Emotional abuse is a quite prevalent in the Korea society, but it has been concerned a little about the issue. Most childhood emotional abuse frequently occurs from parents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, The time to spend with family at home has increased due to the social distancing policy. During this period, emotional abuse has increased, the reality of emotional abuse occurring in the family was obviously revealed. However, parents are often unaware of the emotional abuse while raising their children.
Emotional abuse causes dysfunction in various areas such as children's psychological, mental, and social relationships. In addition, emotional abuse has a negative impact on a child's life as well as physical abuse. Above all, emotional abuse from parents has a more adverse effect on affection and lack of emotion than the abuse itself.
Abuse from parents during childhood is very likely to continue as abuse by their own children when they grow up. Emotional abuse caused by an imbalance in the emotional system and emotional abuse with characteristics transmitted to multiple generations were explained by Bowen Theory.
This study is on the basis of core concepts of Bowen's family system theory.
It includes self-differentiation, triangle, family projection process, fused relationship and emotional cutoff. In addition, it explains the cause of emotional abuse and the process of multigenerational transmission with Bowen's theory.
To understand, it is analyzed with the family in the movie "Three Sisters" as a case. Because the movie "Three Sisters" gives and empathetic understanding to families and clients suffering from emotional abuse.
This research suggests that emotional abuse not only inhibits healthy development of the child but also repeats the vicious cycle that leads to abuse of the victim's own children when they grow up. The intergenerational transmission process of childhood abuse is a serious issue.
The results showed that parents who grew up with emotional abuse do not want to affect on the next generation. Therefore, the parents should increase their level of self-differentiation in order to prevent the transmission of emotional abuse.
According to Bowen's family system theory, problems is not caused by a specific person in the family. Mostly the family problem is caused by family emotional system of the family from generation to generation. having a view of that transmitted emotional system of the family, it can be not only treating a family suffering from emotional abuse but also ending a multigenerational transmission.
This thesis is focused on helping people who was in emotional abuse understanding deeply with providing the assistance of family counselor. Bowen said it is possible that a positive change from one of family member is affect on the entire family system.
The study suggests a role of family counselor about treating the family of emotional abuse. Emotional abuse occurring in the family is usually regarded as a parent's problem. But it is caused from wrong relationship in the family system. Therefore, family counselor should help them understand family system with objective view through the genogram.
Furthermore, encouraging the counselor to increase the level of self-differentiation of the parents makes the parents responsible for their actions. and realizes the fused relationship with their child and the need of detriangling. For this purpose, the Bowen's family counselor should use 'circular question' and form 'therapeutic triangle'.
This study shows the influence of the 'helicopter mom' and 'kangaroo mom' as an examples of parent-child fused relationship. it finds the dysfunction of the highly intimate relationship between parents and children.
The study suggests that it needs to improve correct awareness of 'childhood emotional abuse' and efforts to produce trained family counselors to help clients suffering from emotional abuse.