Why “Family Hunger”?
By Todd Neel
First, a poem …
WITH PASSION
by Daniel Ladinsky
With
passion pray. With
passion work. With passion make love.
With passion eat and drink and dance and play.
Why look like a dead fish
in this ocean
of
God?
by Daniel Ladinsky
With
passion pray. With
passion work. With passion make love.
With passion eat and drink and dance and play.
Why look like a dead fish
in this ocean
of
God?
I do have a passion for families. Some may say I’m on a search for dead fish.
This chapter alludes to why and how I named this book for public consumption, Family Hunger – Breathe Life Into Your Own Family History, and the series of books for family consumption called Family Hunger – A Neel Family History, and other books under other related family names.
Out of respect for those living family members of mine, both those I actively love and those I fear, I will not put the names of living family members in print (for public consumption) unless I have your permission. You should not be reading about yourself, unless I specifically have your agreement, or unless you have come back from the dead. (I may be writing about a person without naming them, like my adopted brother, who is infamous for some people, where I use an alias name.)
My intention is not to print “dirt” or gossip or to get attention for myself at the expense of someone else. My intention is to honor those who have come before us, to whet your appetite so you develop your own hunger for your own roots. I have a passion for my family history, and I hope you find your passion for your own family history. Maybe we can also leave some morsels for those who come after us who have this same hunger, who may wonder who we were that came before them.
Appreciation
I appreciate my ancestors on whose shoulders I stand. I love my family members who hold me up when I need it. I hope and pray that I am there for you if you need me.
As some of my living family members know, there have been times, sometimes long periods of time, when I have missed you and our gatherings and our traditions. I honor and respect whatever space we needed at the time, and I’m glad that’s behind us. A cousin of mine said “life is too short …” to get caught up in any bitterness that keeps us apart. Let us celebrate what time we have together!
Hunger?
Sometimes people ask me why I like the title Family Hunger. Some people ask me if we lived in poverty as a child. No, my family did not live in financial poverty, and we always had enough to eat, and I remember being warm and having shelter, and mostly able to wear the clothes I wanted. My basic needs were met by my parents’ commitment to myself and my siblings. I grew up in a middle class family in America. My father was an officer in the U.S. Navy and retired as a Captain when I was 10 years old, and his active-duty and retirement income always met our basic needs. Sometimes our mother worked for income, but I’m not sure this was a financial need for the family as she also volunteered for many activities outside the home. Maybe, though, we lived in emotional poverty that left me hungry, but what is that?
As a child growing up, I identify my family-of-origin as a “dysfunctional family”. (See paragraph “Dysfunctional vs. Functional” later in this chapter.) This may relate to the “emotional poverty” that I mentioned above. I believe my parents did the best they could with what they had. I believe my parents had many stressors that I am grateful I did not have. I believe my parents were invested in looking good to the community we lived in, which sometimes meant that we kept secrets, sometimes we put up a front, sometimes we lied by omission. Sometimes this may be referred to as “boundaries” or privacy, and some may argue that some circumstances and stories are only the family’s business and nobody else’s business.
But when information is kept in so tightly that it becomes toxic and a burden to those that have that information, it is unhealthy. I have needed to tell my story, at the right times and hopefully in the right places to the right audience, to try to clear emotional and psychological toxins out of my system. I want to not puke on others by doing so.
In my training and practice as a social worker, I learned and have taught others about Claudia Black’s dysfunctional family rules of “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel”, and the recovering rules of “Do Talk, Do Trust, Do Feel”. When I began and as I continue my own recovery process, sometimes I bump into other people who don’t agree with me.
Family Systems
As a social worker I was trained to think about families and family systems. When I was in graduate school for social work working towards my MSW degree (Masters in Social Work) at Eastern Washington University (1984 – 1986), I was in my internship placement where I had an Agency Field Instructor named John Brennan (RIP, John). He told me if I wanted to do family therapy, then I needed to “think, eat, and breathe families …”. Well, I did want to do family therapy, so I took John’s words to heart. I do “think, eat, and breathe families”!
