7
Grandma Passes Down More Than Just Her China
Cultural and Generational Messages
Grandma passes down much more than china or silver patterns. She passes down many other patterns as well in the form of family traditions, attitudes, beliefs, myths, scripts, roles, rules, expectations, disappointments, and rejection messages. Grandpa also does his share of passing down. In fact, many of these patterns can be traced several generations back.
And let’s not forget the influence of the family genes. In The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron describes how having a sensitive nervous system may actually be an inherited trait. Her research points to highly sensitive people as being “a distinct group, separate from the nonsensitive.”
One woman told me this story about her oversensitivity to certain sounds. “When I was growing up, everyone in my family was sensitive to the sound of food being chewed—especially crunchy food. It’s just like the sound of screeching chalk on a blackboard to me. The other day my husband was trying to make plans with me to celebrate my birthday. But as he was talking to me, he was eating a raw carrot. When he noticed I was inching away from him, he really got upset. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it, but clearly his feelings got hurt. I thought he knew how the food sounds upset me, but I guess he didn’t remember. He just got focused on how I was moving away from him, and he thought it was something he said. Now he says he’s hesitant to make plans with me to celebrate important events. Wow. Look at how my oversensitivity led to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. It’s a good thing we could talk about it.”
It is not known for sure if sensitivity to rejection is one of those inherited genes, but it certainly can be an inherited trait, passed down from generation to generation.
Rejection issues are sort of like recipes. “You know the saying ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?’” Fran asked. “Well, in my family it jumps right into the tuna fish salad.” Her granddaughter had been amazed to see Fran put grated apples and carrots in tuna salad. “I can’t believe you do that—my mother does that too!” And is it any coincidence that Fran’s mother and grandmother did the same?
But more than genes, recipes, and family heirlooms are passed down through the generations. Family legacies also determine how we experience our world and how we operate with our own children. For example, have you ever opened your mouth in anger to say something—but wait, where did those terrible, hurtful words come from? They don’t seem to belong to you, but you recognize them, don’t you? That’s right, you used to hear them from your parents. And your parents most likely heard them from their parents.
It’s the strangest feeling when you open your mouth and somebody else’s words come out—words or a tone of voice you haven’t even thought of in years. It’s unfortunate but true: messages that most often get repeated through the generations are the messages of rejection.
Some parents of young children are especially sensitive to rejection. They may perceive the children’s behavior as purposeful and take things personally; they may reject the children in turn.
Many of us have experienced times when we wandered off from a parent to explore new territory and got “lost.” Most of the time we knew where we were—it was our parents who thought we were lost. And what did they do when we showed up? Did they welcome us and comfort us? Probably not. They often guilt-tripped us or punished us, yelling, “How could you do this to me. You worried me to death!” Wouldn’t you say they took it personally?
When babies cry a lot, many parents feel helpless. This triggers some childlike behaviors in the parents, and they may overreact to their babies’ behavior. This is especially true for inexperienced, anxious, or frequently stressed parents. For example, babies are known to cry ceaselessly or spit out food or refuse to get dressed or turn away when a parent tries to hug or comfort them. But sometimes parents tell themselves that their baby doesn’t like them, thinking of themselves as inadequate or bad parents, even seeing these behaviors as accusatory. They may feel their baby is rejecting them and without realizing it they may begin to reject the baby back.
One young mother I know gave her baby the “cold treatment,” affecting a “how can you do this to me” attitude—acting hurt, pouting, ignoring her child. Then the baby began to copy the mother’s behavior by turning away as well. Mom then became even more convinced that the baby was doing it just to hurt her.
The Cyclical (and Reciprocal) Nature of Rejection
Parent-infant expert Selma Fraiberg describes how “in every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents.…” In a study of mothers and young children where there appears to be a lack of attachment, the researchers ask, “Why can’t this mother hear her baby’s cries? They learn that the young mother was herself rejected and neglected in her own childhood, and they conclude, “When this mother’s own cries are heard, she will hear her child’s cries.” And hopefully, the cycle of rejection in this family will end.
