DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES
I’ve been looking through some self-help books lately to see what’s being said on overcoming the past. I’ve found a definition of a dysfunctional family: a family that does not always nurture, support, encourage, protect, teach, create boundaries and structure, work together as a team or any combination of the above. But on the whole, I find myself a little disappointed by the advice out there on what to do about having grown up in a dysfunctional family. Here’s the message that comes across from most of the books I’ve found: Growing up in a dysfunctional family leaves you with poor coping skills, inadequate decision-making and generally a lot of problems in adulthood. It doesn’t matter how you cope, what choices you make or what you’ve done in your adult life, childhood experiences etch deeper habits and behaviours. I think that’s bullsh*t - pardon the language.

How many people don’t have dysfunctional families? I mean really, if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, every family has their own problems and no one gets it right all of the time. There’s a spectrum for sure, but by this logic, 90-95% of adults should be incapable of being well-adjusted adults. Clearly, many of us manage just fine nevertheless, so I don’t buy it. I think that’s a cop out. It’s tempting to believe it. It shifts the blame entirely to others - our egos like that because it’s nice and simple and doesn’t require us to take any responsibility ourselves. I’m not trying to diminish anyone’s feelings or say they aren’t justified. What I’m saying is that if you place all the blame on the adults of your childhood, then you forfeit your power to change.

Two siblings can have the same background, many of the same experiences and yet one becomes a successful member of society and the other flounders. I’d hazard a guess to say that everyone knows of a pair of siblings like this. Whether you’re one of them, they are in your family or you have some other connection to them – it’s a common experience. Should we pity the one who struggles? Look at their past and say it was an uphill battle from the start – they aren’t responsible for any of their current struggles? I don’t think so. Pity doesn’t help. It doesn’t help someone get from where they are to where they want to be at any rate.

It can end with you. No matter the dysfunction, yes you can overcome it and be a fully functioning individual. The disservice that I see in many of the books on the subject is that these words come off as lip service. By the time they get to explaining how to overcome issues, they’ve spent far too much time massaging your ego and allowing thoughts of blame on others to develop strong roots. The parts about it not being about blame come off as the author’s afterthought – something they realized at the last minute should be included. Yes, okay, you are not entirely to blame. Fine. Now does that help you move on and create the future of your dreams? I don’t think so. It’s tough love time.

I’d like everyone at this point to remove the words “fault”, “blame” and “judgement” from our vocabularies. These are not useful words for sorting through problems or communicating. Your ego likes them, I don’t. I can’t take words away without adding new ones, so here are the words I propose using instead: “intention”, “impact”, “contribution” and “trigger”.

Intention means that you consider what the people who hurt you were trying to do. Were they trying to be a better parent than their parents? Were they trying to bring you down to show off because of their own lack of self-esteem or self-worth? Were they too busy dealing with their own struggles to realize how they were affecting you? What was the impact of their actions? How did you perhaps misinterpret their intentions? How did they perhaps misinterpret yours? What were your intentions? What previous interactions were effecting your reactions? What may be in their past that would effect how they interact with you? How did you feel? What was their contribution to making you feel that way? What was your own contribution? What trigger words or situations set off the people who hurt you? Why? What are the trigger words or situations that set you off? Why? These are much more useful questions to be asking than who to fault for your current situation. Seek to understand.

Being in a dysfunctional family doesn’t mean there was ever even a single person who wasn’t always trying their hardest to make it work. In all likelihood, all individuals were trying the best they knew how. This is all the more reason why fault and blame is not warranted.

Another big issue I have with the overriding message from the self-help books is that they don’t emphasis enough the choices of the individual. We all have choices on how we react to situations. Some of the differences in how we react may be God-given intuition or personality differences. Luck may also play a part in terms of who we meet along our path, but I believe a lot of how we react to situations is squarely on our shoulders. We can learn from the people we encounter, or not. We can choose to look around for good role models and learn how to emulate their behaviour, or not. We can decide in what ways we’d prefer to interact with people and take steps towards that goal, or not.

The difference between one sibling or person and the next may be no more than a difference in perceptions. Two people can experience the same situation and interpret it completely differently! One may be picking up new ways to cope by observation while the other is throwing up their hands in despair and praying for a saviour. One may not even be concerned by the situation while the other is fretting that the latest disagreement will spell disaster. What can we learn from this? If your current set of perceptions are not getting you where you want to be, why not try to change those perceptions?

Whenever I catch myself thinking that my life would be so much better if I had not felt neglected as a child, I stop myself. Is it true? Who could ever say? I am who I am. And I am who I am because of the experiences I’ve had. If I had different experiences, I would be a different person. I’d have a whole different set of issues and traumas to deal with instead! Would it really be better?

Whether it would be or not misses the point anyway. That’s not reality. You can’t go back and change the past, what is done is done. So here’s an alternative: when you catch yourself wishing things were different, ask yourself why? What would you rather be like? Who do you want to be? For example, for me, I strive to be confident, approachable, assertive, calm and positive. I struggle sometimes still – particularly with being assertive – but I now know it’s an achievable target. I’ve taken small steps at a time to become the person I want to be. I don’t need a time machine to go back and changes things to become the person I want to be. I can take steps now to become that person in my present and my future. It’s in my control and no one else’s.

Everyone makes mistakes – people do the best they can with the information they had at the time. A different chain of events might not have been so utopic. Instead of wishing for that different chain of events, try learning from your experiences instead – that’s what is most successful. Successful people actually tend to make more mistakes than average because they’re always trying something new, and when it doesn’t work out, they try again in a slightly different way. All the great minds who have produced genius work were not geniuses. They produced masterpieces because they kept trying. I guarantee you, think of anyone that you think of as being a genius and if you research it, you will find that they got that way by doing a lot of work that was far from genius and learning from it. Remember along the way to be your own best friend. Best friends wouldn’t keep reminding you of past failures. If the topic comes up, they remind you of all the good things that came out of the experience and what you learned from it.

The one thing I do wholeheartedly agree with the self-books on is the end goal: To be “truly adult, autonomous, able to govern ourselves and our responses to those around us.” Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas on how to get there, or at least the hope that it’s possible and the motivation to try.