by John Friel
Anita moved back into their house and things cooled off for several months. Bill was actually proud that they had been able to work this out by themselves, and Anita was tremendously relieved that she wouldn’t have to be watching Bill all the time. Their communication was still a little shaky, but it was improving. About three months before he entered treatment, Bill decided that he had the whole thing under control and that his sexual addiction had only been a symptom of the business pressures that he now seemed to have managed well.
It wasn’t long before his addiction had escalated again to destructive proportions. Anita contacted COSA (Co-dependents of Sex-Addicts) and asked for some help. They put her in touch with an intervention specialist who met with her and the other concerned persons who would do the intervention. One week before the intervention was done, they all sat down and practiced how it would be accomplished. When Bill was faced with his wife and friends and the data they presented him, he grudgingly accepted their recommendation for treatment, which was the beginning of his and Anita’s recovery process.
Admitting a problem like sexual addiction carries with it both a sense of relief and a sense of failure and loss, and one of the goals of treatment for addictions is to educate the family about how the addiction process is acquired. Everyone is asking themselves, “How could this happen to us? Who caused this? Who is to blame?”
One of the goals of this educational process is to let people see the dysfunctional dynamics in their present families, and to see how those dynamics developed and were passed on through past generations. The goal is not to blame. At first, it is almost impossible for us not to blame someone for this mess that we’re in. Only later can we detach from our parents and grandparents enough to say, “What went on with them was not healthy. I can choose to live another way even if they don’t so choose.”
As Bill and Anita explored their family backgrounds with their therapists and in their support groups, the following generational picture emerged.
There were no obvious addictions in Bill’s parents’ marriage. Mom and Dad Hopkins were teetotalers, in fact, who had no addictions to any chemical substances at all. And at first, Bill described his childhood and his relationships with his parents as “just normal”. But as his process of self-discovery continued, bits and pieces started to fall into place. Bill’s dad was a hard-working “bring-home-the- bacon” kind of guy who ran his own auto mechanic shop in the small town where they lived. He spent a lot of time teaching Bill how to fix cars, and he seemed to be actively involved in raising Bill. But he was also an extreme perfectionist. Their garage was always spotless. Their house was always quiet. Everything was always under complete control, and there was never a question about Dad wearing the pants in the family. He had quite a temper, too. He never carried a grudge, but he was painfully critical whenever Bill would make a mistake, make a mess in the garage when working on cars, or somehow not live up to his expectations for Bill.
Thus Bill grew up with a highly overdeveloped inner critic that was always telling him that if he didn’t do it perfectly, then it wasn’t worth doing at all.
Bill described his mother as “a saint.” She was shy, retiring and very hardworking. She kept a spotless home and raised five children, of whom Bill was the oldest. She also received strong messages about perfection from her husband, and was emotionally distant from the children. Bill never remembers his parents hugging or kissing in front of the children, and in fact, doesn’t remember anyone in the family being comfortable with appropriate touching.
Despite the perfectionism and domination of the family by his dad, Bill at first did not see the connection between that and his own problems. In going back another generation, the pieces started to fit more, though. His grandfather on his father’s side was never diagnosed alcoholic, but it was a well-kept family secret that he had a pretty serious drinking problem.
Grandpa Hopkins led two lives. Outside of the home, he was generous, charming, humorous and well-liked by the community. Inside the home he was a tyrant who screamed and yelled when his wife asked for grocery money or extra money for school clothes for the children. He drank a lot at home, too, it turned out.
Grandma Hopkins was a quiet, compliant woman who tried to keep the peace by going along with whatever her husband demanded. They, too, showed no outward affection with each other.
On his mother’s side, his grandparents’ roles were just the opposite. His Grandpa Smith was a quiet, shy man, who always felt pretty worthless, who never really “made anything of himself,” and who did what his wife told him to do.
Grandma Smith was domineering and controlling, and angry and bitter about her husband’s perceived failure in life. She had a quick temper and was perfectionistic to an extreme. As the oldest child, Bill’s mother identified strongly with her father and was kept in her place by her angry mother, and thus grew up not knowing how to be warm and nurturing.
As we so often do when dependencies are left untreated, Bill’s mother married a man who had many of the negative traits of her mother believing that his strength and sense of goal-directedness would fill in her own lack of these. And what she first saw as strength, eventually emerged as all-out domination. The fact that he had “made something of himself” far overshadowed the fact that he had some clear problems in being intimate and supportive in a marriage.
And so the pieces began to fall into place for Bill. Patterns began to emerge that made sense. To avoid the confusion that you may have about this family so far, we have outlined Bill’s family tree, in terms of the important personality dynamics, in Figure 7.1, using the diagram that Bill eventually put together for his own understanding.
