Family Ties That Bind. Dr. Ronald W. Richardson
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were beheld in the inside of a Dutch silkmill.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, 1762
1. The Hip Bone’s Connected To The Thigh Bone — How Families Work
A family, as Sue found out the hard way, is not just a collection of individuals who simply “do their own thing.” A family is more than the sum total of the persons in it, just as the hand is more than the sum total of five fingers and a palm. Each finger on the hand develops its own “personality” in relation to the rest of the hand. If one finger is lost, the whole hand is affected and can no longer function as it has; each finger has to adjust to that loss and learn some new functions.
Families are the same way, but a lot more complicated than fingers. Each family member develops a unique personality, but not in a vacuum. Your personality developed in relation and response to the other personalities in your family. And all of their personalities developed and changed in response to yours. Every member of a family, whether it’s mother in the same room or great-uncle Henry who ran away to Australia 30 years ago, affects every other family member in some way. Nothing happens in isolation in a family. If one member of a family gets sick, the other members are affected and adjust to it in some way. Then the sick member adjusts to their changes, which brings about further change. It can go on and on, like a hanging mobile being blown and shifted by the wind. Every time one part of a mobile adds or loses weight, or moves toward or away from the center of gravity, all the parts hang off balance until the changed part returns to its original place or the other parts adjust themselves.
Every time a family member gets in trouble with the law, does well academically, gets a promotion, has a baby, or is hospitalized, the rest of the family compensates. This compensation happens whether the original change is good or bad. The change itself creates the imbalance that causes other family members to scurry around trying to restore the equilibrium.
The ways individuals balance themselves or create imbalance in their family determines the general health and happiness of all the family members.
Example
As an adult, Consuela was quite close to her mother. They talked on the phone or saw each other daily. After her mother died, Consuela tried to rebalance her life by getting more involved with her 13-year-old daughter, Maria. This increased closeness with Maria affected the family in a number of ways. Consuela became even more remote from her husband, who was jealous of her relationship with Maria; Maria became more distant from her 11-year-old sister; that sister became jealous of mother and Maria’s relationship. At just the point in her life when Maria would normally be shifting her allegiance from the family to her friends, she could not abandon mom. She resented her mother’s dependence but felt guilty about her resentment so never expressed it — even to herself. As a result, she got upset over little things and had stomach aches that her doctor could not diagnose. He sent the family to a therapist, where the imbalances began to be discussed openly.
QUESTIONS
1. What major changes have happened in your family of origin in the last 20 years? What births, deaths, marriages, departures, or other changes in status occurred?
2. How did family members react to these changes?
3. How have you or your brothers and sisters been involved in these changes?
The balancing and counterbalancing that goes on in our families of origin affects us for our entire lives, even if we never have any contact with family members after adolescence. Next to our biological drives, it is the single most powerful influence on us. No one escapes its impact.
In Consuela’s case, the death of her mother affected the whole family in ways they would not have anticipated.
Try this exercise to see how your family mobile balances itself.
YOUR FAMILY MOBILE
Either change or stop doing one thing that you normally do with or for someone you are emotionally close to. For example, if you normally kiss your wife goodbye in the morning, or call your husband at work, or ask your son each day what he did in school, don’t do it for two weeks.
• What are your feelings as you think about changing this one thing? How do you feel when you actually change your behavior?
• How does the other person react? If there is no overt reaction, are there any other changes in the person? What are your reactions to the reactions?
When two people get married, we tend to think of their relationship as a separate entity. Their happiness and problems in living together seem to be purely a product of their own personalities and entirely up to them. For example, we see only Joe and Sara in this relationship, as in the diagram:
However, the reality is much different. Any marriage is merely a link-up of two mobiles. It may not look very romantic, but Joe’s and Sara’s relationship actually looks like this:
Joe and Sara became who they are as a result of their experiences in their families. They are very much affected by what went on there and by how their families dealt with the imbalances in their lives. Joe and Sara tend to see and evaluate each other primarily in terms of their own family mobiles. Their self-expectations and expectations about each other’s behavior come out of their family experiences. Their marriage is more than the two of them coming together. It is two family mobiles bumping into each other.
One example of how this works shows up in their fights about money. “He is a spendthrift,” Sara says. “Money burns a hole in his pocket.” She wants to put more money into a savings account. “She is too tight with money and unable to enjoy it,” Joe says. “What’s the point of having it if you can’t enjoy it?”
The attitudes they have toward money, and saving and spending it, were shaped in their own families of origin. They may be the same as or the opposite of their parents, but their attitudes developed in response to their parents’ ideas about money. Sara’s parents, who barely made it through the Great Depression emphasized the necessity of saving and Sara decided they were right about it. Joe’s parents told him similar things, but placed more restrictions on his spending. They called him irresponsible no matter how little he spent. Now, when Sara raises the issue of Joe’s spending, it revives the battles he had with Mom and Dad. He responds to Sara just as he did to his parents. Joe sees Sara’s statements about money through the filter of his own family experiences. She does the same thing.
QUESTIONS
1. What are some of the conflicts you have in your present intimate relationships that trouble you?
2. Are you able to trace any of your reactions to experiences or conflicts in your family of origin? For example, what is one upsetting feeling you have when with a friend or spouse? Who in your family of origin could evoke a similar feeling in you? What parallels are there between the two situations and the way you deal with them emotionally?
2. Eat Your Spinach — Rules In The Family
Every family, and every relationship, has rules. Rules are a set of expectations about how people should conduct themselves in various kinds of settings and circumstances. Rules say what is allowable and not allowable. They also say what the consequences are when the rules are obeyed or disobeyed.
There are two kinds of rules — spoken and unspoken. Families develop many different rules of each kind. The spoken rules are the easy ones. They include such things as: “Don’t interrupt.” “Say please.” “Don’t play loud music.” Everyone in the family knows what these rules are, and they can be openly talked about, perhaps even debated and changed.
The unspoken