Serving My Skepticism

Beginning this blog has been difficult for me on multiple levels. I have had a block with starting it because I don't want to face the emotions that I know are going to arise with such sensitive and controversial topics. AKA I don’t want to feel pain! 

I am in a Family Relations class this spring semester and it is rocking my world, to say the least. I find myself becoming triggered by the content we discuss each week because it hits so close to home...which is exactly why I need to write about it! 

Family issues and dynamics hit the core for all of us because it's the center of our lives. It's in our family units that we learn who we are and what the world is. If that relationship is damaged in any way then that will affect the rest of your life either positively or negatively. Unfortunately for me it has been in rather negative ways up until about a year ago. 

I am in an intense therapy myself due to the current status of my marriage. I am working through deep betrayal trauma due to poor choices my husband has made and because of this trauma I have grown skeptical of marriage. 

Bitter. 

Uncertain. 

Mistrustful. 

Unconvinced. 

How can something that’s said to be so good hurt so badly? 

I am writing this blog as a way to decompress this skepticism and to, well, prove myself wrong that marriage is a good thing. This class is indeed proving that marriage is good through remarkable experiences shared by my professor and amazingly also by scientific data!

The second week of class we discussed “The Family as a Psychosocial System”, family mapping, genograms, etc. What stood out to me most was the assignment we were given to observe children interacting with their parents in a public setting. 

I observed a few different families at the public library. It was interesting to see how the parents engaged with their children. I noticed a pattern that parents were either too involved and suffocated the child with books or interactive play, or they were fairly disengaged and expected the child to play on their own while mom and dad spent time on their mobile device. The behavior in the children were almost identical with these two extremes! The child whose parent was a helicopter and hovered over their free time was irritable and expressing very loudly that they were not happy. The child whose parent was disengaged emotionally from the present experience was responding loudly to any irritant and expressing their displeasure through physical and verbal cues. Again, different situation yet same response. These children didn’t know why they were frustrated because they needed their parent to validate it and their parent’s behavior was invalidating to what that child clearly needed. So what caused this? Why was the parent who was over-engaged in the play disengaged from the emotions? Why was the parent who was disengaged emotionally unaware of the obvious distress from their child?

Having done this observation I then went home and made a list of the unwritten rules in my family. The expectations of behavior, thoughts and emotions that were never spelled out clearly yet we all knew they existed. 

A few of the unwritten rules in my home that were damaging to me were:

1.       It’s not ok to be angry.

2.       Don’t cuddle with dad.

3.       Don’t show mistakes/weaknesses.

4.       Don’t talk about bodily parts/functions.

5.       Silence is bad. Always fill it.

6.       Wanting something is selfish.

7.       White lies are ok sometimes but that’s judged by mom and dad.

8.       Always act like you’re ok.

As you can see my family structure was very authoritarian. Watching the rigid parents interacting with their children triggered a trauma response in me. It was good for these unresolved experiences to surface so that I could feel, identify, honor and release them from my being.