By: Callie Feldman
Ava would walk home from school alone everyday. She’d open the screen door to her house with her green backpack slung over her right shoulder, to silence inside: no one to greet her, no after school snacks or a mother to ask about her day…only the dark, seemingly abandoned house she grew up in. Every day at this time, Ava would visit her father at his office desk, blind to recognizing that he was annoyed by her presence, his slight digs at her appearance and intelligence going straight over her head. Doesn’t she know how stressed he is? She’d make her way to her mothers room with hopes of being able to tell her about the new friend she made at school. She opens the door to her parents bedroom and her mother wakes from a fog. She shines a weak smile at Ava and reaches for the orange bottle on her night stand. “Hi sweetheart,” her mother says as she swallows another pill as she drifts back into a slumber. Ava kisses her sleeping mothers cheek and makes her way through the darkening house to fix herself some dinner.
What does dysfunction look like?
To most of us, the level of family dysfunction here is not only apparent, but extreme. But to Ava, it’s perfectly normal. And when Ava grows up, it also becomes normal to tolerate extreme dysfunction in her spouse…his excessive drinking, his lack of willingness to help out around the house, his verbal abuse…because it’s what she knows. To the outside observer, the degree of dysfunction can be easily seen. According to Marilee Feldman, Founder and Clinical Director of Life Counseling Institute in suburban Chicago, “As an outsider, it’s easy to ask, ‘How can they tolerate this?’ But when we look at the upbringing of those currently enmeshed in a dysfunctional family system, we can see why extreme dysfunction seems, well, normal to them and why they tolerate it.”
Family dysfunction can look a variety of different ways. Whether it’s an emotionally neglectful father, or a mother with a drug addiction, family dysfunction of all kinds share similar patterns and rules that allow for the dysfunction to continue and make the behavior and dynamics seem normal: despite substantial chaos, the family finds ways to adapt to the abuse or neglect. This often occurs by family members taking on rigid roles that compensate for other family member’s dysfunction.
Family Roles
Family dynamics are like a balancing scale. When one side is being weighed down by dysfunction, such as a father’s excessive drinking, something else must be added to the other side in order to maintain balance. For example, in order to maintain a sense of equilibrium, a child might take on the role of mascot, the scapegoat, the peacemaker, family hero, or parentified child. Ava took on the role of the parentified child, having to take care of her mother and provide dinner for herself at an inappropriately young age. To Ava, this seems perfectly normal. As unhealthy and damaging as this is, taking on this role counterbalances her parent’s dysfunction, providing some semblance of family functioning.
Family Rules
In addition to the rigid roles that family members take on in order to maintain balance, there are often a set of unspoken rules that help to continue the cycle of dysfunction often summarized as “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.” That is, family members are expected not to talk about the issues at hand, are unable to trust family members (or anyone else for that matter), and are not allowed to have upset feelings about the situation. Emotions go unprocessed and undiscussed, thus allowing the cycle and harmful family roles to continue.
Growing up in a dysfunctional family creates a great deal of shame. Children tend to believe that they are to blame for their parent’s shortcomings and failures and believe that if they can fit into their role, follow the family’s rules, and not speak of the issues, then surely the issues do not exist to begin with. Luckily, there are ways of learning to recognize the dysfunction someone grew up in and processing the shame and trauma that comes with it.
Counseling
If you suspect you grew up in a dysfunctional family and that it is impacting your life currently, getting into counseling and beginning to talk about your feelings and process what you’ve been through can break down your sense of isolation. Learning to trust others, especially when you’ve been disappointed repeatedly by those who you are supposed to trust the most, can be incredibly difficult; however, this is a crucial step to regaining a sense of control in life and relationships and to learning to trust that others will step up when you need them. Counseling allows those who have never been able to process their feelings to fully understand the harm that has been inflicted on them and how the silence has impacted them. In order to break the cycle of dysfunction, the trauma endured in the home must be addressed so that healing can occur.
Family dysfunction looks vastly different from family to family. What is not different, however, is how the cycle continues on in these homes through a set of rules and roles. Unlearning the unhealthy dynamics of a family is hard work when negative beliefs have become deeply ingrained and have impacted one’s outlook on relationships, trust, responsibility, and identity. However, getting into counseling and sorting through and understanding the family dysfunction–and recognizing the pain and unfairness passed down through our families–is often the first step to healing.
