Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  “I know my daughter’s been binging and purging (bulimia), but since she’s told us about it, she hasn’t done it for two weeks. I really don’t think it will be a problem anymore.”

  What all of these people are doing is denying their feelings. In dysfunctional systems, we learn early and we learn well, that to survive in the system we must pay a “small” price—we learn to deny, ignore or escape our feelings. We learn to shut down that gnawing little voice inside of us that keeps saying, “You hurt, damn it. It’s time to do something.” So we go about our daily business, learning to “hope” that things will get better, while that little voice (our feelings) continues to send us messages.

  When we ignore it long enough, the messages become manifest in our own bodies and in the behavior of our spouses and children. Our feelings become “acted out” in our headaches, stomachaches, ulcers, fatigue, depression and helplessness. They become “acted out” by our children in power struggles, compulsive disorders, shyness, anger and chemical abuse. And persist we must, we tell ourselves. “If I can just hold out a little longer, things will get better.”

  One of our favorite sayings, which we use in our therapy groups, is, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” So while admitting our true feelings to ourselves and others is frightening for what might happen, the long term impact of not admitting them is disastrous.

  We are reminded of the couple who vowed never to get “too angry” with each other because they had both come from angry, combative families.

  After 15 years of apparent bliss and marital harmony, their marriage ended up in our office filled with uncontrollable rage—rage composed of 15 years of normal irritations and resentments that had been denied and hidden by their well-intentioned vow. Their daughter was suicidal and their son was flunking out of school, and they hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was going wrong.

  All during the first session they repeatedly reminded us of their vow and how hard they had worked to keep it all these years. It was painfully apparent, we should add, that the little voices inside of them knew better, and were looking for a way to break the vow without breaking the marriage.

  Inability to identify feelings and inability to express them are two of the key diagnostic features of dysfunctional families or individuals.

  “I’m not angry!” he yells, gritting his teeth.

  “Oh . . . I’m okay . . .” she says with a flat, emotionless, depressed tone of voice.

  One of the most common statements in the early stages of therapy is, “Why do you keep asking me how I feel? I don’t know how I feel. I just don’t know.” Later on, when we have begun to actually identify those feelings, we say, “Yes, I’m very unhappy in this relationship, but if I say anything about it, she’ll be hurt (or go away, or get angry at me, etc).”

  We have a list of perhaps 75 “feelings words” which we sometimes give to our clients to help them figure out what’s really going on inside of themselves. Actually, that list could really be reduced to just a few, as is done in many dependency treatment centers. They are:

  lonely glad

  hurt mad

  sad shame

  afraid guilty

  Look at that list. It’s so simple, isn’t it? “What’s the big deal? I know when I feel those feelings! What are you talking about? I have access to all of those feelings!” If you do, then you’re in great shape. Having access to our feelings is critical in not developing a dysfunctional lifestyle. But be honest with yourself.

  Lonely

  Do you admit to yourself that you’re lonely when your spouse is out of town for two weeks? Or do you exhaust yourself with parties, athletics or drugs to keep from feeling that loneliness or dealing with it in healthy ways? And if you do admit that you feel lonely, what do you do with that feeling? Do you lash out and turn it into anger telling your spouse over and over how hard it was while he or she was away, and how irresponsible it was for them to go? Do you passively make them feel guilty by moping and whining and pouting?

  If you are emotionally honest with yourself, you will simply let those feelings rise to the surface. You won’t react out of hurt or anger or desperation because reaction in the feelings domain usually means we have lost control of ourselves in an unhealthy way. Those feelings will remain there on the surface and you will give yourself time to think about them. Is he or she gone too much? Am I being too dependent on him or her? There is a gap here in my life. How do I want to fill it? What does that gap say about me? What does it say about our relationship? Is it healthy or unhealthy?

  Hurt

  What do we do with our feelings of hurt? Do we put ourselves down?

