Ambiguity in Family Conversations

Send Medicine and Arms by A1Cafel, by the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic 

 

This post will continue on from my posts (2/24, 3/19 and 4/14, and 6/2) summarizing how I incorporated ideas from from fields outside of mental health into my psychotherapy model, as well as how I tried to fit together seemingly contradictory theoretical aspects of several other psychotherapy schools. I've discussed why family members shape their behavior and the the rules by which the family operates in order to to maintain homeostasis. The rules allow family members to be predictable and to maintain their function within the system.

I also discussed how and why people can be highly conflicted about some of the roles they play in their family but cannot and will not admit to this ambivalence. Often they won't even talk about experiences they had in the had that affected them and led to this situation. In my post of 4/1/14 I described a study I did which identified unexplained contradictions in the behavior of parents in  regards to how members should love, work, and play, and what opinions they seem to think are established realities. This phenomenon was seen considerably more frequently in the families of subjects with personality disorders than in those without one.

In this post I'll describe benefits that the academic field of linguistics can provide psychotherapists.

My book Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy discusses in detail the following, which is also discusses in two previous blog posts:

Since these parents are conflicted about their parental roles, they constantly give off mixed messages to their children about what is expected from them. Much of what they say about things and how they behave in various contexts is often highly ambiguous, but they will deny it if confronted about it. The yearnings they won't admit to somehow come out indirectly in their behavior and conversations.

The aspects of language that gives this away was described in the previous post: http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/2016/07/ambiguous-language-and-recognizing_19.html. Any sentence in any language can always be interpreted in at least two different ways.  Important examples include the use of adjectives with a seemingly wrong connotation ("excuse" vs. "reason"), a misleading tone of voice or body language, and direct contradictions of previous statements. It is also important to remember that the meaning of anything is interpreted with the context and repetitiveness of all previous statements and behavior - over the entire course of a relationship. 

This is also what family and couples therapists need to be aware of when evaluating interpersonal behavior seen in a therapy or research session. Two people who have a history together know important implications in a conversation that an outside listener would not be privy to.

 This leaves the children to try to figure out how to simultaneously meet their parents’ contradictory perceived needs to be, for example, both needed by their children and, simultaneously, for their children to just go away. Believe it or not, there's usually a way to combine them into one pattern of behavior. How they do so is detailed in the blogpost:

http://davidmallenmd.blogspot.com/search?q=actions+speak+louder

Self Actualization and Why It may be So Difficult

 

Walking Reflection jpg by Tomascastelazo, creative commons attribution share alike 4.0

This post will continue on from my posts (2/24, 3/19 and 4/14) summarizing how I incorporated ideas from from fields outside of mental health into my psychotherapy model, as well as how I tried to fit together seemingly contradictory theoretical aspects of several other psychotherapy schools, I discussed how families operate by rules mostly set by the prevailing culture, and  how those rules change and how families may not be able to keep up, leading members to share intrapsychic conflicts.

But how does this all manifest itself inside the brains and minds of individuals, and why they do they feel they have to sacrifice aspects of themselves in order to stabilize the family? Why can’t they just go ahead and do whatever they really want to? I mean, if we’d like to believe in free will (and I do), why do they make this choice?

The answer boils down to how the rules of interpersonal engagement are laid down in the brain during  childhood, and how individuals generally feel when they ignore the rules.

Babies come into the universe knowing absolutely nothing about how the universe works and how they can best adjust to their circumstances. They literally do not even know their own body parts can be controlled. We are programmed to learn about our universe through interactions with primary attachment figures. As children spontaneously emit various behaviors (including expressing thoughts that occur to them) that parent find acceptable, the attachment figures  do something called mirroring (first described psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut) - they validate, affirm, and reflect back to the child creating sense of value, grandiosity, and self-worth. That allows a person to build healthy self-esteem and a stable internal identity.

The rate of the creation of synaptic pathways in the brain through this process, particularly in infancy, is phenomenal (less useful pathways are later “pruned” through a process called neural plasticity).

When babies grow older, and throughout much of their lives, they continue to emit new self-generated behavior. When that behavior is grossly at odds with their self image and for which they had not received validation, the evolutionary process that created kin selection kicks in, and they get very uncomfortable. If they are actively invalidated by parents and the rest of the family system when they do or experience something, it creates a sense of existential terror that psychotherapists called groundlessness or anomie. It’s like they don’t know who they are any more. The worse that attachment figures attack ideas and behaviors that don’t jibe with the family homeostasis (as are many efforts at self-actualization), the worse a person’s terror.

People do have the ability to persist in new thought and behavior patterns despite this feeling, and if they stick to them, the feeling of groundlessness eventually dissipates. It’s also often the case that the attachment figures are themselves ambivalent about the behavior in question, but refuse to talk about this for fear of being invalidated by their own attachment figures. They then give children mixed messages about what is expected of them. How I believe children read these contradictory messages will be summarized in the last post in this series.