Blame, Guilt, and Family Dysfunction

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When I discuss family dysfunction, the question of “who’s to blame”– the adult children or their parents – frequently arises. Emotions then tend to run wild. I believe this is the wrong question. The fact is that all family members are beans in the same soup, acting out patterns that have been building up for generations and are being passed down. The right question should always be, “How do we FIX this?”

The question of blame is often the subject of vehement defensive reactions by the community of parents in the US, who gripe about anyone who engages in“ parent blaming” and “parent bashing.” They want to believe that they have absolutely nothing to do with their children’s problems, which they like to think are all genetic or all caused by peer groups at school.

Many mental health practitioners have sided with these nonsensical ideas. I’ve written before about a time when, at a nearby child and adolescent psychiatric hospital, juvenile delinquency and even suicidal thoughts were blamed entirely on heavy metal music. That way, parental guilt could be assuaged so they would pay for their kids to get “treated” for listening to Judas Priest. Well, at least until their insurance ran out.

So are these folks saying that even physical and sexual abuse by parents has nothing to do with children’s insecurities? Or their acting out? Even here, the answer seems to be a sort of yes – people falsely opining that the incidence of this abuse is actually minimal and that almost all of these accusations of such are false. Really?

It is true that if a therapist makes a parent feel guilty, they are less likely to look critically at their own parenting practices or seek help, so therapists have to figure out a way around this paradox. My therapy model attempted to do just that with patients who were adult children facing this conundrum.

I have also written about the massive increase in recent years in parental guilt caused by cultural changes in gender roles. In reaction, this has led to an epidemic of so-called helicopter parenting. That this type of interaction is a major correlate of adolescent depression, which means probably with the rate of suicide as well, has been recently demonstrated in studies (for example: Wattanatchariya K, Narkpongphun A, Kawilapat S. The relationship between parental adverse childhood experiences and parenting behaviors. Acta Psych. 2024(243).  While correlation and causation are two different things, I believe on the basis of my wide clinical experience that in this case these studies are indeed about causation.

Another complication of parent guilt was described in the 2/27/24 column by advice columnist Carolyn Hax.  A mother described herself as being wracked with guilt because her teenage children suffered from anxiety and depression, despite her and her spouse loving them immeasurably and doing their best every day to support, listen to and nurture them. Ms. Hax of course tried to tell her that she did not screw up because “kids everywhere are having an extraordinarily difficult time right now” and that “depression and anxiety are way up, stress is up, mental health resources are strained, and schools are overburdened, underfunded and understaffed.”

My fear is that Ms. Hax’s advice for her to stop beating herself will fall on deaf ears. As I have described in previous posts, parental guilt has become more widespread, and parents often feed into the guilt of other parents – especially if the parents try to set limits with their kids instead of helicoptering. I can recall other families giving us a hard time when we wouldn’t give our kids away at college unlimited funds to do whatever they wanted.

Besides stopping parents from setting appropriate limits with their kids or disciplining them properly, another big problem is one that I have seen clinically but which is not described in the mental health literature: the kids see their parents feeling guilty all the time even when there is no obvious reason for it, and take this to mean that their parents need to feel guilty. They may therefore act like they are more impaired than they actually are so that the parents can continue to indulge this need. The fact that the guilt remains omnipresent in this situation confirms their beliefs!

In a column the very next day, Ms. Hax answered a letter in which a wife in an abusive relationship will not leave for fear of harming the kids.  The letter says “But I read so much about how kids thrive in stable families and are damaged by splits or divorces other than in highly abusive situations. My partner is not physically abusive but checks a lot of other boxes: yelling, vicious anger  name-calling, silent treatments.”

How anyone can possibly believe that subjecting kids to this sort of abuse is better for them than coping with their feelings about a parental divorce is beyond me. And kids are smart enough to wonder about that themselves. So how do they then interpret Mom’s refusal to leave? Perhaps mom is using the kids as some sort of excuse because deep down she thinks she needs or deserves her husband’s abuse? I know that sounds bizarre, but you would be surprised.