  “I shouldn’t feel hurt by her. An adult wouldn’t hurt; therefore, I don’t hurt. My feelings of hurt must be bad. Therefore, I am bad (immature, etc.). Therefore, I won’t let myself feel hurt now. I’ll pretend I don’t.”

  Or do we convert the hurt into anger? “Okay, Buster! You want to play hardball? I’ll play hardball. No S.O.B. like you is going to hurt me! Take that! And that! And that!”

  Or maybe our way of handling hurt is to be passively manipulative. With downturned, puppydog eyes, we mope around the house, sleep a lot, say we don’t feel well, and moan incessantly to the other person about how hurtful they have been.

  Either extreme is dysfunctional. Overreaction and underreaction to our feelings are opposite sides of the same coin, and they both produce the same net result—denial of our true feelings and an unsatisfying outcome from our interaction with the other person.

  Sadness

  Have you ever felt uncomfortable at a funeral, or felt uncomfortable with people’s reactions toward you at a funeral? Unless you are at the funeral purely for a business reason, the most probable feeling that you will have is purely for sadness.

  Terry Kellogg calls sadness “the healing feeling.” To feel sad, we must also let ourselves feel powerless. Sadness is the normal, healthy response to loss. The loss may be a parent who has died, a friend who has moved away or a house that has been burned down. Sadness feels empty at first but eventually becomes the fuel for renewed hope and existence. Sadness lets us cry without feeling ashamed. It lets us take the time to say goodbye. And best of all, it does not require that we do much of anything to be appropriate for the situation.

  We feel so uncomfortable at funerals because we don’t let ourselves have our sadness.

  Wouldn’t it feel wonderful if the next time we experienced a great loss, our friend or relative would simply walk up to us, hug us and say, “I feel sad.” Not, “I feel sad for you.” Just, “I feel sad.” That would be all that we would need. It says that you are with me. It says that you are human. It says that we are all helpless in the face of death. It says that we’re all in this together. It is affirming, honest, real and deep. Nothing else really needs to be said.

  Afraid

  What about afraid? Been afraid lately? “Not me! I’m a man! Men don’t feel fear!”

  In our work with couples, a large portion of the anger we hear being expressed is actually denied fear.

  “I’m sick and tired of this women’s liberation stuff,” he yells. “I’m just as liberated as the next guy, but she’s being irresponsible by going back to college while the kids are still in school, and quite frankly, I’ve had it up to here!”(Which in many relationships, translates into: “I’m afraid she’ll get out into the world and meet someone else whom she finds more attractive than me.”)

  Being therapists, we hear a lot of this one, too. “Oh, George, what the hell are you doing still going to that stupid men’s group of yours? I mean, I’m really getting sick and tired of all this therapy crap. You’re gone one night a week for that and one night a week for work. When are you going to act like a man and take care of things at home like you’re supposed to?” (Which translates into: “I’m afraid that you’ll get healthy and see my anger for what it really is . . . fear.”)

  Is it scary when you have a fight with yo
ur spouse and you have to leave for work before it’s resolved? Is it scary when your lover tells you that there’s something wrong with the relationship? How about when you can’t pay the bills this month? Do you scream at your spouse and passively ignore the children? Or do you sit down with your spouse after the children have gone to bed and simply say, “You know, Sue, I’m a little scared about our money situation, and I just need to share that with you right now.” It sounds awfully corny on paper, but it sure beats scaring everyone else in the house with a load of unreal anger.

  Glad

  Do you feel glad? “Of course I do!”

  About what? “Well . . . uh . . .well . . . I’m glad to be alive . . . how’s that?”

  That’s a good start. What else? “Well . . . I don’t know . . . I’m glad that . . .”

  Many of us actually have trouble feeling glad. “I feel glad that I got that promotion, but I’d better not feel too glad because it might not work out.”

  “I feel glad that I got accepted to graduate school, but I’d better not be too glad because they didn’t want me to go to graduate school.”

