Most of us come from a family. Many of us have perfectly lovely families, but for those who don’t, our family can be a source of great unhappiness. If you come from a challenging or dysfunctional family, you might be wondering if there’s anything that you can do to improve your situation.
Sometimes we grow up with siblings who are loving and supportive, but sometimes our siblings are jealous, competitive; even hostile. Sometimes a sister or brother can be our best friend but sometimes they can behave really badly and feel like our nemesis.
If you grew up with one or more troublesome siblings and still have to spend time with them at family gatherings, you might be wondering how best to handle these difficult interactions. It gets even harder if you’re being pressured by certain family members to turn the other cheek with your hurtful sibling(s).
Sometimes our parents are our greatest source of support. They’re there for us when we need them and give us unconditional love. Sometimes, though, our parents have their own psychological issues. They might be neglectful, hyper-critical, exploitative; even abusive toward us. If you grew up with parents like this, you might be wondering how to deal with them now that you’re an adult.
Sometimes our extended family is great. Our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins make us feel like we’re part of a large, interconnected community. Sometimes, though, these people are disinterested, competitive, jealous, or even hostile toward us. If you find yourself in such a situation, you might be wondering how to deal with the difficult members of your extended family.
One major problem in coping with difficult family members is that there are too many voices in our society telling us how we’re “supposed” to behave toward them. These individuals and institutions have only good things to say about the notion of “family.” They’re in a sort of denial over the fact that some families might contain difficult or even hurtful people.
Our society seems to have a blind spot when it comes to talking about the family. The message is, “Family is the best; family is sacrosanct. We can never speak badly about family.” According to most of our religious, educational, political and social institutions, we’re all supposed to be nice to our family members, even when they’re not nice to us. That just doesn’t make sense.
Our society may refuse to acknowledge that many families contain troublesome members, but it doesn’t negate the fact that these difficult family members do exist. Your personal experience of family might be very different than the idealized picture presented by greeting cards, storybooks and TV shows.
It can be confusing to have lived through (and be living through) family interactions that belie the message of “family is wonderful so we must always love and support our family members.” You might be finding it hard to reconcile the reality of your difficult family members with the image of “family” portrayed in the media.
If you have hurtful or disrespectful people in your family, you might be wishing that your family conformed to all these happy stories. In fact, you might have spent a good amount of time trying to convince yourself that they actually do.
It’s hard to face the truth about difficult family members, because it’s a painful truth to face, and it gets even harder to accept the reality of hurtful family members when you’re constantly bombarded by messages in the media, at school and where you worship that you always need to see your family in the best possible light.
You need to know that despite the messages you’re hearing about “family,” you need to look at your own family as a collection of unique individuals; some of whom might be fine and some of whom might be problematic.
Rather than having only one way to view family members – “they’re beyond reproach” – and only one way to treat them – “with the utmost of forbearance” – we can react to each relative according to how they actually behave toward us.
If a family member is kind to us, we can be kind in return; if they’re disinterested, we can take a step back from them; if they’re trying to get something from us we can set limits and if they’re hurtful, we can walk away. It doesn’t matter whether they’re our sibling, our parent, or even our child. If they’re hurtful, disrespectful, exploitative or abusive, we don’t have to tolerate their mistreatment.
Family members have the potential to be very close because they share so much history. A family could be a tight-knit group of like-minded people or a loose cluster of disparate individuals. The truth is that it all depends on the people in the family; especially the adults.
If the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are loving and caring, they set the tone for the kids to be connected to the adults and to each other. If the adults are in any way hurtful, ruptures can arise in the fabric of the family. And if one or more family members –whether adult or child – are disruptive, through substance abuse, violence or inappropriate behavior, it can cause deep rifts in the family structure.
The most important thing to understand is that you don’t owe your family members anything. Being related to you doesn’t give them any special dispensation to neglect you or mistreat you, and you’re free to respond to their behavior in the same way as you’d respond to any other human being.
If you’ve got one or more difficult people in your family and you’d like to learn some simple, constructive and effective strategies for how to deal with them, check out my new online course, “How to deal with difficult family members, once and for all.”
Sign up here for my free biweekly wellness newsletter that brings you fresh, thought-provoking content.
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to watch my series Moving into Autumn with Good Self-Care, where you’ll learn simple tips for taking the best care of yourself and your loved ones this fall season.
Tune in to my Ruthless Compassion Podcast where I go in-depth about topics like mental health, trauma, and loneliness.
