Insight Garden Program
Lesson 4.5 – Family Systems – Handout
FAMILY SYSTEMS SUMMARY
● Every family is an emotional system with ancient ingrained action and reaction patterns of behavior that are inherited over generations. We all inherit a guidance system and automatic ways to manage anxiety. By developing awareness of these ‘seeds’ of behavior each person can alter the reactivity in relationships. This mindful weeding can enhance actions that are positive and tone down those reactions that create problems for us.
● Sometimes people in a family system are on automatic, there is no weeding and anxiety is spread like a fast growing weed throughout our family and friendship system. One person feels anxious or mad or sad and passes anxiety on, like a hot potato, to other members of the system. The hot potatoes are seen in the blaming, shaming, transferring of guilt, drawing others into the drama, gossip, acting out, withdrawal, addiction, and side taking.
● Just as new seeds become plants changing a whole garden over time, so too can one person consciously shift behavior in a family impacting the whole system. As we develop awareness and self-restraint we form our own garden and not one that is run over by ancient weeds. Our garden is organized by our guidance system. We learn to plant the seeds of new ways of thinking, finding new ways of participating in family and friend relationships.
TOOLS FOR CHANGE
Following are some skills that can help one change one’s role in a family system, and thereby change the way the entire system functions.
1. Differentiation – Becoming more emotionally separate form others. Automatically we each adopted habits, patterns of relating as a child. Growing our ability to be an observer we can see where we are not fully separated from old responses to our caregivers or siblings. Increasing awareness of how and when we are emotionally reactive, fused or merged with others gives us the ability to alter our reactions. We are growing to be emotionally separate, no longer driven to react to others’ expectations, actions, and or comments. Others no longer determine or ‘trigger’ our actions and reactions.
A fully differentiated person doesn’t let the words and actions of the others in the system dictate their actions and responses. A positive difference can be made in a family system when one person starts to be more emotionally separate and differentiate himself or herself, or operate more independently out of their own authentic values and goals. Growing ones “I”, position allows us to be genuine and thoughtful and not controlled by reactions to thoughtless or mean triggers by anxious others.
EXAMPLE OF WAYS TO DIFFERENTIATE
2. Speak your truth – Part of differentiating means finding the courage to handle the discomfort of speaking your truth, even it if means upsetting someone or getting a difficult response from them. We build our own internal garden that contains plants we choose so we can talk about our most cherished plants. When we over-accommodate others, perhaps only talking about the plants others approve of, we lose part of ourselves, our plants. By differentiating from the reactivity in the system, (which we can see in how people try to manipulate us using love and approval or its opposite the critical weeds) we can develop our own garden and manifest our truth.
EXMAPLE
Some of the brightest people in the family are seen as troublemakers. When someone is good at school they can get picked on in the family and among friends. They soon learn to hide their brightness and adapt a negative attitude towards school to fit in with others and to gain approval. People can recall the parent’s siblings or friends scoffing and belittling education. These negative comments may seem far removed from what they did when they dropped out of school.
But by becoming a better observer one can see the reactivity in self and in others when one mentions that they enjoyed reading a book, working in the prison library, and or are curious about how to go back to school.
Then when people begin to scoff and be critical one can think about how to mange these comments now. One can use techniques like restraining actions based on old feelings of anger and laugh instead, saying impersonal things like, “Yes, you and my parents all think education stinks, but I see it differently. Everyone has an opinion. I will stick with mine and you stick with yours.”
3. Diversification – When people are overly focused on just one or two members of their family, or just on their adult nuclear family but not their extended family of origin, the unspoken needs and expectations became more intense and difficult to differentiate from.
Strengthening our bonds with other family members – especially our extended family — is a way to lighten the intensity the need for and the burden of certain key family relationships, and to help us learn to be more of our true self (differentiate) and be more of our autonomous self.
HOW TO LIGHTEN UP AND PRACTICE NEW BEHAVIORS AND DEFINING WHAT YOU WILL AND WILL NOT DO
Perhaps your mother was always saying that her sister was jerk and a troublemaker and so you say. I went to see Aunt so and so and she fun to be with and told me a lot about your parents I had no idea about. Then your mom says, “Tell me, what did she say?” and you can say. “You can ask her as my memory about who says what to whom is really bad.”
4. Boundaries – Setting boundaries is a part of differentiating oneself. It’s a way of saying this is me, and this is not me, or, I will put up with this, but not this. For some of us, this is hard to do in our family systems as we grew up in systems where this wasn’t modeled for us, where people sacrificed or martyred themselves for others, or expected others to do so for them. Acting out of guilt may have been the norm.
Every member of the family system is helped when one member starts to set healthy boundaries, to do and accept only what THEY THINK is right for them to do. It takes practice to be ones well-defined self, without shutting others out. It’s important to remain in communication with and available to other members of the family even as we are differentiating and setting boundaries.
EXAMPLES
IN the two above examples one is defining what one will and will not do. The examples: 1) ”I will go to school or learn and or read books, no matter the negativity that has been associated with me doing this. I will continue to talk to you about this and perhaps even figure out where you got your ideas about education?” 2) The mother gives the “rule” that people in the extended family are not worth getting to know. They are bad people and you should have nothing to do with them. Instead of following along in a mindless fusion with others, you begin to develop you own ways of getting to know others and you let the others know AFTER you have takes a more separate action that you have done this without being negative and critical of them.
These kinds of an action stance allow one to say what they thinking and feeling without backing down in the face of disapproval or pressure. One learns to consider how the emotional system is organized and through developing observations of the system and aware of emotional pressure one is able to define what one will and will not do. This ability to be more separate from emotional pressure allows us to be curious as to how the other came to their opinion and how they are able to hear a little but of our real, more truth telling self. Being different can be seen as a positive effort rather than a reason to distrust or be angry with others who are different.
“Families are way more complicated than a game of chess. It takes a long time to recognize the formation of various patterns and what you might do to make more of an impact. Think about how long it takes to deeply understand our extended families, since the family’s rules have never been written down or in many cases clarified. For those willing to take the higher road to a stronger, better defined Self, the history of relationships tells what one is up against, and where one might be able to find chances to grow Self in altering old relationship patterns.”
— Andrea Maloney Schara