  “I feel glad that Jimmy’s team won the baseball tournament, but I’d better not feel too glad because Frank never won a tournament when he was a kid and he’s been competing with Jimmy ever since he was born.”

  Sometimes it’s hard to feel glad because we never saw anyone close to us feel glad when we were growing up, leaving us with the feeling that “glad” is awfully “bad.”

  Garrison Keillor (radio personality and author) has got many miles from this midwestern stoicism theme.

  Actually, it’s not so much that glad is bad. Rather, it’s that life is a very serious place to be and if we’re going to get through it, we’d darned well better be serious. When those who raise us don’t have access to a certain feeling, like “gladness,” we learn to fit into the system by not having access to that feeling either. And looking at the big picture, it seems like such a minor oversight. I feel everything else except “glad.” So what? Six out of seven ain’t bad. True, except for one “big picture” oversight.

  When one of our emotions gets clogged, the rest have a tendency to get clogged also, because who we are is what we feel, and when one spontaneous human feeling that we have is not allowed, we begin to question the appropriateness of our other human feelings. After awhile, we’re never quite sure if what is in our emotional core is good or not. And when we start to judge the “goodness” or “badness” of our feelings (not our actions), then we’re in emotional trouble.

  Our feelings are simply our feelings and they will always be there flowing spontaneously from within us. What we think about them and what we do with them are another matter.

  An emotionally honest person can say, “I feel glad that you have come to visit me,” and when you leave, they will say, “I’m sad to see you go.” An emotionally garbled person will say upon your arrival, “Why don’t you visit more often? You never do anything for me! Mrs. Jones’ children visit twice a month. What’s the matter with you? You never did appreciate what we did for you.” Hey! What happened to glad?

  Mad

  Mad. For many of us, this is the only emotion. For others, it’s the only one we don’t allow ourselves. Anger is paradoxically frightening and liberating. It can be a deceptive con, a trick to hide all other emotions. It can get us out of a jam quicker than anything else. It relieves us of responsibility. (“It’s his fault that I ran into him.”) It can make us feel right whether we’re right or wrong. But if your anger is covering up another emotion, do yourself a big favor. Turn it off absolutely and completely for awhile and take the ultimate risk—see if there’s another emotion underneath it that’s just dying to get out.

  To know if this is true, you will have to spend some time alone with yourself without books or television or friends or spouses/lovers or children. You will have to let yourself be alone, if only for a few minutes, in which you are so alone that your deepest connection to life itself is the awareness of your own heartbeat inside of your chest. If there are other emotions there, let yourself feel them. If after that you still feel angry, then go ahead and let yourself feel it. In other words, if anger is your game, try playing by a different set of rules. If it isn’t, you’d better shoot for playing with a full deck.

  In addictions circles there are those of us who can get angry and who feel comfortable with it, and there are those of us who can’t. If you’re “good” at anger, take the plunge and try something new, like hurt or sadness or fear. If you aren’t good at “anger,” why not give it a shot? In other words, there are a lot of us human beings who have learned so well to be “good” that we don’t know how to be ourselves.

  You “typical addicts” out there don’t want us to steal your thunder. We don’t stand up for ourselves and then we lean on you to stand up for us, because you’re so good at “doing anger.” So we wind up conning ourselves and conning you.

  The game becomes, “Do my dirty work for me, and I’ll do your dirty work for you!” But it also becomes, “I’ll be powerless for myself, let you express my anger for me, and then resent you for taking my power away from me.”

  Why not try this? “I think I need to get angry about this myself. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you or need you. I just need to claim my own power. In fact, I’ll have more power to love you when I’m done.” Can you buy that?