When I meet with an individual, I often think about who they have “with” them, the connections and relationships they have that got them here. I might ask them what kind of family-of-origin they grew up in. I might try to guess and ask how many siblings they had and what birth order they were in. I wonder about questions like: Did their parents remain married or did they get divorced? Who were their role models which affect what they think is “normal”? I consider what their grandparents were like, and what the multi-generational patterns and unresolved issues might be affecting them. I think in pictures and start to draw a genogram (family tree) in my head or on paper. I ask if they were from a blended family. I wonder if there was an adoption into or out of their family, what the circumstances were, and sometimes I start to think about my own adopted brother. I think about what was healthy about the family they came from, look for characteristics of strengths and resiliency, and I am impressed by their survival skills. I wonder what they think about family, as sometimes they consider the friend who is putting up with them on their couch as their “brother” or “auntie” when there is no biological or legal relationship (what we might call fictive kin). I see family dysfunction and community dysfunction maybe like Sherlock Holmes sees clues to a crime at the same time I look for strengths and survival skills. I wonder about alienation, connection and dis-connection, about secure and insecure attachment strategies. I wonder what secrets they have. I wonder if I am part of the problem or part of the solution. I remember the guiding principle of “Do no harm” from the medical and other helping professions. I try to be compassionate about what kinds of stresses and traumas they have endured, as we all have. I see the potential about their future new family they might create, and see the preciousness of future generations, those not born yet.
Sometimes I think about the dinosaurs who are now extinct, indigenous people that used to walk this earth and the traces they left behind that we find, and I wonder what traces I will leave behind, including clues to my tribal or social behaviors.
And yes, sometimes I do this wondering all in my head at the coffee shop or standing in the check-out line at the grocery store where it’s none of my business!
Professional Perspective
(SNORE FACTOR WARNING: this paragraph may put you to sleep, or may really excite you, depending on your point of view). Other aspects of families that I was trained to consider are the following: stages of development (both the individual’s and the family’s development); attachment and bonding issues; traumas; subsystems and their function and their flexibility (i.e. the parental executive subsystem, the extended family, the children/sibling subsystem, etc); boundaries (enmeshed, clear, or disengaged, and I often ask the question “Where do I end, and where do you begin?” for myself or out loud as instruction for the person I am working with); power and influence (control issues); alignments (affiliation, over-involvement or emotional incest, conflicts, coalitions, detouring, etc.); triangles (pursuing, distancing, etc., i.e. ganging up on another); communication styles (computer style, distracter style, placator style, blamer, leveler, etc.); addiction and mental health issues; family rules/myths/ ideals/secrets; joining/planning/challenging/reframing/etc.; enactment; focusing; intensity; etc., etc.
These concepts are complicated, and they have provided me much insight and relief from the confusion not only from my own family-of-origin, but the confusion in families I work with as a professional. I learned these concepts from graduate courses in my MSW program, and also at subsequent workshops I have taken. I do a lot of reading and some of my favorite books are Families and Family Therapy by Salvador Minuchin, Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir, It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black, Parenting From The Inside Out by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell, The Changing Family Life Cycle edited by Betty Carter and Monica McGoldrick, and The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz.
I make reference to these professional aspects of my view of families for you, the reader, to be aware of the bias I have towards family systems, recognizing them, and honoring them. (And to make recommendations for your own reading.) My trainings and experiences as a social worker have an effect on my lens on genealogy and family history.
The seeds of this professional perspective were planted before my graduate school when I was working on my Bachelors’ degree in Psychology that I received from the University of Montana in 1980 (see my chapter titled “Who Am I? And How Did I Get Here? Psychology and Genealogy” that I wrote in 1979 when I was twenty-three years old).
AND, seeds of my personal point-of-view about families were planted at our dinner table as a child, before that in my mother’s womb, which was affected by her mother’s womb, etc., etc., etc.
Don’t Talk
Claudia Black wrote about dysfunctional family rules of “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” as survival skills, which I saw occurring in my family-of-origin. I believe a great portion of the “Don’t …” rules in my family were issues related to my older, adopted brother as coping strategies. And we continue using the “Don’t talk/trust/feel” rules when we get close to stresses of pain, embarrassment, or shame about sensitive issues. The answer to these rules is to try to live by the alternative “Do talk, do trust, and do feel” rules, which is sometimes like swimming upstream when the rest of the family doesn’t agree, overtly or covertly. I think sometimes my own family members perceive my big mouth as violating their privacy, which is a very good point, well taken. (Well, sometimes not so well taken).
