a multigenerational process that no one consciously chose, the emotional charge around those patterns decreases. They stop asking “Why did my parents do this to me?” and start asking “How do I interrupt a process that’s been running for generations?” The second question is far more useful.
Emotional Cutoff
Emotional cutoff is the most misunderstood concept in Bowen’s theory, because our culture celebrates it. We call it “setting boundaries.” We call it “going no-contact.” We call it “protecting my peace.” And sometimes those descriptions are accurate. But Bowen observed that cutoff — the physical or emotional distancing from one’s family of origin — does not resolve the underlying emotional attachment. It manages it through avoidance.
The person who cuts off from their family of origin doesn’t become free of the family system. They become reactive to it from a distance. They replicate the same patterns in their friendships, their romantic relationships, their workplace dynamics. The unresolved fusion doesn’t dissolve when you stop answering your mother’s phone calls. It goes underground and resurfaces in every other significant relationship you form.
Here’s what this looks like clinically: A client who hasn’t spoken to their father in seven years enters therapy because of chronic relationship problems. Every romantic partner eventually becomes “controlling” or “critical” — the same words the client uses to describe the father. The client’s solution each time is the same: leave. Cut off. Start over. They are replicating the cutoff pattern across their relational life, and each cutoff reinforces the belief that the only way to manage emotional intensity is to flee from it.
At ShieldMee, we do not tell anyone to reconcile with an abusive or dangerous family member. But we do help clients distinguish between cutoff — which is an automatic anxiety-management response — and a conscious, differentiated decision to limit contact. These look similar from the outside but are fundamentally different internal processes. The person who limits contact from a position of differentiation can talk about their family without emotional flooding. The person who has cut off cannot.
Sibling Position
Bowen integrated the work of Walter Toman on sibling position, recognizing that birth order and sibling configuration create predictable functional profiles within families. Not deterministic profiles — no serious clinician uses birth order as a personality test — but probabilistic patterns that influence how a person functions in relationships.
Oldest children, across cultures, tend to develop certain leadership and caretaking functions. Youngest children tend to develop certain comfort-with-being-led and comfort-with-receiving-care functions. Middle children tend to develop negotiation and bridge-building functions. Only children often share characteristics with oldest children but without the sibling relational experience. None of this is destiny. All of it is tendency.
Where this becomes clinically relevant is in partner selection and relational conflict. Consider a couple: she’s the oldest of four, accustomed to being in charge, responsible, and hypercompetent. He’s the youngest of three, accustomed to being taken care of and to having someone else handle logistics. In the early relationship, this complementarity feels natural — she likes his easygoing nature, he likes her competence. Ten years in, she feels overburdened and resentful, he feels controlled and criticized, and neither of them understands why the thing that attracted them to each other is now the thing destroying the marriage. Sibling position doesn’t explain all of it, but it provides a framework for understanding the functional expectations each partner brought into the relationship without ever articulating them.
In session, we explore sibling position as one variable among many — never as a fixed explanation, but as a lens that often illuminates patterns clients have never examined.
Societal Emotional Process
Bowen’s final concept extends the family systems framework to society itself, arguing that the same emotional processes operating in families — fusion, anxiety, regression, triangulation — operate in larger social systems during periods of chronic stress.
A society under sustained anxiety, Bowen argued, will predictably regress toward lower levels of differentiation: increased reactivity, decreased capacity for nuanced thinking, polarization, scapegoating, and short-term crisis management at the expense of long-term problem-solving. The parallels to family process are exact. Just as a family under anxiety will identify a patient and focus on fixing that person rather than examining the system, a society under anxiety will identify scapegoats and focus on controlling or expelling them rather than examining the systemic conditions generating the anxiety.
We don’t do social commentary in session. But we do help clients recognize when their family’s emotional processes are being amplified by broader societal anxiety — political conflict, economic instability, public health crises — and distinguish between anxiety that originates within the family system and anxiety that the family is absorbing from the culture. This distinction matters because the interventions are different: you can work on your differentiation within your family, but you cannot differentiate yourself from a society. You can, however, recognize when the societal emotional process is infiltrating your family system and driving up reactivity beyond what the family’s own dynamics would produce.
How Bowen Integrates with Our Approach
ShieldMee’s clinical model was never a single-theory practice. We work at the intersection of Adlerian psychology, Socratic questioning, person-centered principles, and cognitive-behavioral frameworks. Bowen Family Systems Theory doesn’t replace any of these — it completes the circuit.
Here’s how.
Alfred Adler was, in many ways, a proto-systems thinker. His concept of the family constellation — the idea that a person’s psychological development is fundamentally shaped by their position and role within the family structure — anticipated Bowen by decades. Adler understood that birth order, sibling dynamics, parental favoritism, and the child’s subjective interpretation of their family position all create a template for how that person will function in every subsequent social context. When we use Adlerian principles, we’re already doing family systems work. Bowen gives us the systemic architecture that Adler intuited but never formalized.
