"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
You only had to make it through the first chapter [first line, actually] of Anna Karenina to find this out--and there will be no quizzes assessing your knowledge of the novel after, so you're home free now.
Despite Tolstoy's assertion that unhappy families are distinctly unique, family systems work often finds a recurring pattern among them. When there is a disorder within the family, everybody plays a role. And, then, subconsciously, someone agrees to be the identified patient.
Someone--often a child or adolescent--takes on the family's illness and acts it out, through drugs, alcohol, anorexia, bulimia, school refusal--through any number of unacceptable behaviors. This 'sickness' on the part of the one of the family's members may serve the role of protecting the parents from their own dissatisfaction with each other, protecting another sibling from parent anger, hiding a parent's drinking, etc. This patient and the family response to him/her throw people off the trail of the real problem.
Genograms even account for the existence of such a person within the family system, by doubling the external lines. For example if the patient is male, and a square shape [in the laws of genogram-land], there will be two lines depicting the square. Apply this same drawing process to the female's circle.
And should the identified patient (or IP) start to break the bonds of illness that keep him in his place as 'patient,' the system becomes stressed, and the other parties work to keep the IP 'sick,' so that the family dynamics continue to function as they have been.
Post a Comment