Did you feel good, living in your family?
Did you feel you were living with friends, people you liked and trusted, and who liked and trusted you?
Was it fun and exciting to be a member of your family?
Family therapy pioneer Virginia Satir, identified and described the characteristics of troubled and nurturing families. Satir is beloved among family therapists and social workers because of her optimistic, warm, and simple approach to helping troubled families by teaching them how to love.
In her book, The New Peoplemaking, she asks readers to identify whether their family of origin was nurturing or troubled, and helps them to do so by answering the three straightforward questions that open this essay. If you can answer “yes” to all three questions, you probably lived in a nurturing family. If you answer “no” or “not often” to all three, you probably lived in a troubled family.
Satir wrote that if you answered “no” to all three questions,
“This does not mean that you have a bad family. It only means that people aren’t very happy and have not learned ways to love and value one another openly.”
I like Virginia Satir’s compassionate explanation. It helps mitigate the sadness one feels over growing up in a troubled family and inspires hope in future growth. Even if a loving, nurturing relationship isn’t likely to develop with parents in the family of origin, the adult resulting from that system may yet become a loving, nurturing human being in spite of a bad start in life.
a bad start
Healers differ over what a bad start in life means. A bad start in a war-torn country is different from a bad start in a peaceful one. A bad start in one family may seem a very good start to another. For people with the luxury of thinking about bad starts rather than mere survival, a bad start may be when a person is the result of an unplanned (and unhappy) pregnancy. Another kind of bad start is when one’s parents never stop not wanting you, and treat you as unwanted your entire life. A variation is when parents lie–their behaviors are rejecting, but their words welcoming. An obvious sort of bad start is with parents who are openly abusive, addicted, or violently rage-filled.
The most troubled families produce the most troubled people–we know this. But one doesn’t have to have grown up in an addicted, violent, or neglectful system to have suffered and received too little of the what children need. Many adults who came from troubled families will say, “it wasn’t so bad.” They often don’t see their own spiritual or psychological impoverishment until the pain is so great that their lives reel out of control. They wonder why they feel so crazy, or become easy targets for other people’s blame and projection.
people making
Satir calls parenting “people making.” To whatever extent parents nurture and love their children, the children grow up to become nurturing and affectionate. Children who lack nurture cannot thrive. Having a safe and loving place from which to leave is essential to the later healthy individuation of the person.
The troubled family, like the troubled group or collective, rebuffs vitality and spontaneity. It levels each individual member to a collective standard that injures what Jung called “the vital activity of the individual.” Furthermore, Jung wrote:
Any serious check to individuality [. . .] is an artificial stunting. It is obvious that a social group consisting of stunted individuals cannot be a healthy and viable institution; only a society that can preserve its internal cohesion and collective values, while at the same time granting the individual the greatest possible freedom, has any prospect of enduring vitality.
As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.
C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 6, para. 758.
Collectives often breed dysfunction by demanding conformity at the individual’s expense. Debates that demonize the “other” fuel this destruction, leading us down a path we know is wrong in personal relationships yet justify as patriotism or faith on a collective level. This cycle of projecting our darkest parts onto others is a dangerous madness. More and more, I see wisdom in the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, and community.1
The work of family is to produce persons capable of individuating. First, parents teach the child how to conform to family values and rules. Next, parents teach children how to think and act for themselves, for without the ability to branch off in one’s own direction, the person cannot individuate. Loving parents help their children branch out without cutting them off from the tree.
adaptation & individuation
The necessity of first learning how to function inside a system so we can function successfully outside it is a paradox. Jung cautions that “Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted” (Ibid., para. 760).
We all grow where planted, for better or for worse. People raised by wolves learn the way of the wolf. Those raised by sheep learn the ways of sheep. Only later, after leaving the pack or the fold, does the individual have the opportunity to discover that there are other ways of living and being.
Those raised in troubled families take their troubled ways of being out into the world with them. Many of our systems are troubled as a result. The average person may spend a lifetime in sick systems and never know it. A person can live a lifetime in a troubled family, attend troubled schools, worship at troubled churches, and work a lifetime in sick systems. One marries another troubled person and raises troubled children. People do this all the time.
If you look around, perhaps you’ll notice that many of the systems you’re involved with are troubled. You may wonder from time to time if you ought to remain in a system, or whether there’s anything you can do about it, or if it’s time to leave.
we can learn new ways
We can learn new ways. We can learn what’s healthy, and what’s sick. We can learn what grows good people, and how to avoid producing bad ones. We can learn how to be more loving and more nurturing. We can learn when and how to communicate, “Stop that. You’re hurting me!”
We can learn to doubt, question, and challenge the collective. We can learn to walk the lonely path. We can learn to see, with spiritual eyes, the spiritual collective of which we are all part. We can stop projecting our archaic, childish, parent-driven ideas about God onto God and we can consider the possibility that God may not be who people said They were, nor who we say They are, nor a God who is the opposite of the God our crazy parents or culture gave us. Or didn’t give us.
reacting ≠ acting
The pattern of reacting against the family dynamics we grew up with is as limiting as those very dynamics. Reacting is not the same as acting. A reaction is not a conscious choice or a path we intentionally choose. Reactions are defensive, knee-jerk responses—a Fuck You! path, often rooted in unresolved past patterns.
We must mature beyond reactive living. Recognizing that our reactions often replay family-of-origin dramas is a good start. By resisting the urge to act in opposition and instead choosing a path of conscious, growth-oriented living, we nurture the selves our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. We must root ourselves in the good we find or create to truly re-grow.
Many of us weren’t taught to listen to our own feelings or physical reactions, especially if we grew up in troubled families. Learning to notice these reactions—an ache in the heart, the tears that well up, or the Aha! of insight—allows us to reconnect with ourselves. By paying attention, we begin the process of becoming individuated, growing into more whole and authentic versions of who we truly are.
We can do this. We can stop, breathe, and listen to ourselves–and thrive.
endnotes
- Quaker values, also called “Testimonies,” may be summarized by the acronym SPICES, include Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. For more information, see The Friends Journal. ↩︎
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