Connection to others is an integral part of human existence. According to Substance Abuse: Research and Treatment, supportive relationships can have a positive impact on your well-being and your relationships. Moreover, your family plays an important role in who you are and how you navigate the world. Your family is often the people you look to for support and uplifts you in difficult and good times. Further, in early childhood, caregivers and other loved ones can be important role models into adulthood. Thus, knowing your family dynamics can be invaluable to understanding the roots of trauma and addiction in your life.
When you have healthy family dynamics, you can look to your family as a source of connection and resilience. Thus, family dynamics can be instrumental for overall well-being, including your recovery journey. Through the formation of connections in family dynamics, your sense of purpose and meaning develops. Yet, the positive benefits of your family relationships are dependent on those relationships being healthy and supportive. Therefore, important family relationships like parents and caregivers can help you overcome trauma and accompanying self-defeating behaviors. Conversely, your family relationships can be one of the roots of your trauma and self-defeating thinking and behavior patterns.
At The Guest House, we know self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors often stem from traumatic experiences. Whether you have had one or multiple traumatic experiences in early childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, trauma comes in different forms. From the loss of a loved one to intimate partner violence (IPV) and more, trauma is unfortunately more common than many suspect.
Every trauma, while different, can be devastating, but your ability to be resilient is often informed by your family dynamics. The way your family responds to and interacts with each other and the world influences how you respond, too. Your family dynamics are the foundation for how you cope with the many challenges and traumas life throws at you. Thus, the presence of unhealthy family dynamics that rely on maladaptive coping mechanisms can hinder well-being and contribute to addiction.
Yet, you may still have questions about family dynamics. What makes family dynamics unhealthy? How do unhealthy family dynamics contribute to or relate to trauma and addiction? Increasing your understanding of family dynamics can provide insight into the role your close relationships play in your distress.
What Are Family Dynamics?
According to Family Dynamics by Bahareh Jabbari et al., family dynamics are the “patterns of interactions among relatives, their roles and relationships, and the various factors that shape their interactions.” Each family member typically relies on each other as their main source of emotional, physical, and economic support. Moreover, each family is made up of common and unique patterns that showcase their roles in each other’s lives. Further, your family is your primary source of security and/or stress because no family is perfect.
All families have both healthy and unhealthy dynamics. Therefore, it is through your family dynamics that you see yourself, others, your relationships, and the world. Moreover, it is the influence of family dynamics – no matter how little or how long ago your contact with family was in your early years – that continues to impact your behaviors and well-being.
Yet, what exactly do family dynamics look like? How can you pinpoint the family dynamics within your own family system? Family dynamics can encompass a variety of things, including family alignments, hierarchies, roles, and the characteristics and patterns of interaction within the family. Listed below are some examples of helpful and unhelpful influences on family dynamics that can exist in a family:
- Capacity for conflict resolution
- Ability to effectively communicate with each other
- Family types or the nature of your parents’ relationship
- Blended families, single parents, solo parents, separated parents, divorced parents, and married parents among others
- Shared family values
- Cultural and ethnicity
- Beliefs about gender roles in the family
- The number of children in a family
- Level and type of influence from extended family members
- The personalities of each family member
- Whether the family includes children or not
- The roles each family member takes on in the system
- Presence of role reversal or parentification in the family
- The absence of a parent
- Death
- Incarceration
- Abandonment
- Whether there is IPV in the family system or not
- The presence of emotional abuse in the family system
- Parenting styles
- Authoritarian parenting style
- Authoritative parenting style
- Permissive parenting style
- Uninvolved parenting style
- Whether a child and or adult in the household is chronically ill or has a disability
- Events that affect one or more family members
- Affairs
- Divorce
- Loss of a loved one
- Unemployment
- Low income
- Poverty
- Unstable housing and or unhoused
- Other issues that impact family dynamics
- Substance use disorder (SUD)
- Mental health disorders
- Family violence and other forms of abuse
- Family dynamics between parents and grandparents
Additionally, the unique makeup of a family can also have unique effects on a family’s overall dynamics. Some examples of this include:
- Nuclear family and same-sex family: Consists of parents and their children
- Multi-generational family: Consists of parents, children, grandparents, and or other relatives
- Single-parent family: Consists of a parent and child or children
- Cohabitation family: Consists of two people living and raising children together without marriage
- Grandparent family: Consists of grandparents as primary caregivers of grandchildren
- Reconstituted, blended, or stepfamily: Consists of one or both adults with children from a previous relationship living together
- Adoptive family: Consists of children living with one or more parents they are not biologically related to
- Foster family: Consists of one or two adults taking care of children who are typically not biologically related to the adults or some or all of the other children in the household
- Polyamorous family: Consists of two or more parents raising children together
- Family by choice: Consists of a mixed family that can include children, parents, live-in partners, grandparents, other relatives, and close friends
Looking at the many different things that can influence family dynamics may seem overwhelming. However, understanding some of the factors that can impact family dynamics provides insight into the commonality of healthy and unhealthy family dynamics.
