Of Ethnic Norms and Ethnic Stereotypes

In my post of June 18, The Historical Backdrop of Family Dysfunction, I stated:

" ...a knowledge of history, when combined with a knowledge about typical ethnic group norms (subject of a later post), can be extremely useful in making an educated guess about how and why certain family behavior patterns may have developed. These patterns were then transferred to succeeding generations through a process known as the intergenerational transfer of dysfunctional behavior."

This post is of course is the aforementioned later post. So how does one obtain knowledge of ethnic group norms for all of the various ethnic groups in the United States and elsewhere? And if we are thinking about cultural norms, how do we avoid stereotyping people in pernicious ways? 

In 1982, a book called Ethnicity and Family Therapy, edited by Monica McGoldrick, John K. Pierce, and Joseph Giordano was released. It is currently in its third edition, the last one having been released in 2005. This book was a landmark in family therapy because it described the typical culture and family relationship patterns of Americans who descended from a wide variety of different ethnic and national groups.  Gaining familiarity with these group characteristics gives therapists a leg up in understanding the behavioral interactions of the family members in front of them, and sometimes helps a therapist to understand otherwise seemingly inexplicable family behavior.

Monica McGoldrick

This can be particularly important in cases of intermarriage between ethnic groups. For example, when a Jewish boy marries an Irish girl, he may often want her to complain if she’s sick, but to her an illness may not be bad enough to complain about, because when she’s suffering she believes that it is punishment for her sins. So the differences in viewpoint are perplexing to the members of the couple, and each feels the other person is either crazy or bad.

The editors point out in the introduction to the first edition: 

"Problems (whether physical or mental) can be neither diagnosed nor treated without some understanding of the frame of reference of the person seeking help.” They asked the authors who were writing in the book about various American groups to answer the following questions, relating them specifically to a family therapy context:

1. What do they define as a problem?

2. What do they see as a solution to their problems?

3. To whom do they usually turn for help?

4.   How have they responded to immigration?

5.   What are the typical family patterns of the group?

6.   How do they handle life cycle transitions?

7.  What may be the difficulties for a therapist of the same background or for a therapist of a different background?”

Of course, whenever anyone deals with subjects such as this, they are in serious danger of feeding into or even creating cultural stereotypes, which often then become caricatures of the culture that are then used to denigrate an entire group. We have all seen malignant and vile stereotypes such as the alcoholic, bar-brawling Irishman, the cheap Jew, and the thuggish mafioso Italian. And those are just some of the Caucasian ones! Alleged negative attributes are used to justify discriminating against members of the groups for various and sundry unethical and/or sinister purposes.

The editors of the book under discussion are well aware of this peril. They are also aware that many members of any ethnic group do not conform to even relatively valid cultural norms that arise from the historical experiences of their group.

Many factors will determine the extent to which particular families will fit into a traditional paradigms, such as migration experiences, whether they lived in an ethnic neighborhood in the United States, their upward mobility, socioeconomic status, educational achievement, rate of intermarriage, and the strength of their political and religious ties to their group.

In other words, the members of the different ethnic groups, while having certain commonalities, are still a very diverse group of people. Even further complicating matters is the tendency of some families, or some family members within a particular family, to react against cultural norms, and go to opposite extremes to disprove the stereotype. This tendency often divides members of a particular group into two subgroups that seem like polar opposites of one another on a particular dimension. The contradictory images are nonetheless caricatured by other groups and included in a stereotype, without any attention to the inherent contradictions in these prejudices.

With Jews, for example, the dangers of being too conspicuous in Russia, where that could get you killed during a pogrom, led some immigrant families to value not drawing attention to themselves. On the other hand, we have the gold-chain laced, Rolex-wearing Jewish man in the entertainment business and the “Jewish-American Princess” (an appellation coined by Jews themselves), who seem to go out of their way to be as ostentatious as humanly possible.