Claudia Black also wrote about roles that family members take on in dysfunctional families. She writes, “Many times, there are clearly defined roles within the family. It is typical for adults in the family to divide, or share the roles of being the breadwinner and the administrator – the one who makes the decisions within the home. Children raised in homes where open communication is practiced and consistency of life styles is the norm usually have the ability to adopt a variety of roles, dependent on the situation. These children learn how to be responsible, how to organize, to develop realistic goals, to play, laugh, and enjoy themselves. They learn a sense of flexibility and spontaneity. They are usually taught how to be sensitive to the feelings of others, and are willing to be helpful to others. These children learn a sense of autonomy and also how to belong to a group” (from It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black). If you grew up in a family like this, great! Survival roles can be a problem when we feel “scripted” to fulfill someone else’s agenda for us, and we never really learn who we are without our masks, such as the “Family Hero”, “Scapegoat”, “Family Pet”, or “Lost Child”. I recognize some aspects of each of these survival roles in members of my family.
Adopted Brother
I believe I grew up in a family that was dysfunctional because of my family’s reactions to my older adoptive brother. Plus, there was probably dysfunction before this brother arrived. The questions occur: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Did this brother cause us to be dysfunctional? Did my parents coping with my brother’s challenging behaviors leave some of our needs unmet? Or did we cause him to be our Scapegoat to distract from our dysfunctional multi-generation patterns? (The truth is probably a combination of all of these explanations). This brother was adopted at a very young age (between 3 and 6 months old), but we don’t know what genetic issues he inherited, what issues in the womb he may have experienced, what traumas he may have experienced at that very young age before he was placed with my parents, what attachment and bonding issues he may have experienced with his biological parents, etc. And, as the oldest child in my family, my parents were “cutting their teeth” and learning about parenting with their first child, my oldest brother.
My family’s developmental issues are such that my adopted brother was the first and oldest child of my parents after they were initially not able to conceive a pregnancy. (Were there issues about sexuality between my parents? Some of these things we just don’t want to think about, but they are a reality in our heritage.) Their new parenting skills were developing to cope with his challenging behaviors. He told me he felt different than the rest of our sibling group, and he felt like he was treated differently. It was obvious that he looked different, because of genetics. He told me he felt our parents were abusive to him, and he thought that our parents were alcoholics/addicts, while I don’t see it that way. I do see that his hyperactive behavior invited corporal punishment that was “normal” for my parents’ generation, which my brother perceived as abuse of him. There are many confusing and confounding factors, some of which will never be clear, many of which led me to my chosen profession as a social worker.
Dysfunctional vs. Functional
I want to comment on my labeling of my family as “dysfunctional”. Functional and dysfunctional families both have problems. Functional families resolve the problems and meet their family members’ needs. Dysfunctional families have problems that don’t get resolved in a healthy way, and family members’ needs are not met as well. In dysfunctional families, survival can be questionable. In functional families, members have a better chance of survival, and they often thrive when their needs are met so that they have the opportunity to rise to their greatest potential. (Sometimes in dysfunctional families, seeds of great accomplishments may be planted, also.)
A friend who read a draft of this chapter commented that I may want to balance my critical judgment of my family with some compassion. I do have much compassion for my parents, for their generation, and all of the hardships that they and our ancestors went through so that I may experience the comfort and riches of my current life (and I don’t just mean financial riches). My father was born in 1914, at the time of World War I. He and his family lived through many diseases including flu epidemics (Did you know that the flu epidemic of 1918 killed more people than were killed in World War I?) My mother was born in 1921, and my parents and their families lived through the economic Great Depression of the 1930’s. My father was in the U.S. Navy, stationed in Hawaii at the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They didn’t have the luxury like we do of talking about their feelings and analyzing what their parents “did” to them and be bitter about it. I hope I do not come across as being bitter about my family. My parents did the best they could with what they had. The context of my parents’ lives was much more harsh than I experienced. I am so very grateful for what they have given me.
Whether a family is “functional” or “dysfunctional” is not black and white. Most any family has traits of being functional as well as traits of being dysfunctional. With awareness and consciousness of what these traits are, we can make conscious decisions about whether we are contributing to our family being more or less functional at the moment, or more or less dysfunctional. I can ask myself questions like “Am I part of the problem? Or am I part of the solution?” I can make choices like “Do talk” or “Don’t talk” right now, and hundreds of times per day. And if I do choose to talk about what’s on my mind, I can make choices of doing it with respect to another person’s rights and privacy, or not.
And, I am compassionate about my adopted brother. I do not live within his skin. I do not have the biology that he had to live with. While I may have had my own struggles with feelings of not belonging and low self-esteem at times, at least I did look more like I belonged to my family, whereas he did not look like the rest of our family, and very likely he struggled with feelings of belonging.
