The Family is not a Lawnmower!

Apr 01, 2024

If a lawnmower doesn’t work because the spark plug is broken, we replace the faulty part, and it can hum in the garden again. But what if a family member “breaks down”?

What if our child starts getting bullied at school, or the mother becomes an alcoholic, or the father has a gastric hemorrhage? Is changing schools, removing alcohol, or patching up the stomach enough? Just like changing a lawnmower's spark plug?

Not quite. Members of smaller or larger human groups operate in a much more complex network of interactions. Everyone affects everyone. One of my favorite films is "Wolves of Yellowstone” which you can find on YouTube. The film is only five minutes long, but it perfectly shows the complexity of nature and how a seemingly minor change can have extensive effects.

The family, too, is subject to myriad influences, with every member enduring daily positive or negative experiences that indirectly affect the entire system. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes quite pronounced. Consider that merely the event of a father changing jobs can have reverberations throughout family life in various ways.

So, when someone talks about their father, mother, son, daughter, wife, or husband being unfaithful, aggressive, alcoholic, depressed, struggling with anger, irresponsible, extremely lazy, asthmatic, infertile, etc., I always try to understand the circumstances.

It’s never solely about one person's weakness, flawed nature, addiction, or illness. It’s about how that person maintains equilibrium through their illness, addiction, or bad behavior in the family. They might not have found the best method and failed to establish healthy balance, but at least they are trying to find equilibrium.

Every family is only as healthy as its least healthy member. This means that even though only one family member shows symptoms of a mysterious, often subconscious problem, the whole family system suffers from some kind of disorder.

Staying with the above example, when a father is submerged in a sea of work in his workplace and there is tension between the parents because the mother feels lonely and alone with all the housework and child rearing, one of the children might become severely asthmatic or can have a series of accidents, or develop an addiction directing the father’s attention back to the family. This causes obvious difficulties for the family, the little child suffers, and the adults worry more, but the child reached his or her unconscious goal, family unity is maintained and the father pays more attention to the affaires at home. The child, at his or her level, solved the most concerning problem, since the unity of the family is the most important thing for a little child, who with their child-minds do not make the connection between the work the father does and the money they live on.

Or in another example, the mother has unprocessed grief originated from a miscarriage and is unable to connect to her other child emotionally. The child might become ill, aggressive, or depressed.

Systemic disorder can also manifest when one family member, for example, the father, suffers from overweight or severe health issues while the others are thin and healthy. (More about this in “The ‘Fat Kid’ Syndrome”)

It’s easy to dismiss in such situations and put all the responsibility on the “troublesome” person, but it leads nowhere. To solve the issue, we need to understand the family dynamics and the real motivation behind the behavior, illness, or problem. Once we understand that, we can truly see what we are dealing with, change the situation, and then establish a new, healthy balance for the whole family.

– Eszter