In fact, although obviously I can’t say in this particular case on the basis of a letter to an advice columnist, there may even be an element of truth in this idea. The answer to what might be going on can often be obtained by a therapist using the Adlerian question: “What would be the downside of successfully getting out of this bad relationship?” A common answer: "My parents would blame me and tell me I should go back to him and be a better wife." I kid you not! Maybe because those parents themselves are in a similar relationship. If so, we’d have to find out whether this is indeed the case, and then ask the Adlerian question to the grandparents about why they continue their relationship.

When people feel guilty, it leads to defensiveness, which can lead to fight, flight or freeze reactions which cut off conversations about how to solve problems. Since the problems go back many generations, I have always suggested that we just put the blame on Adam and Eve, and be done with it.

 

 

 

 

 

The Slow Evolution of Gender Roles

I write frequently about a phenomenon called cultural lag that I stole from sociology  and modified a little. What is it? Cultural lag, as originally defined, is when there are differences in the rate of change between different groups within a society. For example, if one group adopts a new technology more quickly than another group, this can lead to a gap in knowledge and understanding between the two groups. This gives the first group an advantage in the job market. In my Unified Therapy model, it happens specifically when the culture evolves to, and begins to demand, a more individualistic way of being and relating to others. This process was well described in historical terms by Erich Fromm in his classic book, Escape from Freedom.

 

Previously present cultural mandates about such things as gender roles, having children, and independence from family have been internalized by families, who follow a series of rules about these areas. In turn, if everyone follows the rules, the family functions smoothly – called family homeostasis. This is highly adaptive - when the rules within a culture are fairly clear. When these rules evolve, many families literally can’t keep up with the changes, and their family rules and the resultant behavior becomes maladaptive in the larger society. Cultural changes are now starting to come more quickly, leaving more and more families in the dust.

 

Nowhere is this more apparent that in the area of gender roles. In the not too distant past, women were not allowed to vote, or own a credit card. (The way the Taliban treat women in Afghanistan is almost like a frightening parody of what this used to look like). Within my lifetime, women started to join the workforce in large numbers, often times in jobs women in the past ever thought about performing. The feminist movement has led to a more egalitarian society. But the old ways still gnaw at many people. 

 

One extremely common pattern is that, with household chores, much of the division of labor between wives and husbands remain stuck in old patterns. People may read about how easy it is to “have it all,” when in fact in today’s culture this is often next to impossible for middle and working class women. We also have feminists on one side denigrating stay-at-home mothers, while on the other are preachers telling women that they are screwing up their children by not being home with them. At the same time, many employers are asking for more and more time from employees and don’t give a damn about their child care responsibilities. I posted a video describing one aspect of this in detail.

 

These issues have led to a lot of guilty parents, most frequently the mothers, because even now they are on average more responsible for children than male parents. While some of the oft-described differences in income between men and women doing the same jobs is indeed due to sexism, some of it is due to the fact that many women have to take care of the kids so they don’t work as many hours.

 

My understanding of this issue was recently supported by a study that showed that  more wives are now primary earners, but still spend less time performing most household chores, let alone child care. As described in USA today on 4/15/23 by Jessica Guynn:

 

“This research shows that wives earn as much as their husbands in more marriages today than ever before. So why do men still spend more time at work, relaxing and socializing and less time mopping floors, cooking dinner and picking up kids from school than their spouses? Most of the time when we talk about gender equality, we focus on the workplace where women are sharply underrepresented at the top, face discrimination in hiring and promotions and are paid less for the same work. But gender disparities don’t just happen from 9 to 5.”

 

“The gender gap in unpaid work has been narrowing, but the reality remains that married mothers do more unpaid work than single mothers,” said Aliya Hamid Rao, an assistant professor in the department of methodology at the London School of Economics. Men are still the main breadwinners in more than half of opposite-sex marriages, but the share of women who earn as much or more than their husbands has tripled over the past 50 years, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. In about a third of marriages – 29% – husbands and wives earn roughly the same. In 16% of marriages, wives are the breadwinners. But housework and caregiving responsibilities are still widely considered women’s work.

