Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  Remember, too, that even to the untrained observer, someone who is addicted to all of these things may obviously have a problem.

  But to the addict who doesn’t get a lot of feedback from other people because they are afraid of it, it is easy to fool himself into believing that no one knows “his secret.”

  By the same logic, dealing with multiple addictions is no different from dealing with just one. Once we break through the initial denial and defenses to treat the most harmful addiction first (such as alcohol), it is much easier to treat the other ones later while recovering from an addictive lifestyle. The alcoholic may say to herself at first, “I know I have to quit drinking, but I know I’ll have to find something to replace it.”

  Once recovery has been in process for a couple of years, she actually finds it easier to think about giving up the next addiction. As addicts, we think in terms of how much of what kind of outside agent we can rely on. As people in healthy recovery programs, we begin to think of how healthy we are and how we can get even healthier. It is as if our entire logic system changes.

  A warning is in order here, too. Early in recovery, it is very predictable that we will replace one addiction with another. The recovering food addict may begin compulsively running, only to find that running is making her no more peaceful inside than food did. This simply means that recovery is still very new, and that the person doing it has more and deeper work to do with the underlying pain. The goal of recovery is to produce inner peace and a clear identity, free from addictive agents. The first step in recovery is to remove the addictive agent so that the true underlying dependency can be felt, touched, seen and dealt with openly.

  Interlude

  5

  The Bear

  Once upon a time there was a big Brown Bear who lived peacefully in the woods near a clear rushing stream. He liked where he lived. He liked the fresh clean air, the abundance of fish in the nearby stream, the dappled sunlight beneath the tall pine trees, the open meadows and the cool damp forest. Every day was filled with quiet time snoozing in the sun on his favorite granite rock by the stream, the challenges of searching for food and romping with his mate.

  One day as he was ambling down to the stream for a drink of clear icy water, something happened. WHACK! A searing pain pulsed through his foot. He lunged forward to escape. THUD! He was trapped to the earth by a pair of steel jaws and a thick metal chain pounded deep into the earth.

  “No!” shouted the big Brown Bear. “It’s a bear trap.”

  His paws weren’t really built to spread the jaws of a bear trap, and his brain wasn’t really built to figure this out at all. He was in a bad situation.

  After several hours of painful struggle, the big Brown Bear had mangled his foot almost to shreds. There was blood everywhere. He called for his mate, who finally heard his calls, but there was nothing she could do either. So she sat patiently next to him to give him comfort, crying quietly, and hoping for a miracle.

  Finally, after several more hours, his mangled foot jerked free from the trap, and he crawled sadly away from that place and back into the woods. His mate stayed behind for awhile to try to understand how this had happened, but nothing came to her. Her brain wasn’t really designed to figure these things out either.

  At last, she returned to their den, where the big Brown Bear was nursing his mangled foot as best he could. They stayed up most of the night, discussing what had happened to them that day, but neither of them could make head nor tail of it. And so with what brain capacity they did have, they simply decided never to return to that place in the woods again. And so they didn’t.

  Part II

  Family Roots

  “A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular, you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.“

  J. M. Barrie, from the dedication

  to his first edition of Peter Pan

  6

  Family Systems:

  Structure, Function,

  Roles, Boundaries

  Perhaps the most important contribution to understanding the dynamics underlying “Adult Child Issues” has come from the field of family systems (e.g., Bowen, 1978, Minuchin, 1974, Satir, 1967). Because of its importance, we want to spend some time here just going over the basics of family systems so that you can begin to get a framework for understanding what happened in your family.

  Every system has a structure and a function. Our nervous system is made up of a brain, spinal cord and nerves that carry messages to and from the brain. Its function is to allow communication to take place within the body, and between the body and the outside world. The circulatory system is composed of the heart, veins, arteries and capillaries and its function is to circulate blood throughout the body to deliver food to the cells and to carry away waste products from the cells. A business or other organization has a structure, too, which includes a president, a vice president, managers, other employees and so on. Its function will depend upon its corporate goal.

  For example, its function may be to produce television sets, sell them, make a profit and provide jobs for its employees and goods for society to buy.

  Each family has a structure and a function, too. The structure of a family system is made up of the individual members of the family, including parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles and perhaps others who live with the family for an extended period of time. Part of the family structure is also the boundaries and relationships among and between family members: who is allowed to communicate with whom, and so on. A family in which Dad is closer to oldest daughter than he is to Mom has a very different structure than one in which Dad is closest to Mom, even though the number of-family members is the same.

  When a therapist helps you construct a genogram of your family system, he or she is helping you discover the structure of your family (McGoldick & Gerson, 1985.)

  In the next chapter we will provide you with an example of a simplified genogram that has helped scores of our clients begin to understand what has happened to them as they grew up in their families. But for now, we would like to offer the analogy used by internationally recognized family therapist Virginia Satir and further developed by her student and colleague, Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse (Wegscheider, 1981), well-known for her work with chemically dependent family systems.

