Separated Families: What Are The Emotional Consequences?
There are many separate families. Probably some of you reading this article have had to live outside your core family. Staying away from the people we love is not easy for anyone, especially in a forced situation that is totally beyond everyone’s control.
Families separated by an enforced condition find the situation even more unbearable and unacceptable. Therefore, in the following lines, we will try to explain the emotional consequences for these families.
In addition, we will also suggest some guidelines for dealing with this period in the best possible way. If we manage to establish good emotion regulation, we will be able to achieve the well-being that is destabilized when we are away from the people we love.
Separated Families: When You Stay Away From The People You Love The Most
For professional reasons, for example, there are times when we have no choice but to go through the obstacles and stay separated from our families. Or maybe it was another external circumstance that pulled us away from the people we love most.
Regardless of what this circumstance is, what are the emotional consequences that arise? How can we deal with our emotional states? Or, in other words: what can we do to achieve adequate emotional regulation in this situation?
-Bernardo Stamateas-
Emotional consequences of living apart from the family nucleus
For people separated from their families, not being able to touch, hug or kiss those they love the most can make the loneliness they are facing worse. Thus, they must accept a different pace of life and take the opportunity to get in touch with others in a different way than they normally did.
That way, if we have to be separated from our families for an extended period, we can plan to contact them online regularly and create a daily routine.
The opportunity offered by technologies to stay in touch in real time through video calls, for example, can make the situation more bearable. Thus, we can reduce the feeling of isolation or loneliness.
In addition to feelings of loneliness, sadness also affects us throughout the days. Prolonged in time, it can lead to depression. The stress that we are subjected to just by the fact that the forced separation breaks into our lives completely destabilizes us.
Feeling this high stress load in a short time can trigger a post-traumatic stress disorder. All this can happen in the most extreme cases. And anger or anger can also appear. So what can we do to prevent this from happening?
Separated Families: Guidelines for Adequate Emotion Regulation
One of the ways to achieve proper emotional regulation is mindfulness practice. Programs like MBSR include a section on meditation-based emotion regulation. Although the first person to introduce this program was Jon Kabat Zinn, there are increasingly more introspective-based interventions that incorporate sessions to work on emotion regulation.
Mindfulness- based programs seek emotional regulation through the body. Thus, once the emotion manifests itself in the body, we can identify it and, later, regulate it. In this way, we are able to avoid internal dialogue about emotion.
That is, if we can regulate emotion by placing our attention on our body, we can eliminate unnecessary emotions automatically generated by thoughts about the initial emotion.
