The term “enabler” has gained widespread recognition and use in popular culture and media over the past several decades. It is a label that can result in a great deal of anxiety and guilt for anyone who has been accused of being, or suspects that they may be, an enabler.

In its original context, enabling refers to a pattern within the families of people addicted to alcohol and drugs, wherein the family members excuse, justify, ignore, deny, and smooth over the addiction. This notoriously allows the addicted person to avoid facing the full consequences of his or her addiction, and the addiction is able to continue.

In a wider sense, enabling can describe a pattern of behavior that becomes organized among the family and friends of not just an addicted person, but any person who is exhibiting poor choices that harm themselves or others and for which they are not being held responsible.

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Who are enablers? Enablers can be romantic partners, ex-partners, parents, adult children, siblings, or friends. The one thing that all enablers have in common is this: they love someone who is out of control, and they find themselves taking more responsibility for the actions of that person than the person is taking for themselves.

The one thing that all enablers have in common is this: they love someone who is out of control, and they find themselves taking more responsibility for the actions of that person than the person is taking for themselves.

Who is enabled? The enabled person may be one who is refusing to take on responsibilities he or she would otherwise be expected to take on in the course of age- and stage-appropriate development. The enabled person may be exhibiting a range of poor choices with alcohol and drugs, ranging from abuse to addiction. This may also encompass poor choices around so-called “soft addictions” such as gambling, pornography, or excessive video gaming. He or she may refuse, or appear unable, to fulfill normative roles of adulthood. If a parent, he or she may underperform or disregard the responsibilities of parenthood. He or she may frequently disrupt romantic partnerships. The enabled person often displays poor money management, as well as disorganized academic and/or career-planning choices. He or she may quit or be fired from a series of promising jobs and educational or training programs. The enabled person often describes himself/herself as a victim of circumstances or of other people.

The enabled person’s behavior elicits a great deal of anxiety within the people who love him or her. This creates a dysfunctional system into which people who are close to, love, or care for the person can become enmeshed: compelled to organize their own behavior around the needs and choices of the enabled person.

Some who use the term “enabler” do so with a heavily negative judgment against the person who fulfills the role. It is commonly believed that enablers are knowingly, even willingly, complicit in the actions of the person they are enabling; that enablers support and condone the negative choices of the person they are enabling.

This is far from true. Enablers do not like or feel OK with what the enabled person is doing. To the contrary, enablers are often the ones most affected by, and most disturbed by, the negative behaviors of the enabled person. They feel extremely anxious about the destructive consequences that the enabled person could face.

Consider the following quotes from self-described enablers in therapy:

• “If I kicked him out, he would be homeless. He’s so irresponsible with money, he could never make it on his own. What else am I supposed to do?”
• “Every time I’ve tried to talk to her about her addiction to those pills, she’s gone on an even worse binge, and I’m afraid she will overdose.”
• “I know I shouldn’t have paid for his lawyer after the third DUI, but if he went to jail, he would lose his job.”
• “Every time she and her boyfriend fight, she crashes here. I let her because I know he can be violent, and I don’t want her to be hurt. I wish she would leave him for good.”

In other words, enablers detest the behaviors of the enabled, but they fear the consequences of those behaviors even more. They are locked into a lose-lose position in the family. Setting boundaries feels like a punishment, a rejection, or an abandonment of the person they love. Enablers may struggle with the guilt they would feel if the person they’re enabling were “left alone” to be hurt and damaged by the real consequences of their actions. In some instances, enablers are also protecting themselves and/or children from those consequences.

Enabling, therefore, is a distorted attempt to solve problems. Enablers desperately desire to find a solution to the issues at hand, but their attempts to do so are severely limited by the dysfunctional family system.

Enablers frequently find themselves thinking things like:

• “If only I can keep this person going through their current crisis, it will buy us another day.”
• “If I can’t change what they’ve done, at least I can help limit the damage of that choice.”
• “Maybe my loved one will wake up and come to his or her senses. Maybe a real solution is waiting right around the next corner.”

Enabling has the effect of releasing the enabled person from having to take responsibility for his or her behavior. Enabling means that someone else will always fix, solve, or make the consequences go away. When someone is in the throes of an addiction or other grossly dysfunctional behavior pattern, he or she begins to rely on the resources available. Enabled persons will come to expect that their behaviors are disconnected from consequences or negative outcomes. Enabled persons may even begin to hold their enabling family members in “emotional hostage” in order to keep this pattern going. They may learn to manipulate their enablers in order to ensure that the help and support keep coming.

In this kind of a system, everybody loses by inches. The enabler is desperate to prevent one enormous crisis, but winds up experiencing a constant state of stress as he or she attempts to manage each smaller daily crisis. Enablers generally are aware that they are being taken advantage of in some way; they often report feeling frustrated, unappreciated, and resentful.

The enabled person becomes stuck in a role in which he or she feels incompetent, incapable, disempowered, dependent, and ineffectual. He or she may gradually accept a self-concept that includes these negative traits, destroying self-esteem.