Themes of This Blog Seen In Newspaper Advice Columns: The Game without End, Gender Role Division

In Amy Dickinson’s advice columns of 5/29, 6/14 and 6/18/17, and in Carolyn Hax’s column of 6/23/17, the Agony aunts published letters which serve as a good, simple and straightforward illustrations of something that family therapists have called the game without end, described in several previous posts.

Whenever one member of a couple or a family makes a good case for changing the rules by which people in the family operate, other members of the family (or the other member of the couple) get suspicious. The person making the request has always followed the old rules. I mean, they say they want things to be different, but do they really?

So the person making the request gets “tested” to see how sincere their request really is. The others make the requested changes, but do so in an obnoxious or annoying manner. My favorite illustration of this is a situation widely created by rapidly evolving changes in gender role functioning, which the letters that are the subject of the current post clearly illustrate.

Both members of a couple work, but somehow everyone - including the females - has always expected the female to do all or most of the housework due to the rules followed by earlier generations of men and women.  The woman often has treated the kitchen, for example, as her own personal fiefdom in which she is the undisputed boss of how things are supposed to be done.

If she suddenly asks her husband or boyfriend to help clean up and do his share of the cooking, he wonders if she really wants that - because of her prior attitude and the accompanying behavior, which had been readily and repeatedly observable up to this point.

So, when it’s his turn to clean the kitchen, he does a half-baked job and puts the dishes and pots and pans in all new places, so that his partner cannot find them when it’s her turn to do, say the cooking. Or he does any of numerous other passive-aggressive things that annoy the heck out of her. So she criticizes him unmercifully for his poor performance.

In a sense, she starts criticizing him for doing the very thing she had asked him to do in the first place.

His conclusion: "See, she really didn’t want me to help out after all." I can never understand why he discounts his own behavior in drawing this conclusion, but that is highly typical.

An effective way to handle a game without end so that the rules really can change is described here.

So for those readers to are skeptical, here are some abbreviated letters from the advice columnists:

5/29/17. Dear Amy: I am really tired of my husband asking: “How can I help you?” “What can I do for you?” or “What do you need?”Here’s why this upsets me: If I am cooking dinner for the both of us and he asks, “What can I do for you?” I think, well, you are eating this dinner too, so why not just ask, “What can I do?” Why is he offering to do something “for me”? I get so frustrated that my response is: “…nothing.” When I suggest that he just pitch in, he tells me that I do these household things so much better than he does. 

He seems to want me to need him. I don’t need him. I just want him to initiate the household work on his own. He watches TV while I run around picking up the house or making dinner, and his only response is, “Am I in your way?”...When he finally does something like putting a load in the washer, he needs to announce it like it’s the second coming. What can I do? - — Frustrated!

A response from a man to the above letter: 6/14/17. Dear Amy: I am a man who has been in the same position as “Frustrated’s” husband, who would ask, “What can I do for you?” instead of just taking responsibility for his half of the household chores. I used to be like this. I just didn’t know how to be helpful and I didn’t want to get in the way. Honestly, my wife basically trained me how to take on more responsibility and now we work together. — Reformed (This guy is still letting her be the boss!)

Dear Reformed: I have received a huge response to this letter, and many men echo your statement — they needed some guidance and when they got it, they stepped up.

6/18/17. Above letter, continued. Dear Amy: I understand a lot of men are responding to the letter from “Frustrated!” about her husband’s lack of initiative regarding household chores. In my case, I jump in and do my best, but my efforts are criticized and belittled. It is hardly inspiring me to do more. — Also Frustrated

6/23/17.  Dear Carolyn: I love my partner. He recently moved in... I’m so tired of people who won’t clean up after themselves and leave it until I do it. I made it very clear to my partner before he moved in that it was important to me...But I’m already tired of asking and I’ve been reading about “the mental load.” Like last night: I was stressed and headed to my second job and he asked what he could do to make me feel better (sweet!) so I said, get wrapping paper and a card and wrap your sister’s wedding present. And when I got home later, he had! But. The box was left out instead of recycled, the couple of dishes I used to feed us before I went to work weren’t done, the living room was a mess . . . he just doesn’t see it…— I’m Already Tired

