Unhappy Families are a Blessing
Author: Elsabe Smit

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.


About the Author:

Elsabe Smit is the author of A Tapestry of Life and the
blog http://www.mypurpleblog.com , spiritual
interpretations of everyday life. Refer the blog for an
exciting competition where you can honour a person over 50
who achieved something remarkable.