Bitter or Grateful?
Am I bitter, blaming, and resentful for the family I was raised in? No. It was the perfect family to bring me here to where I am today, and I have peace. (Although, I am still grieving, and there are times that my emotions come up that surprise me when I discover “unfinished business”.) Again, I am grateful for what my parents gave me. I know they did the best they could with what they had, and I hope they are peaceful wherever they are.
I know I am not a perfect parent either, and I wonder what my children think about, and wonder what they will write about me. (I hope they write about me!)
“Sooner or later a person begins to notice that everything that happens to him is perfect, relates directly to who he is, had to happen, was meant to happen, plays its little role in fulfilling his destiny.
“When he encounters difficulty, it no longer occurs to him to complain— he has learned to expect nothing, has learned that loss and frustration are a part of life, and come at their proper time—instead he asks himself, why is this happening? …by which he means, what can I learn from this, how will it strengthen me, make me more aware? He lets himself be strengthened, lets himself grow, just as he lets himself relax and enjoy (and grow) when life is gentle to him.
“Strengthened by this simple notion, simple awareness, that life is perfect, that all things come at the proper moment and that he is always the perfect person for the situation he finds himself in, a person begins to feel more and more in tune with his inner nature, begins to find it easier and easier to do what he knows is right. All chance events appear to him to be intended; all intentional actions he clearly perceives as part of the workings of Chance. Anxiety seldom troubles him; he knows his death will come at its proper moment; he knows his actions are right and therefore whatever comes to pass as a result of them will be what is meant to happen. When he does feel anxiety, he realizes it is because of that thing he’s been meaning to do but hasn’t done, some unfulfilled relationship he’s been aware of, but …He perceives the anxiety as a message that he’ll have to stop hesitating if he wants to stay high …He knows that he is out of tune because he’s let himself get out of tune; and because he knows he can, he begins to take action. He enjoys his high life; does not enjoy anxiety; so he stops hesitating and does what he has to do.
“He does not live in a state of bliss, though perhaps he feels himself moving toward one— or toward something, he doesn’t know what it is but it is the way he has to go, the journey towards it is the only life he enjoys. It is hard; it is exciting; it is satisfying, lonely, joyous, frustrating, puzzling, enlightening, real; it is his life, that’s all. He accepts it.
“Sooner or later a person begins to notice…”
From “Das Energi”by Paul Williams (1973)
This chapter alludes to why and how I named this book for public consumption, Family Hunger – Breathe Life Into Your Own Family History, and the series of books for family consumption called Family Hunger – A Neel Family History, and other books under other related family names.
Out of respect for those living family members of mine, both those I actively love and those I fear, I will not put the names of living family members in print (for public consumption) unless I have your permission. You should not be reading about yourself, unless I specifically have your agreement, or unless you have come back from the dead. (I may be writing about a person without naming them, like my adopted brother, who is infamous for some people, where I use an alias name.)
My intention is not to print “dirt” or gossip or to get attention for myself at the expense of someone else. My intention is to honor those who have come before us, to whet your appetite so you develop your own hunger for your own roots. I have a passion for my family history, and I hope you find your passion for your own family history. Maybe we can also leave some morsels for those who come after us who have this same hunger, who may wonder who we were that came before them.
Appreciation
I appreciate my ancestors on whose shoulders I stand. I love my family members who hold me up when I need it. I hope and pray that I am there for you if you need me.
As some of my living family members know, there have been times, sometimes long periods of time, when I have missed you and our gatherings and our traditions. I honor and respect whatever space we needed at the time, and I’m glad that’s behind us. A cousin of mine said “life is too short …” to get caught up in any bitterness that keeps us apart. Let us celebrate what time we have together!
Hunger?
Sometimes people ask me why I like the title Family Hunger. Some people ask me if we lived in poverty as a child. No, my family did not live in financial poverty, and we always had enough to eat, and I remember being warm and having shelter, and mostly able to wear the clothes I wanted. My basic needs were met by my parents’ commitment to myself and my siblings. I grew up in a middle class family in America. My father was an officer in the U.S. Navy and retired as a Captain when I was 10 years old, and his active-duty and retirement income always met our basic needs. Sometimes our mother worked for income, but I’m not sure this was a financial need for the family as she also volunteered for many activities outside the home. Maybe, though, we lived in emotional poverty that left me hungry, but what is that?