Socratic questioning — the elenchus method we use across all of our clinical work — is the engine that drives family systems therapy into the client’s lived experience. Bowen theory gives us the map; Socrates gives us the method of exploration. When we sit with a client who is fused with their mother’s anxiety and ask, “How do you know that’s your feeling and not hers?” — that is a Socratic question deployed within a Bowenian framework. When we ask a couple, “What would happen in your family if neither of you focused on your daughter’s grades for a month?” — we are using the elenchus to expose a triangle the family has never examined.
The integration works like this: Bowen provides the systems map — the eight concepts that describe how anxiety moves through the family. Socrates provides the questions — the method by which the client discovers the pattern for themselves rather than being told about it. And Adler provides the “so what” — the understanding of why this matters for the individual, why their family position shaped their private logic, their lifestyle, their pattern of striving and avoiding.
We do not lecture clients about triangulation or cutoff. We ask questions that lead them to see these processes operating in their own lives, in real time, with the full emotional weight of recognition. That recognition — the moment a client sees a three-generational pattern they’ve been living inside without ever seeing from the outside — is where the therapeutic work begins.
When the Family Won’t Come to Therapy
Here is the most common misconception about family therapy: that you need the family in the room.
You don’t.
Murray Bowen spent the latter portion of his career working almost exclusively with individuals — often just one member of a couple or family — on their family system. His reasoning was both practical and theoretical. Practically, getting an entire family to commit to therapy is often impossible, especially when the family’s presenting problem involves addiction, estrangement, legal involvement, or deep-seated denial that a problem exists. Theoretically, Bowen argued that a single person who increases their level of differentiation will inevitably change the system, because the system’s equilibrium depends on every member maintaining their current functional position. When one person changes position, the system must respond.
This is why individual therapy at ShieldMee is often family therapy by another name. When a client comes to us presenting with anxiety, depression, relationship problems, or chronic dissatisfaction with their life, we assess the individual — but we also assess the system. Where is this person positioned in their family? What role are they playing? What triangles are they embedded in? What multigenerational patterns are operating through them? What level of emotional cutoff exists, and what is it costing them?
The work then becomes: How does this person shift their position within the system without the system’s cooperation? How do they stop overfunctioning without waiting for the underfunctioner to step up? How do they exit a triangle without recruiting someone else into it? How do they maintain emotional contact with difficult family members without being governed by the family’s emotional process?
This is differentiation work, and it is demanding. The family system will resist it. When one member starts to change, the system generates enormous pressure to restore the status quo. The overfunctioner who stops overfunctioning will hear: “You’ve changed. You don’t care anymore. What happened to you? Was it that therapist?” The person who stops absorbing the family’s anxiety will watch that anxiety redistribute to other members, often with dramatic results. This is not a sign that the work is failing. It is a sign that the work is landing.
One differentiated person can shift an entire family system. We have seen it. It takes time, it takes courage, and it takes a therapist who understands both the individual and the system well enough to guide the process. That’s what we do.
Who This Is For
Family systems work at ShieldMee is designed for specific clinical situations. Not every family problem requires a systems approach — some conflicts are genuinely about communication skills or logistical disagreements that resolve with practical intervention. But the following situations almost always have a systems component that must be addressed for lasting change to occur.
Adult children navigating toxic or enmeshed family dynamics. If you’re in your thirties, forties, or fifties and still feel hijacked by your family of origin — still losing sleep over a parent’s opinion, still playing a role you’ve outgrown, still unable to visit home without regressing — the problem isn’t that you haven’t learned enough coping skills. The problem is that you haven’t differentiated. You are still fused with a family system that assigned you a position decades ago, and no amount of cognitive restructuring will change that until you do the systems work.
Parents of treatment-resistant adolescents. If your teenager has been to two therapists, tried medication, and nothing is working — pause before you try a third therapist. Consider the possibility that the treatment is being directed at the wrong unit of analysis. Your child’s behavior may be the symptom, not the disease. Family systems therapy examines what the adolescent’s behavior is doing within the family system, what anxiety it’s managing or expressing, and what would need to change at the systemic level for the adolescent’s symptoms to become unnecessary.
Family members of someone in addiction or recovery. Addiction is a family disease not because it affects the family — of course it does — but because the family system often organizes around the addiction. The addicted member occupies a specific functional position, and the rest of the family adjusts their functioning to accommodate it. When the addicted person enters recovery, the system destabilizes — not because recovery is bad, but because the system’s equilibrium depended on the addiction. If the system doesn’t reorganize, it will unconsciously pressure the recovering member back into the addicted position, or someone else in the family will develop symptoms to fill the functional void.
Multigenerational conflict patterns that repeat across decades. If your family has been having the same fight for twenty years — the same dynamics at every holiday, the same alliances and oppositions, the same person storming out and the same person smoothing things over — that is not a communication problem. That is a multigenerational transmission process in action, and it will not stop until someone understands it and consciously disrupts it.
