Dysfunctional Family Roles, Part I: The Spoiler

In two previous posts, I discussed how children act out certain roles in their family of origin in order to try to emotionally stabilize parents who are emotional unstable. Doing so also has the effect of maintaining dysfunctional relationship patterns so that the family operates in predictable ways (family homeostasis). In my July 15 post, It’s the Relationship, Stupid, I mentioned the family systems role of avenger. In my post of September 11, If at First You’ve Never Even Tried, Fail Fail Again, I mentioned the savior role.

The concept of children acting out specific roles to stabilize family homeostasis was first described by psychoanalyst Sam Slipp in his 1984 book, Object Relations: A Dynamic Bridge Between Individual and Family Treatment. I subsequently enlarged his little catalog of roles to include, among others, the role of spoiler. This role is the basis for the problematic behavior of individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD).

The basic problem in the "borderline" family - to make a complicated and highly variable story tremendously oversimplified - is that the parents in such families see the role of being parents as the end all and be all of human existence, but deep down they hate being parents or see their roles as parents as an impediment to their future personal fulfillment.

This leads to a pattern in which the parents go back and forth between hostile overinvolvement  or abuse, and hostile underinvolvement or neglect.  The double message inherent in this pattern in turn leads the children to perceive a message from their parents that roughly translates into, “I need you, but I hate you.”  The overinvolvement or underinvolvement polarity may predominate in a particular family, but if you wait long enough, the other extreme rears its ugly head.

How can the child remain central in the parents’ life - even if contact seems very limited – and still provide them with an easy justification for taking their anger out on the child so they do not have to feel guilty about it? Spoiling behavior is the perfect solution, and it is ingenious.

Spoiling behavior was first described by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who though it had something to do with primitive envy of the mother’s breast. I personally think Melanie Klein's explanation verges on psychotic, but she was describing a very real pattern of adult behavior.

Not the kind of spoiler I'm talking about


The spoiler child refuses to grow up, remains dependent in some way on the parent or a parent surrogate, and ruins everything the parents try to give. A child might start to lose or mistreat valuable designer clothes, and then demand both replacement of the expensive gifts and more of her mother’s time. Nothing the parent does or says is ever good enough. The “child” – and this continues well into adulthood - will figuratively piss all over everything the parent does for them. The parents’ motives are consistently misinterpreted and they are constantly accused of being selfish, overly-demanding, stupid, or downright evil. They are treated with utter contempt.

This treatment of the parents is a form of invalidation. The child is, in effect, doing to the parents exactly what the parents have been doing to the child. Spoilers never become independent of their parents because they never really function as competent adults.  At the same time, their outrageous and scandalous behavior gives the parents a much needed excuse to vent their often unacknowledged hostility at their offspring.

The spoiler role is difficult to maintain, and the child needs to continually practice it with lovers, spouses, and of course therapists.

In an upcoming post I will discuss some of the other major family systems roles, including a review of the two I already mentioned in the previous posts: savior, avenger, defective, go-between, little man and monster.

If at First You Have Never Even Tried, Fail, Fail, Again

One of the most frequent debates I get into with patients and psychotherapy trainees alike is the true meaning of the oft heard statement, "I did not try to do (such and such) because I was afraid of failure."  This statement is made by patients and people in general all the time to explain away such decisions as not going back to school to learn a more lucrative trade or refusing to enter the dating pool.

The statement sounds to me like an excuse that is used to cover up a real reason why the person did not do something potentially beneficial.  But why do I think this?  Well, first of all, I wonder why these people are just assuming that they are going to fail when they have not even tried.  Nobody can do much of anything with a guarantee of success.  If we all demanded certitude in succeeding before attempting something new, no one would ever accomplish anything.

Second, if someone is afraid of something, that usually means they will go to great lengths to avoid that something.  If you are afraid of snakes, you try your best to avoid them.  If you are afraid of failure, that should mean that you should persistently keep trying to accomplish whatever it is until you succeed - in order to avoid the failure which you supposedly fear. 

So how exactly is not accomplishing something through sheer lack of effort at all a success? 

I know it is somewhat more discouraging if you fail at something after you have attempted to do it than if you never tried at all, but in both instances, you have failed!  And as I said, why would you presume that you were going to continue to fail?  Unless they are trying to do something that is clearly totally beyond their capability, physical capacity or talent, most people can succeed at a great many things.  A given person may have to work harder that the average Joe to achieve one or another particular goal, but if they were truly afraid of failure, they would in fact work as hard as necessary.

