Psychology of Functional/Dysfunctional Families
Families are not fair and we don’t choose the one that we are born or adopted into. Today a family is what most people are in recovery from. What makes a family functional/ dysfunctional? Where does yours match up?
A functional family encourages the potential growth of each member of the family and provides a safe place where each person can more or less be themselves. Parents make and enforce rules that help guide a child’s behavior, but they do not try and regulate their child’s emotional and intellectual life. Functional families should feel free to share their thoughts and feelings on emotional subjects, without feeling nervous about differences. Finally parents should be calmly connected to their own family, and no family member should have to deny or silence and important aspect of self in order to feel heard or like they belong.
In my opinion this is the ideal family. Unfortunately this is not the reality of most families. No family is perfect and each family has its own struggles, but I feel that each family should try to strive to be encouraging and supportive of one another. Every child should be able to feel comfortable talking to their parents about their feelings without feeling like they will be judged. Families need to be more open with one another.
Dysfunctional families don’t allow people to be their authentic selves. They tend to dance around their shame, denials and addictions, working to keep each member assigned to their “assigned” dysfunctional roles.
There are four basic roles in the dysfunctional family:
“The Golden Child/Hero” this is the child who “can do no wrong.” The golden children usually play their part pretty well. They usually end up stuck in the role of success-object and some are entitled trouble makers who are never expected to actually earn anything. They feel entitled and are generally the “more favored” of the children. Many of these children will wake up much...