Understanding Dysfunction in Behaviors and Communication
It is not unusual for families to have some level of dysfunction. From poor communication patterns between adolescent siblings to an overworked parent, dysfunction is a part of the growing pains of life. Many families experience tension and stress in their relationships at different times. An example of this includes arguments between siblings as they discover their identity outside of each other, which can lead to tension.
Similarly, periods where a parent has to work overtime to support the family or meet a deadline can lead to tension between parents and even children. The rise of tension from various factors like life stressors and differences in personalities can cause communication to break down between family members. However, the relationship between family members, like the parents and siblings, returns to a healthy dynamic when the stressors are removed. Moreover, healthy dynamics grow and are supported when the family starts or returns to utilizing adaptive coping strategies to get through the stressors together. Typical periodic dysfunction in families only becomes problematic and leads to deeply harmful dysfunctions like abuse because of occurrence.
As the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign states in “Understanding Unhealthy Relationship Patterns in Your Family,” there is quite a bit of variability in how often dysfunctional interactions and behaviors occur in families. Moreover, there is also variability in the kinds and the severity of dysfunction found in families. When poor communication between siblings or an overworked parent is short-term, those dysfunctions dissipate, and the family restabilizes.
However, when dysfunction becomes the norm in a family, those dysfunctions or unhealthy dynamics can foster more harmful behaviors like addiction. Further, some families are filled with dysfunction that goes beyond the ebb and flow of changing environments and periodic stressors. Some family dynamics are unhealthy as a result of severe dysfunction. What does typical and significant dysfunction look like in family dynamics? Listed below are some of the dysfunctions that can feed into unhealthy and harmful family dynamics:
- Emotionally unavailable parents or caregivers:
- Parents or caregivers are unable or unwilling to provide physical and verbal affection
- Often associated with an authoritarian parenting style
- Rarely or never offers words of encouragement
- May appear or act coldly towards their children and other relationships
- Factors that can contribute to emotional unavailability include lack of energy and addiction
- They may lack energy due to working long hours, caring for multiple children, caring for elderly relatives, caring for family with disabilities, difficulty paying for food and shelter, or navigating abusive interpersonal relationships with partners and other relatives
- A parent or caregiver may be distracted by the effects of substance use
- Unaddressed SUD and or other mental health disorders:
- Whether secret, obvious, or unknown challenges with SUD and or mental illness can impede maintaining employment and housing, fulfilling parental duties, or being stable and fully present
- Co-dependent relationships:
- One or more family members are mentally, emotionally, physically, and or spiritually reliant on another member
- Occurs often in relationships where one person has SUD
- Often impedes boundaries and independence in relationships inside and outside the family
- Factors that can contribute to co-dependence can be biological, psychological, and social
- Abusive relationships:
- Arguments and criticism are the norm within their family dynamics
- One or more members of the family respond to stressors with anger, aggression, and or violence
- They typically view their family members as possessions rather than people with needs and feelings
- Exploits members to only respond to the physical and or emotional needs of the abuser
- The prevalence of mental, emotional, verbal, physical, and or sexual abuse is high in the family
- They create environments in which you often feel lonely, scared, worthless, and ashamed
- Gaslighting:
- Leaves you feeling like you are the one in the wrong and oversensitive
- Creates confusion and convinces you to believe you have exaggerated the dysfunction
- Often leads to distrust in yourself and your ability to make decisions
Communication is a key tool that can impact function and dysfunction. Through healthy communication, you can recognize the presence of healthy and unhealthy family dynamics throughout your life. According to the Journal of Marriage and Family, within family communication patterns, families must create a shared social reality or a shared understanding of each other. A shared reality between family members is established through perceived topic similarly, belief in shared attitudes and perceptions, and accuracy in those shared beliefs. Through a shared reality, you are better able to understand and be understood by each other.