When  people do fail at an initial effort, they can learn from their mistakes and try again.  Instead of doing that, some people beat themselves up about the initial failure.  They tell themselves the irrational thought, well known by cognitive therapists, that just because they did not succeed the first time, they are just a miserable excuse for a human being who is bound to fail from that point in time until eternity.

If you keep telling yourself that, you will undoubted continue to fail, because you will never make the required effort.

What is even more surprising is hearing people offer the "fear of failure" excuse for not doing something a second time after they already had succeeded at it or something very similar the first time!  As a therapist, I hear this as well.  The lameness of the "fear of failure" excuse starts to become more obvious in this situation. 

I think people who use the fear of failure excuse are really afraid of success.  Failure is the end result (the net effect - see my post of August 20) of not making any effort to accomplish something.  Yet failure is what these people profess to fear.  This sounds like Orwellian doublespeak. Seeking out something that one claims to be afraid of. 

Why would people be afraid of success?  I find many patients who claim to fear failure believe that  it is their success that seems to destabilize their family of origin.  The others around them try to invalidate or make light of their efforts or even their achievements in any number of ways, appear jealous and resentful, and often accuse them of trying to be better than everyone else in the family. 

"Who the hell do you think you are, Mr. smarty pants?  You think you're so great?!  We know how you'll turn out!"  Imagine if everyone you know and love is saying things like that to you with all the vitriol they can muster.  Do you think you might be a bit intimidated?

When  people say that they fear failure, they are usually not actually lying, however.  "I am afraid of failure" is not a complete sentence.  We have to ask, failure to do what?  The failure to accomplish the ostensible task of which they speak?  That cannot be the answer to the question for the reasons I've mentioned.  The failure that they may fear is the failure to keep their family stable.  If they really try to succed at the ostensible task of which they speak, they will fail at keeping the family stable, and it is that failure that they fear.

In some cases, family invalidation of successful offspring (in the more ordinary sense of the word successful) is not nearly so extensive.   Some parents in fact push and push their children towards a specific goal like, say, becoming a physician, whether the child wishes to pursue that career or not.  However, when the child graduates from medical school, the parents appear to get depressed.  Sometimes they do not even come to the medical school graduation, and make an excuse for not coming that is oh so obviously lame. 

What I believe is happening here is that the parents are pushing their child to do what the parents always wanted to do but were not able to do - because of either family rules or external circumstances - and cannot for various reasons admit that that is what they are doing.  The parent then lives vicariously through the child.  According to psychiatrist Sam Slipp, the child in this case is playing the role of the parent's savior.

When the child is too successful, however, it reminds these parents that they did not get to do whatever it is they had been pushing their child to do.  That is usually why they get depressed, but the child has no way of knowing about this.  Often, the successful children then get depressed themselves. 

Sometimes after a child becomes what the parents really wanted to be, the parents start to send off negative messages that seem to indicate to their offspring that the offspring should back off on the achievement thing.  This, after the child gave up what he or she really wanted to do in order to be what the parent wanted! 

This betrayal is called a double bind on achievement.  The adult child living out his or her parent's dream is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position.  If they do not achieve, they are criticized, but if they do achieve, they are still criticized or made to feel bad in some other way.  Sometimes, the only way out is a bizarre compromise. Example: get the MD degree, but keep failing the licensure exam.  That way it looks to the parents like their children are doing what the parents originally wanted, but failing at it all on their own.

It's the Relationship, Stupid!

Two of my friends recently e-mailed me an article in the New York Times by a Psychiatrist named Dr. Richard Friedman entitled Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/13mind.html).

Before I could blog about it, I noticed that my fellow family issues blogger, pediatrician Dr. Claudia Gold, had beat me to the punch, with an absolutely spot-on critique of the article entitled, Neither Bad Parents Nor Bad Seeds (http://claudiamgoldmd.blogspot.com/2010/07/neither-bad-parents-nor-bad-seeds.html).

Still, I did not realize just how pernicious Dr. Richard Friendman's column was until I saw a comment on Claudia's Blog from someone calling himself J.C. He made the comment that the column made a strong implication that "Children are not dynamic, they can come broken just like computers, without any inherent ability to adapt." Reading the column again, I saw that it implied that the "son" described in the article had apparently come into the world with a heavy genetic loading for rude behavior!

His opinion: "the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children." Toxic children? The very phrase reminded me of Susan Forward and Craig Buck's famous (and still selling) 1989 self-help book, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. While Dr. Forward did hold out some hope for the adult products of abusive family environments reconciling with their parents, many therapists took note of the title and started advising their patients to divorce their "toxic" parents in order to feel better.