As I mentioned in chapter 6, this reciprocal nature of rejection was studied by Mary Main and her associates. Her initial idea involved researching attachment styles, but an enlightening follow-up study led reseachers to look into how rejection messages were passed down from generation to generation. The parents in the original study were given a questionnaire that asked about specific childhood memories of their relationships with their own parents. Examples of the questions were “Choose five adjectives to describe your relationship with both parents; explain what made you choose those adjectives”; “As a child were you held by parents for comfort?”; “Did you ever feel rejected by your parents?”
A fascinating generational pattern of rejection emerged. The mothers who tended to perceive their own mothers as “rejecting” and tried to protect themselves from further emotional hurt were the very same mothers whose infants avoided them following the brief separation. The study concluded that the mothers who felt rejected by their own mothers tended to reject their children who, in turn, avoided them in response to the rejection. By avoiding their mothers these children were in effect rejecting them. And the mothers, ultrasensitive to this rejection, took it personally and rejected their children in return.
Breaking the cycle takes a lot of work. I know this not only from my work with clients, I know it best from my own family experiences.
The cycle of generational messages became clear to me one morning when I got a 7:30 phone call from my daughter, Jocelyn. She was calling from the university, and something was on her mind that clearly couldn’t wait. “I figured it out,” she told me, “Now I know why I overreacted like I did. It was because I felt ignored.” She was recounting a recent argument with her friend Elise. “I was angry and flustered. I couldn’t speak clearly, couldn’t get across what I was trying to say. And Elise just sat there and didn’t say anything. She kept staring at me as I was trying to explain my feelings. She just kept nodding her head, repeating, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yes, I can see that.’”
“I finally managed to blurt out how angry I was. Then she answered slowly and deliberately, ‘Yes, Jocelyn, I see that you’re angry. I wish you could see yourself right now—the way you’re acting.’ Her patronizing behavior drove me crazy. I felt like stomping my feet, grabbing her and yelling, ‘Listen to me. Please listen to me!’
“Now I realize why I got so angry. It was as if what I had to say wasn’t worth listening to—as if it wasn’t important enough—as if I wasn’t important enough. Mom, this is how I used to feel sometimes when I was younger and I’d try to talk to you. When I was angry at you about something, I’d try to work up enough nerve to tell you. I’d sit in my bedroom and practice in my head what I wanted to say until it would come out right. I always felt very adultlike for having the maturity to tell you how I was feeling. Wasn’t that what you wanted me to be able to do?
“I’d walk down the hall and into your room and try to tell you how I felt. Somehow the words never came out the way they’d sounded in my head when I practiced. You’d listen and nod your head and say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ Then you’d say something like, ‘That must be really hard for you, Jocelyn. That’s a lot to have to worry about.’ I felt you were feeling sorry for me when it was you who was the center of my problem. I’d ask, ‘Mommy, are you listening to me?’ And you’d sort of mumble, ‘Yes, Jocelyn. It must be tough dealing with a mom like me.’
“I’d end up going back to my own room and crying. I was frustrated and angry because I felt ignored. I’d practiced so hard what I was going to say to you and I thought I was acting like such a grown-up. Instead I found myself feeling like a two-year-old—wanting to pull out my hair or stomp my feet to get your attention. And here I am, twenty-one years old, still acting the same way because I felt ignored by Elise.
“I wasn’t getting enough attention from you and I really felt hurt. I was trying to tell you something important, and you couldn’t hear it. I realize something now that I didn’t know then. You were most likely trying to protect yourself from your own hurt, and I guess that’s what Elise is trying to do now.”
It was no easier to hear this from Jocelyn in that phone call than it was ten years ago. And for a moment there, as I was listening to her tell me how hurt and angry she was, I again started to armor myself. It’s hard to stay in the present in the face of this kind of honesty, it reminded me of my own childhood hurts—all the times I’d felt ignored or dismissed. My pain was so great I had to armor myself from it back then. That’s why I had had so much trouble hearing Jocelyn. This time I could hear her a lot better because I wasn’t feeling so overwhelmed by my personal memories. This time I could let her see me as a real person.
