3.2.4 Openness, Boundedness, and Patterns

We might like to think that the family is a bounded entity where members can be themselves, grow, blow off steam, display their eccentricities, their true emotions, that is, a haven of safety in the big harsh judgmental and uncertain world.

And indeed, the good enough family is probably just that!

Systems theory suggests that even though the family is indeed bounded, it still has a substantial degree of openness.

The boundary can define the family, that is, give it an identity.  But because it is also open, its identity is not fixed, as information, knowledge, feelings etc. flowing into and out of the family, and of course, growth itself, may cause changes in identity over time. 

Mostly these changes in identity cause changes in the relationships within the family, and with other families.

Other families (i.e. the extended family, or indeed the small community, wherein the changes occur), will, for the purposes of this discussion in the next few posts, be called a network.  (I use this term as it is the term often used in articles, books etc. about systems theory).

In the network, (extended families or small communities), open systems (families) will have relations with each other, and each system will determine to some extent how the network functions – even though changes might seem to be initially insignificant or barely noticeable.

You will probably see where I am going here, talking about relations, as relationships are in constant motion as I will discuss in the next post.

When I considered the nature of systems and how reality is relational (that is, how everything depends on everything else) in the natural world, (and that, obviously, includes human society) I was reminded of the movement of waves, i.e. wave motion, and I thought it might be helpful to use it as an analogy for how the family experiences change in the context of relationships within a network.

If we throw one stone into a circular pond with perfectly still water then the wave generated by the impact of the stone hitting the water will move (propagate) outward from the point where the stone hits the water.

If we throw in two stones simultaneously and they land a little away from each other, the two waves generated will interfere with each other as they propagate outwards from the points of entry of the stones.

This will cause the waves to be irregular, some of the interference causing the waves to be bigger, some causing the waves to be smaller or even cancel each other out. 

Obviously if we throw in a number of stones the amount of interference will increase considerably, causing the wave patterns to be so irregular that it would be virtually impossible to distinguish what stone caused what wave.

A measurer with a slow-motion video camera and hours of time to spare may be able to determine which wave is caused by which stone and then analyse the waves to see which ones interfered with others, cancelled each other out, and/or reinforced each other, (in other words, examine the entire scene in a reductionist way).

The casual observer, however, would be uncertain as to what wave was caused by what stone.  He would simply see a body of water with waves big and small going in different directions, the overall disturbance dependent on the size of the stones, the frequency at which they hit the water, and the force of their impacts.

In the next post I will apply all the above to the family situation.

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.

Someone who wished to measure the physical disturbance of water in a pond caused by stones falling in would face a completely different challenge to the person who wishes to measure the emotional disturbance in a family. (If you have read the two previous posts this post will make more sense).

In fact, it would be virtually impossible to slow down the process of disturbance and match each feeling effect precisely to a specific cause, as one might be able to do with a slow motion camera in our circular pond.

There might, of course, be obvious proximate causes, (causes near the event) such as the cause of Dad’s fear is that he might be late for work.  But there will also be deeper causes for each emotion.  (That is, causes farther away from the event).

For example, Dad’s feelings of fear might be due to a long forgotten fear, of which he is not consciously aware, of his own Dad who was very strict around time-keeping.  Or it might be that his fear arises from the fact that he will look bad in the eyes of his boss, as he is competing with a colleague for a vacancy that would lead to higher pay.  Or he may have a fear that he will not have an authoritative image in his children’s eyes, as he feels he should have – and the feeling that he should have an authoritative image may come from core beliefs about parenting, which in turn will have come from how he was parented himself – and so on! 

Trying to identify the root causes of each emotion in Dad (remember he is also beginning to get angry) and then the root causes of the emotions in each of the children and the relationships between all the emotions would be virtually impossible. 

Some very analytical person might attempt to define the relationships, reduce them, give each emotion a quantity of some sort and then express the entire process mathematically to understand it better.

