Chapter Samples

Family problems that don't get better have roots hidden in family history or someone's genes or both. Finding where trouble starts helps you figure out what to do.

Early in my hospital training I met a world-weary grandmother with a lifelong history of depression who asked to be hospitalized to prevent another suicide attempt. She recalled feeling the same way a generation ago, when her daughter was the age of her granddaughter now. In a group meeting the doctor asked if anything had happened to her at that age, and she suddenly started to sob. When she could speak again, she told the group that her stepfather molested her at that same age. She had not remembered it until the question was asked. For the next several days she cried and raged. Then she left the hospital with a joy and peace she'd never known before.

Suggestions for Change. Before the next insult or argument or screaming match in your family write down your answers to these questions:

• What are the conflicts in my family?
• Who is the primary carrier of each conflict?
• Where does each conflict come from?
• Does it have roots in some real or perceived injury? Or does it seem to arise out of someone's personality?

Questions that go to the roots of conflict open new doors. Good questions highlight possible solutions. This chapter will guide you in creating good questions and in searching for answers.

Four Major Categories of Family Trouble
Like major roots of a tree, family troubles come from four principal sources: (1) current events, (2) individual temperament, (3) mental illness, and (4) family legacies or "ghosts."

• Current events: Stresses is our day to day lives provide a steady source of sparks to ignite conflicts kindled from other sources. Fabric-rending family trouble can break loose from any stressful situation. The best of parents will lose it sometimes, be it to a squalling baby, an oppositional child, or a sullen teenager. This is where inadequate or absent shock-absorbers can contribute to family disaster.

• Temperament: Individual temperament is partly inborn to all of us. Ask any mother of two or more children and she will tell you children, even twins, are constitutionally different. In addition babies are exquisitely sensitive to emotional experiences perhaps as early as mid-pregnancy, and earlier yet to toxic chemical insults. Children born with, or who early on develop, temperaments that clash with their family or are inherently difficult to soothe create severe ongoing tensions for the whole family that can make effective parenting seem impossible.

• Mental disorders: Whenever someone’s resilience, competence, or good humor are absent for significant periods of time, a mental disorder may well be present. If these have been lifelong problems, they can seem normal, when in fact they may signify a treatable mental disorder. Someone who always seems morose or irritable may have a very treatable problem. Given a steady diet of loving and respectful interactions, does someone in the family persist with irritable, angry, sullen, leaden, impulsive, repetitive or avoidant behavior? If they do, they may be depressed, anxiety ridden, addicted to alcohol, or in some other way afflicted with a mental disorder that renders them unable to reciprocate the love and respect they are consistently offered.

• Family legacies: Our individual early childhood experiences with our own parents and parental figures create templates in our subconscious for how to deal with our own children and other family-like relationships. Until we make these deep-seated patterns conscious, we will act on them without awareness or understanding of what we are doing. We will believe these unconscious mis-directives are true, because they always seemed true growing up, even if their role now is to create conflict rather than solve it.

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