Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

Emotional Health of a Family
Normal curve demonstrating that roughly two-thirds of the
population at large falls within the average range of the health/
dysfunction continuum.
of the more covert types of abuse that nearly all of us have
experienced.
On our continuum from extremely healthy to extremely unhealthy
families, you will find some or all of these characteristics listed
below, depending on how functional or dysfunctional a family is.
Some families have few, if any of them, and some families have all
of them.
1. Physical, emotional or sexual abuse/neglect and vicarious abuse
2. Perfectionism

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3. Rigid rules, lifestyle and/or belief systems
4. The "No Talk Rule"/Keeping "The Family Secrets"
5. Inability to identify and/or express feelings
6. Triangulation (a communication pattern using one person as
intermediary)
7. Double messages/double binds

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8. Inability to play, have fun and be spontaneous
9. High tolerance for inappropriate behavior/pain
10. Enmeshment
As you process them in more depth, remember that the degree of
overall dysfunction is what matters, and that this "degree" depends
not just on how many of these traits exist in a family, but also how
often they occur. We know of no one who doesn't have little rituals
or rigidities in his life. It is when these rigidities begin to interfere
with healthy intimacy, with family members' feelings of wholeness
and dignity, that problems begin to crop up.
Frank, our California engineer, grew up with "everything" any
child could ever want a father who was a doctor, a mother who was
active in the community, a good education, athletic ability, good
looks, vacations at the lake and money yet his own marriage and
life were thrust into chaos because he never really learned how to
feel and be. He became so overly competent at "doing" that he
never had the time or the family guidance to learn how to be m
"non-doing relationship" with other people.
In our busy world it's such a simple thing to overlook, and there are
no evil bogeymen to blame. It happens much too often, and the end
result is just plain sad. The happy news is that it doesn't: have to
stay that way. We aren't bears. We have bigger brains to figure out
those traps sooner or later, and it's never too late to start looking at
those traps as the traps that they are.
As you read through our descriptions of these traps, it is absolutely
normal and "okay" to: (1) say to yourself, "that never happened in

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my family", (2) feel confused, (3) get really mad at us or your
family, (4) wonder, (5) question, (6) doubt, (7) feel sad, (8) cry, (9)
want to talk to someone about it, or (10) be bored.
Physical, Emotional or Sexual Abuse and Neglect/Vicarious Abuse
As recently as 1975, one psychiatric textbook reported that child
sexual abuse occurs in only one family in a million (Kohn, 1987).
This simply underscores the tremendous denial and fear on the part
of educated professionals regarding the nature of the human
animal.
The facts tell a different story. As many as one in six people in this
country were sexually abused as children. And in one recent

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study it was discovered that roughly 30% of all women and 15% of
all men were sexually abused by physical contact, ranging from
fondling to intercourse, while they were still children. When
noncontact forms of sexual abuse are included, the figure increases
to around 50% for women (Kohn, 1987).
Sexual abuse occurs most frequently when children are between
the ages of 9 and 12, but it also occurs with regularity in infancy,
which makes it extremely difficult for a recovering person to ever
identify and deal with it.
While we basically agree with the work of Lloyd de Mause (1974),
who makes a good case for the general improvement of the lot of
children from ancient to present day times, the statistics on abuse
and neglect in this country are still staggering. A lot of children get