Let us now apply the wave motion that I described in the previous post to the family. There are always chaotic events happening in families, creating disturbances – like the stones hitting the water – as there are in all living environments.
Chaotic events can sometimes be harmful, and action will often be taken to reduce the potential harm.
Parents who are the responsible ones in a family can either increase the level of chaos that arises from the event, or decrease it. If parents’ behaviour is such that the felt sense of chaos in a family continually increases, children will grow up believing that the natural order, or the norm, is chaos [1].
Perhaps it is because people desire order so much that members of families affected by addiction take on roles such as caretaker, hero, hidden, scapegoat, clown etc. to ensure that when a chaotic event occurs there will be a predictable reaction from each member to the event. These roles are very well described in a book entitled Children Under the Influence by Michael Hardiman.
Now let us imagine a very simple and common chaotic event causing a disturbance in a family (like a stone hitting a body of water) and imagine that the disturbance generated by the emotional event is akin to a wave of feeling flowing rapidly through the members.
Let us say that Dad is busy getting three children out for school in the morning. Everything has been prepared, lunches are made etc. Then one child drops a bowl of corn-flakes which causes a second child to slip on the wet floor. The young child that slips instinctively roars at the child who drops the bowl. A third child who is in a baby chair and eating her breakfast now stops eating and starts crying demanding attention. This is an unexpected event that causes waves of feelings to propagate through the family.
~ Child No. 1 feels afraid that he will be blamed for dropping the corn-flakes.
~ Child No. 2 feels angry at having to pick herself up off the floor with a sore elbow.
~ Child No. 3 feels neglected and cries to demand attention.
~ Dad feels afraid that everyone will be late for school/crèche and he will be late for work, and may begin to feel angry at the delay.
Let us select Child No. 2’s feeling of anger as an example.
The way that Dad responds to this anger will determine how much energy the anger wave will have when it breaks upon the shores of the other members of the family.
If Dad is a reasonably well adjusted man who is able to deal with unexpected events and, in his own family history, reason and calmness were modelled, he will instinctively know that calming the angry child with words and actions of sympathy and understanding will reduce the level of anger, make the wave smaller, (attenuate is the technical word) and ensure that calm returns to the family pond quickly.
If, however, Dad is from a family where anger waves were made bigger (amplified is the technical word) rather than attenuated, and he has never learned or experienced anything different, then there is a big danger that his actions will increase the amount of anger, fear and anxiety among every member of the family – the equivalent of throwing a larger stone into the family pond and causing greater disturbance than the initial event.
Chaotic events when we are children and how our parents reacted to them influence how we will react to chaotic events in our adulthood.
As the family is a mixum-gatherum of continually occurring emotional events it is, (like the water into which we threw the stones), very difficult to detect which emotional event causes which wave of feeling!
And since the first emotional event (probably) happened the first minute of the first hour of the first day that the two people who started the family met, and that emotional event was a consequence of the patterns of countless waves of feelings that the two people experienced in their lives up to then, the family system is truly an Atlantic Ocean of emotional waves, not a still circular pond.
And because it is like an ocean, the family system influences the climate in a family!
Shirley Ward in her book Healing Birth, Healing Earth gives a wonderful insight into the impact of predictable but uncertain emotional events in families when she describes pre-conception, conception, pre-birth, birth and our lives in general in the context of fractals.
[1]. Just a quick aside here; a workplace is, ideally, ordered and structured. Unlike a family, there are rules and regulations and policies and procedures. However, it will be argued in a later Chapter that a workplace that tolerates some chaos and uncertainty can be of great assistance to people in distress as they make what is sometimes a fearful journey from their own chaos to a more balanced lifestyle.