As a child growing up, I identify my family-of-origin as a “dysfunctional family”. (See paragraph “Dysfunctional vs. Functional” later in this chapter.) This may relate to the “emotional poverty” that I mentioned above. I believe my parents did the best they could with what they had. I believe my parents had many stressors that I am grateful I did not have. I believe my parents were invested in looking good to the community we lived in, which sometimes meant that we kept secrets, sometimes we put up a front, sometimes we lied by omission. Sometimes this may be referred to as “boundaries” or privacy, and some may argue that some circumstances and stories are only the family’s business and nobody else’s business.
But when information is kept in so tightly that it becomes toxic and a burden to those that have that information, it is unhealthy. I have needed to tell my story, at the right times and hopefully in the right places to the right audience, to try to clear emotional and psychological toxins out of my system. I want to not puke on others by doing so.
In my training and practice as a social worker, I learned and have taught others about Claudia Black’s dysfunctional family rules of “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel”, and the recovering rules of “Do Talk, Do Trust, Do Feel”. When I began and as I continue my own recovery process, sometimes I bump into other people who don’t agree with me.
Family Systems
As a social worker I was trained to think about families and family systems. When I was in graduate school for social work working towards my MSW degree (Masters in Social Work) at Eastern Washington University (1984 – 1986), I was in my internship placement where I had an Agency Field Instructor named John Brennan (RIP, John). He told me if I wanted to do family therapy, then I needed to “think, eat, and breathe families …”. Well, I did want to do family therapy, so I took John’s words to heart. I do “think, eat, and breathe families”!
When I meet with an individual, I often think about who they have “with” them, the connections and relationships they have that got them here. I might ask them what kind of family-of-origin they grew up in. I might try to guess and ask how many siblings they had and what birth order they were in. I wonder about questions like: Did their parents remain married or did they get divorced? Who were their role models which affect what they think is “normal”? I consider what their grandparents were like, and what the multi-generational patterns and unresolved issues might be affecting them. I think in pictures and start to draw a genogram (family tree) in my head or on paper. I ask if they were from a blended family. I wonder if there was an adoption into or out of their family, what the circumstances were, and sometimes I start to think about my own adopted brother. I think about what was healthy about the family they came from, look for characteristics of strengths and resiliency, and I am impressed by their survival skills. I wonder what they think about family, as sometimes they consider the friend who is putting up with them on their couch as their “brother” or “auntie” when there is no biological or legal relationship (what we might call fictive kin). I see family dysfunction and community dysfunction maybe like Sherlock Holmes sees clues to a crime at the same time I look for strengths and survival skills. I wonder about alienation, connection and dis-connection, about secure and insecure attachment strategies. I wonder what secrets they have. I wonder if I am part of the problem or part of the solution. I remember the guiding principle of “Do no harm” from the medical and other helping professions. I try to be compassionate about what kinds of stresses and traumas they have endured, as we all have. I see the potential about their future new family they might create, and see the preciousness of future generations, those not born yet.
Sometimes I think about the dinosaurs who are now extinct, indigenous people that used to walk this earth and the traces they left behind that we find, and I wonder what traces I will leave behind, including clues to my tribal or social behaviors.
And yes, sometimes I do this wondering all in my head at the coffee shop or standing in the check-out line at the grocery store where it’s none of my business!
Professional Perspective
(SNORE FACTOR WARNING: this paragraph may put you to sleep, or may really excite you, depending on your point of view). Other aspects of families that I was trained to consider are the following: stages of development (both the individual’s and the family’s development); attachment and bonding issues; traumas; subsystems and their function and their flexibility (i.e. the parental executive subsystem, the extended family, the children/sibling subsystem, etc); boundaries (enmeshed, clear, or disengaged, and I often ask the question “Where do I end, and where do you begin?” for myself or out loud as instruction for the person I am working with); power and influence (control issues); alignments (affiliation, over-involvement or emotional incest, conflicts, coalitions, detouring, etc.); triangles (pursuing, distancing, etc., i.e. ganging up on another); communication styles (computer style, distracter style, placator style, blamer, leveler, etc.); addiction and mental health issues; family rules/myths/ ideals/secrets; joining/planning/challenging/reframing/etc.; enactment; focusing; intensity; etc., etc.