The other piece of the puzzle that is missing, of course, is how Anita became entwined in this system. As is almost always the case, the spouse of the person who goes in for treatment or counseling rarely sees their own contribution to the problem because they have become so overly focused on their partner’s problems that they can’t see anything else. It is also common that their focus on their partner is an unconscious way to avoid looking at their own untreated dependencies. Remember paradoxical dependency?
At first Anita told herself, “Why, there’s nothing for me to work on. When Bill finally stops acting out, all of our problems will vanish. I’m responsible. I’m the strong one in this marriage. Without me everything would have fallen apart long ago!”
Figure 7.1. Bill’s Family
Fortunately for Anita and Bill, the treatment program Bill entered was aware of family dynamics and co-dependency, and they knew that it takes two to tango. Anita began to discover things about herself and her family that she had never examined before, and she found it to be just as painful and scary as Bill’s discoveries about himself.
She knew all along that her mother had a tendency to rely on alcohol under stress, but she had never let it cross her mind that maybe her mother was alcoholic. Her mother had never passed out, had never gotten “sloppy drunk” in front of her, and had never seemed to have a problem.
And Anita had always seen her father as the ultimate “Dad.” He was hardworking, responsible, cooked dinner when Anita’s mom wasn’t feeling well, played with the children on weekends, went to school plays and concerts, and was always easygoing and pleasant. What Anita didn’t know was that Dad was very tired inside, and mildly depressed much of the time, really not the happy-go-lucky guy that he tried to be on the outside.
And it never bothered her that no one seemed to know anything about her grandparents on either side of her parents’ marriage. All anyone seemed to know was that they were European, and that both of Anita’s parents had come to America in their early teens, accompanied by aunts and uncles, or something.
As the oldest child in her family, Anita identified very strongly with her father and took on the role of the “good girl.” When Mom was tired or “ill,” Anita would help Dad do the cleaning and cooking. She would babysit the other children gladly, even when she was a teenager and could
have been out with her friends, learning how to date and socialize. It didn’t bother her when Mom was cranky and irritable, because like Dad, “she understood.” Mom wasn’t feeling well.
So from a very early age, Anita became a little parent, giving up her own childhood to take care of domestic chores, do well in school and stand beside Dad as one of the “adults” in the family. This became her set-up and her steel trap. With the trap securely set over years and years of growing up in her family, Anita was ready to go out into the world and get into her own dysfunctional relationship.
1For an excellent discussion of sexual addiction, see Patrick Carnes’ Out of the Shadows and Ken Adams’ article entitled “Sexual Addiction and Covert Incest” in Focus On Chemically Dependent Families, May/June, 1987.
Figure 7.2. Bill and Anita
In Figure 7.2, we have reproduced Anita’s family diagram that grew out of months of her own self-exploration, anguish and pain. We have set her family next to Bill’s so that the entire system can be viewed at one time. You may want to study this system for awhile. It is a very common one.
What Bill and Anita discovered in their long journey together makes so much sense to them now, after many years of struggle, that it is hard for them to remember that nothing made sense to them before. The patterns, the early messages, the subtle conditioning, the unintentional pain that they grew to know, all fit into a coherent scheme now. They have moved beyond denial, through anger and blame, and on into peaceful acceptance of what was. They are living now, not in desperation and in the emptiness of not knowing what or why, but in the confidence and serenity of coming to terms with what was, and in the freedom that comes with putting what was to rest. And if this sounds too good to be true, believe us, it isn’t.
What is difficult to convey is the process that people like Anita and Bill go through to reach this point of wholeness. The patterns that they unraveled and put back together were patterns of emotional denial going back many generations. They were patterns of fear of closeness with people, of fear of being vulnerable, of addictive patterns large and small, of individual selves trying to survive, of little children trying to fit into families and a larger world outside that weren’t always functional.
8
When Families
Get Off Course
What are some of the things that can go wrong as we grow up? What are some of the dysfunctional patterns that happen in families and make us vulnerable to addictive patterns of living? Just as a flower needs sunlight, water and soil to grow up healthy and bloom, children need certain things from their families to emerge as adults who have a healthy sense of interdependence. We know of no families that provide all of these things perfectly, but we know of many families in which enough of these things were not provided so that the children growing up in these families entered adulthood with serious dependencies.
In a healthy family, children’s needs for security, warmth, nurturance and guidance are met most of the time. These children enter adulthood with a sense of security and trust that is inside of themselves. In dysfunctional families, these needs are not met enough or at all, and these children enter adulthood with a sense of incompleteness, mistrust and fear inside of themselves, along with a strong need for some kind of security outside of themselves. As adults who grew up in troubled families, we constantly seek to fill up the empty parts inside of us that were never met while we were growing up, and it is the external search for our unmet needs that leads us into addictive lifestyles. In our many talks around the country we have found the following analogy to be most helpful:
Figure 8.1. The Cup
Imagine yourself to be a cup (see Figure 8.1) which at birth is empty. Your goal as you grow up is to get the cup filled. In other words, you have certain needs that must be met. In a healthy family you get your cup filled almost to the top, and so when you go out into the world, you make friends and/or fall in love with others whose cups are full. If you came from a dysfunctional family, your cup didn’t get filled. In extreme cases, it may only be 1/8th full when you become an adult. So when you go out into the world, you make friends and/or fall in love with others whose cups are about 1/8th full. And to maintain the illusion that your cup is full, you rely on outside agents such as addictive relationships, chemicals, work, television, etc.
