Here’s the problem: As a child, you internalized beliefs and adopted behaviors that enabled you to adapt to and function within your own unique family system. But when you take those beliefs and behaviors with you into adulthood, they often don’t make sense anymore. You’re operating in a different environment—the adult world and the relationships that come with it. Your world, your needs, and your goals have changed, but your habitual perceptions and behaviors haven’t. As an example, let’s say you grew up in a family in which your mother’s love was conditional. When she approved of your behavior, she was loving and affectionate—you were her good little girl. But she chastised or criticized you whenever you did something she didn’t like, withdrawing her affection or rejecting or punishing you. Then you were a bad girl. Growing up, in order to avoid the pain of her disapproval, you might have developed a habit of behaving in ways that were designed to please her—at the expense of your own needs. If Mommy wanted you to be quiet, you’d be quiet. If Mommy wanted you to stop crying, you stopped. If Mommy wanted you to be a cheerleader or wear your hair long or go without makeup, that’s what you did. You learned to suppress your own wants and needs to win her approval. How does that translate into adult behavioral patterns? When you become involved in an adult relationship, you have no idea how to articulate your needs, because you’re so used to suppressing them. You might be terrified of making the other person unhappy. While your overriding goal—that of seeking approval—made sense during your young life, because pleasing that demanding mother made you feel loved, it is counterproductive to hold on to that pattern as an adult.
Our Fundamental Human Needs
The family exists to meet certain fundamental human needs. In fact, every human system—whether it’s an individual, a couple, a family, or a society—must meet these fundamental needs in order to thrive. Psychiatrist Jerome Bach, M.D., conducted research that demonstrated that a family system—in fact, any social system—has four very basic requirements: unity, emotional maintenance, relationship, and productivity.6Based on Bach’s work and the work I’ve done with my clients, I’ve identified what I believe are the requirements for a family to function as a healthy system and effectively meet the needs of its individual members:
• A sense of safety and stability. A healthy family system feels physically safe and provides a sense of stability. In a healthy family system, people aren’t throwing things at each other. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re going to be hurt; you don’t have a parent who’s screaming at you and scaring you. It’s a system that meets your most basic human needs—for food, shelter, and physical safety—and provides consistency and predictability. You know from one day to the next that your family is going to be there for you; that there’s a routine in place; that home is a safe, stable place.
• Interpersonal connectedness. Members of the family are involved with each other. There’s a sense of intimacy. You interact. You communicate. You take an interest in one another and share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You’re involved in each other’s lives in a healthy way.
• Support and nurturance. Each individual gets a sense of support from the other family members. You feel nurtured and cared for. You’re encouraged to be yourself and to pursue your own path. Family members express affection for each other both physically and verbally. As a result, everyone in the family feels valued and cared for.
• Emotional release. Family members feel free to express whatever they’re feeling. If you’re feeling angry or sad, you can express it. You don’t have to hold it in and internalize it. The same holds true for happiness or excitement. Because nobody’s putting a lid on your feelings, you’re free to express them in ways that are healthy and respectful of others.
• Self-expression. This means being able to express the uniqueness of who you are. For example, one child might be artistic and be allowed to freely express that part of himself through dance, music, art, or whatever else he is inspired to pursue. Another child might be a natural athlete. No one’s insisting that, instead, she should be book-smart. It’s safe to be and to express yourself as the person you really are—your authentic self. Family members are free to express their thoughts and feelings, their talents and abilities, and their passions and interests.
• Esteem. When we’re born, we naturally feel good about ourselves. We have no reason not to. Have you ever noticed that a very young child will wave to everybody on the street, say goodbye to everyone at the supermarket, and walk up to people and just say hello? That’s a reflection not only of trust, but also of self-confidence. Esteem means feeling good about yourself—feeling capable, feeling like you’re a good person, feeling a sense of pride in who you are and in what you can accomplish.
Constructive and Dysfunctional Family Systems
A healthy, constructive family system operates differently from a dysfunctional one in three important respects. A constructive family embraces the differences between individual family members, allowing each person to flourish. The family system itself is able to thrive because people take on different roles at various times to meet the family’s overall needs. As an example, when the father needs emotional support, the mother takes on the supportive role, and vice versa. It’s a far more fluid and open system than the typical dysfunctional family system. Below are the core characteristics of a healthy, constructive family system:
• Rules and structures are flexible. They’re designed to serve both the needs of the system and the members of the system. The full range of human emotions is accepted. Your parents or primary caretakers guide you in a constructive manner, so that you can develop healthy behavioral styles and use them in your day-to-day interactions in the world.
• Differences are respected. Not everyone in the family is expected to think or behave in the same way. There’s a healthy respect for dissimilarities—for each person’s individuality and unique personality.
