AUCTORES
Globalize your Research
Mini Review article | DOI: https://doi.org/10.31579/2693-4779/150
Psychotherapy Research Center Saint-Petersburg, Russia
*Corresponding Author: V. Stepanenko
Citation: V. Stepanenko (2023), The Problem of Violations of Self - Regulation in the Family, Clinical Research and Clinical Trials, 8(1); DOI:10.31579/2693-4779/150
Copyright: © 2023, V. Stepanenko. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: 16 July 2023 | Accepted: 18 October 2023 | Published: 16 November 2023
Keywords: addiction; problem; psychosomatics
Addiction is a phenomenon that is causing more and more attention in modern society, due to its prevalence and destructiveness of its impact on the health and well-being of a person and his family. There are many concepts of dependence, both within the framework of natural science and humanitarian knowledge. As a result, we have not so much a systematic vision of the phenomenon of addiction, its etiology and pathogenesis, the whole system of factors that can be influenced in the course of therapy, as versions of what increases or decreases pathological attraction.
In our opinion, systemic psychological concepts that consider a person and his functions in the dynamics of norm and pathology have sufficient potential for the development of ideas about the phenomenon of addiction, the conditions for its formation and the means of therapy for addictive behavior. Murray Bowen's theory of family systems belongs to such concepts that allow us to see this phenomenon in the context of systemic processes.
The model of the etiology of addiction, based on the theory of family systems, requires a detailed consideration of the main concepts and theses related to it. According to Bowen, all life forms are systems. The system principle of organization allows the body to receive and process information both from inside the body and from outside, from the environment, in order to organize its behavior in the most adaptive way. The key concepts of his theory are the level of anxiety and differentiation of the "I". Bowen defined the emotional system as the internal regulatory system of an organism inherited in the process of evolution from other, more ancient species. This is a means of survival, which has lost some of the significance of the means of fighting for life, which it was in the past. Anxiety is a basic property of the emotional system to give signals that contribute to adaptation to the environment. These brain structures are responsible for the individual's automatic reactions to external environmental influences, while the frontal lobes are responsible for consciousness, control, planning. The ability of the intellect to control emotions depends on the level of functioning of the personality, the degree of its success and social adaptation. Differentiation of the "I", according to Bowen, performs exactly this function – it differentiates the emotional and intellectual components in the human psyche, allowing us to comprehend what is happening regardless of the emotional context. The concept of differentiation was taken by M. Bowen from biology, by analogy with the differentiation of cells during the development of an organism. It is understood by him in application to the "I" of a person as the ability to remain independent of emotions in the process of self-regulation. Later regulatory systems (intellectual) perform their functions of an independent assessment of reality, and the differentiation of emotions and intelligence plays a key role in the dynamics of the level of anxiety and resistance to stress. The higher the level of differentiation of the "I", the higher the adaptive potential of the individual. The cognitive activity of a person, according to the theory of family systems, has subjective features that are functionally conditioned by role positions in the social system. And the problem of violations of human self-regulation, leading to personal dysfunction in the form of dependence, can be considered in the context of concepts such as "individuation" and "compatibility". Like almost any dysfunction, dependence on surfactants can be caused by the interaction between two opposing "vital forces": individuation and compatibility in their quest for the most adaptive variant of functioning. According to Bowen, the "victory" of the family system, or the priority of compatibility, is manifested by various deviations in the functioning of the individual at different levels, for example, in a decrease in intelligence (cf. with: "groupthink" by Irving Janis), the appearance of illness, hyper - or hypofunction.
Thus, within the framework of the theory of family systems, dependence as a form of violation of self– regulation of the individual can be explained by the inability of the individual to control his choice in the dilemma of individuation - compatibility. The result of this may be the priority of compatibility and personal dysfunction. Compatibility as a strategy that determines human behavior, in its pathological forms, can have the character of excessive or insufficient role functioning of a person. This is affected by deviations in the process of regulating human activity at various levels. Violations are manifested by a low degree of differentiation of the "I" and, ultimately, a decrease in the level of adaptability of the individual, its resistance to stress and the ability to cope with current life tasks without additional self- reward.
The low differentiation of the "I" of a person can be understood as a manifestation of the priority of compatibility associated with psychological defense mechanisms that play a role in maintaining homeostasis. A person may, for certain reasons, not "want" to understand some things, protecting himself from changes in his position in the social system. The basic concepts for him are those that are functionally adequate to the given specific conditions of his life. In his novel "The Woman in the Sand", Kobo Abe described the struggle for people's lives in the desert, which is absurd in its meaning and has become habitual: "The sterility of the sand, as it usually appears, is explained not just by its dryness, but by continuous movement, which nothing living can bear. How similar it is to the dreary life of people clinging to each other from day to day." The images of this work have a vivid symbolism, because they describe a system where there are victims who have no choice, and those who benefit from this position.
The very phenomenon of dependence as the needs of living organisms in certain conditions of maintaining their vital activity is a natural phenomenon in the existence of all living organisms. Natural is the behavior developed in the process of evolution based on the mutual conditionality of human activity and the endocrine processes accompanying this action. It does not require additional self-stimulation with the help of chemicals or certain forms of activity. It involves a self-reward system at the body level, representing the presence in the brain of sites capable of responding to opioid peptides (enkephalins, endorphins), as well as other "pleasure hormones", the synthesis and release of which is controlled by the brain itself. The most useful and preferred types of activities for adaptation are a condition for self- reward of the brain for participating in them, and vice versa.
In the issue of violations of self–regulation by the type of dependence, the system of self-reward of a person, in our opinion, is the subject field where deviations of the system of regulation of higher orders
- psychological, social, spiritual - are most obviously represented. Personal dysfunctionality as a result of the impact of the social system manifests itself in dysfunction at the level of the organism. Addiction is just one of the variants of this manifestation, along with psychosomatics, conversion and other mental disorders.
Thus, the etiology of dependence in the perspective of the theory of family systems can be understood as a violation of the process of self–regulation of the individual, the cause of which is, firstof all, the inability to cope with the dilemma of "individuation - compatibility" and, as a result, the priority of compatibility to the detriment of individuation within the family (or other social) system, the most significant for this person. This is manifested by a decrease in the level of differentiation of the "I" and adaptability of the personality. Subsequently, dysfunctionality may be reflected for a person by a partial or complete loss of her ability to do without additional self-stimulation (food, play, alcohol and drugs, etc.), due to developing disorders in the self-reward system, and the formation of a pathological attraction to psychoactive substances.
Clearly Auctoresonline and particularly Psychology and Mental Health Care Journal is dedicated to improving health care services for individuals and populations. The editorial boards' ability to efficiently recognize and share the global importance of health literacy with a variety of stakeholders. Auctoresonline publishing platform can be used to facilitate of optimal client-based services and should be added to health care professionals' repertoire of evidence-based health care resources.
