IS YOUR FAMILY MESSY? Here are some questions that can help you decide.

• Is communication within your family fuzzy, confusing, or sometimes non-existent?
• Do some people in your family continually do things that hurt others, intentionally or not?
• Are kids acting out—a lot, all the time?
• Is everyone walking on eggshells?
• Is addiction a problem? Or chronic illness?
• Are some family members cut off from the rest—completely unreachable, but nobody knows why?
• Does one family member dominate all the others?
• Are there big secrets?
• Have you ever tried to change your behavior but couldn’t because the others pulled you back?
• Is your family challenged from every direction without knowing what to do?

If a number of these descriptions fit your family and no one knows how to make it better, it’s messy. Of course, there are degrees of messiness. We are talking here about seriously constrained families that are hard to be a part of, that cause members to feel stuck, unable to leave but unable to deal with the pain of staying.

In this type of family, the secrets and lack of deep communication (which could expose hidden information) cause each member to fill in the gaps in what they know about the others. They invent what they don’t know. They make assumptions about the others that they accept as truth. The family ends up being a group of figments of each other’s imagination. Then everybody in the family becomes combative against everyone else because they’re being treated as someone other than who they are.

It’s hard to be a member of a family like this. You love your people, of course, but you may not like all of them, or you may not always like their behavior. In fact, you may spend a lot of time feeling angry, sad, or depressed because your family is like this. And you may want it to change but fear change could make it worse.

I’ve spent more than 45 years as a family therapist working with very messy families, helping them unravel the knots and figure out what internal and external forces are pushing parents, spouses, siblings, and children into negative patterns of behavior over generations. I first worked with families in the South Bronx, NY, in the 1980s when it was the most challenged community in the country. They experienced breakdown from every direction, and they taught me much of what I know about the implosion of families and communities. I want to bring messages from these families, who have worked their way into healthier ways of being, to other people out there who may feel stymied amid the frustrations and battles they experience in their families day after day.

Families don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re the building blocks of their communities. Messiness is on the increase in families across the country, which means that communities are getting messier, too. Communities are the building blocks of a country; community health and well-being is essential to the health and well-being of a nation, especially if it’s democratic. That’s why there’s urgency in sharing the understanding I’ve gained from working with so many challenged families. Their pathways to healthier relationships, if widely followed, could bring strength even to nations.

So, what did I learn over these years? In this short letter, I’ll try to summarize that knowledge.

First, the members of a messy family want above all to protect it, as counterintuitive as this may seem. Of course there are tremendous problems, so you might think everyone would just want to move as far away as possible and cut all ties. Sometimes a few members do that, but typically each member’s identity revolves around their family, and they may be driven to understand why it’s so difficult, why it demands so much of their energy. Beneath all the drama, they’re attached to these people they’re related to, even though they usually blame others for all the problems. They want their family to remain intact, and it’s important to understand that this can motivate many of their often ugly behaviors.

This is a paradoxical situation: it is the unhealthy relationships that bind members of this type of family to each other and to the family as a whole. If a family member were to escape from these difficult relationships, they wouldn’t automatically be free and healthy. Instead, they would be floating outside somewhere alone, unrelated to anyone, untethered. For these family members to be truly free, the family as a whole has to heal, so that every member is still connected, but in relationships that are finally healthy.

We live in a blame culture, so it’s natural and typical for family members to identify another member as the cause of the family’s problems. Sometimes they mostly agree on who it is. That person is the identified patient. But finding a scapegoat doesn’t solve anything. In fact, identifying a skunk at the picnic escalates the situation. After all, if there’s a skunk, what happens to the picnic? Furthermore, it takes the same pattern over multiple generations to create the messiness in families. Therefore, blaming someone in the current generation for the problems is ludicrous.

If a person wants to help their family but feels unable to because they are so stuck, there are steps they can take to help their fellow family members relate to each other more effectively. Suppose you are this person: here are some things you can do.

A first step is to become more of an observer of the drama than a participant, but it’s important not to judge others as you do this. That’s hard. Judging others, which we’re taught to do, allows us to put all our focus on them instead of looking at our own contributions to the problems. It frees us from responsibility for our involvement, and that feels good. What’s helpful is to become a neutral observer, refraining at first from interpreting what you’re seeing. You just notice.

