Reply to If you come from a FUNCTIONAL family, why resent/dislike people from dysfunctional families?

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Reply to "If you come from a FUNCTIONAL family, why resent/dislike people from dysfunctional families?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Functional vs  dysfunctional are way more nuanced and mean different things to deferent people even within the same family.

I do think there are some people who assume that their “normal” upbringing automatically makes them normal and functional. When in reality, there was a lot of sweeping issues under the rug and therefore nothing was dealt with and so you get some quite emotionally immature adults who fear their own dysfunction.

Whereas, more chaotic upbringings may help create some more resilient compassionate adults.[/quote]

I get this. My mom is super weird about our family's issues. Like on the one hand, she's the first person to be like "we have issues with alcoholism and mental health in our family." But if my siblings or I ever even hint at the idea that our childhood was not "normal" she freaks out. She sees the issues but is terrified of the idea that we aren't normal and worked super hard to project an image of our family being very normal to outsiders (which was a huge part of our family dysfunction!).

But a major part of the problem was the way she separated people into normal v. not normal. She conflated "normalcy" with healthy/functional, and they aren't the same. Like I know people from families with divorced parents where they have very functional, healthy relationships with their parents. In some ways the divorce facilitated those relationships because it was a way of their parents being honest (our relationship isn't working and we are better off apart) and that translates to similarly honest and straightforward relationships elsewhere. Meanwhile my parents hated each other and often hated us (but also loved us, and resented us, and were jealous of us). And rather than DEAL with that, we just put a show of normalcy to others. I remember going through a mild goth phase in high school (I was a theater kid) and my mom absolutely melted down at the idea of other people seeing me wearing a black dress and eyeliner. As an adult, I realized it's because she understood we were all basically pretending to be functional anyway, so she didn't want anything that would even give a sniff of "issues" to anyone, especially not her super conservative family, because then the jig would be up.

Family therapy should be more widely available and probably offered to all families when their kids are in elementary school, just in case. It would solve a LOT of problems.[/quote]

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