Families where one member is the identified patient but the system is the problem. This is perhaps the most common scenario we see. Someone in the family has symptoms — the child with behavioral problems, the spouse with depression, the sibling with addiction — and the family consensus is that this person is the problem. The rest of the family is fine; if only this one person would get their act together, everything would be fine. In almost every case, the identified patient is carrying the system’s symptoms. They are the designated repository for the family’s unmanaged anxiety. Treatment that focuses exclusively on the identified patient, without addressing the system, is treating a symptom and leaving the disease intact.
Couples where the real issue is each partner’s family of origin patterns colliding. Many couples who present with “communication problems” or “we’ve grown apart” are actually dealing with the collision of two family systems. Each partner brings their family’s patterns of managing anxiety — overfunctioning and underfunctioning, pursuit and distance, conflict and cutoff — into the marriage. When those patterns are complementary, the marriage works. When they collide, the marriage produces symptoms. Understanding each partner’s family system is often more productive than any amount of work on the couple’s communication skills.
Forensic and High-Conflict Families
At ShieldMee, a significant portion of our caseload involves forensic populations — court-involved families, custody disputes, families with members in the criminal justice system. Family systems theory is not just applicable to these cases; it is essential.
High-conflict families operate at the extreme low end of the differentiation spectrum. The anxiety in these systems is chronic, intense, and usually involves external systems — courts, attorneys, child protective services, probation officers — that function as additional triangulated parties. When a family’s internal conflict becomes externalized through the legal system, the triangles become extraordinarily complex, with attorneys, judges, and evaluators pulled into positions that mirror the family’s own emotional processes.
We bring Yochelson and Samenow’s framework of criminal thinking patterns into this work, because in families where one member is involved in the criminal justice system, that member’s thinking errors — the entitled thinking, the failure to consider injury to others, the concrete and fragmented reasoning — do not exist in a vacuum. They exist within a family system that has either enabled, accommodated, or organized around those thinking patterns. The mother who bails her son out every time is not just enabling; she is maintaining her functional position in a triangle. The father who has cut off from the family entirely is not just absent; he is managing his own fusion through distance. The sibling who has become hyperresponsible is not just resilient; she is compensating for the system’s dysfunction and absorbing anxiety that the system cannot process.
In custody disputes specifically, we frequently see children triangulated into the parental conflict with devastating precision. Each parent recruits the child as an ally, confidant, or messenger, and the child’s symptomatology — anxiety, behavioral problems, loyalty conflicts — is a direct product of the triangulation. Family systems thinking allows us to assess these dynamics forensically, identify the processes driving the conflict, and provide courts with analysis that goes beyond “Parent A is alienating” or “Parent B is neglectful” to describe the systemic patterns both parents are participating in.
This is not neutral, conflict-avoidant work. We are direct about what we observe. When criminal thinking patterns are destabilizing a family system, we name them. When one family member’s undifferentiation is driving the conflict, we trace the process. When a court-involved family is using the legal system as a triangulated weapon, we make that pattern visible. The goal is not to assign blame but to expose the system’s operating logic with sufficient clarity that intervention becomes possible.
The Differentiation Challenge
Most people come to family therapy wanting to change their family.
This is understandable. When you are embedded in a family system that produces pain, reactivity, chaos, and repetitive conflict, the natural impulse is to change the people who appear to be causing it. Fix your mother’s anxiety. Stop your father’s drinking. Make your sibling take responsibility. Get your partner to understand what they’re doing. If they would just change, everything would be fine.
This is the most seductive lie in family dynamics, and it is the lie that keeps families stuck for decades.
The work — the real, difficult, transformative work — is not changing your family. It is changing yourself within your family. It is learning to occupy your space in the system differently. It is finding the capacity to be present with people whose anxiety used to hijack your own, without absorbing it, without reacting to it, and without fleeing from it. It is discovering that you can love someone deeply and disagree with them completely, that you can maintain contact without fusion, that you can be part of a system without being governed by it.
That is differentiation. And it is the only thing that actually works.
It is also the hardest thing most people will ever do in therapy, because the family system has extraordinary mechanisms for maintaining homeostasis. When you change, the system fights back. People you love will tell you that you’re cold, selfish, different, wrong. They will escalate. They will withdraw. They will weaponize guilt, obligation, and loyalty. And every one of those responses will be an invitation to return to your previous position in the system — to re-fuse, to resume your role, to abandon your own functioning in service of the family’s equilibrium.
The question is whether you can hold your position.
At ShieldMee, we don’t promise that family systems work will make your family easier. We promise that it will make you clearer. Clearer about who you are within the system. Clearer about what belongs to you and what belongs to the system. Clearer about what you can change — yourself — and what you cannot — everyone else.
We have a 96% client retention rate not because this work is comfortable, but because it is honest. And most people, once they’ve seen the system for what it is, don’t want to go back to pretending it’s about one person.
If you’re ready to do this work — or if you’re not sure yet and want to find out — we should talk.
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ShieldMee Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit telehealth therapy practice serving all of Florida. Clinical Director: Eduardo Florez, LMHC #MH23066. Bilingual services available in English and Spanish.