One framework for your observations is to notice people’s roles in the family. Is one person louder or stronger than others? That person may be a fixer or a bully. And that person might be the most successful, with a lot of money or an important position. Someone else may be the communicator, who is usually shunned or pushed out for potentially creating dangerous conflict. In every generation there will be someone for whom conversation is important. Another person may be chronically ill; their illness enables them to shut down conflict by having a distracting episode. One member may be the people- pleaser, who tries to smooth everything out by becoming a chameleon, catering to everyone.

These are some of the roles you may see in your family. It’s important to know that in messy families, the roles are fixed: the family members can’t get out of them because of the way each role shuts down the others and pulls people back into the status quo. But no one will be allowed to succeed in their roles either. It’s a lose/lose situation, and everyone feels like a trapped failure.

However, each person at times feels encouraged by their role. They have something they’re determined to do and they try hard. They feel limited success until they soon get ground down by the family dynamics. Because of the family members’ limited possibilities, when they get challenged from either the outside or within, their behaviors get uglier, and anger can reach a boiling point, as it does in domestic violence.

It’s very important for you to understand that everyone in the family is stuck, not just you. That understanding helps to diffuse some or most of the blame, but then comes the difficult part, which is to use this knowledge to create some change.

To do that, when you’ve amassed enough information, you have to look carefully at what you’ve learned in your observations in order to identify patterns running through the behaviors you’re seeing. You will find that family members have consistent ways of triggering and reacting to each other. Notice who initiates conflict repeatedly, and who shuts it down, whether by screaming or leaving or undercutting or having an episode of illness. Notice who always backs up another member, or who always attacks another. Notice who is typically shunned and by whom. Noticing these patterns will help you understand more about how family members’ roles function to maintain rigidity. For a messy family as a whole, rigidity is the most important pattern. The interweaving of roles creates a force that, like gravity, cannot be thwarted. Once you understand this, along with knowing who has which role, you will be able to predict how everyone will react to any kind of incident.

Your ability to predict outcomes will become an important tool for you. The other members, while being oblivious to the family’s dynamics, will notice this new ability you’ve gained and be puzzled by it. You can begin to describe some of the things you’ve observed, being careful to word your descriptions in ways that prevent anyone from thinking you are judging. Judgment will shut everything down again, whereas your nonjudgmental descriptions will pique interest. You can begin to help others see the family’s dynamics from a systemic, depersonalized point of view and understand that everyone is locked in the prison of their entanglement. That’s when the rigidity will begin to soften and real change will slowly become possible.

This process is not easy. As you begin to quietly shift your stance and abandon your pattern of reaction, others will initially attack you, trying to pull you in. You will need courage and perseverance to hold your ground. Your refusal to judge others will be the biggest arrow in your quiver.

One danger in trying to help your family in this way is that you might inadvertently destabilize its homeostatic balance, which families typically won’t let you do. If you are headed in that direction, you will notice an uptick in resistance.

During this process, don’t personalize any behavior directed toward you. It’s part of the rigidity, and other family members will do whatever they can to prevent you from changing their behaviors. Rigidity doesn’t take into account who people are deep down. It treats people as if they are their roles, which makes them angry because they’re being treated as someone they aren’t.

Now that you have some idea about this process for loosening up a messy family and helping its members learn to relate to each other in healthier ways, you may be wondering if you could apply it to your own family. Do you think it might take a miracle for you to do this? It may help if you can find someone else in the family to do it with you. If you think there is such a person, you could say to them, “If I found a way to make it easier to be part of our family, would you be willing to work with me?” Then you could share this letter with them.

I’ve learned that to leverage change, it takes only one person with some knowledge and the determination to persevere. The perseverance is difficult at best, but the key is to keep reminding yourself that the behaviors of other family members are driven by their roles. Don’t mistake those behaviors for the person. When the roles begin to soften, thus allowing people to begin to change the way they interact, you’ll be attacked less often, and you’ll begin to see the others as they really are outside their roles.

If you start this process, even with help from another family member, you may run into difficulty. At that point, you could try to find a therapist with training in family therapy to coach you. You could show them this letter to help them understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Also, if you get stuck or have questions, my website has resources (www.chaosinstitute.org), and I am available for consultation. My contact information is there.