Hand-Me-Down Feelings and Messages
Sometimes the generational legacy of rejection can be cruel. Remember Karen’s “barbed-wire” mother from chapter 6? Karen has vivid memories of how her mother would get mad at her and threaten to stick her in the oven as punishment. Karen was at a loss to explain her mother’s harsh threats until she recalled her grandmother’s basement and the baker’s oven in the wall. As we talked about her mother’s stories of being locked down there for punishment as a child, Karen finally put it together. “Now I get it. I’ll bet my grandmother threatened to stick my mother in that oven—maybe she even did. It probably scared my mother to death, and she began to scare me in the same way.” This memory doesn’t excuse her mother’s threats, but now Karen can understand the origin of her mother’s words. She can see how both of them grew up with the same core fears having to do with life and death.
In one woman’s family the life and death message that got passed down was “Life’s supposed to be a struggle,” and she seemed to be the designated struggler for her whole family. “I learned to protect myself by clawing and kicking and biting. Even now I’m always fighting someone—my lover, my supervisor, customers. I guess I’m still carrying on the ‘life’s a struggle’ tradition of my family.”
There’s no question that fear of abandonment is a prime core fear transmitted between generations. Before I was able to deal with my own issues about abandonment, I didn’t realize I was transmitting my fears of abandonment to my young daughter. After my mother and grandmother died, I spent a lot of time worrying that other people important to me might die. As it turns out, something happened that reinforced my fears: my stepmother died of cancer exactly ten years from the date of the plane crash.
Jocelyn used to worry about people dying, too. Whenever her dad or I were a few minutes late picking her up from nursery school or dance lessons, she convinced herself that we had died in an accident. As I outgrew my fears, Jocelyn outgrew hers as well. I first went into therapy when she was seven years old. She remembers being nine years old when her anxieties about death ceased. I don’t think it was a coincidence that this was when I began to get a handle on my own abandonment issues.
My abandonment fears also affected Jocelyn in the way I held back from allowing myself to show my love for her. I could love her, but not too much, because in my mind, if I invested too much love in her I might lose her just as I lost my mother and grandmother. So I held back emotionally, at the time not knowing why.
A turning point in overcoming my abandonment fears came in the form of a dream. I rarely remembered my dreams, but this one I was able to recall in vivid detail. I was in one of those little amusement park boats going through the tunnel of horrors. On each side of me, behind glass, were all the important people in my life who had died as well as all the people I feared might die. As the boat slowly made it’s way down the canal, I was able to speak to each of these people in turn, expressing my feelings of loss and my fears, getting some closure with each of them. It was a powerful dream. From that day on, my fears about death diminished considerably, and so did Jocelyn’s. As I no longer feared losing the people I loved, my capacity to show love for Jocelyn increased. There’s no question in my mind that as I began clearing the residual fears out of my head, she benefited as well. I wonder if she might have been helping me out all those years by sharing my fears. Sometimes children do that.
Maria’s story also shows how rejection messages are handed down. Her dad was called the “Black One” by his family in Mexico because he was darker than his brothers or sisters. As a child, he always felt his brothers and sisters received more favors, including new clothes. In fact, when his father bought shoes for the brothers and sisters, he refused to buy Maria’s father some shoes.
Maria has her father’s coloring and is somewhat darker than her sisters. As she was growing up she always thought her dad favored his lighter skinned daughters. Maria felt discriminated against when he didn’t allow her to have new shoes or clothing. She had no way then of knowing that he was treating her the same way his own dad had treated him. Maria began to see herself as worth less than her sisters. Her self-image soon translated to “worthless,” which permeated the way she related to her world.
