Why We Love Cats - Family Systems Theory

Dr. Murray Bowen created what has come to be known as "Bowen Theory" or Family Systems Theory. Dr. Rabbi Friedman set Bowen's hypothesis to work for rabbis, ministers and different religious callings in Generation to Generation and his after death work Failure of Nerve. 

This hypothesis of family conduct depends on a few key ideas regarding why individuals act as they do in gatherings, not founded on unthinking parts but rather on how individuals in bunches act inwardly. This hypothesis thinks as far as enthusiastic procedures and not in pecking orders or scholarly terms. 

This article looks at why a great many people love felines as a way to clarify a few of the primary thoughts in Murray Bowen's hypothesis of Family and Societal Systems. 

We unreasonably love felines - those of us who do. The individuals who loathe felines detest them unreasonably. Why every one of the feelings about felines? Since they uncover reality about human passionate frameworks by presenting catlike enthusiastic conduct! 

The feline, any feline, brought into the human passionate framework, will make the human enthusiastic framework revise. Not on account of the feline does anything besides rather as a result of how the feline is inwardly.

1. Cats Tend to Be Emotionally Self-Differentiated

Self-differentiation is the goal and high water mark of maturity for the Bowen Theory. Cats have it.

They know what they like. They know who they like. They know what they will and will not do and refuse to be trained. They have no desire to win approval but seek emotional support (petting) when they want it and from whom they want it.

Most humans call this independence or detachment. It is really the position of self-differentiation to which we all aspire. We admire cats for being able to be aloof and standoffish. What we truly admire is their ability to shamelessly self-differentiate.

Those who hate cats most likely are uncomfortable with others who refuse to participate in emotional hubbub in the human system too.

2. Cats Do Not Accept Anxiety from Others

When there is "drama" between humans, cats usually run off or keep out of the fray by hissing and going into fend-off defensive mode until they can escape. Cats refuse to accept anxiety from others.

They may choose to purr around you when you are upset, but that, we all know, is pure coincidence. Cats take care of their own emotional distress. They do not ask for help. They fight their own fights and never seek to recruit the "gang" or "herd" effect as humans do.

3. Cats Have Learned a Perfect Balance Between Closeness and Distance

Cats never become so attached that they cannot do without you but never so distant they don't look for you after you have been gone a while.

They have found the perfect balance of distance and closeness that humans rarely find. Most humans become so close to each other they fuse either by loving or fighting. Or humans distance from each other in response to anxiety thus keeping the fusion on a distance level.

Not cats.

If you are gone a year or an hour it makes no difference. They will react the same to your return in predictable patterns. The longer you are gone the less they may react upon your return.

Most humans respect the boundaries of a cat much more than the emotional boundaries of other humans!

4. Cats Are Distant but Connected

They never "leave" the system. They do their own thing and then, suddenly, it seems, they will arrive into the emotional system with purring and a desire to be petted on their own terms. Try to coax them and you will only get disdain and disinterest. Try to stop them when they WANT strokes and you will have to get out a broom.

5. Cats Learn This Behavior From Parents

While at the same time cats, they demonstrate no self-separation aside from when they will brutally push the runt off the beaten path to get the last suck of drain despite the fact that the runt might starve to death. 

Felines are social creatures like people, yet even the mother is self-separated. She sustains when she feels like it and guards the litter in the event that she is in the mind-set. 

People are interested by this closeness/remove adjust however we respect it as well. 

The little cats take in it from their folks. The dad remains off to the side as an occasionally defender of the litter and the mother goes to the little ones without asking a thing more from the dad. 

On the off chance that a little cat misbehaves, the mother never debilitates the cats with the arrival or reprisal of the dad: she does the swatting herself. 

6. Felines May Feel Anxiety During Times of Change yet They Handle Their Own - They Do Not Triangle 

In Bowen's hypothesis, people dependably triangle. We can't deal with the regular nerves of life thus we search out somebody to share our uneasiness. The nervousness maker - whether it is a circumstance or a man or a weight - is dependably the third individual in the triangle. 

Felines don't do this. They handle their own tension like the senior pioneer of a lion Pride. At the point when the youthful lion challenges the Pride pioneer the pioneer may set up a stately battle however handles the uneasiness. He doesn't try to impart the tension to anybody. He goes off into the separation and watches the Pride proceed onward without him. 

People respect this and dread it in the meantime. Somebody who is self-separated is alarming to the individuals who are most certainly not. The purpose behind this is on the grounds that people have a tendency to be a grouping animal categories, particularly when there is change or miracle in the "ordinary" way nervousness is taken care of in the framework.

7. Cats Feed on Herds They Never Form Herds

Cats eat from panicked herds. They do not form herds. They form Prides. Even the name suggests independence and positive attributes.

When humans experience anxiety, they tend to herd together to expel the anxiety by attacking it or running from it instead of dealing with it.

For instance, think of the distasteful images on the television documentaries of lions eating water buffalo or gazelles. Notice, if the herd suddenly turned on the cats, the cats would lose. Even if several, maybe just a handful, of the thousands-of-pounds beasts turned on the cats, the limber but vulnerable-to-stomping cats would flee in panic.

Herds "group think" and panic. They run from anxiety or mindlessly attack each other trying to find the panic-making culprit, but they rarely attack the real predator which has been stalking them for days.

They fail to see the real danger: the cat in the room.

8. Cats Can Switch Prides Based on Their Own Self-Interest

Cats can go from owner to owner, Pride to Pride, without loss of self-differentiation. Give a cat away and it will adapt immediately to the new situation because it was not emotionally fused with the last one!

Humans may experience this as selfishness on the part of the cat or self-absorption. In fact, it is adroit emotional adaptation. Some cats will leave one household and adopt another with seemingly no regrets if the new situation is in the best interest of the cat. And the cat knows.

Selfishness and self-differentiation are not the same and cats seem to understand this. Cats are not selfish. They share when they decide to share. They show affection when they want to and not when they ought to.

They don't NEED humans. They can hunt if they have to. If they do choose to hunt, they generally bring the poor beast to their humans to supplement the foodstuffs the humans gather from God knows where.

9. Cats Can Act Like Kittens if They Feel Like It

Felines can, superbly, every now and then all of a sudden demonstration like a little cat! - Playing with balls and moving after laser lights moving from a human penlight. Felines can relapse when they feel fun loving or inquisitive. 

This capacity to relapse isn't passionate shortcoming yet the ability to be candidly open when they feel like it. There is the key: when they feel like it. 

Their flightiness is superb to generally people. A few people despise felines. They aren't sufficiently poor. They don't intertwine. They are useless tension receptors. A furious human may kick a canine and the pooch will grovel. Kick a feline and see what happens. They won't share your nervousness. 

Conclusion: 

These are just a couple of reasons why people love felines. They mirror the passionate wellbeing portrayed in Bowen's Family System Theory and this causes an awesome division among people. 

Some detest felines for a similar reason a few people loathe self-separated individuals. Like a feline, a self-separated individual can't be sincerely controlled, does not fall effectively into triangulation, and appears to be unfeeling and narrow minded to somebody who is asking for an accomplice in nervousness. 

A few people despise this. 

They need crowd individuals who will feel frustrated about them, spread the tension, begin a frenzy and take off in assault or departure from an inconspicuous and obscure adversary. 

The dismal truth is that self-separated individuals tend to hang together and watch from a separation the abnormal practices of the crowds beneath. Candidly non-self-separated individuals tend to hang together as well. They tend to group together, serve the nerves of the weakest individuals from the crowd, and look for fellowship and assention over whatever else. 

It would be a smart thought to recollect this: felines eat up crowds; groups keep running from felines.