The Curse of Family

Read Part One of this blog series here.

"Curses" work by activating the emotions of our threat brain, which motivate us to behave aggressively, defensively, or submissively. In this series of blog posts, we will be exploring five human curses—consciousness, memory, culture, family, and character—which are particularly potent and which, if we do not recognize or manage them, can cause us significant problems.

The family dance

To understand the curse of family, we must recognize the relational dances that go on within them—dances which we are born into, which we quickly fall in step with, and which teach us how be with others. To not join in is to not belong, and few of us will choose that option.

Family therapist David Kantor observed that these "dances," or recurring patterns of interaction, are the strategies family members use to regulate and shape their relationships with each other. The original intent of these strategies is to support the family as individuals and as a whole to achieve their goals and to prosper. However, families often do not succeed in fulfilling their original intent or purpose.

Kantor described this as “the disabling chasm between what is sought and what is actually experienced” and observed the feelings of guilt, shame, loss, frustration and depression that accompanied repeated "strategic failure." These feelings arise from our threat brain and are an expression of being cursed by the unskilled, confusing, and contradictory patterns of behavior that we are subjected to, and that we find ourselves colluding with in order to sustain the family script, secrets, and image. When we are young, these patterns of strategic success and failure sear deep into our unconscious or implicit memory and influence our adult relationships.

It was the psychiatrist Ronnie Laing who controversially exposed the interactions of the family as potentially debilitating to the healthy growth of its members. In his book The Politics of the Family, he describes the kaleidoscopic pattern of communications that contributes to the “almost complete holocaust of one’s experience on the altar of conformity.” No wonder, said Laing, that family life can leave one feeling empty and invalidated.¹

Whilst there are many interactions between family members that have the potential to curse, in this blog post, we will explore the importance of the safe place and a common interaction that disrupts the safe place, which is the dance of disconfirmation.

The safe place

Perhaps the most essential requirement of both child and adult is to have significance or, as Laing put it, “place in another person’s world.” For a child, this "place" is where basic survival needs are met (food and shelter), but more importantly, where the nurturance and growth of our safe brain capability occur through kindness, attention, and reassurance.

A well-developed and functioning safe brain generates and sustains feelings of significance. Without nurturing social interaction—which includes non-sexual physical touch, healthy conversations, and unconditional, compassionate regard²—my threat brain emotions (unregulated by these safe brain experiences) will remain alert and potentially hyperactive. The dutiful parent, who offers everything but kindness, attention, and reassurance, contributes to the sensitization of our threat brain and reduces the likelihood of us being able to approach adult relationships with confidence and trust.

Equally, we can live in families that seem highly "relational," where there appears to be a lot of talk, touch, and "love," but the quality of those interactions are, in varying degrees, confusing, conditional, belittling, and suffocating. For example, a man recounts how he spends all his free time coaching his son to become a professional rugby player. He goes to all his games, upholds a strict training regime, and discourages any pastimes and recreation that are not rugby-related. He is unsure, given all the time, money, attention and effort he gives this child, why their relationship is fractious.

To have a safe place and to feel significant, a child needs to receive genuine confirmation of who she is and feels herself to be. Yet, as Laing describes, there are many ways in which a parent or caregiver can intentionally or unintentionally disconfirm the child's experience.

The dance of disconfirmation

One of the most common ways in which a child is disconfirmed is through a tangential response. For example, a mother comes home from work and enters the kitchen. Her child greets her with a big smile. “Mummy, look, I’ve baked a cake for our tea!” Mother does not smile or look at the cake and replies, “Haven’t you noticed that the bin is overflowing and needs emptying?”

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Imagine (or remember) what it feels like to contribute a well-intended gesture into the relationship—a comment, a smile, a hug, an idea—only for it to be utterly ignored and/or met with a wholly inadequate response.

A tangential response is an inadequate response and causes deep frustration and hurt. In this case, the child has probably made the cake to please her mother and to demonstrate her capability. She is seeking approval. However, the mother ignores this and changes the subject without any acknowledgment of the cake or the act. In the mother’s tangential response, there is a failure to endorse what the child has done and how the child feels.

The persistent absence of confirmatory responses leads to feelings of shame and self-loathing (“I’ve got it wrong again”) that we can carry with us for a lifetime.

Breaking the curse of family

The author and psychoanalyst Adam Philips writes,

It is worth wondering what has to happen to someone, or what someone has to make of what happens to them, to make them begin to wonder not what was wrong with their family but what might be wrong with the family as a way of doing things.³

As Philips suggests, what has to happen to break the curse of the family is our re-appraisal of the family’s purpose and function in society. This would involve acknowledging the relationship between family and culture and recognizing how difficult it is to disentangle one from the other.

Why, for example, when there are so many configurations of family life, do we still privilege the nuclear version of husband, wife, and "2.4" children as the norm³? Why do we still feel embarrassed, ashamed, or anxious when our families do not conform to the stereotypical images of family life portrayed by advertisers, and the conservative ideologies espoused by our political, religious and academic institutions? And how do the "rules" governing family life sustain themselves across generations, even when they frustrate, diminish, confuse, and alienate its members?

Like all the curses, breaking free is easier said than done. The family, the way it works, and the way we view it, are held within the tight grip of culture, and the loosening of that grip is the hardest of all.

From the family to the cultural dance

The curse of family, then, is that we are born into its relational dance. We are subject to the conscious and unconscious habits of a group of people whose language (verbal and nonverbal) we cannot yet (or ever) understand. Yet we need these people for our survival, so we learn their language as quickly and as best we can. And what we learn is how to cope with their problems, to live with their rules, meet their expectations, and dance to their relational tune.

It takes enormous strength to question and re-formulate the options, identities, definitions, rules, repertoires, roles, and attributes our family has given us. And even if we briefly succeed, as in our teenage rebellions, when we leave our family and enter the adult world, we are confronted once more with the same beliefs and values. With nostalgic (and misplaced) guilt and regret, we see that our parents were right after all, and so, because we have learned it so well, we fall in step with the cultural dance, recognizing in its repetitive tune our own familiar experience. And so the problematic consequences of feeling cursed by who we should be, and failing to discover who we are, deepen.

In the final part of this blog series, we explore the curse of culture.