  The analogy is that of a mobile. As you imagine a mobile suspended from the ceiling of your living room, notice how all of the separate pieces of the mobile hang magically suspended in delicate harmony and balance with each other. Although each part of the mobile might be a separate, fragile piece of crystal or polished metal, the mobile as a whole seems to be at one with itself—one beautiful, whole work of art. If you bumped against one element of the mobile, it may move with a burst of energy and unpredictable motion—but it does not move by itself. Although it appears to be a separate, solitary piece of crystal or metal, it is connected nonetheless to the rest of the mobile by wire or string. And thus, whatever energy it picks up from you will be transmitted to the rest of the mobile, even though the effect may be subtle and nearly imperceptible.

  In other words, whatever happens to one part of the mobile affects the other parts of the mobile. If you stop bumping into the mobile, something else very predictable will happen, too. Each of the individual, autonomous pieces of that mobile will return to precisely the same spot that it was in before you bumped into it. The mobile is a “whole” work of art that “wants” to be what it is, the way it “should be,” the way it was “meant to be.” So it returns to its original form, hanging silently where it began, a whole made up of individual parts, each in its own place, carrying out its function of giving us joy and a sense of beauty. It is truly a brilliant metaphor that Satir provides us.

  The mobile tells us a lot about principles of systems. It tells us that:

  1. Systems have a definite structure to them. Each piece of the mo
bile has its place. It would not be the “same” mobile if we were to rearrange the pieces.

  2. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The mobile is more than just pieces of strings or wire and pieces of metal or crystal. It is a work of art with its own identity, defined by how all of the parts are arranged.

  3. Changes in one piece in the system affect all of the other pieces in the system (but not necessarily in the same way).

  4. Systems always try to return to their original state. This is the principle of dynamic homeostasis or balance. It would not be the “same” mobile unless after I bumped into it, it returned to the same place that it was before I bumped into it.

  The Unhealthy Family System

  Let’s look at an example that hits closer to home. Let’s make each piece of that mobile a member of a family instead of a piece of metal or crystal. One piece is Dad, who works very hard and also watches a lot of TV. Another piece is Mom, who works a lot and worries about the kids. Another is oldest son, who gets good grades and is the valedictorian of his high school. A fourth is middle sister, who is “nice” and quiet, and praised for “not being a bother.” Lastly comes little brother, who is cute and sassy and funny. This mobile is in balance. It has a structure. It is a family, which is more than just a Dad or a Mom or a big brother, a middle sister or a little brother. And like all systems, if one member gets “bumped,” it affects all members. And when one member gets “bumped,” everyone, unconsciously, without malice, tries to get him or her back into place.

  So Dad works and watches TV and Mom works and worries. Dad and Mom don’t take care of themselves. Dad and Mom don’t nurture their marriage. Oldest son works harder and harder to get good grades and be a star on the football field. Middle daughter works harder and harder to fit in, be “nice“ and not make waves. Youngest son gets cuter and cuter.

  Dad and Mom begin to feel empty in their marriage. They lose touch with each other. This creates stress. No one talks about it. The stress remains. Mom worries more about the kids. Dad watches more TV. Oldest son wins more honors. Middle daughter gets nicer. Little brother picks up on the marital stress and gets drunk with his 8th grade friends. Dad gets concerned. Mom worries a whole bunch. Older brother gets another “A” to make sure the family is doing okay in spite of the stress. Middle sister gets nicer, quieter and tries to fit in more. And then little brother gets caught using drugs.

  The mobile has been bumped! Something is causing chaos. We know what it is. We can fix it. We are a system. We are a family. Let’s rally together, get closer, identify this problem, analyze it, troubleshoot it, discuss it, make a list of options, huddle ’round, come together and lick this thing! Little brother has a problem, and we won’t leave him alone with it. We are going to help him. And so we do. We will seek counseling for little brother.

  Because we care, we agree to go to family counseling with little brother because that’s what the counselor recommends. We go. The counselor tries to look at the whole family system. He or she starts to focus on Mom and Dad. We wonder why. We just want little brother fixed. There’s nothing wrong with anyone else in the family! Why, just look at big brother. He’s successful. Just look at middle sister. She’s so nice. Look at how hardworking Mom and Dad are. No. It’s just little brother. Please fix him.

  But it’s not just little brother. We can’t see that, though, and so we terminate the counseling to reduce our anxiety about having to look at ourselves.

  Little brother continues to act out. Eventually he becomes chemically dependent or truant enough or steals enough that he must go to some kind of inpatient treatment. While there, he starts to feel better because someone is hearing him, someone is asking him to be responsible for his own behavior without putting him in a dysfunctional system at the same time.