How, then, does the enabled person also “lose”? The enabled person may wish he or she felt in control of themselves, particularly with regard to addiction; but lacking the life experience and lessons that facing consequences brings, they may not know how to break those patterns. They may not have had the benefit of true self-reflection and self-evaluation of their behaviors. The enabled person becomes stuck in a role in which he or she feels incompetent, incapable, disempowered, dependent, and ineffectual. He or she may gradually accept a self-concept that includes these negative traits, destroying self-esteem and rendering the person even less likely to suddenly do a 180 and become responsible and self-sufficient in the future. The enabled person may essentially be prevented from building the skills and motivation he or she needs in order to practice responsibility and reach his or her full potential. Because the enabler(s) will always solve problems for them, the enabled person does not learn how to solve their problems themselves.

By this point, you may be thinking, “I can see some of the ways I have been enabling my loved one. What now?”

You must accept that while your enabling behaviors come from a place of love, enabling is an ineffective way of solving problems at best; debilitating to all involved at worst. You may buy another day or prevent another emergency, but in the end, you are only postponing the real solution.

The key to breaking the pattern of enabling is to return responsibility to the person it belongs to. This involves setting boundaries between yourself and your loved one. You can no longer attempt to take on responsibility for anyone else’s actions but your own. Your loved one’s choices are (and have always been) his or hers. Your loved one’s outcomes and consequences, as well, belong to him or her alone.

The enabled person lives in the same world, with the same rules, as everybody else. Managing their world for them means that they don’t learn to manage themselves within the world. He or she is very likely to have untapped internal and external resources which have not been utilized because the enabling pattern has short-circuited their growth.

When you set boundaries, you release your need to control the outcomes that your loved one experiences. You allow your loved one the chance to connect his or her own choices to the positive and negative experiences that naturally follow. Their choices, their consequences, and what they do or don’t learn from them are all on their side of the boundary.

On your side of the boundary, this means that you must learn to cope with, and internally manage, the anxiety of not being in control of your loved one. Many recovering enablers find that they must rely on their own sources of support to help them overcome the urge to control and enable. The fear of your loved one being hurt can be so overwhelming that setting boundaries and stepping back can be panic-inducing. Receiving counseling for further insight and support in this area is highly recommended.

When you stop enabling, this does not mean that you stop loving the person. It does not even mean that you cannot help him or her.

When you stop enabling, this does not mean that you stop loving the person. It does not even mean that you cannot help him or her. There is a difference between healthy help and enabling. Healthy help involves providing information, encouragement, and coaching to your loved one. You may give your loved one contact information for doctors, counselors, lawyers, or rehabilitation programs, without feeling the need to force him or her to accept this help. You may discuss with your loved one what the possible consequences of actions might be, without feeling as if you must make sure they make the choice you want them to make. Healthy help puts your loved one in control and allows you to take a secondary role.

Enabling is essentially love turned to fear, and help turned to control. The effects of enabling are toxic to all involved. With a solid understanding of what enabling is, and what it is not, there is hope for families who are acting out this pattern. An experienced individual and/or family counselor can be a valuable source of support for anyone who is looking to break enabling patterns.

“Jeanette” and “Tim”—names and identifying information have been changed—have been married for seven years when they seek couples counseling. Tim complains to the therapist that each time the couple argues, Jeanette phones her mother, Barbara, to vent. Tim has become uncomfortable around his mother-in-law, feeling as though Barbara has formed a negative opinion of him as a result of these conversations. Tim also feels that the involvement of Barbara makes it more difficult for him and his wife to work on their marriage together. Jeanette insists that she has tried and failed to talk things out with her husband and that she needs her mother’s input in order to resolve her feelings.

“Kristen” is the 17-year-old “baby” in a family of three siblings. As each of her older siblings grew up and left home, Kristen sensed increasing tension in her parents’ marriage. Recently, her father began to confide in Kristen regarding the conflicts between himself and her mother. She fears that upon her graduation from high school, her parents’ marriage may dissolve and they will seek a divorce. She is worried that her father, in particular, will be extremely negatively impacted if this occurs. Kristen’s grades have dropped and she is procrastinating on completing her college applications. She is considering staying at home to work instead of attending her dream university because she is fearful of leaving her parents “alone with only each other.”

“Joe,” “Mike,” and “Eddie” are brothers in their forties. While Joe and Mike frequently argue and find fault with one another, Eddie subsequently receives phone calls from each of his brothers complaining about, blaming, and accusing one another. Eddie feels as if he is constantly being pulled into the middle of a decades-long conflict between his brothers, and spends long hours speaking to each of them in an attempt to move them toward resolution. He has begun to avoid family gatherings in anticipation of the stress of being his brothers’ referee. Eddie’s wife “Lisa” observes the stress he is under and is frustrated by the toll this family conflict has taken on her husband.

In each of these scenarios, a dyad (two-person relationship) has become taxed and communication strangled, which has resulted in the triangulation of a third party into the relationship.

Triangulation is a family therapy concept discussed most famously by multigenerational family systems theorist Murray Bowen. Bowen described dyads as being inherently unstable under stress, much like a two-legged stool. When in balance, the dyad is capable of functioning well and meeting the needs of both people in it. However, when thrown out of balance by conflict, stress, or transitions, the dyad will often pull in a third person, or “leg” of the stool, to help them stabilize the relationship.

