Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

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

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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

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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 anti 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 clearcut 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

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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

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Figure 8.2. 
Health/Dysfunction Continuum