That sounds like good advice until you read the attachment literature. It shows that the best predictor of how well your relationship with your own children will turn out is the nature of your relationship with your own parents. This happens regardless of whether you remain in continuous contact, or not. In fact, since you unfortunately carry your parents around in your head forever (regardless of whether either you or they wish it so), "divorcing" your parents may not prevent the intergenerational transmission of highly dysfunctional family patterns. It may in some cases actually help foster it.

An awful lot of my patients try awfully hard to be the "unparents." They vow they will never treat their children the way that their parents treated them. Unfortunately, they tend to go to the opposite extreme and often end up with kids who have the same problems they do, or who have a polar opposite but still related problem.

If they felt neglected by their parents, for example, they may become overinvolved with and overprotective of their children. If you want to know what might be likely to happen if they do that, please read my very last blog post.

If their parents were alcoholics, for another example, they may compulsively drug-test their kids and repeatedly search the kids' room for contraband before the kids have ever done anything - thereby giving their children the inadvertent message that they expect their kids to abuse alcohol. In working on emotional family trees called genograms, therapists sometime see a generation of alcoholics followed by a generation of teetotalers followed by a generation of alcoholics. Try explaining that one with the concept of a genetic predisposition to alcohol. I dare you.

So were abusive parents born toxic children? Was the 17 year old boy described in Friedman's article born to be "...unkind and unsympathetic to people...rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members"?

Friedman trots out the ignorant old warhorse explanation that the boys behavior could not possibly have been caused by "bad parenting" because "this supposedly suboptimal [parental] couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?"

First of all, who even said that they were bad parents in the first place? Second, parents do not even remotely treat all of their children the same. Anyone with a sibling or more than one child can tell you that. Anyone remember the Smothers Brothers' comedy team schtick, "Ma always liked you best?" They built a huge career around that one routine. Do you think it might have struck a chord with anyone?

In Claudia Gold's blog post, she describes a family that she treated in which a behavior problem that was similar to the one in the Friedman article was present. She describes exactly how and why a negative pattern of interactions between a parent and a child was set in place, despite everyone's best intentions. I highly recommend her post.

Warning: speculation ahead, based on similarities to many other cases I have treated, and which may or may not apply to this one:

In the case of the particular adolescent described in the Friedman column, a clue as to what might have happened in this family was the observation Friedman himself made that ""it was clear that her [the mother's] teenage son had been front and center for many years."

Maybe too front and center. If the parents were obsessed with their son's negative attitudes and repeatedly lectured him about them ad nauseum, they may have unwittingly given him the message that they would be disappointed if they were deprived of the right to go on lecturing him. In response, he might continuously give them that opportuntity by maintaining the bad attitude.

In addition, it is possible that the parents gave signs to the boy of covert approval when he was rude to other family members. A son sometimes takes on a role that psychotherapy integrationist Sam Slipp called the avenger, in which he acts out his parents unacknowledged and for them forbidden hostility. This allows the parents to vicariously experience the expression of their negative feelings without having to own or be responsible for them.

Psychoanlysists refer to this interpersonal phenomenon as projective identification. They speak of "superego lacunae" or holes in the parents' conscience that prevent them from expressing certain feelings but which lead them to indirectly validate the expression of those very same feelings in their children, even while criticizing the children unmercifully for having done so.

It is not toxic people that create a dysfunctional family, but toxic relationships. Affixing moralistic blame to one individual in the family just makes matters worse. It turns that person into what family systems therapists refer to as the identified patient, when the real patient is the whole group. The identified patient is often a scapegoat.

Even when parents or children do horrible things to each other, labeling them as bad seeds is counterproductive.

In dealing with a toxic relationship, the choice that an adult from a dysfunctional family has is not between self-exile and continuing to put up with abusive behavior. There are types of psychotherapy which can help people repair dysfunctional relationship patterns, solve problems, and reconcile with their loved ones. In my new book, I tell which psychotherapy paradigms are designed to do this. Not all therapists know how. It's not an easy task to detoxify a toxic relationship because feelings run very high, and defenses can be formidable, but it can be done.

IMHO, we need to help put a stop to the intergenerational transmission of dysfunctional family patterns, and these treatments are the best way to do that.

It is interesting that next to Dr. Friedman's article is a still from the 1956 movie, The Bad Seed, about a pretty little girl from a fine family who develops into a young murderess for no apparent reason. Such things, unless a baby comes out brain damaged in some way, happen only in lurid novels and movies.