  Shame

  Shame. It is felt by many therapists nowadays that shame is at the very base of all addictions. Gershen Kaufman (1980), a psychologist who did some pioneering writing about shame, believes that shame comes from damaging the interpersonal bridge between two people, especially when one of those people is more powerful than the other. Shame comes from not being able to depend on someone. It is a feeling of being exposed as helpless. It can best be expressed as feeling worth less (than I did before that bridge was broken). That is, we feel worthless. “I made a mistake” becomes “I am a mistake.”

  Imagine a child who is criticized by her parent. The criticism breaks the bridge between parent and child. The relationship suddenly comes into question.

  “I have done something awful,” we say to ourselves, “and Mommy doesn’t love me (approve of me, care for me, etc.) anymore. She won’t be there for me now when I need her.”

  We feel ashamed of ourselves. We feel worthless, We feel helpless. We feel scared.

  To help clarify the dynamic of shame induction, imagine yourself surrounded by all of your loved ones. You are in the center and they are encircling you. Each and every one of them is pointing a finger at you, eyes glaring, saying, “Shame, shame, shame on you! You are bad! You are stupid!

  You are ugly! You are clumsy!”

  That is the essence of shame. It is ostracism. It is being cut off from the group. From the human race. From your most precious support. A child can be corrected without being shamed. But when the inner core of the child is left with a haunting voice inside saying, “I am bad,” then we are speaking of shame.

  As adults this core of shame is usually well hidden from us (not necessarily from others). We hide it with anger or sadness or depression or, for many of us, with one or more addictions.

  “She didn’t return my phone call? Who needs her? I’ll go out with the guys and get drunk.”

  “The boss didn’t like my report? I’ll fix him! Don’t get mad, get even!”

  “Mom and Dad don’t like the way I dress? They don’t like the shape of my chin? Who needs them? I’ll just sleep around with all the boys. They’re interested in me.”

  “My husband doesn’t think that I’m spontaneous enough? Who needs to be spontaneous? I can work circles around him and make three times what he makes. Work addiction? You must be kidding. I’m just not a loser!”

  A friend of ours, John Holtzermann, describes shame thus: “I passed by the mirror and was surprised to see that it thought enough of me to reflect my image.”

  Shame also comes from being spoiled because we ne
ver learn to be self-reliant and autonomous. We remain overly dependent on our families for a sense of well-being, which leaves us helpless and paralyzed as we face the outside world. Parents who give their children too much, who do too much for them and who protect their children from life’s pain are not doing their children a favor. Spoiling a child is a form of emotional abuse.

  Guilt Guilt is a tricky one for a lot of us because there is healthy guilt and there is unhealthy guilt, and often it is hard to know the difference.

  Healthy guilt lets us know when we have authentically done something to hurt someone else, and it provides the energy and drive for us to want to correct the hurt.

  Unhealthy, inauthentic guilt tells us that we have done something wrong when we really haven’t, and thus it provides a lot of energy and drive to keep us paralyzed.

  Anytime we step outside of ourselves and make something happen, we are open to feeling guilty. But is it appropriate to feel guilty because we want to go back to school and get a college diploma, just because our husband wants us home every night to give him backrubs? Should we feel guilty for not wanting to be around our parents when they physically and emotionally abuse us? We don’t think so.

  Feelings awareness is a key to recovery from dysfunctional family systems. We invite you to have your feelings because they are truly the Little Child Within who needs to be nurtured, loved, listened to, affirmed, held and protected. Have reverence for your feelings, and you will begin to have reverence for yourself.

  12

  The Secrets

  It is said that every family has its skeletons in the closet. In the public domain politicians are perhaps the most sensitive to this fact. Many a career has been slowed, diverted or stopped because of the public disclosure of some past impropriety that everyone including the politican thought had long since been forgotten. In the domain of family and intimate relationships, it is our closely kept secrets that can kill us.

  Secrets can be about our feelings, our thoughts or our behavior. They have a great deal of shame attached to them, or we wouldn’t be expending so much energy keeping them secret. Finding a safe place to disclose those secrets is the key to overcoming addiction and family dysfunction.