One day I was talking with my older sister, comparing the similarities and differences in how our parents raised us. Since she was the first child and five years older than my older brother, she got to experience what nearly all firstborns go through: parents who were tougher on her than younger siblings. She seemed to relish the opportunity to enlighten her younger sibling on how much harder she had it, but she told a particular story that caught my attention and was a great example of how my parents raised all of us.
One of the most obvious differences, according to my sister, was a car. While I had a car while in college, my older sister didn’t. I can even remember how when I was in middle school I used to ride with her and my father to drop her off at her friend’s houses several hours away over Christmas break to help her get a ride back to school. But it had never occurred to me that she had had to preplan her rides to school and back home. I asked her what she had done to figure this out, and she explained to me, in her moment of definitive victory about how much harder she had had things, that she rode the Greyhound bus back and forth from school. I couldn’t help but laugh, as it seemed like a ridiculous thing, but I followed it up with the next most obvious question in my mind: “What did your friends think about you riding the Greyhound home?” To which she replied with a now infamous quote in my family: “Well,” she said with a smile, “they always said that I was raised by wolves.”
When it comes to how families interact, there are three different styles: balanced, enmeshed and disengaged. In my family, we are balanced with maybe hints of disengagement, as my parents allowed us to be highly self-sufficient, as you can see from my sister’s story of having to figure out her own way to get to college. In disengaged families, family members often don’t know what each other is going through emotionally, and boundaries can be so rigid that your family members might not do things that you would think “normal” families would help you out with due to it being an inconvenience. You might be a part of a disengaged family if you don’t think that your family members would help you out if you are in a pinch or if you don’t feel like you can talk about your emotions to your family (but do feel comfortable talking about them to others).
The opposite of disengaged is an enmeshed family, where instead of rigid boundaries and limited emotional engagement, there are unclear boundaries and your feelings might be dependent upon the feelings of other people in your family. For example, in an enmeshed family, the worry and anxiety of a child can cause a parent to feel worry and anxiety as well, as they can have a difficult time separating their own emotional experience from the emotional experience of their loved ones. Often times in an enmeshed family, the act of feeling the same thing as your family member is viewed as a result of love and care for that family member. However, in a more balanced family, a parent can see their child going through a hard time and empathize with them, but it doesn’t necessarily cause the parent to feel anxious and worried as well. The parent is able to communicate care for their child, while at the same time giving them the space and independence to figure out how to cope with their own emotions.
Finally, in a balanced family, each person is allowed to experience their own emotions without always causing others to feel the same thing. Parents can communicate empathy and understanding for their highly anxious daughter without actually getting anxious themselves.
Knowing what type of relational patterns your family has can help you understand why you act in a certain way and why you feel like you do. If you’re interested in learning more about this, look up information on family systems, as the more that you know about yourself, the better you can be at managing your responses!
Mischa McCray is a licensed professional counselor and licensed marriage and family therapist in Greenwood. He can be reached at mmccray@wpcgreenwood.org.