Discussing Dysfunctional Family Patterns with the Family: More Tricks of the Trade

Offering Theories Better than Asking Questions

As I have discussed in many previous posts, when adult children try to figure out the reasons behind their parents' confusing behavior, they usually conclude that the parents are either mad, bad, blind, or stupid. I mean, how else can you explain the following bizarre parental behavior: denying the obvious, giving double messages that put their child in a damned-if -you-do/don't situation, seeming to want their children around (often in a caretaker role of some sort) while simultaneously seeming to hate their guts, putting up with abusive spouses while making excuses for them, being completely preoccupied with one sibling while acting like another child barely exists—and a host of other unfortunately fairly common dysfunctional behaviors.

I believe, as readers of my blogs know by now, that most parents who act like this are neither mad, bad, blind nor stupid. They are instead acting out roles with their children - in a highly ambivalent fashion - that they themselves had learned in their own families of origin. These roles stabilized the grandparents, who were themselves highly conflicted about certain family and cultural norms and rules of behavior.

Mothers who have gender role conflicts are a really good example of what I am talking about. They often give out mixed messages to their daughters about both having careers and having children. Their daughters are somehow also expected to get some man to take care of them while simultaneously being independent.

Just asking the parents why they are doing what they are doing usually leads to more obfuscation, non-sequiturs, denial, and various other ways of invalidating the person who poses the question and/or disqualifying their own true beliefs. Or even worse, questions sometimes even lead to violence, suicide attempts, and other forms of acting out. 

"Why" questions are also particularly likely to lead to either aggressive or defensive remarks because they can sound accusatory—sorta like asking a child, "Why is your hand in the cookie jar?"

Asking "yes or no" questions is equally problematic. It also often leads to responses that are less than edifying about what the parents are trying to accomplish with their bizarre behavior. The parents can just answer "yes" or "no" with no additional explanation.

One trick in metacommunication is based on the idea that in human interactions, certain verbalizations seem to require certain responses, making it more likely that when they are used, the other person will feel obligated to respond in certain ways. They may say things that are more enlightening or clear. Of course the strategy I am about to describe is not foolproof, but it does increase the odds that a useful exchange may take place.

The trick is for the person to empathically offer some speculation about family interpersonal processes that may be triggering problematic feelings or behavior in the parent. There is something about tentatively offering someone someone a hypothesis that makes it much more difficult for them to merely agree or disagree. Hypotheses seem to demand more than questions; they increase the likelihood that the parent will feel it necessary to explain what is wrong or right with the hypothesis, rather than just giving out an unexplained acceptance or rejection of it.

This is especially true if the adult child overtly labels the intervention as a guess, thereby giving the parents an "out" that allows them to reject the guess if they are just feeling too threatened to respond with more information. This technique makes it difficult for the parent to provoke a power struggle with the adult child over the accuracy of the hypothesis.

The potential metacommunicator can base speculations or hypotheses on any information concerning his or her family that is already available, or on typical patterns that they have seen or read about in my blogs or elsewhere. Having done one's family's genogram often provides a good source of such guesses. Such hypotheses should always be offered in a tentative and non-threatening manner.

Continuing with the gender role conflict situation mentioned above, for example, the adult child might say something to her mother like, "I don't know if this applies to you or not, but in other families where a woman's career choice is an issue, mothers often feel bad because their daughters get to do things the mother always wanted to do but was not free to do. I wonder if this might apply to our situation?

Just Another Manic Mom Day

So mental illness is a myth, huh? 

"How do You Grab a Naked Lady" is a gripping memoir by Sharon L. Hicks that is hard to put down. It mostly centers around her crazy-making relationship with her legitimately bipolar mother, particularly during the mother’s manic episodes. Her mother certainly did not have bipolar, myass disorder, or bipolar “spectrum” disorder (B.S.).

