August 2024: Toxic Families Part 3

This is part three of a three part series on the powerful impact negative messages from our families of origin can have on our lives. Obviously, not everyone carries around negative messages from their families, but this series is aimed at those of us who do.

A helpful way to think about this issue is to think of families as the cast of a play. Everyone has a role in the production and everyone learns their lines and learns how to play their part. I’ve acted in community theatre and I know you always feel pressure to make sure you’re playing your role properly. In order to not mess the play up for the other actors in families, we play our assigned roles passionately. All of us playing our role keeps the family going just as surely as playing a role we auditioned for keeps the play going.

Living with our family, we can find ourselves slipping into old ascribed roles even if our parents are not saying or doing anything. For example, a child whose role has always been to be fearful might feel and act fearful around their family as an adult, regardless of how their family is acting in “real life”. A child who has always been seen as less than capable will not believe in their own capabilities.

If you’re the “identified patient” in your family, please know that narrative was NEVER about you, and it was never true. We can all stand in our power and capabilities and be around people who are excited by the possibilities of what we can do, how we can feel, and how we can be a positive force in the community and in the world.

Remind yourself:

“I am strong”

“I am capable”

“I can create the life I want to have”

You might need to get out of the theatre to do this, but you can quit the family’s play, and be the absolute star (and playwright) of your own story.

July 2024: Toxic Families Part 2

This is part two of a three part series on the powerful impact negative messages from our families of origin can have on our lives. Obviously, not everyone carries around negative messages from their families, but this series is aimed at those of us who do.

The spider web created by toxic narratives from our family of origin is difficult to escape under the best of circumstances. It becomes almost impossible when we are still living in that toxic narrative.
For a variety of reasons, we can find ourselves as adults living with our parents. Typically, this can be uncomfortable and can remind us of how we felt about ourselves and about the world when we were children. But if we have to live full time with our parents, or on their property, it becomes something deeper and really problematic.

One of the principles of family systems theory is that sometimes a family member is identified as the problem, or unstable, or not capable. In family systems theory this is called the identified patient and the idea is that the family needs this person to be the problem in order to maintain the family equilibrium. Sometimes this can start with a child who is significantly premature or has some newborn complications, and the family understandably identifies them as fragile and is overprotective. More often, a child is identified because they are different, or they are acting out, or in some ways they don’t meet the parents’ expectations. Often the “identified patient” serves as a scapegoat, or a distraction that keeps the family from addressing real issues.

If your family of origin has a narrative that you are not capable or not stable, it is unlikely they will change that narrative. They need to hold onto it to maintain their view of you and to keep the family in balance.

If you live with your family of origin, this narrative is incredibly toxic and incredibly present. When you are strong and capable in the world the family will feel threatened and will try, consciously or otherwise, to undermine you.

I work with some awesome humans who have struggled heroically to overcome a toxic family narrative, but if they are still around their family it can be one step forward and two steps back. It is like living in a mouldy house and believing there is something wrong with your lungs. Actually, there isn’t anything wrong with your lungs; you just need to get out of that house.

In part three I’ll talk about the path to overcoming these self-beliefs once we are “out of the house”.

June 2024: Toxic Families Part 1

This is part one of a three part series on the powerful impact negative messages from our families of origin can have on our lives. Obviously, not everyone carries around negative messages from their families, but this series is aimed at those of us who do.

PART ONE
Every family has a narrative; a story through which the family understands itself.  Members are assigned roles in this narrative, and if we are assigned a role that is disempowering it is hard to shake.
Toxic narratives from our family of origin can be like spider webs for adults. We are so entangled in them psychologically they can be almost impossible to escape.

The psychological entanglement is because we believe the lessons our parents taught us.  If they taught us the alphabet, we didn’t fact check; we just accepted that’s the way it is. Similarly, if they taught us our feelings are not important, or that we are not valuable/capable human beings, we accepted that too.

As adults, even when we intellectually know some of these messages were wrong, we still can find ourselves believing them at our core.  It makes sense since they were passed onto us as we were developing that core and learning of who we are.  Also, even the most mature and intelligent adult may have a knee-jerk reaction to defend their parents.  When we’re little we can’t entertain the idea that our parents are wrong, because our survival depends on them.  Even when our survival no longer depends on them, we carry this “defence” into adult hood.  Almost always, when someone is telling me about their childhood and references parents being abusive, neglectful, or emotionally unavailable they will go into justification (“but he was brought up that way”, “but she had a terrible childhood herself”).

People defend their parents even when no one is attacking, and often part of that psychological defence requires perpetuating a negative construct our ourselves.

For example, if we grew up believing we are not ever going to “succeed” in life, we may find ourselves floundering.  And if we start to succeed, we may find ourselves subconsciously sabotaging our own efforts.  I may have a great relationship and “find myself” cheating; have a great job and “find myself” oversleeping and missing work or be making progress on my fitness and “find myself” eating a whole chocolate cake.

The power of these negative childhood messages cannot be overstated and in Part Two I’ll look at when this dynamic is most prevalent, and most destructive.

May 2024: No One Else Like You

This month’s reflection is a poem that has always had special meaning to me.

No One Else – By Elaine Larson

Someone else can tell you how to multiply by three
And someone else can tell you how to spell Schenectady
And someone else can tell you how to ride a two-wheeled bike
But no one else, no, no one else can tell you what to like

An engineer can tell you how to run a railroad train
A map can tell you where to find the capital of Spain
A book can tell you all the names of every star above
But no one else, no, no one else can tell you who to love

Your Aunt Louise can tell you how to plant a pumpkin seed
Your cousin Frank can tell you how to catch a centipede
Your Mom and Dad can tell you how to brush between each meal
But no one else, no, no one else can tell you how to feel

For how you feel is how you feel
And all the whole world through
No one else, no, no one else
Knows that as well as you!

April 2024: Celebrating Our Individuality

Most people who know me and my practice (or have read my book: The Human Spectrum) are aware of my belief that diagnoses are destructive, both to individuals and to our society. Sometimes clients are very adamant that they want a diagnosis, which probably reflects why it’s a systemic problem. I express my concern that diagnoses move our focus away from the individual, just like any stereotype, and point to my Kierkegaard quote hanging on my office wall:  “When you label me, you negate me”.

I’ve had people respond to this by saying they want a diagnosis to learn more about themselves. This leads to a super interesting philosophical discussion.
I would suggest that we cannot learn more about one thing by enlarging it into a bigger category. We CAN get some general information, but the enquiry takes us away from the individual thing/person.

Consider coming across a tree in the forest that we have never seen before. We would look at all the features of this tree to try to understand it. But what if we Googled “trees”? We would learn a bunch of information about the category that may or may not apply to this specific tree. And if this tree was the only one of its type, we might miss its idiosyncrasies because they weren’t delineated in the broader category.
We are each the only one of our “type”, by virtue of being human.

This often comes up with culture. If I know I am seeing someone who is from Sudan, I can spend hours researching Sudanese culture. It will give me LOTS of information, but I will have ZERO idea if it applies to this individual until I meet and get to know them. And if I go into that meeting with pre-conceptions because of the category, I am doing a disservice to the individual. I am stereotyping them. I am negating them.

We are all magnificent in our individual differences and the only way to know/understand ourselves and each other is to learn and celebrate those individual differences that make us who we are.

March 2024: A Poem

This month’s reflection is a poem that has always had a special meaning to me.

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936)