• Family roles are fluid and flexible. People aren’t locked into a specific role. Roles are interchangeable, depending on circumstances. For example, one day, one child might be the center of attention because she’s got a softball game; the next day, another child, who needs help with schoolwork, might take center stage. Or, on one occasion, one parent might be providing counsel and support to the other; then those roles will reverse. It’s all in response to the natural flow of events. And since freedom of self-expression is encouraged, people are free to express all parts of themselves and take on different roles at different times.
In contrast, here are the core characteristics of a dysfunctional family system:
• An absence of rules and structures, or very rigid ones. Either there are no rules or structures—and chaos prevails—or rules are extremely rigid and everyone is expected to conform, leaving no room for mistakes or flexibility.
• Suppression of emotions and behavior. Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that threaten the prevailing norms of the system are suppressed, which results in the erosion of each person’s innate wholeness.
• Sameness is the rule. Any deviation from the acceptable norms—as defined by the particular family system—is considered crazy, sick, or bad.
• The roles of family members are rigid and inflexible. Family members take on and become locked into distinct roles to keep the whole dysfunctional family machine running. This is the result of the system’s need for balance or homeostasis, a subject I’ll talk more about later.
Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all dysfunctional families are different. The level and character of the dysfunctions are determined by the parents—by the extent to which they have each retained their innate wholeness, and by the relationships they have with themselves and with each other. The parents bring to the family the dysfunctions from their own families of origin, which are passed on like a legacy to the next generation. Let me give you an example of how this works. If a mother grew up in a family system in which feelings and expressions of anger were forbidden, in order to
survive in that system, her innate ability to express anger is diminished. In order to feel safe within her family system, she had to suppress her anger. Her family was dysfunctional, because it made no room for the natural expression of anger. Let’s say she marries someone who grew up in the same kind of family—where anger was unacceptable. As a result, in their relationship, this couple will have difficulty dealing with conflict—because, in order to deal with conflict, you have to have a way of expressing your anger. There will also be issues around anger in the new family they create.
How does that play out? Let’s call their son Tommy. When Tommy has his first temper tantrum—which is a perfectly natural early expression of frustration or anger—his parents’ dysfunctions come into play. If Tommy takes a toy and throws it against the wall, they might have any number of reactions. They might shame Tommy and say: “That’s bad. You’re a bad boy” or “That’s naughty. We don’t raise our voices in this house.” Or reject and humiliate him with: “Go to your room and think about what you did.” They might abandon the child: “I’m not going to stay here in this room and talk to you. I don’t talk to bad boys who break their toys.”
It’s also quite possible that, in response to her own parents’ taboos, rather than suppress her anger, Tommy’s mother could have rebelled against her family norms and developed a hair-trigger temper. In that case, she might scream at Tommy—“You stupid idiot, you broke the toy”—or even strike the child. No matter which of these responses greets Tommy’s tantrum, over time he learns that anger is bad and that he’s bad because he experiences anger. By receiving the same message over and over, Tommy will learn through conditioning that he has to disenfranchise the part of him that expresses anger. That anger has to go underground, compromising his innate wholeness.
Before we move on to how this plays out later for Tommy, and what the full range of possible family dysfunctions is, it’s only fair to share with you an example of what might go on in a healthy family when Tommy has a temper tantrum and breaks his toy. One possibility is that Tommy’s parents will validate his experience. They might say: “You’re feeling angry!” or “Boy, you’re really mad.” The underlying message is: This is normal. This is a valid experience. Anger is a normal feeling. Maybe Tommy’s broken his toy and there’s a clear opportunity for a lesson in cause and effect. “Honey, when you throw your toy against the wall, it gets broken. When you get really angry, you can go punch a pillow. But if you throw your toy, you’ll break it.” So the child learns to release his anger in another way that’s more constructive. And, as he gets older, he learns to use his words.
In a healthy family, the parents accept anger as a normal emotion that needs to be discharged. But in a dysfunctional family where anger is repressed, those emotions can’t be discharged and released. So when Tommy grows up, he may continue the habit of internalizing his anger. Since he’s unable to express it freely, he could turn his feelings of anger inward, which can lead to depression and other emotional and physical consequences. Or he may react by outwardly expressing it in destructive ways—maybe through an explosive temper or through passive-aggressive behavior in which he expresses anger by being critical, sarcastic, judgmental, or oppositional. The anger has to find expression somehow; he’s going to either direct it at himself or direct it at others.
Keep in mind that these patterns of behavior are the result of consistent patterns within a family. All parents make mistakes; even the healthiest parent has been known to scream in the face of a tantrum. Unfortunately, some parents make the same mistakes over and over, because that’s what they learned in their own families. When you uncover dysfunctional patterns in your own parents’ behavior, it’s important to remember: Your parents are only human. Through their experiences as children, they too have suffered pain and the erosion of their self-esteem and wholeness. Try to be empathetic and forgiving, recognizing that your parents were doing the best they could with the emotional resources and knowledge they had available to them at the time. Again, the purpose of this process is not in finding fault with or blaming your parents. The purpose is to gain a deeper understanding of yourself, so that you can reclaim your own lost parts and live in alignment with who you really are and where you want to be in your life. As you go through the process of examining the dynamics of your family of origin, you may experience some difficult feelings; you might feel sad, disloyal, resentful, conflicted, upset, or even furious. Although processing and moving through your feelings is an important part of personaldevelopment work, there’s no value in staying stuck in a victim role or playing the blame game. The value of this process lies in uncovering constructive changes you can make in yourself and in your own life.