Of course, having a parent with a severe mental illness can itself lead to severe family dysfunction that adversely affects other, completely normal family members, particularly children. What follows are a couple of examples of Mom’s behavior while in the manic state. Ask yourself how you might turn out if your mother routinely did things like this in front of you - and often in public:

"Sharon, are you listening to me? I had a 24K gold necklace made for me with the letters   F-U-C-K to dangle across my chest. It cost me $15,000. Let's go pick it up."...
"I'm sorry Mrs. Hicks, but management would not allow us to make the necklace." 
"Oh yeah, well fuck you!...Mother spun around and headed for the escalator or the 2nd floor...In one fluid motion, Mother pulled her muumuu over her head..
"Yes, sir, completely naked."
...As she paraded down the escalator, she yelled, "You're all a bunch of shitheads."

Or another time: “I’m calling President Kennedy. He absolutely must take these pills! And I’m calling everyone I know to tell them about the divorce [from the author’s dad]…And the flies on the wall agree with me…I know because they are fluttering their wings. That’s how they talk to me…I’m the only one who understands how they communicate…they have names. I’ve named them all. They really like their names. They told me so.”

And no, people with personality problems do not act like that, or seriously say things like that. Seriously.

The patient’s childhood was further complicated by the mother’s behavior when the mother was in the euthymic state (neither manic or depressed). In the euthymic state, bipolar patients are just like everyone else. Their moods completely span the normal range. They can have the same problems as anyone else. They can be very functional, or they can have severe personality problems. They can also react poorly to the consequences of their own crazy behavior when they had been in the manic state.

In the case of the author, her mother is described as having been very narcissistic and self centered while euthymic, and as having rarely asked her daughter how the daughter felt about anything. Furthermore, Mom seemed to love being in the manic state, even though it frequently led to her being arrested or thrown into a mental hospital and given electroshock treatments. (This was during the 1940’s, 1950’s, and early 1960’s when patients had few rights, and there were few effective medications).  

But later, when there were effective medications, the mother would refuse to take them. She seemed to feel that even the depressed episodes were worth it, because there would also be those exciting manic highs. While manic, she particularly liked the hypersexuality that came with the territory, even when that meant running naked in public.

At times, the author felt that maybe mother really had control of her behavior even while manic, and was using it to get what she wanted. She read Thomas Szasz, who wrote about how mental illness was a myth. For a short time, she considered it. 

Naaah! She knew her mom was just crazy during manic episodes.

Another factor that affects both the way diseases like bipolar disorder present themselves as well as their effects on other family members is the ambient culture. This idea in no way diminishes the FACT that psychosis is a brain dysfunction. 

The author was born at a time during which gender role stereotypy was the norm. The dream of the author’s father was that she would marry a professional man who made a lot of money, move into the suburbs, and have lots of children. Sort of what her mother did, although she complained about it her whole life. She loved telling her husband what a sh*thead he was.

The author actually didn’t really like the whole sexist white picket fence fairy tale, wanting rather to get her doctorate in philosophy and do great things. On the other hand, she did not want to be anything like her mother. Yet somehow she spent most of her life living out the worst of the two worlds. Her career aspirations were halted when she got pregnant - several times - and married two men whom she did not love but who provided the picture perfect world that her father wanted for her. 

In this world, even men who appeared to be supportive of women's careers nonetheless saw them as lesser beings. When the author had to quit the graduate philosophy program (because she "accidentally" allowed herself to become pregnant, of course), the department chair said, "We need women like you to become professors. So the men can do the research."

In line with the family dynamics of someone without a psychotic parent, the author allowed her husbands and even her son to verbally abuse her, much like her mother frequently did whenever the author had to rescue Mom from her manic escapades. Between husbands, the author became somewhat hypersexual herself, though not nearly in the same way that her mother did during mania. After spending much of her life trying – and failing for the most part, even while not being mentally ill herself in the least - to be everything her mother was not, she came to realize that she admired her mother’s free spirit.

