HEALTH PLUS: The family is one of our most valuable resources – we need to look after it
WE RETAIN an identity as we make our way through life. We have a sense of sameness, of continuity, despite the alterations in our appearance over decades.
And, just as we feel that we are a coherent identity despite changes in appearance, in relationships, in knowledge and views, so too do we retain a belief in the identity of our family, as if it is a singular, stable, constant unit.
But it is not. It is an ever-evolving network of relationships to which constant adaptations are required.
When we speak of “my family” we are really talking psychologically and humanly about a set of attachments, a range of securities and interactions across our lifetime that the term “family” encapsulates for us.
We are talking about people with whom we have grown up. People we knew as children. People who were children with us. People who have known us all our lives, through all our personal changes and transmogrifications into the people we are now.
We are talking about relationships, bonds of affection and links of loyalty. Membership is not an option. It is lifelong. Because, regardless of whether or not people geographically disconnect from their families, whether they love them, hate them, resent them or revere them, for good or ill, they remain psychologically attached to them forever.
Irrespective of whether or not families are traditional or non-traditional, despite their self-definitions or the complexity of their constitutions, we still talk about “the family” as if it was one static unit because it is natural and reassuring to do so. We do this unconsciously. We do this because all families – regardless of whether or not they are large or small, rigid, calm, volatile, quirky, chaotic, irritating, loveable, infuriating, stable, scatty or organised – go through what are known as “lifecycle changes” which are significant and inevitable stages that families encounter in the course of being families, from one generation to the next.
As family members we accompany our relatives through each lifecycle family stage and they accompany us through the sequences in our lives. The family is a group in transition, coping with changing values, demanding new roles of its members and shared concerns, admitting new members, accepting them, rejecting them, loving them or tolerating them for the sake of the integrity of the family and relationships within it.
The family is a powerful unit. It is a force to be reckoned with. It is amazing how families manage to remain families while adapting to changes in their size and composition.
They adapt to evolving relationships, to the passage of time and shifting dependencies and interdependencies, continuity, stability and change. Parents and children adapt to role reversal, children move from being parented to growing up and looking after the health and wellbeing of their parents who reared them.
In between these reversed dependencies, parents must alter their manner of parenting with each new phase in their children’s lives: learning to be fiercely protective of their children in babyhood and infancy; allowing them some safe independences in childhood; protected autonomy in adolescence; and respecting young adulthood while nonetheless intervening in careful advisory ways; always vigilant, always available and ensuring that their children are safe and skilled for the developmental stage they are going through in the family lifecycle phase.
Families unite in celebration and in grief. There is the birth of new members, the death of older family members, the experience of children leaving home and finding careers, finding partners, children becoming parents, parents becoming grandparents and all these events over a lifetime that renews and replicates itself from each generation to the next.
The family is an extraordinary system. When it functions well, it is a cushion and haven in a harsh world; the source of security, the seat of belonging, the sanctuary from life’s upsets, the place where people can be themselves, be authentic and real and relaxed. It offers shelter and asylum. It is a mental oasis. It is the place where people need to be when they cannot cope elsewhere.
The family is one of our most valuable resources when it works and one of our saddest losses when it doesn’t.
The nurturing family is the place where children want to be, where they belong, where they feel safe, nourished and loved and able to grow. It deserves support. It deserves every protection it can get.
mmurray@irishtimes.com
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD