14. The Can of Worms in Action

      So far we’ve talked about the lines on the family map as if they were TV channels along which messages and feelings could pass. This is true, as far as it goes, but these lines are also family ties. These lines tie all the individuals together so that each one is affected by every other one. Any one person can be in the middle of many pulls at the same time. And again, the issue is not how to avoid these pulls (because that’s impossible) but how to live with the pulls creatively. That is precisely what I want to deal with in this chapter.

      Incidentally, some of the exercises I am going to ask you to do in this chapter may seem silly, possibly too time-consuming, or too much bother. I urge you to undertake them anyway. What can be revealed to you in something as artless and simple as these games will absolutely astound you. Surely it is worth an investment of some of your time and effort: the reward could be deeper understanding and a more fully functioning and creative family life.

      We’ll start with the Lintons. john comes home from work. Alice would like to have his company. Joe, Bob, and Trudy might also like to have his attention. If they all want to have his attention at once John will be in this position:

You can imagine how pulled he feels. You can do better than imagining by experiencing these kinds of pulls yourself.

      Let’s start with your “John”. He should stand in the middle of the floor, straight and balanced. Then ask “Alice” to take his right hand. Ask your first-born to take “John's” left hand; ask the second-born, “Bob,” to grasp “John” around the waist from the front; ask “Trudy” to put her arms around his waist from the back. If you have a fourth, have him or her grasp the right knee; a fifth, the left knee. Just keep going until all members of the family have their hands on “John”. Now, everyone pull gently, slowly, but firmly toward themselves until everyone feels the pull. Then freeze. After a few seconds “John” will begin to feel stretched, uneasy, uncomfortable, and miserable. He may even fear he will lose his balance.

      John’s feelings in this exercise are very similar to his actual feelings when too many demands are made on him. He cannot stay in this position forever. He has to do something. Several choices of action are open. He can decide to endure it and get increasingly more numb until he no longer feels anything. Once he’s numb, he can wait indefinitely. Finally people will just let go, left with the feeling that “Daddy doesn’t care.” Or John can decide to bully his way out by using brute force. Some of the family members might accidentally get slugged or knocked over. Then, as John looks at his family, he can see he has hurt them. He may feel guilty and blame himself for not being able to do what they want, or he may blame them for putting burdens on him. The others are likely to feel that Daddy is mean, unloving, and hurtful.

      Something else John can do is collapse when he feels the pressure. He drops to the floor, which represents his solution of becoming sick or helpless. When this happens, his family could feel they are bad because they have hurt Daddy. And john could feel angry at them for making him feel weak.

      Another choice open to John is to start making deals by bribing and making promises he probably can’t keep but which provide a way out of his misery. In this case john asks each person’s price for letting go, and the sky’s the limit. Whatever they ask for, John will have to say yes; but since his promises aren’t sincere, they probably won’t be kept. Distrust grows out of this maneuver, as well as all the other feelings one directs at a promise-breaker.

      John has still another choice. At the point of his discomfort he can yell for help——to his mother, his therapist, his pastor, the neighbors, or a visiting friend. “Come get me out of this mess!” And if the one he calls is skillful, powerful, or convincing enough, John can be freed. The entrance of an outside party, however, brings new chances for rifts within the family. Many secret relationships outside the family——lovers, and so on——develop and end this way.

      One more choice is open to John. He can be aware that he is an important person to all of those who are asking things of him. He realizes that all those pulling on him are not feeling the same as he is. He can tell all the other family members how he’s feeling and have the confidence to ask them for relief. He can ask for it directly——no hints.

      John should now role-play all these ways of getting out of his bind. Then all members of the family can talk about how they felt as this was going on. I think all of you will learn something. Then go through the same procedure with each person having a turn in the center, being pulled.