The Erosion of Wholeness
Anger is just one example of the constellation of normal human emotions, and repressing anger is just one family experience that interferes with your sense of wholeness and well-being. Below is a list that covers the range of conditions and experiences that can erode a person’s innate wholeness:
• Verbal, sexual, or physical abuse. This can take the most obvious extreme forms—verbal and physical battering, sexual abuse, or witnessing these forms of abuse within your family. But it also includes less overt forms of abuse—for example, having a parent who’s critical and judgmental and talks to you in a demeaning way, or having a parent who sexualizes the parent-child relationship with flirtations or inappropriate comments.
• Parental alcoholism and other addictive behavior. Addictions lead to a variety of family dysfunctions, from denial and abandonment to physical abuse and unpredictability. Children who grow up in households where there is an addiction come away with all kinds of patterns of behavior that enable them to adapt and survive, including addictions of their own. This category extends to families where there is habitual drinking—a daily cocktail hour, for example. Even though parents aren’t falling-down drunk, they may drink enough to diminish their ability to effectively meet their children’s needs for parental involvement and attention.
• Neglect. This can range from severe, overt physical neglect—not feeding a child, changing his diapers, or putting him to bed at night—to milder or more covert forms of neglect. Maybe a parent is a workaholic and just isn’t around very much; maybe a parent is very self-absorbed and consistently puts his or her needs ahead of the child’s; there could be a sick family member or child, which causes a parent to neglect the other children.
• Betrayal. Betrayal involves trust, and acts of betrayal can run the gamut from the extreme to the mundane. At one end of the spectrum, say you adore your parents and you find out your father is cheating on your mother; your family falls apart and you experience tremendous loss. At the other end of the spectrum, maybe your father has promised to take you to a ball game, but it never happens. Or your mother never remembers to pick you up on time. Or one minute your mother is telling you what a smart little girl you are, and the next minute she says you’re getting fat. That feels like a betrayal.
• Physical or emotional abandonment. I have a friend whose mother just up and left the family when he was 12 years old. That’s the most obvious and extreme form of abandonment. But there are subtler forms. If parents are always out with friends and leave you home alone or with a babysitter all the time, that’s another form. Or maybe your parents are physically in the house, but they don’t talk much with you or express any interest in you; that’s a form of emotional abandonment. Over and over, you end up feeling unwanted and uncared-for.
• Oppression of self-expression. If you’re unable to freely express your feelings or who you really are, your self-expression is oppressed. This is what I touched on with the example of Tommy and his tantrum—his parents couldn’t deal with his anger. Another common example: Let’s say your feelings were hurt at school. Someone called you stupid, and you came home and started to cry, and your father said, “Stop crying, that’s for sissies.” Or you were listening to music, twirling in circles, and singing along, having a gra
nd old time, and your mother told you to calm down, remarking, “You’re always too loud.” This also extends to your personal interests and passions. A mother tells her daughter: “You don’t want to be a dancer. You’d have to be thin.” Or a father pushes his son to play football when what the teenager really wants to do is spend his afternoons at the chess club. That father is suppressing his son’s own innate nature, interests, and needs.
• Being shamed or humiliated. How many children haven’t heard the expression “You should be ashamed of yourself”? At one extreme, parents can say profoundly deflating things to a child that shame and humiliate him: “You’re an idiot.” “I wish I’d never had you.” “That’s just plain stupid.” “I can’t stand the sight of you.” They can tease in humiliating ways: “Bobby wet his pants today at school.” But shame and humiliation come in subtler forms. “Why can’t you get the grades your sister gets?” “You’re not wearing that, are you?” “Aren’t you eating a little too much again?” Comments that are overly critical and judgmental all fall into this category. So do actions. When you’re sitting in a car at the foot of the driveway with your date, and your mother comes out and knocks on the window and screams at you, that’s humiliating—or when you miss that last pitch at a baseball game and your father gives you a public dressing-down.
Core Limiting Beliefs
When you’re a very young child, all you have to go on is your immediate environment. You’re like a sponge; your parents are like gods. You don’t yet have the capacity to intellectualize or rationalize. You take the world at face value—and the world your family creates is your reality. From that reality you draw what I call your core beliefs. If you grew up in The Brady Bunch—with parents who were caring, loving people, where conflicts were resolved through discussion, and where you were loved unconditionally for who you are—you would probably come away with the core belief that the world is a safe, predictable place and that you are a person worthy of love. But if you grew up in an environment in which you were neglected or abused, your core beliefs might include a very different set of beliefs about yourself and the world around you.
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