With mutual understanding comes more effective interactions and fewer disagreements and conflicts. Further, a shared reality in a family typically comes from conversation and conformity. Through communication, you share thoughts, feelings, and opinions to understand each other’s points of view. Whereas, a lack of shared beliefs and attitudes can contribute to poor communication. The more poor communication that exists between family members, the greater conflict and dysfunction become. Therefore, looking more closely at unhealthy dysfunctions in family dynamics can give you insight into the traumas in your family and how they have impacted you.
Impact of Negative Family Dynamics on Trauma
Negative family dynamics are born out of dysfunction, and dysfunction increases exposure to traumatic experiences. There are a variety of factors and family dynamics, like differences in culture, that can influence trauma and dysfunction. Similar family dynamics like single-parent or solo-parent households are not always synonymous with negative family dynamics and trauma.
However, looking at the presence of dysfunction in different types of family dynamics can provide insight into their relationship with trauma. For example, some single-parent families may experience more socioeconomic disadvantages that contribute to distress and other traumatic experiences like poverty. In contrast, two-parent families can also experience dysfunction and trauma from factors like high conflict and abuse. Meanwhile, with greater exposure to trauma in unhealthy family dynamics come maladaptive coping strategies.
Understanding Dysfunctional Family Roles in Addiction
High dysfunction in a family naturally leads to seeking ways to alleviate the distress of the dynamics and self-defeating behaviors. To make sense of the trauma, some may turn to substance use to cope. Thus, the introduction of SUD in the family presents another trauma and shift in the family dynamics. As a result, other members of the family seek to also cope with the addiction of one of its members. Unhealthy family dynamics often lead to maladaptive coping mechanisms that increase the likelihood of six dysfunctional family roles:
- Addict: Source of the family conflict
- Caretaker or enabler: Enables the addict’s behavior and shields them from the consequences of their actions
- Covers for the addict’s when they neglect their obligations and responsibilities
- Hero: Attempts to restore the dysfunctional family in secret
- Seen as over-responsible, self-sufficient, and perfectionist
- Focuses on keeping up appearances by helping cover up the addict’s mistakes
- Scapegoat: Viewed by the family as the problem child
- They are defiant and hostile in an effort to divert attention from the addict’s behavior
- Mascot: Viewed as the comedian of the family
- They use humor and silliness to lessen the stress in the family caused by the addict’s behavior
- The lost child: Viewed as the quiet one in the family
- They try to stay out of the way and avoid interactions
- Often go unnoticed while the family plays into their roles to deal with the addict’s behavior
Looking at dysfunctional family roles showcases the impact addiction has on family dynamics. Therefore, the family can be both a source of strength and impairment to well-being. When you experience challenges with SUD, healing the many roots of your distress is invaluable to recovery. With therapies like family therapy, you can work with your family to foster healthy dynamics to heal the whole family.
Healing Family Dynamics With Family Therapy at The Guest House
Your interpersonal connections, especially with the people you call family, are deeply intertwined in you and your experiences. Whether small or large, every act of healthy connection contributes to building meaningful relationships for well-being. At The Guest House, we recognize that talk therapies like family therapy can provide a safe, structured framework where you and your loved one can express your thoughts and feelings.
Through the collaborative nature of talk therapies, the whole family can rebuild trust in each other and understand each other better. With greater trust and understanding, everyone can build adaptive coping strategies to heal and grow together. Recovery is not only for you but your whole family, and with holistic support, the whole family can thrive.
Trauma, addiction, and family dynamics influence each other. Healthy family dynamics support shared values, beliefs, and attitudes for communication and understanding. Although some level of dysfunction is normal, severe and frequent dysfunction can lead to negative family dynamics that contribute to trauma. Poor communication erodes understanding and increases conflict, which can lead to abusive relationships and maladaptive coping like addiction. Addiction compounds negative family dynamics as families engage in dysfunctional roles that enable substance misuse. However, at The Guest House, we offer holistic care with talk therapies like family therapy to create a safe and judgment-free space where you and your loved ones can express your thoughts and feelings to heal together. Call us at (855) 483-7800 to learn more.