Now, as an adult, Maria repeatedly finds herself attracted to men who tend to prefer blondes and redheads, then she berates herself for being worth less than the other women. By seeking out these men she continues to compare herself to others and comes out the loser each time. She recreates feelings of rejection and reinforces her concept of herself as unattractive, worthless, bad. She rejects herself.
Rude Awakenings
Sometimes the problem isn’t only messages that get passed down through the generations—it’s a lack of them as well. An example would be customs concerning family contact. When Bart comes into the kitchen each morning he never says a word to anyone. Well, to be fair, sometimes he kind of grunts. His partner, Bess can’t stand it. She would love to hear a “hello” from him and feels he’s ignoring her by not acknowledging her presence. She keeps trying to figure out what she did or said to make him so offish in the morning. In couples therapy, when she finally brought it up, he seemed surprised. He had no idea that he appeared so unfriendly.
Then he remembered how it was growing up. “In my family, no one ever spoke a hello, we just went about our business. In fact, we were so afraid of my dad, whenever he was around we all went into our separate bedrooms so we wouldn’t have to talk to him.” Bess was amazed at his revelation, “All this time I’ve been taking it as a personal rejection! In my family we all greeted each other with a big hello, it’s what I was used to. I guess I took it for granted it was the same for Bart. I never dreamed it might be so different in someone else’s family.”
I had a similar experience. When I was sixteen and my father remarried, my brother, Lee, and I acquired a stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister in the deal. I was stunned the first time I heard my stepmother greet my stepsister with a friendly “Good morning, Sunshine.” It was like a whole new world to me. No one had ever made it a point to greet one another in my family. I began to practice this kind of courtesy, but it didn’t come easily, and to this day I sometimes forget to bid my daughter a good morning. I still have to work at it.
The Sponge Effect
Children are great sponges, absorbing their parents’ anxieties or depression or anger. Taking in their parent’s pain isn’t a conscious act—it just seems to happen. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini, Prince of Tides, and Beach Music says, “One of the things I learned in my childhood is that I could take things on myself and hold it all in. I used to try and do that with my mother. If I could take her pain and hold it and hide it, that would make it better. Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”
When children absorb their parents’ intolerable feelings and share in the misery, it spreads the negative energy around and may allow parents to give more attention to themselves and their children. For example, my father used to brag, “Your mother and I never had an argument,” but I find it hard to believe they never disagreed or got angry with each other. Where did their angry feelings go? My brother and I used to fight all the time. We were acting out their unspoken anger—chipped teeth and all.
Children are like sponges, absorbing their parents feelings.
Perhaps because some children get so used to absorbing and acting out their parents’ feelings, they do the same with their partners later in life. They may find themselves getting angry for their spouse who “never gets angry,” or depressed for the mate who can’t acknowledge his or her own depression, or fearful for the lover who shows a brave face to the world. These are examples of projection and projective identification, which will be discussed later in this chapter. And it’s a boundary thing, not knowing what feelings belong to whom, not knowing where you stop and where someone else begins. (More about personal boundaries in chapter 11.)
Parents who have experienced anxious attachment in their own childhood are inclined to seek care from their children, according to the attachment and loss studies of John Bowlby. Children who become caretakers for their parents often become anxious, guilty, or phobic. Some children even stay home from school to keep an eye on the parent. This anxiety is called “school phobia.” It’s not a fear of school as many people believe, it’s a fear about the catastrophes that might befall a parent while the child is away from home. So the clever child tries to avoid the anxiety of worrying all day about the parent and devises excuses to stay home from school in order to protect the parent.
Good Kid/Bad Kid
Let’s take a look at the concept of “good” and “bad” within families. In some families one child appears to be designated as the “good” one, while another child is thought of as “bad.” It’s as if a script has been written and the children play out their respective roles. But unlike a play, this is for real, and there’s no room for the children to rewrite their lines.