  Thirty days later, little brother is doing much better. He goes home. Everyone thinks that the problems are over. But they aren’t, because no one else in the system has done any work on their problems. Dad and Mom haven’t looked at their shaky marriage. Big brother hasn’t looked at what a burden it is to have to be a “star” all the time. And middle sister hasn’t looked at the huge toll she is paying for being “nice” all the time. So more than likely, the system will return to its original state. In this case, it means that little brother will continue to provide his service to the family, which is to act out its pain so that no one else in the system has to admit that there’s anything wrong.

  This happens all the time unless the whole family eventually gets help. Little brother will continue to act out in more and more serious ways until he either grows up and leaves home and gets help, or until he gets put in jail, or dies of alcoholism, suicide or in a reckless auto accident. If he’s lucky, when he leaves home, he’ll try to get help on his own.

  If the family still resists getting involved in treatment, his therapist will recommend that he stay away from the family as much as possible and that he develop a “new” family system to replace the old dysfunctional one. This new system may be a therapy group, a 12-Step group, such as A.A., Al-Anon, ACoA or some other structured support system that follows a functional set of rules in which little brother does not have to “feel crazy” to fit in.

  In more and more cases nowadays, what happens is that the entire family does get involved in treatment; and not just for little brother’s sake. Enlightened therapists and an enlightened general public are helping families to see that problems like these are really symptoms of problems in the entire family system, and that when one member of the system is displaying a serious problem in adjustment, it means, in most cases, that all of the other members are experiencing problems, too. It’s just that these other members’ defenses and roles are more socially acceptable and less troublesome on the surface.

  The Healthy Family System

  The obvious question now is: what happens in a healthy family system? Healthy systems experience stress and problems, too. Mental health does not mean the absence of problems. Far from it. Mental health means the ability to handle problems in a healthy way. A healthy family system is like a mobile, too. But the rules and boundaries and roles and interconnections between family members are different.

  In the example given above, Dad and Mom in the healthy family system would probably sit down one day and say to each other, “You know, I’ve been feeling overworked and kind of distant from you these past few weeks, and I don’t like it. In fact, it scares me a little. I don’t like what’s happening to us and our family. I think we need to make some changes.”

  Dad might say, “Yeah, I’ve been in a rut lately. Work, work, work, and then I just sit in front of the tube all night.”

  Mom would say, “I spend too much time worrying about the kids but doing nothing about it.”

  They decide to change some things about their marriage. They spend more time together without the television on. They share some of the housework perhaps. Then they talk to the kids about the changes they’ve been making, and ask the kids how they’re doing.

  Because they have already recognized and admitted their own stresses, and have then done something to change the situation, they are giving a powerful, clear, healthy message to the kids that change is okay, admitting problems is okay and coming up with solutions is okay. Preaching and demanding is not necessary here.

  With this clear permission-giving via their own behavior, Dad and Mom make it very easy for the kids to express their fears and needs and wants.

  Older brother might then say, “Yeah, I’ve been working too hard, too. It’s fun to be successful, but I need more time just to socialize. You know, make more friends. Do things just for the heck of it now and then.”

  Middle sister might say, “My friends all say I’m so nice! But sometimes I think they take advantage of me because I’m too nice. It makes me angry. I think being nice all the time isn’t good for me.”

  And little brother is then free to say something like, “I’m tired of everyone treating me like a toy. I�
�m little, but I’m not a toy. I have rights and feelings, too. And I want to be more responsible for things around here.”

  Does this sound far-fetched? Impossible? Contrived? It is not. For purposes of space and time, we have left out the details of how a healthy family negotiates these changes; but what we have just presented here is exactly the kind of process that happens, over a period of time, in a healthy family. The people ultimately responsible for the workings of the family system (the parents) made some healthy changes, and those changes reverberated down through the system in a healthy way; just like the unhealthy denial of problems reverberated down through the system in the first scenario, ending in what is called the “scapegoating“ of little brother.

  Family Function

  The family has several functions that it serves, just as any other system has functions. Many of these functions meet family member’s needs. For example, there are maintenance functions, in which basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter are met. When the furnace breaks down, someone fixes it. When we outgrow our clothes, someone provides new ones. When we are hungry, someone feeds us.

  The family provides for these needs in various ways. Sometimes one family member will provide the money needed to buy most of these things. Sometimes every family member is involved in providing these basic maintenance needs.

  The family should also provide safety, warmth and nurturance to its members. Family members in a healthy system will care for each other, provide appropriate touch, laugh together, cry together, share joys together and protect each other from harm.

  As psychologist Abraham Maslow has noted, we also have love and belongingness needs, which are quite similar to the ones just mentioned. We need a sense of communion, of belonging to a group or a unit, of being loved and included. A healthy, functioning family will provide these, too.