According to Bowen, some triangulation is normal and even healthy in the course of a family’s interactions. Because dyads are inherently unstable, the involvement of a third party can assist a two-person relationship in overcoming impasses, meeting needs, and coping through stressful times. For instance, two children who are arguing over a toy may seek out a parent to help them resolve the conflict. This kind of triangulation occurs because both of the people in the dyad are looking for healthy and effective mediation. When the triangulated person gives input, it is accepted into the dyad and processed together in a way that moves the original dyad forward in their relationship. Healthy triangulation can also occur in the context of parents (or other family caregivers) who come together to meet the needs of a third member, such as a child.

Triangulation can become unhealthy in families when it causes undue stress on the third party and/or when it prevents, rather than invites, resolution of the dyad’s conflict.

In the case of Jeanette and Tim, the triangulation of Barbara is being sought by only one of the spouses. Furthermore, the input provided by Barbara is not being brought back into the marriage for joint processing by both spouses. It is being withheld by the wife for her own individual purposes. Jeanette’s conversations with her mother are essentially taking the place of the emotional process that needs to be occurring within the marriage itself in order to return the marriage to healthy functioning.

In the case of Kristen, the 17-year-old high school student, her triangulation into her parents’ marriage is both active and passive. Her father has actively placed Kristen in the role of confidant, replacing communication that should be occurring between husband and wife. Kristen has also been passively placed by her dysfunctional family system into a role in which she must sacrifice her own individuation and growth in order to serve her parents’ emotional needs. Although her mother and father may not be expressly stating this to Kristen, the message is clear: The parents are relying on Kristen’s presence in the home in order to avoid confronting the breakdown of their marriage.

Finally, in the case of brothers Joe, Mike, and Eddie, the triangulation of Eddie over the course of many years has simply become an ingrained part of the conflict-heavy dyad between Joe and Mike. Joe and Mike have become accustomed to being able to discharge the anger and tension of their dyadic relationship onto a neutral party. After they utilize Eddie to manage their emotions, they return to their battles with one another with ever-renewed energy. The triangulation in this case is a piece of the unhealthy cycle rather than an honest attempt to seek mediation. Eddie has begun to bear the symptoms of the dysfunctional relationship, and his own bonds with uninvolved family members are crumbling under the weight of his “referee” role.

It is predictable that everyone will encounter triangulation in their family relationships at some point, whether as one of the dyad seeking stability or as the third party who is being put in the middle. If you find yourself involved in a triangle, it is helpful to ask yourself a series of questions in order to determine whether this triangle will ultimately be beneficial or harmful to the family system:

• Are both people in the original dyad jointly seeking the input of the triangulated member?
• Is the input of the triangulated member being brought back into the dyad itself for mutual discussion and consideration?
• Is the dyad openly and directly communicating with one another before, during, or after the triangulation occurs?
• Is everyone involved, including the third party, able to speak frankly and express their own emotions and opinions authentically?

If the answers to the above questions are yes, then the triangulation is likely to be of the normal type which necessarily occurs in families over time.

• Does any member of the triangle feel overly forced, pressured, stressed, blamed, or manipulated by the interaction?
• Does any member of the triangle feel as if he or she is not allowed to speak freely, express emotions, or ask for needs to be met?
• Is the triangulated member being pulled into an inappropriate role (such as a child being parentified or overly confided in by a parent)?
• Is this part of an ongoing pattern of interaction in which the original problems never seem to be resolved?

If the answers to the above questions are yes, then the triangulation may be the type that is unhealthy and dysfunctional in the overall family system.

If you find that unhealthy triangles are occurring in your family, there are steps you may take to counteract the negative effects of such triangles:

• A triangulated person can decide to step out of the middle by refusing to speak about the conflict with the involved members. The triangulated person may inform the two people in the dyad that he or she will continue to have a relationship with each of them that does not include taking a referee, peacemaker, or other inappropriate role.
• Encourage the original two-person dyad to speak to one another rather than projecting their conflict outward. Open, honest, and direct communication between family members is the most efficient antidote to dysfunction in families.
• If a triangle is still needed for the dyad to stabilize, encourage the two people to seek a professional mediator, counselor, or therapist. The professional will likely become triangulated, but can step into the triangle with a background of training and objectivity which will allow the professional to work from his or her triangulated position to help the dyad return to healthy functioning.

I think you hit on an essential element of your situation—it seems to be working for you. It’s very easy to get caught up in “shoulds” and external expectations and lose sight of the fact you and your partner may choose to create a satisfying life together that might seem unconventional to others. It matters less that you are a great feminist in the abstract, and more that you are feeling satisfied with the relationships in your life.