These good and bad roles often span several generations. For example, Danny is named after his mother’s brother, Dan, who is the black sheep of the family. He looks like Uncle Dan, too, even down to coal black hair and blue eyes. He grew up hearing the litany of poor ole Uncle Dan’s badness—“He’s just no good. He gets into fights and loses one job after another because of the booze. He’s been married four times.” And Danny? It’s no surprise that he was called incorrigible in junior high school and was often kicked out of classes. When it was time for high school, he was sent to the school for “bad boys.” He married early and it lasted a year. He’s been married twice more for short periods. Danny came to think of himself as a bad boy, a failure. He began to believe his parents were right all those years when they used to tell him, “You’re just like your Uncle Dan.”
Keith’s experience of growing up was very different. “I was expected to be the one who accomplished everything my parents couldn’t. I had to make top grades; there was no room to be less than perfect because all the hopes and expectations for the future of my parents rested on my shoulders. It was up to me to perform ‘like a good little boy’ in order to meet my parents’ needs for a better life.” It wasn’t until Keith did a genogram, a family diagram with descriptive details about each family member, in my office with me, that he realized how his dad had been expected by his own father to succeed, but couldn’t do it well enough. So the mantle got passed down and now it was Keith’s turn. “The trouble is,” he now realizes, “I lost my identity by trying so hard to be the ‘good son’ they wanted me to be. I manufactured a “good boy” veneer with nothing underneath but sawdust.”
The notion of “good and bad” was another source of confusion for me in my childhood. I never knew from one day to the next whether I was supposed to be good or bad. You see, I had a “good girl” mom and a “bad boy” dad, and each seemed to have an expectation that I’d follow in their respective footsteps. Sometimes I was bad when my mother was counting on me to be good like her, and sometimes I was good when my father was expecting me to be bad like him. I guess I couldn’t always read their minds correctly. I guessed wrong a lot.
To make matters more confusing, my parents used to recite this nursery rhyme to me: “There once was a girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.” I was positive that rhyme was written about me. After all, I did have really curly hair, with at least one curl in the middle of my forehead. I was the same little girl who was banished from nursery school on the first day for throwing tantrums and being “uncontrollable.” And the same little girl who was asked to leave Sunday school a year or two later for being “disruptive.” And the very same high school student who was frequently booted out of study hall for disturbing every one by talking—they called me “obstinate.” By the time I was in college I didn’t want to be that “horrid” little girl with the curl any longer, and I not only started straightening my hair, but I started to clean up my act. Yet, to be honest, being “bad” was so much a part of my identity when I was growing up that a part of me still wants to hold on to it—my eyes glow at the thought.
Will the Real You Please Stand Up?
Often, we are unable to acknowledge certain aspects of ourselves. Parts of our personalities stay hidden from us because they are not acceptable to us. This is what Carl Jung called the shadow—the dark part, the part we don’t want to know about ourselves, and wish wasn’t there. This comes about in childhood as we can begin to notice we bring on someone’s displeasure by displaying certain emotions or behaviors. In other words, these emotions or actions were “bad,” they were unacceptable to others so we submerged them.
These cultural demands appear to affect boys at an earlier age than girls. Even before the age of five, boys are encouraged to “be real men,” to push down their feelings—especially soft, vulnerable ones. But for girls, societal influences make their strongest impact during preadolescence, according to studies by Carol Gilligan and the American Association of University Women. Girls, who until then have been confident and straightforward, begin to lose their ability to speak up for themselves. In order not to lose the love and approval of important people in their lives, they develop a “Perfect Girl” facade—compliant, nice, self-sacrificing. As they lose their voice and self-esteem, they reject their authentic selves. The case studies in Peggy Orenstein’s School Girls, Emily Hancock’s The Girl Within, and Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia offer poignant portraits of such girls.
So, rather than take a chance on feeling humiliated or rejected, both boys and girls learn to hide “unacceptable” behavior in order to get approval. The suppressed behavior might involve showing anger, sadness, independence, sensuality, curiosity, or talent. Robert Johnson, in Owning Your Own Shadow, says some of these hidden characteristics are “pure gold”—but we end up rejecting these parts of ourselves because they were unwelcome to family or society.