These concepts are complicated, and they have provided me much insight and relief from the confusion not only from my own family-of-origin, but the confusion in families I work with as a professional. I learned these concepts from graduate courses in my MSW program, and also at subsequent workshops I have taken. I do a lot of reading and some of my favorite books are Families and Family Therapy by Salvador Minuchin, Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir, It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black, Parenting From The Inside Out by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell, The Changing Family Life Cycle edited by Betty Carter and Monica McGoldrick, and The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz.
I make reference to these professional aspects of my view of families for you, the reader, to be aware of the bias I have towards family systems, recognizing them, and honoring them. (And to make recommendations for your own reading.) My trainings and experiences as a social worker have an effect on my lens on genealogy and family history.
The seeds of this professional perspective were planted before my graduate school when I was working on my Bachelors’ degree in Psychology that I received from the University of Montana in 1980 (see my chapter titled “Who Am I? And How Did I Get Here? Psychology and Genealogy” that I wrote in 1979 when I was twenty-three years old).
AND, seeds of my personal point-of-view about families were planted at our dinner table as a child, before that in my mother’s womb, which was affected by her mother’s womb, etc., etc., etc.
Don’t Talk
Claudia Black wrote about dysfunctional family rules of “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” as survival skills, which I saw occurring in my family-of-origin. I believe a great portion of the “Don’t …” rules in my family were issues related to my older, adopted brother as coping strategies. And we continue using the “Don’t talk/trust/feel” rules when we get close to stresses of pain, embarrassment, or shame about sensitive issues. The answer to these rules is to try to live by the alternative “Do talk, do trust, and do feel” rules, which is sometimes like swimming upstream when the rest of the family doesn’t agree, overtly or covertly. I think sometimes my own family members perceive my big mouth as violating their privacy, which is a very good point, well taken. (Well, sometimes not so well taken).
Claudia Black also wrote about roles that family members take on in dysfunctional families. She writes, “Many times, there are clearly defined roles within the family. It is typical for adults in the family to divide, or share the roles of being the breadwinner and the administrator – the one who makes the decisions within the home. Children raised in homes where open communication is practiced and consistency of life styles is the norm usually have the ability to adopt a variety of roles, dependent on the situation. These children learn how to be responsible, how to organize, to develop realistic goals, to play, laugh, and enjoy themselves. They learn a sense of flexibility and spontaneity. They are usually taught how to be sensitive to the feelings of others, and are willing to be helpful to others. These children learn a sense of autonomy and also how to belong to a group” (from It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black). If you grew up in a family like this, great! Survival roles can be a problem when we feel “scripted” to fulfill someone else’s agenda for us, and we never really learn who we are without our masks, such as the “Family Hero”, “Scapegoat”, “Family Pet”, or “Lost Child”. I recognize some aspects of each of these survival roles in members of my family.
Adopted Brother
I believe I grew up in a family that was dysfunctional because of my family’s reactions to my older adoptive brother. Plus, there was probably dysfunction before this brother arrived. The questions occur: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Did this brother cause us to be dysfunctional? Did my parents coping with my brother’s challenging behaviors leave some of our needs unmet? Or did we cause him to be our Scapegoat to distract from our dysfunctional multi-generation patterns? (The truth is probably a combination of all of these explanations). This brother was adopted at a very young age (between 3 and 6 months old), but we don’t know what genetic issues he inherited, what issues in the womb he may have experienced, what traumas he may have experienced at that very young age before he was placed with my parents, what attachment and bonding issues he may have experienced with his biological parents, etc. And, as the oldest child in my family, my parents were “cutting their teeth” and learning about parenting with their first child, my oldest brother.
My family’s developmental issues are such that my adopted brother was the first and oldest child of my parents after they were initially not able to conceive a pregnancy. (Were there issues about sexuality between my parents? Some of these things we just don’t want to think about, but they are a reality in our heritage.) Their new parenting skills were developing to cope with his challenging behaviors. He told me he felt different than the rest of our sibling group, and he felt like he was treated differently. It was obvious that he looked different, because of genetics. He told me he felt our parents were abusive to him, and he thought that our parents were alcoholics/addicts, while I don’t see it that way. I do see that his hyperactive behavior invited corporal punishment that was “normal” for my parents’ generation, which my brother perceived as abuse of him. There are many confusing and confounding factors, some of which will never be clear, many of which led me to my chosen profession as a social worker.