That said, I do wonder about your hesitation to talk openly about it with him. The fact you are worried about the “hassle” and “emotional toll” of talking about it says to me that perhaps something is not quite working for you. Right now, the affair is a “secret,” and keeping big secrets tends to undermine relationships rather than foster healthy, stable ones. It may work in the short term, but think about how much energy is going into each of you pretending the affair is not happening. That is hard work! At some point, one or both of you may just get too tired to maintain the pretense. Eventually, secrets tend to come out. What might happen if your husband were to discover months from now that you knew all along? What are you afraid might happen if you were to talk about it now? What do you fear you might lose? What might there be to gain? You may want to consider talking with a therapist to explore your fears and hesitation, and also to take an affirmative look at what you do want from your relationships and your life as you move forward.

You mention two positive elements of this affair—you get some alone time that you enjoy, and your husband has been more attentive and caring. It seems like that may be a place to start as you consider what it is that you want. If you are honest with yourself about what you want and need, then you will have the information you need to make the best decisions you can. Since you cannot control how your husband responds or what steps he chooses to take, all you can do is try to make decisions that feel right to you.

Best of luck,
Erika

Shouting, yelling, screaming. Nearly all parents have done it; nearly all children age 10 and under have heard it. In small doses, such as in emergencies, yelling is not believed to be harmful. Yet, as common as this interaction is within families, if it happens too often it can break down positive conflict-management skills and flood a family’s emotional field with negative affect.

Why Do We Yell?

The most basic reason we yell in any situation is because, on some level, we feel we are not being heard. Whether literally—the person is in another room, for example—or figuratively, not feeling heard is an incredibly frustrating experience. When we believe we have a valid point and are being intentionally ignored, misheard, or invalidated, inside our brains we are thinking, “They must not really be hearing me. I will speak louder. That should do the trick!”

Yelling also stems from a need for control. Yelling is a form of verbal aggression; it carries the message that the yeller desires to be the loudest and most dominant person in the room. If someone is yelling, it is a good bet that the yeller is feeling out of control and is feeling the need to dominate the interaction.

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Parents often experience frustrating and even oppositional behaviors from young children. Depending on your child’s age, he or she may be focusing on developmental tasks ranging from establishing a sense of independence to experimenting with rebellion. The act of not listening to you can actually be part of your child’s necessary development.

At various times of the day or week, parents’ reserves of patience and energy can already be low. For example, a full-time parent may feel that he or she can barely make it to nap time with sanity intact. A pre-nap meltdown from their toddler hits them at their absolute lowest point of the day. A working parent’s morning can be so tightly orchestrated that just the slightest alteration in routine can cause a cascade of setbacks and tardiness. Throw in an early meeting and some traffic, and there is a perfect storm of frustration which can come lashing out toward a child. Parents can reach a saturation point at which their own coping skills are no longer carrying them through a particular interaction. At these points, parents often resort to yelling in an attempt to regain a sense of validation or control.

What’s the Case against Yelling in Families?

Yelling raises blood pressure, heart rates, and adrenaline levels. Those who yell exhibit higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their bloodstreams over time. These physical consequences are also seen in those who are yelled at. Like second-hand smoke, second-hand anger can take a big toll on health.

That’s a case against yelling in general, but in families with children age 10 and under, there are several other reasons that yelling isn’t healthy.

Children look to their parents to maintain the safety—physical and emotional—of the family. Babies and very young children do not yet have the ability to determine the difference between a real threat to their safety and an upsetting or frustrating circumstance. Many parents can attest to this, hurrying to the scene after having heard their toddler scream as if hurt, only to discover the source of the scream was a minor frustration such as not being able to reach a toy. The child’s cognitions in this stage are quite concrete; circumstances are either “all good” or “all bad” and there is little room for ambiguity. Children under age 5 can therefore mistake a parent’s loud tone with an alert to a true threat. This can be terrifying for a child in this developmental stage.

Fear is one of the most basic and universal emotions—every animal experiences it. Fear is centered on a primitive part of our brain called the amygdala. When fear permeates a young child’s emotional experience, such as in a household with daily episodes of yelling, the amygdala will become overly active and this will inhibit the child’s brain from working on higher-level functions such as concentration, reflection, learning, decision making, and behavior planning.

With older children who are more verbal, the words that are shouted can be even more harmful than the tone itself. Even though yelling is an attempt to gain control through aggression, the irony is that in doing so, we actually lose control of our behavior and our ability to filter and manage what we are expressing. Negative labeling, blaming, and other harsh words are especially harmful to children because children accept unconditionally that what their parents say is true. Children between approximately ages 5 and 10 have the cognitive ability to understand the words themselves, but not the adult’s emotional context. They will internalize the messages from the parent without questioning if they are accurate, and will add those messages to their budding self-concept.

[fat_widget_left]Finally, many parents who yell can relate to this scenario: “When I don’t yell, my child doesn’t listen to me. He or she only seems to respond (do what I want) when I yell.” The escalation involved in yelling can become a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Children can become desensitized over time to their parent’s escalation pattern. The child, who is interested mainly in persisting in play or attending to his or her own agenda, will naturally search for ways out of responding to a parent’s demands. We cannot fault the child for this; it is simply a piece of his or her development. The more parent-free space and time a growing child can carve out, the more he or she can explore the world around him/her and his/her own inner experience. The child learns that the parent will eventually escalate to yelling each time, and so the child learns that he or she does not need to respond until and unless yelling is used. The “pre-yelling” time becomes seen by the child as “don’t have to listen yet” time. And the parent, on the other side of this interaction, keeps needing to up the ante over time to get the same response.

