Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

The family should also provide safety, warmth and nurturance to its
members. Family members in a healthy system will care for each
other, provide appropriate touch, laugh together, cry together, share
joys together and protect each other from harm.
As psychologist Abraham Maslow has noted, we also have love and
belongingness needs, which are quite similar to the ones just
mentioned. We need a sense of communion, of belonging to a
group or a unit, of being loved and included. A healthy, functioning
family will provide these, too.
There is also a need for autonomy or separateness. A healthy
family will allow its members to be largely self-determining
(depending upon the age of the family member). Children will be
allowed to find out what they like and don't like about the world,
what they want to do for a living. They will be allowed to have
privacy and a sense of uniqueness as well as belonging. Parents

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will be able to change their minds about things like careers, roles
and so on as their needs change or as their personalities develop
over time. Parents and children are allowed to love each other
without having to be enmeshed and tangled up in each others' lives.
Families also function to promote self-esteem or a sense of worth
in each family member. This is done by praise, rather than
criticism, and by healthy skill-building, rather than relentless
pushing and demanding of perfect performance. We believe that
each person truly does have value and truly does have something
important and worthwhile to offer to the world and to the family. A
healthy family will let each person find and have that sense of
personal value, dignity anti worth.

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Families also get to make mistakes. That's right! Healthy systems
have room for human error and imperfection. We get to be naughty
now and then, and it's okay. We might call this the "blowing-off-
steam-function". Think of a steam-heating system without a
pressure-release valve! That wouldn't be too good, would it?
Families get to have fun. We get to be silly, playful, creative and
"let our hair down". This is the "primary process" kind of thinking
that Freud spoke of, and which the Transactional Analysts call The
Child. Families that allow play to be an important function tend to
be much more creative at solving their own conflicts and stresses.
Families have spirituality, too. Whether we know it or like it or
not, spirituality is a very important function that a family provides.
We aren't talking about formal religion here because we know
some very spiritual people who do not belong to a formal religion,
and some very spiritual people who do (and vice-versa). By
spirituality, we mean our relationship with creation, with the
universe, with the ineffable, unexplainable around us, with a
Higher Power, with the cosmos, however you describe it. People
who learn to let go of what isn't important and to persevere with
what is, very often can do so because of their spirituality.
There are other functions that a family can provide for its members,
but let's stop here and see what happens when a family is
dysfunctional. What happens then is that we get stuck in
dysfunctional roles.
Dysfunctional Roles
Those needs and functions just listed are things that each family
member should be getting. In a dysfunctional family, those

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functions are often divided up separately and delegated to one
specific family member. Let's take a look at some of the
dysfunctional family roles that develop (Wegscheider-Cruse, Satir,
Kellogg).