With this amount of diversity, and the risks of creating discrimination and hate, and the fact that no therapist can become an expert on all ethnic groups, what good are the chapters in the book that describe the various ethnicities? 

The authors make the following arguments, as exemplified by Dr. McGoldrick in the introduction to her chapter about her own Irish heritage, with which I agree:

“What follows is a greatly simplified outline or paradigm within which to consider Irish-American families. The characterizations may or may not be accurate in any individual instance, and we hope it will be read in the spirit of providing a new provisional hypothesis to help therapists understand their Irish families. Describing ethnic patterns necessitates using cultural stereotypes or simplified pictures of the culture. There are obvious disadvantages to this, and these generalizations are meant to serve only as a framework within which to expand clinical sensitivity and effectiveness. 

The paradigms in these chapters are used not as "fact", but rather as maps which, although covering only limited aspects of the terrain, may nevertheless provide a guideline to an explorer seeking a path. This focus can mean emphasizing certain characteristics which may become problematic while ignoring certain others, such as the Irish people's great hospitality and charm, which are not problematic. By no means is it meant to add to any tendency toward negative labelling or stereotyping of the Irish.”

In other words, like with any patient in front of them, knowledge of the culture of that person serves the same function as the diagnosis of a personality disorder (or at least that is what a personality disorder diagnosis should function as): a starting point in order for the therapist to more quickly begin generating hypotheses, or educated guesses, about what might be going on with that patient or family, based on a sort of statistical likelihood. Such hypotheses must be then tested with an open mind before the therapist jumps to any firm conclusions.

Facts and patterns begin to reveal themselves as therapy progresses, and the therapist must see whether these facts and patterns are consistent with an initial hypothesis, inconsistent with it, or require some alterations to it. Knowledge of both ethnic norms and common combinations of dysfunctional personality traits often saves the therapist and the patient a great deal of time.  

Some critics of the field complain that personality disorder diagnoses label and pigeon-hole patients, just like ethnic stereotypes. Well, they can do that, but they do not have to! Almost anything can be misused, but this is hardly an argument against the usefulness of anything.

Stereotypes are bad, but you have to begin somewhere.

To point up the belief that Irish children are not praised enough because their parents don’t want to spoil them, Dr. Pearce was quoted (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 2/9/80) as saying that when he said that to an Irish mother, she replied, “I praise them.  Kevin here, he’s not so bad.”  

Borderline Personality Family Dynamics: The Parents, Part I

In my post of 2/6/11, Dysfunctional Family Roles, Part I: The Spoiler, I opined that the basic problem in the "borderline" family (one that produces offspring with borderline personality disorder [BPD]) is that the parents in such families see the role of being parents as the end all and be all of human existence, but all the while, deep down, they either frequently hate being a parent or see their parent role as being an impediment to their personal fulfillment.

I also explained how the person with BPD develops the Spoiler role in response to the double messages that this emotional conflict leads such parents to give off to their children.

It's all well and good to try to understand the behavior of the individual with BPD in terms of a response to parental problems, but that just kicks the question of an explanation for the disorder back a generation. In order to fully understand BPD, we have to ask, "What on earth makes these parents so damn neurotic that they compulsively have children and then covertly resent them?" 

If the parents are not patients themselves, the only way for a therapist to get to the bottom of this is by helping the patient with BPD to construct a special type of family genogram.  A genogram is sort of an emotional family tree, and is a mainstay of the type of family systems therapy designed by family therapy pioneer Murray Bowen.

Murray Bowen

Using historical figures and geneology records as illustrations, the book Genograms: Assessment and Intervention by Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson describes how genograms can be constructed .

Monica McGoldrick

The genograms described by Bowen therapists are, in my mind, incomplete.  They concentrate on which relatives were overinvolved or underinvolved with which other relatives, and whether these relationships were hostile or friendly.  IMO, this leave out an awful lot of important information.  Two individuals may easily have a hostile and enmeshed relationships with each other over one area of functioning, say work or love, and yet still be very distant, friendly and uninvolved with each other over a different area of functioning. 

