How Understanding Your Family’s Relationship Can Help Improve Your Mental Health
Understanding how you operate is the key to making any necessary changes or improvements that can enhance your mental and behavioral health. How you operate however, isn’t completely by your chosen design. Your internal operation system it based on a collection of conditioned responses to how your family operated as a system throughout your life and how that system continues to operate.
If you grew up in a nuclear family, there is no escaping the fact that you are of your family. This means that while you are of course a unique individual, your family’s relationship to you and each other has shaped so much of who you are today and how you behave in relationships. Whether you navigate through life with healthy confidence and resilience to stress, or become unmanageably overwhelmed by your emotions, many of your behavioral patterns, insecurities, self-expression and so much more can be explained by understanding your family’s relationship system.
A family’s relationship system is the unique system that is developed from the way in which family members communicate and interact with one another. Within their relationship system there are expected roles and agreements that either influence or prevent overall equilibrium within and between each family member. You can sort of think of the family relationship system as a machine with all different parts and functions. Each part is different and serves a different function in the operation of the the machine, but together they are inherently one unit, or one machine.
Below I will go through the three steps to exploring how your family’s relationship systems has affected you, how it informs your mental health as an adult, and how to use that information to empower change you want to see in your life.
Recognize your role
To understand the function you served in your family’s relationship system, you must first recognize your role. You can do this by examining what you were responsible for in the relationship between you and your parent(s) and what you might still feel you are responsible for in the relationship. An example of this is having felt responsible for your parent’s well-being since you were a child. This is often experienced through role reversal in which a parent overshares intimate information with their child about things like their relationship with their spouse or dating life which overtime causes the child to feel as if they are responsible for meeting the emotional needs of their parent, which is in fact is the responsibility of a parent.
Another relationship role is the scapegoat. This is where one family member is blamed for the family’s dysfunction or problems another family member experiences. The function of scapegoating is for one or more family member to avoid taking accountability for their own actions and contribution to the family’s dynamic because it might be too painful or uncomfortable for them to confront.
Other roles that that exists within a dysfunctional family system is the caregiver, the lost child, the mascot, the identified patient and the hero. Again, each serves a unique function in the family’s system that enables the system to continue functioning without any sort of intervention or inconvenient confrontation.
2. Identify your role’s affect on you
Once you have identified what your role is or has been in your family’s system, you can begin to explore how that role affected your own emotional well-being and behavioral responses. Questions that can help you explore this concept are: What did it feel like you were responsible for as a child? How does it feel to know you were assigned that responsibility? What was your reaction to assuming that role? How did having that role affect your priorities/interests/hobbies as a child? How did your role and the responsibilities that came with it affect how you formed connections with others? How did your role affect your connection to your family members?
As you explore the answers to these questions, keep in mind that revisiting these thoughts and memories may be very painful and that embarking on that journey with a companion like a therapist, counselor or someone you feel safe with and trust may be necessary for your emotional safety throughout your course.
3. Determine your behavioral patterns
After you have explored how your role affected and shaped your childhood experience, you can then begin to get an idea of how it now affects your relationships and behavioral patterns today. For example, if you experienced role reversal (also known as parentification) you may have a difficult time forming deep and connecting relationships with others because you spent so much of your energy trying to take care of a parent that you missed out on fundamental childhood experiences that taught you how to connect with peers. Perhaps having been “the hero” in your family system influenced you to be an overachiever, set unrealistic expectations for yourself and others and caused you to have difficulty feeling satisfied or secure in relationships or even overly anxious in maintaining a relationship. Having been “the mascot” may have influenced you to avoid intimacy and develop a more avoidant attachment style in relationships.
Questions to consider in exploring this concept are: What could prevent you from feeling safe in a relationship? What do you do in order to maintain your safety in a relationship? Do you have any behaviors that attempt to disrupt connection to others? How might your behaviors be a reflection of your role in your family’s relationship system? Do you have any behaviors that might stand in the way of you reaching your full potential (e.g. negative self-talk, self-doubt, severing relationships, self-sabotage) and if so, what needs to change?
Conclusion
Our insecurities and fears very often inform how we behave, interact with others, and ultimately whether or not we connect with others. Understanding our family’s relationship system can be the key to understanding where our fears and insecurities are rooted and how we may unintentionally be watering those roots. Knowing what your assigned role was in your family’s relationship system and how it influenced your relationship with your family members, peers and other relationships, can help you better understand what beliefs you currently hold that add to or limit you in life.
Your emotional and behavioral health are dependent on your relationship with yourself and also the quality of your relationship with others. We are more capable of living happy and fulfilling lives when we feel content with who we are and have a network of social support. In order to cultivate healthy relationships, we must first understand what disrupts the flow of our relationships, where the disruption begins and when and how we want the disruption to stop.
For extra support in understanding and reshaping your family’s relationship system checkout our Family Exploration Program by clicking the link below.