      I would like to underscore the fact that any time you are in a group, you subject yourself to getting into binds like this. I know of only three ways to avoid these binds completely: become a hermit; plan your family contacts so that no one approaches anyone else without a previous plan and permission (“You can see me at 5 P.M. for five minutes on Tuesday”); or simply don’t care about anyone else. If there are other ways, I haven’t found them.

      None of these ways of avoiding binds is particularly satisfying. As a matter of fact, people who practice them complain about them. The real skill, as mentioned, is not in avoiding binds but in knowing how to resolve them. It is a fact, however, that most people use one of the approaches we had “John” enact in the last exercise: the martyr approach (enduring), bullying (fighting out), the poor-me approach (collapsing), the con artist (promises, promises), or passing the buck (calling for outside help). Few talk straight to the other family members and give them directions to help change the situation. I have found people usually respond when asked directly and honestly for help.

      Obviously there are times when one has to endure pain, do battle, admit fatigue, or ask for help. There is nothing wrong with these states. They become destructive only when they are used to avoid binds.

      We've been talking about John, but the same situation holds true for all members of the family. Every wife and mother knows how Alice feels when John is waiting for his dinner, Joe has just cut his knee, Bob is late for his clarinet lesson, and Trudy is yelling, “Mama!” from the top of the stairs. Alice has a headache.

      Now Alice is the one in the hind. She has the same choices that John had. Which will she take? Practice all of them to see how they feel.

      Joe is going out on his first date. Alice is giving him instructions on how to behave. John is warning him about staying out too late. Bob is teasing him about shaving, and Trudy is pouring because she’d hoped Joe would take her to the movies that night.

      He, too, has the same choices. Which will he take? Have your Joe practice the bind-breaking approaches his parents did.

      Bob has just cut his knee. Alice is scolding him for being careless. John is telling him to be brave, that men don’t cry. Joe is calling him clumsy. Trudy is crying. Bob, too, has the same choices. Which one will he take?

      Trudy got two low marks on her report card. Alice is consoling her; John is scolding her, telling her she’ll have to spend two hours doing homework under his supervision every night until the next report card period. Joe is winking at her, and Bob is calling her a dummy. Which of the same choices open to her will Trudy take?

      You are the center of this bind now. What kind of pressure are other family members putting on you? Try to feel them, then describe them to the people involved. Each of you take a turn. Then try to imagine what pressures you may be putting on others.

      As I said, you do break binds by commenting on them. What is significant is what happens afterwards: the choice a person makes has after-effects, determines her or his reputation, and guides the ways the others treat him or her.

      Now we’re going to do an exercise that will make your family network come alive for you. Wholehearted participation can give you a good boost toward becoming a more vital and nurturing family.

      Cut a piece of heavy twine or clothesline into twenty-foot lengths, four for each of you (in a family of five). In addition, cut five three-foot lengths, and tie one of these short pieces around each person’s waist (some of you might prefer putting it around each other’s necks, but I prefer the waistline). Next, have each person tie his four longer ropes to his waistline rope. Now each of you literally has a line available to each of your family members.

      Now hand each of your ropes to the person who belongs on the other end. For example, John would hand his husband rope to his wife; she will hand her wife rope to him. When everybody has another person at the end of each rope, you will be ready. And, you should excuse the expression, you have your hands full, don't you?

      Tie the ropes you have received to your waist rope (many people do this immediately, almost without being aware of it). You'll look like the picture below.

      Keep the lines tied while you do the following experiments.

      Begin by having chairs placed in a circle no more than three feet from the center of the circle. Sit down. Now you’ll hardly notice your lines. Everyone is in a chair; you can talk to each other, read, or do other quiet activities.

      All right. Now imagine that the telephone is ringing, and your oldest child jumps up to answer it. It’s probably thirty feet away. See what happens to the rest of you. You’re all shook up! Individuals may feel invaded, pushed, or angry. You’ll probably be aware that whatever your feelings are, they are feelings you have experienced before. (“Joe, why do you make so much noise?” “Why do you move so fast?”) If the caller is a teenaged pal of Joe's settle in for at least ten minutes.