It is our belief that our symptoms come from not having our cups filled while we were growing up in our families. Instead of learning healthy ways to live and grow, we learned some unhealthy ways to be, because of certain things that were going on in our families. It is these things that set our traps for us.
In looking at the emotional health or lack of health in a family system, we suspect that families are probably normally distributed just like most other traits in nature and in psychology specifically (see Figure 8.2).
The majority of us, approximately 2/3, fall in the average range, with an average amount of health and an average amount of dysfunction. This means that the majority of us have our cups filled up partially, but by no means fully. This also means that the majority of us have some clear-cut dysfunction to work on, and some clear-cut addictive or other symptoms that plague us.
Notice that only a very small percentage of us are in the extremely healthy range. And even for extremely healthy people, problems exist like they do for the rest of us. The difference in these families is that the problems are handled in healthy ways. Conflicts get resolved. Children grow up and leave home, which still pulls at parents’ heartstrings. People still inherit genetic predispositions for chemical dependency, obesity, depression, and the like. But they handle their genetic endowment differently than the rest of us.
At the other extreme are families that are extremely unhealthy, where there is a lot of mental illness, repeated incest and battering, and child death. In the following pages we will describe some of the characteristics of dysfunctional families that we and others have written about in the past (Black, 1981; Fossum & Mason, 1986; Subby & Friel, 1985). We also refer the reader to the works of internationally known psychoanalyst Alice Miller, especially her book entitled For Your Own Good (Miller, 1983), in which she coins the term “Poisonous Pedagogy” to describe the methods of physical and emotional abuse that parents use to “guide” and “mold” their children. She makes a compelling and scholarly argument for the family-of-origin roots of our adult symptoms, including descriptions of the more covert types of abuse that nearly all of us have experienced.
Figure 8.2. Health/Dysfunction Continuum
Emotional Health of a Family
Normal curve demonstrating that roughly two-thirds of the population at large falls within the average range of the health/dysfunction continuum.
On our continuum from extremely healthy to extremely unhealthy families, you will find some or all of these characteristics listed below, depending on how functional or dysfunctional a family is. Some families have few if any of them, and some families have all of them.
1. Physical, emotional or sexual abuse/neglect and vicarious abuse
2. Perfectionism
3. Rigid rules, lifestyle and/or belief systems
4. The “No Talk Rule”/Keeping “The Family Secrets”
5. Inability to identify and/or express feelings
6. Triangulation (a communication pattern using one person as intermediary)
7. Double messages/double binds
8. Inability to play, have fun and be spontaneous
9. High tolerance for inappropriate behavior/pain
10. Enmeshment
As you process them in more depth, remember that the degree of overall dysfunction is what matters, and that this “degree” depends not just on how many of these traits exist in a family, but also how often they occur. We know of no one who doesn’t have little rituals or rigidities in his life. It is when these rigidities begin to interfere with healthy intimacy, with family members’ feelings of wholeness and dignity, that problems begin to crop up.
Frank, our California engin
eer, grew up with “everything” any child could ever want—a father who was a doctor, a mother who was active in the community, a good education, athletic ability, good looks, vacations at the lake and money—yet his own marriage and life were thrust into chaos because he never really learned how to feel and be. He became so overly competent at “doing” that he never had the time or the family guidance to learn how to be in “non-doing relationship” with other people.
In our busy world it’s such a simple thing to overlook, and there are no evil bogeymen to blame. It happens much too often, and the end result is just plain sad. The happy news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. We aren’t bears. We have bigger brains to figure out those traps sooner or later, and it’s never too late to start looking at those traps as the traps that they are.
As you read through our descriptions of these traps, it is absolutely normal and “okay” to: (1) say to yourself, “that never happened in my family, ”(2) feel confused, (3) get really mad at us or your family, (4) wonder, (5) question, (6) doubt, (7) feel sad, (8) cry, (9) want to talk to someone about it, or (10) be bored.
Physical, Emotional or Sexual Abuse
and Neglect/Vicarious Abuse
As recently as 1975, one psychiatric textbook reported that child sexual abuse occurs in only one family in a million (Kohn, 1987). This simply underscores the tremendous denial and fear on the part of educated professionals regarding the nature of the human animal.