As she struggled to break free from her sexist upbringing, the author brilliantly describes the existential terror that results when someone tries to do something like that: “…might strip away a lifetime of beliefs about who I was, who I was supposed to be. Then what?  What happened after that? That’s the part they didn’t tell you. What happened when you didn’t recognize your life or even yourself any more? When there was only a smoldering void where familiarity used to live?”

So are all of the people society labels mentally ill just eccentric folks who just do not fit in with society?  During her many trips to mental hospitals to visit her mother, the author relates the following conversation with another patient:

“Don’t eat the food,” he told me.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s poisoned.”

“How do you know?”

“The aliens told me. They communicate with me through the fillings in my teeth.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

The thoughts of a functioning normal brain?  Yeah, right.

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."

Putting an End to the Game Without End

In my post of November 18, Changing the Rules of a Game That Will Not End, I described what I find to be a fascinating phenomenon that seems to take place whenever a family member attempts to change the existing rules by which the family operates.  Because everyone had compulsively followed the rules before that point, no one really believes anyone else really wants the rules to change.  That happens even when everyone in the family would be happier with the rule changes than with the previous set of rules.

What happens next is that people start doing the new, requested behavior, but they do it in a half-baked or obnoxious way.  When the person who requested the change then complains about the new behavior, everyone else thinks to themselves, "See, I just knew they really did not want the change in the first place."

In the earlier post, I gave an example concerning attempts to change traditional gender roles that a lot of folks may be familiar with.  When both a husband and wife have to work, the wife often still ends up doing the bulk of the housework and childcare. Why? Is it because men are all male chauvinist pigs?  Well, no. 

In this situation, the husband will generally start to do, say, the after-dinner clean up, but purposely does a poor job, puts things away where the wife can't find them when she needs them, or does things in some other way that he knows the wife will find objectionable. 

She then almost invariably complains to him that he's not doing it right, and he concludes that she really does not want to cede control of the kitchen despite her protestations to the contrary.  So he stops doing things unless she specifically asks him to do it.  She gets tired of always having to ask and then ends up doing everything herself.

In a way, she is often not completely comfortable ceding control of the kitchen- but only because she may have been taught in her own family of origin that the housework was a woman's job. 

Conversely, if she is asked to take over a traditionally male job such as taking the family car in to get fixed, she will do a very similar thing to him.  She will draw criticism about the way she goes about it (often with the help of an unscrupulous auto mechanic, who believes that he can cheat her because he knows that she probably does not know very much about cars). 

Hubby then gets mad that she spent too much or got cheated, and she concludes that he really wants to remain in charge of things like that.  Which he sort of does, since he had been taught in his family of origin that getting cars fixed was the man's job.

People in a family system will almost invariably "test" any new, requested rule change in this manner.  They do it this way in order to give the person who is requesting the rule an "out" - just in case he or she really is uncomfortable with the change. Through their actions, they also take the blame themselves for any failure to change the rules.  Family members are so generous that way.

At the end of the previous post, I mentioned that there is relatively simple way for game players to end the game without end, but that I would save that for a later post. This is now that post.

In order for this solution to work, it is important for individuals requesting the change to freely admit that they are not completely comfortable with the changes, but only because they were raised to follow the old set of rules.  They now see the error of the former ways, but it will take some time before they get comfortable with the changes.

When another family member then does the requested behavior in a half-baked or obnoxious way, the person requesting the change should first praise the person for trying to do what was asked for.  Then and only then should the requester quibble with the way that the task was performed. 

For example, "Thanks for doing the dishes, honey, I really appreciate it.  But if you are going to move things around, please tell me so I know where everything is."

Another example from the previous post: a wife had been encouraging her husband to be more honest about his true feelings and not so closed off. Consequently, he began to express himself, but in an abrasive fashion in front of her boss.  The wife here should wait until she is no longer furious with the husband for doing that, and then say, "I'm really glad that you're being more open about your feelings, but I really wish you wouldn't do that in front of my boss."

Point, game, match.