All Families Are Complicated (But Some More Than Others)

There is a particular experience that many people carry into adulthood, the wish that they had been raised within a different family. When reflecting on your family's complexities, tensions, and the things that were never spoken about (or the things that were spoken about too loudly), a logic can emerge that another ‘normal’ family would have been a preferable context within which to come of age. Other families, it seems, do not have these problems. Other families, it may be surmised, are functional in a way that yours was/is not.

The myth of the normal family

The ‘normal’ family (the one against which most people measure their own) is often a construction. A composite image assembled from curated versions of family life that other people present publicly. It might be social media posts or the carefully managed accounts of family life that friends and colleagues offer in conversation. What is not visible in any of these is the interior. The conflicts that are managed or suppressed, the histories that are not shared, the dynamics that operate beneath the surface of every family regardless of how well-functioning it may appear from the outside.

Looking to screen families (whether in television, film, or the aspirational domestic content that populates social media) as a measure of what family life should look like tends to produce the same distortion. These are also constructions rather than truths. They do not reflect the ordinary messiness of family life, with its compromises, its failures of attunement, and its persistent complexity.

What complicated actually looks like

Family complication takes many forms. At the more severe end, it includes physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, parental addiction, serious mental illness in the family system, neglect, and the sadly endless forms of harm that can be done to children by the adults responsible for their care. These experiences are damaging and they leave lasting marks on the adult self that was shaped by the environments within which children grow.

Complication also exists in families where: love was present but affection was not expressed; achievement was valued over emotional attunement; certain topics were permanently off the table; one parent’s needs consistently organised everyone else’s; or there was favouritism or triangulation or a family role that felt assigned rather than chosen. All of these family dynamics have a significant impact on the people who grew up within them.

The desire for safety

Often beneath the wish or longing for a different family (or the conviction that other families function in ways one’s own does not) is the desire for safety. The entirely reasonable and human wish to have grown up in an environment where the body was safe and respected, and where boundaries were acknowledged rather than violated. Where communication was encouraged rather than shut down, and where the emotional climate was predictable enough to allow a child to develop without constant vigilance or fear.

Beyond physical safety, children need to feel seen, heard, and attuned to. To have their emotional experiences acknowledged by the adults around them. To feel that their inner worlds matter and are responded to with care. That attunement can be absent for a number of reasons: through parental preoccupation, emotional unavailability, mental illness, neglect, or a family culture that did not make space for feelings or understand ow to demonstrate attunement.

Safety is not an unreasonable ask. It is the baseline that every child deserves. The difficulty is that it is not the baseline that every child receives. And the gap between the safety that should have been present and the environment that actually was, is often where the most significant psychological work lies.

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space to reflect upon and see your family clearly, exploring your feelings about what took place in your early years, compared to what you wish had occurred.

Understanding what actually happened within the family and what it has shaped in each of us, tends to be a a very significant piece of therapy work. A clearer relationship with our early experiences, can change what the present and the future can look like for us all.

If you are thinking about your family dynamics and feel that you would benefit from support with this journey, you are welcome to get in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.