Johnson reminds us that these “refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of our personality.” In fact, they begin to seep out, most frequently when we judge or criticize others. We often cannot tolerate in others the very same traits we can’t stand about ourselves. Through a process of distortion called projection, we mistakenly imagine those traits exist in the other person when we cannot acknowledge them in ourselves because they are emotionally unacceptable. As one woman said, “If we can’t own our own stuff, we try to give it away to someone else. In a way, projection protects us from ourselves by spreading the garbage around.”
It really gets confusing when the other person accepts the projection and acts in accordance with it. This is called projective identification—a trading of feelings, needs, or thoughts. Maggie Scarf describes projective identification as “a psychological barter which occurs at an unconscious level.” It is a “displacement of what is inside the self to what is outside the self … seeing in the other what cannot be tolerated in the self.” This dynamic occurs not only between members of a couple, but between parents and children and in the workplace as well. For example, one person finds a feeling too “hot” to deal with; to acknowledge having it would cause the person extreme anxiety. So what happens? The person tosses it to the other person who takes it on, finds it’s too “hot” to hold, then throws it back. Because the first person disavows the feeling, the only way he or she can deal with it is via the emotions of the other person, who reciprocates by identifying with the projection.
For example, a woman who grows up in a family where there is an overt (or even covert) rule against expressing anger, may find her own angry feelings unacceptable. She may say to herself and whoever will listen, “I never get angry.” Because she disavows her own feelings, she may project them onto her partner (or child or co-worker) cueing, or even provoking, that person to act aggressively. While she’s calmly berating the other person for his or her anger, she doesn’t have to experience her own, because the other person is expressing her anger for her. The anger that she can’t deal with in herself is “out there” courtesy of her partner, and she can deal with it vicariously.
In a similar way the person who learned to “never be sad” sees his or her depressed moods only in the partner—who unconsciously conforms to the projection and carries the sadness and despair for them both. Scarf notes that the relationship begins to look different when one of the partners “has had the experience of taking back a projection—accepting that, for example, the craziness, hostility, incompetence, depression, anxiety, etc., that is being perceived in the partner may be emanating from the self.” Once the partner “has refused to accept a projection—to behave crazily, angrily, become depressed or the like, in order to accept the spouse’s suppressed and dissociated feelings—changes have to start occurring in the relationship.” Scarf goes on to say that “each member of the couple must reown and take responsibility for those aspects of his or her internal world which are being put onto the partner. This means learning to experience ambivalence—the good and bad within the other and the good and bad within the self,… seeing both one’s goodness and one’s badness, one’s craziness and one’s saneness, one’s adequacy and inadequacy, one’s depression and one’s happy feelings, etc., as aspects of internal experience rather than splitting off one side of any of these dichotomies and being able to perceive it only as it exists in the mate.”
Recognizing the disavowed parts, the dark side, leaves less room for critical judgment of others and of ourselves as well. Owning our shadow side as well as our more desirable features is an important part of the road to self-acceptance—to wholeness. There’s a lot of room in there for all the parts to coexist. Why not encourage them to befriend each other? Each part could teach the others quite a few things. They all have information to share, but you’ll find some of them are more talkative than others. Try getting to know them.
In The Missing Piece—Solving the Puzzle of Self, Drs. Claudia Black and Leslie Drozd suggest nine useful tools for embracing all aspects of yourself, and I’ve paraphrased them here:
• Motivation
• Commitment
• Strengths
• Healthy defenses
• Firm (not rigid) boundaries
• Ability to create a safe place
• Ability to be present, grounded, and balanced
• Ability to gain distance and perspective
• Ability to be
High Hopes
The legacy of high hopes for the next generation is poignantly portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, which follows the fears and hopes of four Chinese families through three generations. The mothers’ fears compel them to desperately try to arrange better lives for their daughters. The daughters see their mothers’ behavior as emotional or physical abandonment. The mothers’ hopes for their daughters are so high and their expectations so unrealistic that the daughters experience it as rejection.