      What is happening to the rest of you while Joe's talking? Maybe some of you will start to pull on Joe so you can be more comfortable. “Hurry up on the phone, Joe! You’ve got three minutes!”

      Joe starts to yell, “Leave me alone!“ He may get breathless and raise his voice.

      Let yourselves see and feel what happens to you as you live with this.

      Now go back to your chairs, and we’ll do another scene. Mother, it’s your turn. You remember something cooking on the stove fifteen feet away, and it may be burning. See what happens to everybody else as you rush to the stove. Then come back and get your balance.

      This time, John, you are getting tired or bored, and you want to get up and take a walk. As you are headed for the door, you feel tugs and pulls. “My God, can’t a man even take a walk without everyone getting on his back?” What happens to all the rest of you? How do you feel about yourselves and your family members?

      Now, Trudy, you are tired and want to go to bed. Go over and put your head on your mother’s lap. See what happens now.

      Bob, you decide you want to have a little fun with Joe and start wrestling with him. Now what happens to everyone?

      All right. Come back and get your balance. This time let’s make an extreme plot for our little play. Joe, you answer the telephone; Alice, see about the cooking, John, try to take a walk; Trudy, you’re sleepy and head toward your mother’s lap; Bob, you start something with Joe. Do this all at the same time.

      Along about now, you are probably all mixed up with one another and feeling angry and frustrated. Some of you have possibly tripped and are on the floor. The food is burning; the telephone is still ringing; Bob is struggling with Joe, who is still trying to get to the phone; Trudy caught her mother’s foot as she turned; and John, you didn’t even have a chance, did you? (Won’t it be nice to get back to work tomorrow?)

      The feelings elicited by this experiment probably seem familiar to you. Of course you don’t run around every day with ropes attached to you, but I’m sure it often feels as if they were there. Perhaps next time you’ll be aware of how easily family members can get in each other’s way without meaning to.

      Look on these lines as representing the love-care-duty-comfort relationships that exist among people in a family. It’s easy to see how, without ever intending to, someone can upset the whole family applecart. What we should learn here is that we need to recognize each other's self-life, too.

      Now let’s try that last experiment again. Only this time when you feel the pull, say what you are feeling, and say what you are noticing. Then you’ll have a chance to get your lines back from the others and to untie them so you are free. This is straight, clear, and full communication to the rescue.

      You may have noticed that only five people are present, but there are twenty lines. And pulling a string between husband and wife affects the lines between each parent and the offspring.

      Here is another experiment you can do while you’re still all tied up. John, you and Alice start pulling against one another. See what happens to the others. If you pull quietly and lightly, maybe your children won’t notice (after all, they shouldn’t see you two fighting, should they?). If your pull is light enough, maybe neither of you will notice it either. But you pull as you mean it, the lines to the children get taut, which draws the attention of your children and starts the triangles moving.

      Now John, you and Alice draw close together and embrace. See what happens with the children: they’ll have to move. Try the same thing with each pair becoming active and see what happens.

      Ready for another experiment? The time comes when members of the family decide to leave it. This is Joe’s wedding day. What happens to your ties now? Do you, John, give Joe your end of the rope and let him go? Do you just untie your end and tuck it in, symbolizing memories of fathering him? He’s a grown man now.

      Joe, what do you do? It isn’t enough for your parents to let go; you have to, too. Bob and Trudy have to do something about their ropes, and Joe has to do something about his ropes to them. Joe needs to untie his old lines and develop new ones as he prepares for the making of his own family.

      For a final experiment, think of some important event about to occur in your family or perhaps some everyday situation that frequently causes problems. Act it out with your ropes, and see what happens to the ties among the various family members. Where is the pull? What might you do to relieve it?

