Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

part of that family system, whether consciously or unconsciously
so, and therefore there must be something wrong with me, too. So
it is much easier to just say, "I am wrong", or "I am bad'', or "I am
dirty", or "I am crazy". From there, it is a simple hop, skip and a
jump to say, "I don't want to feel this at all. I'll just pretend it
doesn't hurt and then maybe it will all go away."
We deny our feelings, which are our reality. Then we deny the

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objective reality around us (Dad doesn't get angry very often,
really). And then we build a tidy shell around us so that on the
outside we're looking great and on the inside we're suffocating. We
humans are extremely clever, not like bears at all.
Triangulation
This refers to communication patterns within a family. Families
who do this use one family member as a messenger or go-between,
rather than speaking directly to the person with whom they want to
communicate.
For example, Mom and Dad just had a fight. Dad thinks that he'll
be able to get to Mom if he works through 10-year-old Bobby, so
he

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says, "Bobby, will you go ask your mother if she's still mad at me?
Tell her I really didn't mean what I said, and ask her if she wants to
go to dinner with us." Being a good little trooper, Bobby does what
he is asked. Mom says, "Bobby, you tell your father I wouldn't go
to dinner with him if he was the last person on earth. And then you
get upstairs and clean your room like I told you to do an hour ago."
Bobby was trying to be a good boy. He was trying to help get More
and Dad back together, but he wound up with Mom taking out her
anger toward Dad on him, and he was left feeling that part of their
marital problem was his. He had failed in his mission. He had let
down Dad. He had made a mess of things. Or so Bobby felt. How
Bobby felt is all that matters. When triangulation becomes a
regular fixture in a family system, communication becomes
blurred, people become enmeshed in problems that are not theirs,
and children, especially, become pawns in their parents' power
struggles. Anti when you are made a pawn in someone else's game
long enough, you become just a pawn to yourself, too. You become
an object. You take on other people's feelings and guilts and sense
of worthlessness.
Children who grow up with lots of triangulation going on at home
between them and adults, and between adults and other adults,
come to feel and believe that this is "normal" and so they repeat the
pattern in their own adult lives. Because it feels "normal", they also
gravitate to other adults who communicate this way.
In fact, when they encounter an adult who does not communicate
this way, they think something is wrong. Thus, they shy away from
people who communicate in healthy ways, and in so doing, manage

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to recreate the dysfunctional system they grew up in. This is true of
all dysfunctional family patterns, this one included.
Double Messages/Double Binds
Tommy runs up to Dad when he gets home from work and asks,
"Do you love me, Dad?"
"Sure, son," says Dad, as he buries his head in the newspaper, eats
dinner, turns on the television set, sits there for three hours and
then goes to bed.
Betsy runs up to Mom at bedtime, throws her arms around Mom
and says, "I love you". Mom's back stiffens and her body gets tense
because no one ever hugged in her family when she was growing
up,

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"I love you, too, honey." Because Mom's double reaction was so
subtle, Betsy doesn't appear to notice, but she does unconsciously.
Double messages are of the kind, "I love you/go away." "I need
you/I don't need you." "We are proud of you/We are ashamed of
you." ''Sure, we like you/why can't you be more like your brother?"
More often than not, these double messages are extremely subtle;
and the more subtle they are, the harder it is to identify that they
were ever there in the first place.
In one family that we worked with, Mom and Dad were always
talking about how democratic they were and how hard they tried to
treat each child equally. What they couldn't see because they had
such a closed family system was that they were really doing just
the opposite of what they said they were doing. Oldest brother was
the "star". Middle sister was a quiet, shy girl who earned good
grades in school but who had a heck of a time connecting with
anyone else in the family or outside of it. And little brother, who
was "the problem", was acting out in school and causing trouble at
home. Oldest brother sat next to Dad, who appeared to wield most
of the power in the family. Mom and Dad spoke in glowing terms
about all of his accomplishments. Middle sister sat off to the side a
bit, and Mom and Dad talked less enthusiastically about her. She
was "the quiet one", they said. Little brother was more or less
bouncing off the walls of our office, and everyone else spoke with
humor and a touch of condescension about him. "He's the charmer
in the family," they all chimed in, "but he's trouble, too," they
laughed. "We're proud of our parenting skills," said Dad. "We treat
each one just the same."
What really happened in this family is that oldest brother had been

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treated all along just like Dad. He had all the power and all the
glory. Middle sister was treated just like Mom. She was quiet, shy
and had no power at all. Little brother was treated like a toy, and
wound up acting out all of the real dysfunction in the family and all
of the real tension in the family that was being suppressed by Dad's
unfair balance of power. The double message here, of course, is
"We treat you all the same. We treat none of you the same."
It is true that no two children will be alike in any given family, and
that each child will develop his or her own personality, as well they
should. But it is dysfunctional when one child gathers up all of the
power and attention in a family, or when one spouse in a