In order to fulfill their own dreams, the mothers constantly prod their daughters to do better. Instead of supporting and encouraging them, the mothers criticize and nag them, creating intergenerational experiences of “raised hopes and failed expectations” by hoping for “something so large that failure is inevitable.” As Jing Mei tells her mother, “People rise to other people’s expectations. And when you criticize, it just means you’re expecting failure.” Her mother replies, “That’s just the trouble, you never rise. Lazy to get up. Lazy to rise to expectations.”
Jing Mei’s friend, Waverly, a child chess whiz, complains to her mother, “Why do you have to use me to show off. If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?” But her mother’s response is chilling, and Waverly remembers, “My mother’s eyes turned into dangerous black slits. She had no words for me, just sharp silence.”
Some children seem to know what their parents expect from them, but others get confused. I was one of those confused children and it hadn’t improved much when I reached adulthood. After my mother died, her sister would occasionally try to fill in as a long-distance substitute mother. She’d remember my birthday, send me “care packages” of clothes, keep in touch, and be supportive of my endeavors. When I was about thirty years old, she was hospitalized for surgery, and I called her and sent a get well card. Ten years later she told me how disappointed she was that I didn’t think to fly to her bedside when she was in the hospital. Of course I translated that to mean she was disappointed in me. I felt confused (and guilty) that it hadn’t crossed my mind to fly there.
A distant cousin explained the family “rule” to me. She said that my aunt may have seen me as a kind of “quasidaughter,” and in my maternal family, the daughters were expected to take care of their mothers. After all, hadn’t my own mother died while accompanying my ill grandmother to the Mayo Clinic?
The Messages Resonate
The influence of our families has an impact on us throughout our lives and in all of our relationships—friends, lovers, and colleagues. Let’s take a look at ways that early family patterns interfere. First of all, in any interaction between two people, there’s also a roomful of family members—both dead and alive—present. Let’s take a look at how many influences might be there. First of all, the messages of the mother and the father of each person are hovering around, so already we’ve got four other people in the room. If stepparents are involved, the number increases. Adding the influence of all the grandparents makes eight more people. It any wonder an angry interchange can be so powerful and overwhelming? Look at how crowded the room is, how many old messages might be flung back and forth, and how many people could be taking something personally at any given time. Is it any wonder confusion reigns?
During couples therapy you can imagine how intense my office can get with all this generational family energy around. Sometimes I want to put up folding chairs to accommodate everyone who is trying to get a word in. Criticisms and judgments of the brothers and sisters or mother or father or grandmother or grandfather get imported into the relationship. And the room fills up with so many thoughts, beliefs, or messages that don’t actually belong to the couple.
In order to make space for the couple to love each other, it’s important to keep these negative thoughts out. One way to do this is for the couple to have a “bad thoughts” jar—sort of like a chore jar that some families use for particularly nasty chores. The chore jar works like this: The chores no one wants to do are written on slips of paper and put into the jar. Whichever chore you draw is the one you do—no complaining allowed. But with the “bad thought” jar the thoughts go in, but don’t come out.
The couple’s task with the “bad thoughts” jar is to write down and toss into a jar or box whatever particularly nasty thoughts they may have. The jar functions as a container for whatever bad-mouthing, criticism, and general mean-spiritedness may have been passed down through the generations. Hopefully, when either one of the couple opens his or her mouth to speak to the other, his or her own words will come out, instead of the words of a mother or father or grandmother or grandfather. Maybe this will allow space for their words to be respectful, loving, and accepting. This is a way to keep the parents out and make space for the couple.
Work situations can get pretty overwhelming, too, when there is a disagreement between co-workers. Each individual’s family floats around the office, and the room can get crowded by all the thoughts and beliefs, each family member wanting to put in his or her two cents’ worth to liven up the negotiations. Again, all those old messages and influences need to be booted out to make room for the thoughts and words of the two people involved.
