Three Characteristics of Healthy Adult Families
And eight spectrums to consider when evaluating family and relational health.
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I deeply appreciate your trust, your encouragement, and your readership!
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The field of psychology has a history of defining and treating mental health the following way:
Observe dysfunction, using medicalized terms like “depression”, “anxiety”, and “schizophrenic”.
Define individualized characteristics of each of these defined disorders, evaluating daily living activities like sleep, eating, focus, and self-motivation.
Evaluate the behavior and stories of client(s) and align the described symptoms with a specific category of mood or behavioral disorders in the DSM-V or ICD-10.
Eliminate dysfunction through a myriad of interventions with the hope of working backward to finding “health”.
What would happen if our profession engaged with mental health by starting with “health”, observing when clients are practicing health, encouraging the continuation of health, and addressing dysfunction when it comes up, rather than starting with dysfunction and hoping that we can work our way backward to stumble upon the concept of “health”?
Tomorrow (the day before Thanksgiving), I’ll send a followup article to last week’s article “The Relational Consequences of a Trump Vote”.
I’ll allude to the research of Kristina Scharp, professor of communication at Rutgers. Dr. Scharp is one of the premier researchers on the process of family estrangement. In her 2017 article “You’re Not Welcome Here”: A Grounded Theory of Family Distancing”, she describes ten strategies that family members practice when intentionally distancing from their larger families due to family chaos, abuse and other forms of bad behavior, and wildly differing values.
Scharp uses a method called the “Components of the Estrangement Continuum”, in which she assesses for the polarized practices of these eight features in family systems in which the children are young adults or older. (We’ll use the phrase “adult children” moving forward):
Communication quality, including an understanding and mutual investment in a depth and breadth of conversation topics and emotional sharing.
Communication quantity.
Physical distance between the adult child and the rest of family members, most notably the parental subunit.
Presence or absence of emotion. Scharp specifically assesses for the quantity of emotion that the adult child feels toward family members.
Positive/negative affect. The extent to which experienced feelings are positive or negative. You could also explore the utilization and function of emotion.
Is emotion utilized to draw people together?
Is emotion utilized to punish or shame?
Is emotion even utilized?
Desire to be a family. The extent to which the adult child wants to align themselves with their family of origin. If the distancing from a family happens as the result of a relational rupture, the extent to which there is a desire for or practice of reconciliation?
Role reciprocity. The extent to which parents and adult children are mutually sharing and giving resources, such as financial aid, emotional support, and social engagement (i.e. grandparenting)
Taking legal action. The likelihood that an adult child will rely on legal processes to establish their allegiance or disconnection from their families of origin (i.e. legal emancipation).
Scharp researches families in which there is an extremely low desire of communication quality, high level of negative affect either from the adult child or directed toward the adult child, and a minimal desire from the adult child to participate in the family of origin as a form of protest. Again, we’ll talk about the results of her study in tomorrow’s Substack.
But for today, the eight categories that Scharp defines also speaks to relational and family health.
For instance, families who express a consistent amount of conversational depth positive emotion toward each other are more likely to experience the relational and psychological benefits of family connectedness.
It’s also important to note that these eight categories exist on a spectrum. After all, a family might have a high dependence on conversational depth and positive emotion that they prevent family members from experiencing their own individual relationships. (In family therapy, we call this enmeshment.)
This weekend, or the next time you’re with your family, I invite you to do the following exercise.
Draw eight horizontal lines for each of these categories. At one end of the line, write one extreme (i.e. zero communication quality), and on the other end, write the other extreme (i.e. so much communication quality that it feels forced or smothering).
Enjoy your family time together. Pay attention to the types of conversations and stories that get told.
When does laughter happen?
Who laughs? (And more importantly, who doesn’t?)
What two-person relationships have the greatest sense of closeness?
How does the family engage with people who participate less?
How does the communication within the family event correspond with communication outside of the family event?
After you leave your family event, mark where your family falls on each of these lines. These will be approximations, of course.
Ask yourself, “To what extent does this current model of family communication work for you?”
Write two or three things that you and your family does really well when together. These may be activities or interactions that you’re looking forward to in the future.
Write one or two things that don’t work for you at this particular time. Perhaps this is a reflection of family dysfunction that you don’t want to participate in. Or perhaps this is a reflection of your desire to separate your own life from your family of origin. (For instance, regardless of how healthy mine and Julia’s families operate, a 90 minute drive is as close as we want to get.)
Family health with adult children happens in three ways.
Quality communication. Family members reciprocally engage with and are curious about each other’s personal lives. Family members laugh together, and grieve together when necessary. Family members offer a mixture of positivity and guidance (when asked for). The other seven characteristics don’t speak to family health, in and of themselves. Culture, preferences, and personality traits influence communication quantity, role reciprocity, and the extent of the desire to be a family.
A general agreement about the role of family and desired family interactions. Some families desire daily interaction with each other. Some families (like mine) desire monthly or bi-monthly communication. (By the way, I would argue that family members who have an absence of emotion haven’t made an agreement to have an absence of emotion. They’ve avoided emotion. Agreements involve conversations that openly address “Who do we want to be?”)
An acceptance of differences that exist between family members. For instance, while there was a short grieving period from my parents, they have accepted that I will never live in Texas again. I have also accepted that they will likely never visit me wherever I live. Am I sad about this? Sure. Do I criticize my parents (or vice versa) for this? Absolutely not.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about what happens when there isn’t a general agreement about the role of family, or when there isn’t an acceptance of differences that exist between family members. (For instance, I’m thinking of adult children who get exhausted by parents or family members who parrot Fox News talking points in their attempt to create quality dialogue.)
But for today and this weekend, take note of how what quality communication looks like in your own family. Take note of how your family describes the role and purpose of this specific family. And pay attention to the differences between family members that are accepted (as well as those that are not).
If you’d like some help your family communicate and operate with more health, positivity, and joy, Julia and I would love to offer our family coaching services. Learn more by emailing us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah
How can we know when we are "Functional?' Are there minimum Standards? Reading, did I find yours: 1 Communication 2 Agreement 3 Acceptance? In other words, "cooperate."