      One of the very real challenges of the family map is to keep it up to date. Compare the Lintons of today to where they were twelve years ago, when john was twenty-eight and Alice twenty-six. Joe was five; Bob, four; and Trudy, an infant. The only constant from that point to the current one is the number in the family. The needs, wishes, and individual forms have changed drastically. If the family map doesn’t register these changes, you may feel disoriented, as though you’re using a 1920 map of Chicago to locate a current address.

      Is your map up to date? Are you still calling a six-foot,four-inch son whose name is William, “Willikens,” or something equally absurd? “My baby,” I hear a mother describe her twenty-one-year-old daughter; I notice the daughter cringe.

      Another common happening in families is that several members may go through drastic changes simultaneously. This creates what I call a normal developmental crisis cluster. In short, things bunch up. It is not uncommon, for example, for the wife-mother to be pregnant with her third child when the first child is just entering kindergarten, the second child barely talking, and the husband-father just recently returned from military service.

      Let's take the Lintons one year from now. Joe will be eighteen and probably taking a big step on his own. Trudy might be starting her active dating life, Alice might be approaching menopause, and John might be reassessing his dreams. As they all go through these deep, yet normal crises, the stresses become greater. When there is a cluster of such crises, someone in the family falls apart for a while. Everyone else feels squeezed, and the family can temporarily be as strangers, which is scary.

      This is fertile ground for developing the generation gap, as well as a marital gap. For example, I know a young woman whose son, Joel, age six, became very interested in small garter snakes. For Joel the snakes were a source of interest and delight. For his mother they were frightening and horrid. In another instance, a man I’ll call Josh one day announced to his wife that he had decided to have a vacation by himself. He wanted the chance to be totally outside any family demands. This fits his internal state, but to his wife it meant rejection.

      Suppose Alice Linton decided to take a job to add variety and interest to her life, or to help with the income. This meant growth to her, but to John it meant she was dissatisfied with his ability to provide. There are countless illustrations of this kind of thing.

      Although these kinds of situations generally reflect individual growth needs, they are often not understood that way. What action will be taken depends on the consequences that arise when family members’ roles collide. Will Joel get to keep the snakes without giving his mother a nervous breakdown? Will Josh be able to take his vacation alone without rupturing his relationship with his wife? Will Alice get to keep her job without losing John?

      I would like to describe the major, natural steps a family undergoes as its members grow. All of these steps mean crisis and temporary anxiety and require an adjustment period and a new integration.

      The first crisis is the conception, pregnancy, and birth of a child.

      The second crisis comes when the child starts to use intelligible speech. Few people realize how much adjustment this takes.

      The third crisis comes when the child makes an official connection outside the home, namely, school. This brings the school world into the family, and brings in a foreign element for the parents and children alike. Teachers are generally parental extensions; and even if you welcome this, it requires adjustment.

      The fourth crisis, which is a great big one, comes when the child goes into adolescence.

      The fifth is when the child has grown to adulthood and is leaving home to seek independence. There are often heavy loss feelings here.

      The sixth crisis comes when the young adult marries, and the in-laws become foreign elements to be accepted in the family.

      The seventh is the advent of menopause in the woman.

      The eighth, called the climacteric, involves a reduced level of sexual activity by the male. This is not a physical problem; his crisis seems to be more connected to his feelings that he is losing his potency.

      The ninth comes, then, with grandparenting, which is chock full of privileges and traps.

      Finally, the tenth comes when death comes to one of the spouses, and then to the other.

      The family is the only social group I know that accommodates so many changing differentnesses in so little space and in such a short time. When three or four of these crises occur at once, life can get really intense and more “worriable” than usual. Chances are good, though, that if you understand what is happening, you can relax a little. In turn, you can clearly see what directions to take to make changes. I want to emphasize that these are normal, natural stresses; they are predictable for most people. Don’t make the mistake of regarding them as abnormal.

