Unhappy Families are a Blessing

I am currently reading a fascinating book about Henry VIII and his six wives. The author of the book states that happy families all resemble one another, while unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique ways.

And Henry VIII was very good at creating unique unhappy families. He was married six times. During an age where divorce was the last option and the divorce of a monarch was unthinkable, he divorced his first wife, had the second one beheaded, lost the third in child-birth, divorced number four, had number five beheaded and left number six widowed.

I recently attended a talk where the presenters described their upbringing to give some perspective to their product. They started the presentation by asking the audience how many people were from dysfunctional families. As you could expect, some hands went up immediately (some people like to define themselves by means of their history rather than who they really are) and other hands went up reluctantly (because we all have some skeletons in our closets).

The one presenter then said "As I expected - we are all from dysfunctional families" as if that was a given. It became clear during their presentation that their view of the world being populated by dysfunctional families impacted on everything they had personally experienced.

It reminded me again that we like to put labels on people, because it makes us feel safe. We tend to compare ourselves to other people, see their challenges in life and then see our own challenges in a far better light.

You may have heard about the woman who discovered that her husband was having an affair. They moved in circles where this happened quite often, but people were very discrete about it. However, this woman was determined not to share her husband.

She confronted her husband with the evidence, and he calmly acknowledged that he was having an affair with a particular woman. He reminded her that his friend Bob had been having an affair for years, that she was aware of it and never had an issue with it.

However, the wife would not tolerate her own husband having an affair, and of course she then threatened to divorce him if he did not end the affair immediately.

His response was "OK, you can have a divorce. You will also have your credit card taken away from you, which means you will have to get a job. You will no longer get a new car every two years or holidays on tropical islands once a year. You will not be able to buy designer clothes or get your regular beauty treatments. Would you really like a divorce?"

The wife thought about this for a while, and then said "I think our mistress is far more beautiful than Bob's."

On a more serious note, the reasons why families are "dysfunctional" or challenging are because they teach us things about ourselves. We choose our families before we enter this existence because our interaction with them highlights our own particular needs for spiritual growth. Somehow we allow families to get away with behaviour that we would definitely not tolerate from others. We do this because we intuitively know our families love us and will always love us no matter what. We tolerate their actions until we have learnt what we needed to learn from them, and once we understand our love for them only becomes deeper.

Some people thrive on their badges of being from dysfunctional families. That blurs their own perceptions, but that is also part of their journeys.

I know of a couple who were both abandoned as babies. The husband was from a large family, and he was given away to an unmarried aunt who had a no children but a very strong maternal drive - so strong that she in fact emotionally abused the boy. By the age of about ten, he was claimed back by his mother. You can imagine the impact this upbringing had on him.

The wife was given to her grandparents when she was a baby, because both parents had serious health problems. She grew up thinking that her grandparents were her parents, until she was six years old. She had no contact with her biological parents and did not even know that they were alive. Then her parents simply appeared one day and claimed her back and took her home with them. Imagine the impact this had on the little girl, being taken away from a familiar environment and having to get used to two complete strangers who were now the new figures of authority in her life.

These two people then married and had a daughter. The daughter became anorexic and suicidal in her teens and nearly ruined her parents financially and emotionally with her excessive demands for things and situations that could potentially make her happy and stop her torturing herself and her parents.

The parents liked to describe the whole experience as an intervention from the Holy Spirit to help them realise that money and earthly possessions are not important. They described their daughter as a "very mature teacher" of spiritual lessons.

My view was that they were both abandoned as children, and then overcompensated with their child's upbringing by smothering her with their version of parental love. They did everything they could to give her the opposite of the childhood they had. The daughter then rebelled by becoming anorexic and by playing on their guilt feelings and manipulating them to the hilt.

How would they react to a different view on their experiences? Would they sit up and think about it and learn even more about their journey? Would they reject a view that clashes with their view of the world and continue to miss the point? Or is this a point I want to make based on my ignorance? After all, I was not there and heard their version of the events long after they took place.

And those are the questions that each of us - at least those that do come from unhappy families- have to ask of ourselves.

Being a member of an unhappy family is a challenge because our relatives remind us time and again of our own dark sides. Because it is a challenge, we tend to prefer the least painful perspective on the issue.

How would each of us react to a view of our lives that focuses on the pain? Would we understand that the healing will only take place once we experience an equal amount of pain and pleasure, and achieve a balanced perspective on our experiences?

Confronting our own dark side is a brave act. We often choose to either gloss over it or wear it as a "badge of injury" rather than deal with it.

Once we start to search for the advantages in the experiences that shaped us, we gain an understanding of where and how it fits into the Master Plan. We see that every single experience has a positive and a negative side. We stop focusing on the negative side and get a balanced view. Only then can we experience gratitude and get a feeling of the immense Love that God has for us. That is the moment where our lives really begin.

And that is the moment when a dysfunctional family begins to heal and start to see and love the lighter side of one another.