How Do We Break the Yelling ‘Addiction’?

1. Set a SMART goal around yelling: a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound goal that solidifies your commitment to changing this behavior. Such a goal may sound like this: “Within the next month, I will decrease my instances of yelling on weekday mornings until I’m yelling once per week or less during that time period.” Write down your goal and put it in a place you will see it every day.

2. Find ways to increase true power, so that false control is less tempting. Yelling is false control. It feels powerful in the moment, but it undermines our internal self-control and the quality of our relationships over time. Ways to gain true power include:

• rearranging your schedule to relieve some of the pressure on certain times of the day or week that you tend to yell
• asking for help and delegating tasks to decrease your overall stress
• planning ahead for triggering moments, such as taking a distracting toy to the grocery store, or laying out your child’s school clothes the night before
• taking advantage of calm times to focus on strengthening a positive relationship with your children which will serve to buffer any episodes of yelling

3. Assume responsibility for the outcome of each interaction. You are the parent. You set the stage for the relationship between you and your child. If your child escalates, this does not mean you must escalate. If the situation escalates, this does not mean you must escalate. No matter how bad the traffic, how frustrating the missing shoe, how grating the whining, or how sassy the defiance—in the end, you always have a choice.

4. Speaking of choices, realize that yelling is only one of hundreds of things you can choose to do in a frustrating moment. Instead of yelling, you could:

• whisper
• sing
• dance a jig
• say a little prayer
• close your eyes and count to 268
• take a lap around the house
• splash your face with water
• go outside and yell at the snowman or rosebush in your yard instead

Some parents choose a grounding object, color, or mantra which they use to bring their attention away from their momentary anger and refocus it on their goal.

5. Return often to a developmental lens through which to view your children. At all times, children must be expected to behave as children. They cannot and do not think, process, or behave as you do. It is entirely predictable that children will lose things, drag their feet, misunderstand you, ignore you, and throw tantrums at inopportune times. The more you can remind yourself that this is developmentally normal, the less you will feel personally offended or annoyed by childish behavior.

6. When—not if—you do yell, be prepared to acknowledge and apologize for this to your children. Parents must be willing to role-model to children the process of owning up to poor choices and the effects they can have on others. If as parents we are not willing to do so, how can we expect the same from our children?

Breaking ingrained patterns of interaction like yelling is not an easy thing to do. Parents must take full responsibility for “being the change they want to see” in their families. Parents must make their tendencies and triggers conscious, face them honestly, and focus their attention on them if they wish to change. Keeping a written goal, a list of alternatives, and a developmental perspective will be of great help to the parent who wishes to reduce yelling. Over time, parents who make these efforts will be able to enjoy a great deal more peace in their family, a reduction in stressful feelings, and an increase in the amount of true power they are able to exert over their lives and actions.

There is nothing like bringing home a close friend or partner to shine a spotlight on the unspoken rules by which every family, your family, lived and lives.

Every family that lives with one another for some time develops a set of patterns for emotional engagement that soon feels like the “family rules.” These expectations for behavior may start within a marriage and strengthen their grip as children are brought into the home. Once the children catch on to these patterns, they begin to live by them. Only family members know how that family works, even though no one may have ever spoken these powerful expectations out loud.

Many of these rules are quite helpful, and create a kind of emotional shorthand that members count on. Some rules families frequently live by are: this family lets one another know our whereabouts; this family goes to church/synagogue/mosque; this family values education; this family values friendship, and this family works hard. Others might be less helpful. They might be expressed as: this family avoids conflict; this family never questions mother/father; this family relies on men for money, women for support; this family doesn’t live outside our region; this family keeps secrets, and this family doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.

With these internal rules, members keep the connections of their family relationships, even unhealthy ones, intact. Once we bring another person into close relationship with this family system through marriage, the rules become more obvious; our new partner has no way of knowing or observing these internal rules except by bumping into them. Because they don’t have the years of unconscious training in working within the boundaries of these family expectations, newcomers invariably stir up distress and even conflict by disregarding these rules or even openly disagreeing with them. This is one way newcomers remain permanently on the outside of their partners’ family systems.

This is where the partner, whose family of origin is the one getting stirred up, has to bring his or her best self to the party or he/she will end up offending and damaging the new family and partner. If the rule is “no one can challenge the way Mom behaves,” Mom can run roughshod over the new wife of her son and her son gets caught between his loyalties toward his family of origin and that toward his partner. Because the loyalty to one’s family of origin is older and deeper, chances are that is the one that most easily wins.

In families where emotional connection has never been particularly intense or expected, this kind of division of emotional importance happens automatically. Parents have children, raise them, and expect that once their children marry, the old family changes. The new has come, and everyone has to adjust. In more emotionally intense, enmeshed, or distressed family systems, blending a new spouse and/or grandchildren into the mix may require an our-way-or-the-highway kind of behavior from the newcomer that can make for chronic distress for everyone.