Situations at your job may replicate your very own growing up experiences. You might have a boss who ignores you, or insults you, or is heavy-handed. So you may find similar issues coming up at work that you experienced growing up—things such as loyalties and betrayals, secrets, alliances and coalitions, and communication deviances—and you may react the way your family has “taught” you to react.
Where exactly do these intergenerational messages come from? How can you learn to recognize them, especially the subtle ones? I often do a genogram with many of my clients to look for family patterns. In this family diagram it’s helpful to go back three generations, even if names and details aren’t known. This isn’t a diagram of history like a family tree where you look for dates and historical facts; it’s a diagram of the broad context and repetitive patterns and family messages that get passed down from generation to generation.
In any interaction between two people there’s also a roomful of family members present exerting generational messages and occasionally creating chaos.
Because of my interest in how fear of rejection affects personal and work relationships, I tend to look for patterns of acceptance or rejection messages that get passed down. This includes unavailability of parents due to drug, alcohol, or work addictions and family “scripts” such as good/bad, success/failure. Other messages passed down are personal safety issues, trust issues, guilt feelings and anger—often due to historical prejudice, or uprootings, or even mass tortures or deaths that have affected some religious, racial, or cultural groups. And then there are the various patterns of abandonment, such as chronic illness or early deaths or sudden moves from place to place, or parents who leave because of separations or divorce. One man discovered a pattern of disownings that took different forms throughout the generations. He’d had no idea such occurrences happened in his family.
I do genograms with individual clients, but it’s fascinating when working with couples, to have each partner draw their family genogram during a couples session. Then we can compare their family patterns to understand how exquisitely the couple “fits together.”
Here is Vanessa’s story; it shows how old family messages affect her fears that important people will not stay in her life. From the genogram she discovered how impermanence was a multigenerational refrain in her family. Her genogram is on page 134; however, I’ve streamlined it here so that it contains only the information pertinent to Vanessa’s fear of rejection and abandonment.
The firstborn child in Vanessa’s family was Van, who died at the age of two. Vanessa was conceived a few months after his death. So the name Van became Vanessa, and Vanessa became a replacement child for Van. “As I grew older I realized I was living in Van’s shadow, and every day was a struggle to be my own person,” recalls Vanessa. “I could never be that little boy they had pinned so many hopes on.” In addition, her parent’s fears that something might happen to her, too, were constantly hovering over her head. They tried to have another baby but were unsuccessful.
To complicate matters, Vanessa’s family moved from town to town every two or three years adding to her confusion about identity and security. She found herself leaving friends, schoolmates, and surroundings. And why did they move? “My mom always said that my father would get restless if we stayed too long in one place,” she said.
So what did we learn from Vanessa’s genogram? We saw that patterns of impermanence began to emerge as far back as four generations. On the paternal side, Vanessa’s great-grandmother died suddenly of an infection at age fifty-eight. Vanessa’s grandmother lost a child at six months of age, and when Vanessa’s father was seventeen years old, his forty-year-old father died in a boating accident. In addition, her “restless” father left them on and off several times during the first twelve years of her life.
And what about her mother’s side? When Vanessa’s great-great grandfather was a young boy, the family left their country and friends in Ireland to come to the United States during the Potato Famine. When Vanessa’s mother was sixteen years old, her own mother died suddenly from pneumonia at age thirty-eight. Vanessa’s mother married a few years after, choosing a man who also had a family history of loss and abandonment. Any fears that either of them may have carried came to be realized when Van died.
And how has this generational pattern of uprootings and loss and death affected Vanessa? Well, she has had one short-lived marriage, one not-very-long-term relationship, and currently has a very rocky romance where each of them keeps threatening to leave the other. All of her relationships have been with men who have their own family histories of sudden leavings and deaths. And, no, she does not have children. “Nothing’s permanent,” says Vanessa.
Figure 4: Vanessa’s Genogram