      There is a positive side to all this. Usually, no one in a family has lived exactly the same number of years as anyone else. No one has had the exact kind of experience, and each has a wealth of experience to share with others. The Lintons, for example, have a total of 123 years of human experience from which to draw, and that is a whale of a lot of experience. Few families that I know of have looked at their accumulated ages in this way.

      Change and differentness are constant, normal, healthy factors present in every family. If family members do not expect change or prepare themselves for emerging differentness, they run the risk of falling on their faces; they expect homogeneity when it doesn’t exist. People get born, grow big, work, marry, become parents, grow old, and die. This is the human condition.

      Becoming aware of one’s family network helps shed light on the squeezes and stresses in family life. So does fully understanding roles in family life. Describing a family by its role names alone——husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers——leaves out the human beings who live out these roles and give them life. As far as I am concerned, a role name describes only one part of a relationship. I think roles also set boundaries for that relationship. Thirdly, roles indicate the expectation that an affectionate, positive tie exists between people: that the husband loves the wife and vice versa, mother loves daughter/ son, father loves son/ daughter, children love the parents, and so on.

      If I say that my feeling toward you is as toward a father, I am saying that I feel you as protective and do not see you as a sexual partner. The same is true if I see you as a brother, a son, or a daughter: I indicate a closeness but rule you out as a sexual partner.

      Two forms of what I call the role-function discrepancy appear frequently in families. As we saw in the chapter on special families, one is where the son gets into a head-of-the-family role, commonly that of his father. This could be because the father is dead, divorced, has deserted, is incapacitated, incompetent, or neglectful. In the other form, a daughter gets into the mother role, presumably because her mother is unavailable for similar reasons.

      The child in this condition usually ends up with all the responsibilities and none of the privileges of the new role. To take on a new role, the child leaves a real role behind; and this becomes a very lonely and unsure place to be. For example, suppose Joe Linton at the age of eighteen becomes the main support of the family as his father has become chronically ill. As the primary wage-earner, he could feel he has a right to decide how to spend the money; he could therefore come into contact with his mother over this issue as a husband might. His mother might turn to him as she would to a husband and ask him to help her discipline the younger children. Joe can’t fully be a husband, a son, or a brother.

      First children seem to get into this bind most frequently. They are neither fish nor fowl as far as their family positions are concerned. The way a role is lived out in the family seriously affects the self-worth of the individuals involved.

      I see nothing wrong with anybody doing whatever he or she can to help with whatever is necessary. The problem lies in the messages surrounding the behavior.

      Look at your family map again. Are there any people who have one role name but really are performing another?

      Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, many families have men who do not actively father. They’re away because of work demands, they’ve been divorced, or incapacitated, or have emotionally resigned from fathering. As a result, their sons carry impossible burdens. If the father is unavailable, it is a great temptation for a woman to begin to use a son as a substitute husband. This usually works to the detriment of the son.

      If I have made it as clear to you as it is in my own head, then some things must have struck you about your family map. Let me briefly describe what strikes me.

      Every family member has to have a place, simply because each one is a human being and is present. For every family and for every family member, it is crucial that each person’s place is fully recognized, accepted, and understood.

      Every family member is related to every other family member. The importance here, again, is that these relationships be clearly understood.

      Every family member affects and is affected by every other family member. Therefore, everyone matters and everyone contributes to what is going on with any one person and has a part in helping that person change.

      Every family member is potentially the focus of many pulls simply because each has so many relationships. It is normal and natural. What is crucial is not to avoid the pulls but to deal with them comfortably.

      Since the family develops over time, it is always building on what it has already developed. We stand on top of what was built before. Therefore, to understand what is going on in the present, one needs a perspective of the past. I would add that seeing one’s past in terms of experience and resultant learning will usually illuminate the present. Never mind about labeling it right or wrong.

      Every family member wears at least three role-hats in family living. What is important is that you are wearing the role-hat that matches what you are saying and doing. You need to develop a facility for being a quick-hange artist so you can wear the right hat at the right time.