I counsel couples who find themselves in conflict over family rules to think about loyalty as an emotional quality of relationships that can and must be shared unequally. One can be loyal to both one’s family of origin as well as to a new spouse, but the most successful marriages have partners who transfer their primary loyalties to their new partner. Mom or Dad may still be core relationships, but if there is any important conflict, decision, schedule, or issue to decide, the default must move to the spouse and couple.

If you and your partner seem to be in constant conflict over your visits back to visit your parents, your time spent with siblings, or the ever-present sense that you care more about pleasing your parents than you do your spouse, check in with yourself regarding that unequal balance of loyalty. If you feel miserably caught in the middle, it’s time to shift your focus. Unplug some of that urgency from your family of origin and give it to your new partner and children. And, of course, if it’s just not as easy as that for you, consulting with a local marriage and family therapist will help you more easily make that emotional transition.

Family therapy can help families and couples overcome challenges with interpersonal relationships. Many issues that families and couples face become volatile and hostile without the help of learning how to constructively communicate and problem-solve. Relationship issues do not discriminate, and people of all cultures and races are vulnerable to family conflicts. This does not mean that people of every ethnicity embrace family therapy equally. In fact, African-Americans are far less likely than white people to seek out therapy for family problems. The reasons for this are many, and could include limited access to care, financial restrictions, mistrust of mental health professionals, and fear of stigma associated with counseling.

Cadmona A. Hall of the Marriage and Family Counseling Center at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Illinois wanted to examine the specific barriers preventing African-Americans from seeking treatment. In a recent study, Hall interviewed nine participants and found that stigma presented the biggest obstacle to treatment. Resilience was the most common personality trait that helped the participants overcome the stigma. Hall believes that African-Americans are more likely to be resilient, having had to surmount the atrocities of slavery and the injustices of discrimination. This ability to overcome could have been an underlying force that led the participants to seek out help despite the barriers.

Hall also noted that eight of the nine individuals in her study were affiliated with the college where the counseling clinic was located. Having knowledge of and access to the services could have increased the willingness in this sample of participants. Another appealing aspect of the university clinic was the sliding fee scale, which was cited as a very beneficial aspect. Mistrust, which was listed as a barrier to treatment seeking, was addressed when the participants realized that their sessions were confidential and they felt comfortable enough to build rapport with their therapists. This was critical in setting them at ease and ensuring they would return to complete therapy. Although the sample size used here was small and lacking diversity, it was able to provide insight into the factors that prevent African-Americans from seeking out therapy. “As clinicians increase sensitivity and understanding of the unique features of African-Americans, they will have an increased ability to engage that population in therapy and increase quality of care,” Hall said.

Reference:
Hall, Cadmona A., and Jonathan G. Sandberg. “We shall overcome”: A qualitative exploratory study of the experiences of African-Americans who overcame barriers to engage in family therapy. American Journal of Family Therapy 40.5 (2012): 445-58. Print.

Families need to be together. After all, the family as a group exists to provide support, nurturance, food, shelter, resources, and a stable future to each member. While most families have their ups and downs, even stressed, impoverished, chaotic families want to live with one another. When is it in the family’s best interest for members to separate from one another? Can leaving the family home for a short while ever bring healing to the relationships in the long run?

Family separations occur in American culture in formal and informal ways. Formally, families can legally be ordered to separate by the courts because of domestic violence, child sexual, emotional, or physical abuse or neglect, chronic drug or alcohol abuse, and/or failure to educate and when there is a threat to the life, health, and well-being of one or more family members. Typically, less-intrusive assistance has been attempted at many levels before a court order occurs, including weeks or months of child-centered school counseling, family therapy, marriage counseling, social work support, addiction treatment, spiritual community support, or elder advocacy.

All of these actions occur at local, county, and state levels because we as a society believe that we have a stake in supporting and sustaining healthy families. State laws vary but generally have been written with family reunification as the end goal of this intervention process, wherever possible. Violent fathers, neglectful or addicted mothers, and abusive siblings can and often do change and grow into healthier, happier parents, spouses, siblings, and grandparents. We want families to get along well and have what they need to contribute to the world. No one benefits when families are so chaotic and dysfunctional that it takes dozens of people and thousands of hours and dollars to try to help.

[fat_widget_right]More informal separations occur every day, particularly among highly distressed married couples. Unable to live in the same home without physical or emotional pain, one member of the couple leaves the home temporarily and lives elsewhere. Unlike a formal, legal intervention of family separation, this kind of separation is less likely to change the marital interactions at all. What it usually does is create less fighting and conflict in the home, while increasing the stress of the separating spouse and any children in the family. The only person who may feel any relief is the remaining spouse, and this relief is generally temporary. The focus is shifted to the dozens of life details that, once shared, have to be renegotiated, from grocery shopping and bill paying to getting a child to baseball practice.

Unless a separated couple gets professional support and assistance immediately, the family begins to reshape around the absence of the separated parent. Children feel neglected and forgotten, no matter how diligent the separated parent is in spending time with the children. There is just no adequate substitute for living together, and the children’s behavior often suffers. The couples will simply shift their conflict away from one another in the short term and have no real plan of action for getting everyone back together. Because separation only tones down conflict and doesn’t solve it, I almost always suggest that separated couples who want to remain married work at getting back together as soon as possible, and always with professional family or marital therapy. If this is not the chosen path, statistics predict this couple will end up divorcing.

