The Healthy vs. Dysfunctional Family

I am so loving this little book by Claudia Black. In Double Duty:Food Addiction she laid out the differences between the healthy and dysfunctional families. She made such a profound statement “since many Adult Children often lack an understanding of what is normal or healthy in family”. Boy isn’t that the truth! For most people that grow up in dysfunctional families the extended family is at some level of dysfunction as well. It makes it hard to find anyone to look at and say “oh, this is what healthy looks like”. Even when you see healthy it may feel so uncomfortable because it is foreign that you don’t know how to react to it.

In a Nurturing Family…..

• People feel free to talk about inner feelings
• All feelings are okay
• The person is more important than performance
• All subjects are open to discussion
• Individual differences are accepted
• Each person is responsible for his/her own actions
• Respectful criticism is offered along with appropriate consequences for actions
• There are few “shoulds”
• There are clear, flexible rules
• The atmosphere is relaxed
• There is joy
• Family members face up to and work through stress
• People have energy
• People feel loving
• Growth is celebrated
• People have high self worth
• There is a strong parental coalition

In a Dysfunctional Family…..

• People compulsively protect inner feelings.
• Only “certain” feelings are okay.
• Performance is more important than the person.
• There are many taboo subjects, lots of secrets.
• Everyone must conform to the strongest person’s ideas and values.
• There is a great deal of control and criticism.
• There is punishment, shaming
• There are lots of “shoulds”
• The rules are unclear, inconsistent, and rigid.
• The atmosphere is tense.
• There is much anger and fear.
• Stress is avoided and denied.
• People feel tired, hurt and disappointed.
• Growth is discouraged.
• People have low self-worth
• Coalitions form across generations.

One of the interesting things to me as I read over this list was to gut check how my house was today. This is no longer about my family of origin now it is about how am living today? What do I want for my life? What am I teaching my children? Will I be the one that breaks the cycle?

How to Recognize the Adult Child

For some reason this morning I was reading about Adult Children of Alcoholics. I think often we say to ourselves “if I have this new family and no one drinks and we go to church and we work hard then all that chaos I grew up in won’t affect me anymore. ” There is research that says even if the parents are adult children and there is no drinking in the home the effects can pass through to the next generation. This is a collection of statements often referred to as the “Laundry List for Adult Children”.

• We become isolated and afraid of other people, especially authority figures.
• We are frightened by anger and any personal criticism.
• We judge ourselves harshly and have low self-esteem.
• We don’t act – we react.
• We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment.
• We will do anything to hold on to a relationship. This is the way we avoid feeling the pain of our parents not having been there for us emotionally.
• We become alcoholics, marry them, or do both. Or we find another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic or an overeater, with whom we continue to play out our fear of abandonment.
• We have become addicted to excitement from years of living in the midst of a traumatic and often dangerous family soap opera.
• We live life from the viewpoint of victims or rescuers and are attracted to victims or rescuers in our love, friendship, and career relationships.
• We confuse love with pity and tend to love people whom we can pity and rescue.
• We felt responsible for the problems of our unstable families, and as a result we do not feel entitled to live independent lives now.
• We get guilt feelings if we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
• We became approval seekers and lost our own identities in the process.
• We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility toward others, but we rarely consider our responsibility to ourselves.
• We had to deny our feelings in our traumatic childhoods. This estranged us from all our feelings, and we lost our ability to recognize and express them.

Adult Children grow up to have addictions, marry addictions or have serious control issues. My experience is it is hard to trust a God when you are so busy playing god. And since you fail at being the god of your universe you assume the true God will fail you too.

Tomorrow we will talk more about the Healthy Family vs. the Dysfunctional Family.

Blessings…..

Choices…..

You know we all want something. We want to be happier in our marriage, we want to wear a smaller size, we want to be more financially free. We all have some area in our life that we want to be different. Many of us it seems that it, is an ongoing battle. Whatever that thing is that we want somehow always feels unattainable. But the truth is nothing is really unattainable. We all make decisions each day that are moving us toward freedom or toward bondage. What if you asked yourself new questions or set new boundaries. It is not that I can’t eat this piece of pie it is that this piece of pie will not allow me to be the size that I want. Do I want to give up the desired size more than the piece of pie. It is not that I can’t have the trinket of the day. The question is does this trinket move me closer to my goal of financial freedom? Do I want it more than I want to walk in financial peace? You get the idea. Walking in freedom is a series of decisions. We all want it to be one big cloud of thunder, thunked on the head event. But recovery is a journey not an event. Change is one decision at a time it is not a one and done event.

What if you step back and ask yourself a new set of questions, what if you step back and make a new set of choices. Instead of living a life that is impossible to gut out, invite your life to be lived by choices toward your goal. Happy trudging…..