In other words, these genograms omit the content of the family squabbles.  When the content is added to the genogram, one can then look for the historical experiences of the family that may have created the picture that is taking place in the present.

While I have indeed seen the parents of adult children who exhibit BPD in therapy and traced their genograms, I have also coached patients with the disorder themselves to construct their family's genogram.  We try to go back as far as we can to figure out what family experiences led to the parents' conflicts.  Sometimes the story goes back more than three generations and we may lose the historical scent, so to speak, in that no one alive knows what happened way back whenever.  Usually, however, certain patterns come to the fore.

In Part I of this post, I will describe the one most common major issue, and the resultant behavior patterns, that I have discovered leads individuals within a family to develop a severe conflict over the parenting role.  In Part II, I will describe some other ones.

All of these issues may seem very common everywhere, and indeed they are.  Most families that face them do not produce emotional conflicts significant enough to create BPD pathology.  Rather, the issues in families that do have been magnified signficantly by an interacting tableau of historical events impacting the family and the individual proclivities of each and every family member and descendent. 

I will not describe the details of the magnification process here, but a full explanation can be found in my book, A Family Systems Approach to Individual Psychotherapy.

The most common cause of conflicts over the parenting role stems from cultural rules regarding gender role functioning.  Over the last century the opportunities open to women to explore their interests and ambitions have gradually expanded, and having a lot of children certainly put a damper on their ability to do this.  If a woman came from a family where the women were very bright and had a natural proclivity for being ambitious career-wise, this would often create difficulties for them since they lived in a male-dominated culture that was at best unfriendly to female career ambitions. 

To demonstrate how this might play out in a hypothetical family, I often discuss the evolving role of women in the United States since World War II. During the war, when all the men went off to fight, women in the United States entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time - in order to build the airplanes and tanks.  This phenomenon was known as "Rosie the Riveter." 

Some women found the experience of a career exhilerating, but when the war ended, they had to go back to just being wives and mothers once again.  The US govenment even made propaganda films thanking the women for their important work, but then encouraging them to go home and get barefoot and pregnant once again.  I have seen some of them; by today's standards they are positively jaw dropping. But effective. The Rosies did what they were told, and that is why we had the baby boom.

Rosie the Riveter

The daughters of this generation came of age in the sixties, when the women's liberation had started in earnest.  Women were more and more torn between the earlier gender role requirements and the new cultural opportunities expectations, and some women (as well as some men) did not make the transition very smoothly at all - for a variety of reasons.  One common reason: the Rosie the Riveters, having had a taste of the career world, would vicarioulsy live through the career aspirations of their daughters, but at the same time be extremely frightened by them.

Having children could easily bring the whole craziness to a head for some families.  Even today, parents feel very guilty about not spending as much time with their children as they would like, and they are often criticized at every turn by their own parents as well as the Phyllis Schlafly's of the world.  (Phyllis Schlafly was a career woman who made a career out of bashing career women).

Phyllis Sclafly

In doing genograms, one can often see just how far a family's operating rules lag behind the current cultural norms .  In anthropology, this problem is called cultural lag.  The cultural progression in Western nations, which is mimicked within certain families, was thus:  First, women really could not have careers at all.  Then, they could have careers, but only when they were single.  Then - and here is where many families with BPD members are stuck - they could only have careers when they had not yet had children.  Then, they could have careers even if married with children, but they had to give priority to the husband's career.  Last, both men and women were entitled to the same freedom.

Gender role confusion and conflict can, given the right combination of ingredients, create a nasty intrapsychic conflict over the very act of procreating. 

In Part II of this post, I will look at the rest of the historical factors and patterns that can create such a conflict: Deaths and illnesses, financial reverses, religious demands, parent-child role reversals, being the eldest child in a traditional family, and having children to "save the marriage."