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The
Dysfunctional Family
by Wendy Freebourne
A dysfunctional family is a closed system. It is set up to protect the members from abandonment. This means holding the family together tightly, in order to maintain the status quo, but it can mean an avoidance of intimacy and commitment that produces a family with no appearance of cohesion. Nevertheless, such a family has rules to be adhered to.
The family will organise around a myth, such as normality, respectability, poverty, dependency or even independence. In order to maintain this myth, there is denial of anything that does not support it. This denial also denies the reality of the individual member. Members of dysfunctional families are not encouraged to be individuals. Change is shunned in any form. They are encouraged not to feel, to think for themselves, to communicate their feelings or to trust anyone outside of the family, because this would encourage safety outside of the family and therefore the possibility of movement away from it. The paradox is that, because reality is denied, there is little trust within the family. Children who grow up in dysfunctional families do not learn to trust others, or their own responses.
Because of the behaviours set up in these families, the rights of members are violated, which is abusive. There are no individual rights. There are no clear boundaries because merging is encouraged. Members are shamed for being different, for exposing or betraying the family myth; breaking the rules. Shame, abuse and the inability to make clear boundaries result in low self-esteem, which increases dependency and clinging. Many of the rules in dysfunctional families are unspoken, and opposite to those that are. Paradoxes and double messages create confusion, which, in turn, fosters inadequacy and therefore dependency.
Members of the family are unable to break away because they feel guilty; there is a strong bond of family loyalty, even when there is fighting within the family. They have no separate identity, with which to function in the world. They remain dependent because, having grown up in a dependent family, they have not learned maturity; they cannot cope in the outside world.
When they do leave, they create their own dysfunctional families, because they are trying to recreate the myth of their original family, without questioning it, which they would have been shamed for.
Dysfunctional families create people who have no sense of their own reality; therefore no sense of self. They cannot take up authority for their own feelings because they have been taught to deny those feelings. They cannot assess their needs realistically because their needs have always come second to the needs of the family, which were to stop anything from changing in order to ward off abandonment.
As adults, children of dysfunctional families find other children of dysfunctional families, who are as needy as themselves. In this way they can deal with their immature dependency needs by contracting to fulfil the dependency needs of others; rescue them in order to be rescued themselves. The system of the dysfunctional family stunts growth and prevents maturity. It promotes responsibility for others but shuns self-responsibility. Children of these families have to live their lives through other people, their partners and their children, because without a sense of who they are, they cannot create a life of their own. They have no sense of separateness. Their best way of dealing with this inadequacy is to create dysfunctional families in which the can feel they belong. Unfortunately, families do grow up and move away.
Hopefully, a time comes when they do have to take responsibility, to question and to find themselves. Otherwise they feel empty and hopeless and look to substances, people or behaviours to fill themselves up, because they have not learned to fulfil themselves from their own resources, many of which lie untapped, or misused and wasted. Often this comes at a time of crisis, when change must happen, however much their dysfunctional family has taught them to defend against it. Then they need help in finding who they are, separating from their families, and learning how to live their lives, as themselves, in mature, healthy and functional ways.
Adapted and reproduced from a paper published in the British Association for Counselling, Personal Relationship and Group Division, News and Views, Spring 1998
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