Separation is often a necessary choice when family behaviors become violent, abusive, or dangerous. But in nearly all cases, families should be helped to heal and reunify as soon as possible. Separation is not the best course of action unless it is the only course left for health, safety, or stability’s sake. Every one of us needs to feel like we belong and to be part of a group of people who know, appreciate, sacrifice for, and value us most of all. At our best, these are our families. It’s worth the effort to make them as healthy, whole, and loving as possible.

Related articles:
Three Truths Every Couple Needs to Know About Marriage
Want Family Therapy? These 4 Problems Should Be Treated First
Harness the Power of the Marriage Bond

You might have heard that “love is the glue” that holds us together. I’d like to make a case for mindfulness as a similar connecting agent. In thinking of the work I am passionate about offering at Counseling on Capitol Hill, I’ve discovered that the various offerings have a common theme. What is it that couples counseling, Positive Discipline parent education, individual therapy, mindfulness coaching, and Family Therapy have in common?

Each of these offerings are about relationships, with ourselves, partners, kids, spirituality, and community. All of these relationships or domains depend on capacity and resilience.

When a child breaks a treasured dish, or tracks mud onto a newly-cleaned floor, it takes resilience to remember our compassionate self. If we see the experience of what is happening as larger than our capacity to tolerate, we send ourselves into crisis mode. In fight or flight mode, we don’t have access to clear thinking, empathy, or compassion. It is a good bet that if we are not prepared to handle this common occurrence, we will say or do something that we will regret.

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What helps us develop capacity and resilience? The practice of mindfulness—with regard to our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and more—allows us to develop these abilities. Take the basic practice of awareness and counting of the breath, where we sit and bring attention to our normal breathing (available in most introductory books and articles, and demonstrated on my website’s mindfulness page). We set a timer for five minutes. During that time we note our “out breath” and our “in breath.” As with most attempts at concentration, we soon notice distracting noises, thoughts, and smells. We become aware of what is distracting us and then return to the simple focus on breath. Although it is a simple act, it is a very powerful way to develop resilience and capacity over time.

One wonderful and commonly-reported experience is that after meditating daily for a few weeks, we discover humor around the troubling eddies of thought that our minds often get stuck in. When my mind takes me back down familiar routes of thinking during mindfulness practice, I often chuckle at myself, noticing the dogged and familiar tendency before returning to my chosen focus. Humor is a sign that the door to resilience and greater capacity has been cracked open. What once took up my whole mind and started a heated reaction of frustration is now a bit smaller and doesn’t take up all the space.

I have seen similar developments in capacity with couples when they become familiar with their old patterns of disconnection. Once that pattern is named, it is easier to recognize. Sometimes a funny name helps too: we don’t want to go down that “toilet bowl” again! Another way of talking about capacity is how we say that we gain “distance” from things. Mindfulness practice and emotionally focused couples therapy both help create a bit of distance from and awareness of troubling patterns of disconnection.

Positive Discipline parent education (PD) also calls on us to maintain the space between ourselves as adults and the children and teens who we care about. PD is based on the observation that most negative behavior is based on a child’s mistaken belief about themselves or a mistaken attempt at getting a need met. For example, a child’s persistence might become annoying when they are acting on the mistake belief, “I don’t matter unless I am the center of attention.” Again, our work of developing capacity and resilience leads us to recognize the pattern and not get pulled into reacting to it.

Mindfulness coaching, individual, and family therapy also offer us the opportunity to recognize patterns and respond to ourselves and our loved ones with greater capacity. Greater capacity—knowing that we are not defined by a particular thought, behavior, or experience—allows us to have greater compassion. We’ve come full circle, as it is clear that our increased resilience is based on seeing who we are in relationship to our experience, rather than what happens. With increase capacity and resilience, it is a short leap to the belief that we are all trying to connect with others and our desires, and that sometimes we forget that others are good people in the same game.

Though it takes practice to entertain and maintain this perspective, through it we are able to approach and find balance in all five domains of relationship: personal, partnership, parenting, community, and spirituality. Instead of having to practice and maintain five things at once like a circus performer, we can intentionally choose to be in a few of our experiences each day. No matter how many times we get pulled off center, we can always choose to pull out one of the practices that helps us reground, relax, and relate. Whether you do mindfulness practice, therapy, playtime, tai chi, dancing, yoga, walking, cooking, or more as a way to feel better and reintegrate your five domains, your loving attention to yourself is developing more resilience and capacity in yourself and in the world. Keep up the good work!

Families are amazingly resilient relationship groups. While many of us have enduring trouble with some aspect of our families, past or present, all of us are part of some form of family all our lives. Most of us organize our lives around the needs, priorities, goals, and problems of our chosen family. Whatever differences and conflicts we may have with other nations and peoples around the world, the human family is the way all of us organize.