But even if this was done in a kind of freeze-frame or snapshot of the incident, it would not be possible to factor in the emergent properties of each person present.

Also, it would of very limited use in reducing the level of chaos in real time at the breakfast table.

However, if, as stated above, Dad’s pattern is to remain relatively calm in such events, and this pattern has been learned within his own family, over many years, then the pattern of behaviour will most probably reduce the level of chaos.

While the analysis of all the causes, the relationships between them, and the effects of the causes might be of interest to an outside observer or researcher, it will not have much use in real time.

Studies that highlighted the importance of factoring in uncertainty into processes suggested that there are patterns that are important in how our world is known to us.

In quantum physics, elementary particles can be described in terms of their certain mass, volume etc. and in terms of their more uncertain wave characteristic. When I thought about human behaviour and in particular families in this way I noticed some parallels.

When we view a family from one perspective (as a census taker might) we see a certain fixed entity. For example, Mammy, Daddy and a fixed number of children, or perhaps Mammy and a number of children, or Daddy and one child etc. living in a certain place, going to certain work and/or schools, having breakfast and dinner at a certain time, doing everyday tasks that can be observed and measured.  This is a quantitative way of looking at the family.

But when we view a family qualitatively (as a family support worker might) we observe uncertain patterns of behaviour generated by continual movements within and through the boundaries of the family.

Now I would like to distinguish between uncertain and unpredictable here. Patterns of behaviour, which will almost always have an element of predictability, can never be said to be certain because behaviour is governed by whatever we are feeling at a particular time.

This is an important point.

The uncertain patterns are almost always very complex, and, in terms of description, they are just as important as the certain characteristics of the family.

When we measure an aspect of the family from the reductionist (quantitative point of view as I described a few paragraphs above), the patterns might be left out, (or conveniently ignored if they do not fit in with our preconceived beliefs about how things should be), but from the perspective of systems theory the patterns are real, and cannot be ignored.

The patterns in each family extend out into the extended family, then into the community and then society at large, forming more and more complex patterns.

We can also examine a process from these two perspectives.

Take, for example, ‘the process of successful integration of immigrants to Ireland’.

This is something that is dynamic – and will probably involve considerable change over time in planning of education, housing, employment, health etc.  The numbers can be determined in a census (quantitative) by including a standard ethnic identifier in the census questions, and then count the numbers of the different boxes ticked as Iranian, Nigerian, Polish, etc. etc.  The results will give us fixed entities.

However, when we view immigration systemically, we are more interested in both gifts and problems that immigration brings, the emotional wellness or otherwise of the immigrants, their employability, language skills, culture, as well as a host of other factors which include the warmth of welcome of our native population, our own sense of identity, emotional intelligence, our general level of fear, and even our overall health.

And the well-trotted-out argument that because we emigrated in large numbers ourselves we should welcome immigrants with open arms will cut little ice with me if my level of fear is higher than my level of trust.

In this project, our overall levels of confidence, fear, anger, optimism etc. will all be influential, and the patterns that arise from immigration are potentially influenced by all the above. 

So, as much (if not more) attention needs to be given to these systemic factors in planning and designing responses and making decisions, as to the numbers of each ethnic minority.

Getting away from immigration, let us look again at the second half of this post on Complexity where I pondered on whether or not scientific discoveries can be value free. Very often, in advances in science, engineering etc. that bring changes in our lives, patterns are ignored – particularly if their presence threatens those who are promoting the advances, or have something to gain from them, or do not have the emotional intelligence to grasp the implications of the patterns.

For example, considering human society at large, the long-standing pattern of humans to be destructive towards self and others cannot be ignored when we are experimenting with uranium, plutonium and similar substances so we can develop nuclear energy which is intended for peaceful means.

And this same self-destructive pattern is completely ignored when it comes to manufacturing cars that can go at very high speeds.  (This was already discussed in the description of corporate closed-ness in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society in the previous Section).