Dysfunctional vs. Functional
I want to comment on my labeling of my family as “dysfunctional”. Functional and dysfunctional families both have problems. Functional families resolve the problems and meet their family members’ needs. Dysfunctional families have problems that don’t get resolved in a healthy way, and family members’ needs are not met as well. In dysfunctional families, survival can be questionable. In functional families, members have a better chance of survival, and they often thrive when their needs are met so that they have the opportunity to rise to their greatest potential. (Sometimes in dysfunctional families, seeds of great accomplishments may be planted, also.)
A friend who read a draft of this chapter commented that I may want to balance my critical judgment of my family with some compassion. I do have much compassion for my parents, for their generation, and all of the hardships that they and our ancestors went through so that I may experience the comfort and riches of my current life (and I don’t just mean financial riches). My father was born in 1914, at the time of World War I. He and his family lived through many diseases including flu epidemics (Did you know that the flu epidemic of 1918 killed more people than were killed in World War I?) My mother was born in 1921, and my parents and their families lived through the economic Great Depression of the 1930’s. My father was in the U.S. Navy, stationed in Hawaii at the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They didn’t have the luxury like we do of talking about their feelings and analyzing what their parents “did” to them and be bitter about it. I hope I do not come across as being bitter about my family. My parents did the best they could with what they had. The context of my parents’ lives was much more harsh than I experienced. I am so very grateful for what they have given me.
Whether a family is “functional” or “dysfunctional” is not black and white. Most any family has traits of being functional as well as traits of being dysfunctional. With awareness and consciousness of what these traits are, we can make conscious decisions about whether we are contributing to our family being more or less functional at the moment, or more or less dysfunctional. I can ask myself questions like “Am I part of the problem? Or am I part of the solution?” I can make choices like “Do talk” or “Don’t talk” right now, and hundreds of times per day. And if I do choose to talk about what’s on my mind, I can make choices of doing it with respect to another person’s rights and privacy, or not.
And, I am compassionate about my adopted brother. I do not live within his skin. I do not have the biology that he had to live with. While I may have had my own struggles with feelings of not belonging and low self-esteem at times, at least I did look more like I belonged to my family, whereas he did not look like the rest of our family, and very likely he struggled with feelings of belonging.
Bitter or Grateful?
Am I bitter, blaming, and resentful for the family I was raised in? No. It was the perfect family to bring me here to where I am today, and I have peace. (Although, I am still grieving, and there are times that my emotions come up that surprise me when I discover “unfinished business”.) Again, I am grateful for what my parents gave me. I know they did the best they could with what they had, and I hope they are peaceful wherever they are.
I know I am not a perfect parent either, and I wonder what my children think about, and wonder what they will write about me. (I hope they write about me!)
“Sooner or later a person begins to notice that everything that happens to him is perfect, relates directly to who he is, had to happen, was meant to happen, plays its little role in fulfilling his destiny.
“When he encounters difficulty, it no longer occurs to him to complain— he has learned to expect nothing, has learned that loss and frustration are a part of life, and come at their proper time—instead he asks himself, why is this happening? …by which he means, what can I learn from this, how will it strengthen me, make me more aware? He lets himself be strengthened, lets himself grow, just as he lets himself relax and enjoy (and grow) when life is gentle to him.
“Strengthened by this simple notion, simple awareness, that life is perfect, that all things come at the proper moment and that he is always the perfect person for the situation he finds himself in, a person begins to feel more and more in tune with his inner nature, begins to find it easier and easier to do what he knows is right. All chance events appear to him to be intended; all intentional actions he clearly perceives as part of the workings of Chance. Anxiety seldom troubles him; he knows his death will come at its proper moment; he knows his actions are right and therefore whatever comes to pass as a result of them will be what is meant to happen. When he does feel anxiety, he realizes it is because of that thing he’s been meaning to do but hasn’t done, some unfulfilled relationship he’s been aware of, but …He perceives the anxiety as a message that he’ll have to stop hesitating if he wants to stay high …He knows that he is out of tune because he’s let himself get out of tune; and because he knows he can, he begins to take action. He enjoys his high life; does not enjoy anxiety; so he stops hesitating and does what he has to do.
“He does not live in a state of bliss, though perhaps he feels himself moving toward one— or toward something, he doesn’t know what it is but it is the way he has to go, the journey towards it is the only life he enjoys. It is hard; it is exciting; it is satisfying, lonely, joyous, frustrating, puzzling, enlightening, real; it is his life, that’s all. He accepts it.
“Sooner or later a person begins to notice…”
From “Das Energi”by Paul Williams (1973)