Family therapy is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to understand, theorize, and imagine ways to help families function better with more flexibility, healthier communication, and more functional roles, responsibilities, and shared connections. When family relationships are strained beyond the members’ capacity to respond, having a trusted, compassionate, and trained relationship coach or mentor can really make life happier, easier, and healthier for all involved. Licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFT) have specialized education, training, and supervision in helping families increase their ability to function in a positive, enjoyable way—at least, that’s the goal.

As helpful and healing as family therapy can be, there are certain life problems that are so detrimental to individual functioning that they should be addressed in individually therapy before family therapy can begin. These include:

1. Addiction. Major, active addiction is so distracting and distressing to personal functioning, that the condition must be in treatment and under stable recovery before family therapy can be helpful. Most LMFTs will expect that drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions, and eating disorders get identified and treated before the whole family is under care. Sexual addictions, in my experience, are often only identified when a couple or family is well into therapy, and so may be initially hidden. However, they too are best treated individually if the addiction has been identified in the beginning.
2. [fat_widget_right]Severe mental health conditions. Major mental health issues such as bipolar, severe depression, anxiety, schizophrenia or other disabling conditions should be under treatment before family treatment is begun.
3. Family violence. Chronic anger, violence, and abusive behaviors are so threatening to family life that attempting family therapy can actually cause more hurt unless the violence is first prevented, controlled, and stopped.
4. Affairs. Secret or not, ongoing emotional and sexual affairs unbalance a family so that therapy is not possible unless they are completely stopped. Most family therapists will ask about affairs in their initial phone conversations or meetings with couples and the adults of family groups and will defer family therapy in cases of ongoing affairs.

Even if your family may be in the midst of one of these problems, a family therapist may be a great local resource for finding the help you need. If you are worried about your family, have run out of your own ideas, and energy for making a change is running low, please consider seeking out the professional help you need to get your closest relationships back on track.

Family harmony is a dream we all share. Wouldn’t it be great if we could function, day to day, like our favorite television families? Sure, life would come along with a one-two punch, but because we are so connected, in sync, funny, and resilient, by the end of the day we would land on our feet, together. Whether you relate more to the family of The Cosby Show, Malcolm in the Middle, or Family Guy, those families always come out wiser and still united in the end.

Real families aren’t so predictable. Marriage, child rearing, going to work, moving across the country, cleaning the house, going to school, loaning or borrowing money, having medical problems, dealing with one another’s moods; this is family life. It’s a messy marathon, and some of us find the experience more painful than others. Into some families comes divorce, or alcoholism, or mental illness, perhaps poverty or abuse. These families struggle to be connected and have positive relationships. And with enough pain, some of us walk away from our families and never look back.

There are times when it may be wise to create some emotional distance from our relatives. We don’t need to be intensely involved with every member of our family all the time. Our family systems have their own sense of rhythm. Varying closeness and distance is a natural process that brings balance in the dance of maintaining manageable emotional energy. We all do it, and it is a function of every close relationship we have.

Some of us have the experience of deliberately cutting off connection, particularly with one or both of our parents, for an extended period of time. We have another argument, the phone gets slammed down, and something inside us closes. We have run out of energy to explain, defend, and extend ourselves and we just need a rest from that intensity. Such periods of distance and recovery are common in families. You may be in one of those periods right now. It may feel like a burden has lifted, and you vow you’ll never go through that, whatever that was, again.

But here’s the thing: while shorter times of disconnect won’t interfere in your life, years of emotional shunning can. When we cut out a key family relationship from our life, it takes quite a bit of energy to keep that emotional door closed. And, any positive emotional energy that that relationship could provide us with is gone. While the bad stuff is not active, neither are the benefits. We compensate for that missing support, interaction and connection by leaning more heavily on other close relationships, like our marriage, our children, and our job. Our other relationships can take the extra expectations for awhile, but they can’t provide extra emotional stability indefinitely. Those relationships can get stressed. And then instead of one cut-off relationship, people can find that they are being distanced or shut out by other key relationships. Loneliness, isolation, and distress can erupt, seemingly, “out of nowhere.”

I believe that we are better-balanced human beings when we strive to maintain some measure of openness and connection with all the key people in our family system. It’s like the water pipes that feed my basement sink. In Minnesota, winter temperatures can dip well below zero. I’ve discovered that when the temperature is that low, the pipes to that sink can freeze. Frozen water pipes are one problem I don’t want. I have learned that if I keep the faucets slightly dripping on the coldest of nights, I prevent a huge problem. Drip, drip, drip: that’s all it takes to keep my pipes working. Drip, drip, drip is all the energy you really need to expend to keep connected to the most difficult family members in your life. You don’t need to open your emotional “faucets” very far to prevent your own emotional system from freezing up.

This can look like a birthday card, a call on a holiday, an invitation to a family event. It can mean returning an email graciously, showing up for an anniversary dinner, knowing your parent’s cell phone number. It means simple connection, the kind that keeps families functioning, particularly at times of high anxiety or emergency. I don’t want to have the first connection I have with my mother for years be in the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital.

For me, it boils down to this: we need each other, particularly our core family members, to be in our emotional world. Don’t cut someone off from your life completely. The relief you feel is short lived, and the pain can last a lifetime.