How do I cope when family life becomes too hard to deal with?

Thank you for your question – you have given me a very good picture of what’s going on with you and your family and how you are feeling in it. I can see that you have come to the end of your tether and that you want something different for your life, and I fully understand that.

By way of responding to your question, I’ll write a little bit about family systems and how I see yours, according to the information you’ve given me, and what I think would be helpful for you.

When family counsellors work with families that are experiencing distress, they try to look past the individual family members and view the family as a system that has its own life and energy and that has distinct patterns of operation that are often outside the awareness of the individual family members. These systems have particular attributes of cohesion, or distance and closeness, as well as flexibility, or rigidity and chaos. The level of cohesion in a family is reflected in the emotional bonding family members have with one another, and the level of flexibility is reflected in the family’s ability to permit changes in roles and rules within the family structure. Too much cohesion causes the family to be enmeshed and overly entwined in each other’s lives; too little cohesion causes members to be distant and isolated. Too much flexibility leads to chaos, and too little to rigidity - sticking to the existing spoken or unspoken rules, and stagnation. A family that is functioning well will have a good balance between stability and change (healthy flexibility) and will be together but allow separateness (healthy cohesion). A third element necessary for healthy family functioning is communication – the family’s ability to listen to each other – and this either facilitates or impedes flexibility and cohesion.

It sounds as if your family’s system has difficulty communicating and listening carefully to one another, and family members are quite enmeshed with each other. The reason I say this is that you are feeling misunderstood, attacked, manipulated and wrongly accused by many of your family members, that the messages are being passed between family members about you (rather than directly to you), and that your family system is looking inward, so that the conversations and stories are commonly about other family members and their effects on the stability of the overall system (the effect of the behaviour of family members on other family members); there is a lot of blame, and nothing much changes over time. This is raising the levels of anxiety throughout your family system, and of course in you.

Something that happens within families to reduce the anxiety levels is triangling, and it sounds like this is what’s happening in your family. A triangle is a 3-way relationship where the anxiety has risen between two of the family members to such an uncomfortable level that one brings in a third member to offload about it, thus distancing themselves from the member they have difficulty with and coming closer to the one they have drawn in. This in turn can create its own intensity and once again a third person can be drawn in to talk about it, and this can go on forever, especially in a family that is enmeshed.

The way you are thinking is a family process that Family Systems Theory has identified as one way family members reduce their anxiety – distancing or at the extreme, emotionally cutting off the family members that cause them the most anxiety. This can feel wonderful at first, because the person feels relieved of the stress, and free. Down the track though it can cause other problems for the person in that they look for the closeness they’ve lost with their family in either their work or people outside the family, sometimes with disastrous results – for example, workaholism, or overwhelming friends or partner with the unmet needs from the family system.

Having said that, I think that sometimes it can be very beneficial to pull back from the family temporarily – to obtain relief and some peace for oneself, to find your personal power again, and to find yourself again and who you are apart from your family. Sometimes in an enmeshed family this differentiation from the rest of the family isn’t completed during the teen years because of the pull of the family to continue to “be like us”, so it happens later on when that demand becomes threatening to the person’s sense of self.

Something that you could do that would make good use of your time apart from your difficult family members would be to obtain counselling with a qualified family therapist. At some time during therapy you may have the opportunity, and feel ready, for one or more family members to come into the session with you so that you are all able to feel heard by each other in a safe environment. You may find after you have been in counselling for a while working through your family and personal issues that you are feeling stronger and are able now to reconnect with some of the folk that are distressing you at the moment – slowly, carefully and safely, of course. That way, if the family member is in your experience still too toxic for you, you can withdraw again easily.

It’s great that you have a romantic partner that you can feel close and safe with, good friends and of course your faithful dog – these are all factors in maintaining good mental health in the face of a family crisis.

I wish you all the best with your pursuit for peace and strong healthy family relationships.

Penny