Did I do thaaaat?

– Steve Urkel

So if like me you loved watching Steve Urkel and Laura Winslow and all their antics, you’ll be familiar with the theme of this post. However, I’m going to focus on the title of the show rather than the content of the show…

Family matters. And family matters matter. So, you guessed it, we’re talking about family systems! This is a massive, multifaceted framework for therapy so bear with me as we take a little trip.

How we relate to our relations impacts how we relate to other people outside of our family and how we process our own emotions. So a few things to think about:

• Enmeshment – This is a fun word for when a person can’t distinguish their own emotions from another. An example of this would be a mom who cannot distinguish her own emotions from those of her child’s. This can sometimes go both ways but sometimes just goes one way. 9 times out of 10, that child will need to do extensive work in therapy to be able to not have enmeshment with others in future relationships.
• Disengagement – This is what it sounds like, this is when a family member is emotionally absent. The opposite of enmeshment. This too will have profound impacts on a person’s ability to relate to others.
• Family System – So, how a family relates to one another as a whole, not just individual relationships with enmeshment or disengagement, impacts how folks relate to those outside the family system as well. An example, if a family tends to function in a loop of anxiety, a family member trying to interact with others outside of the family system may also do so from a place of anxiety, whether conscious of it or not. Other examples in addition to anxious dynamics, families that are confrontational will be so outside of the family, families that are avoidant of conflict will be so outside of the family.
• Children of Alcoholics – Of note, children of alcohol users have a specific set of family dynamics, typically over or under functioning depending on how many children are in the family.

So what do we do with all of this? It can be really helpful to sit down, either with a therapist or on your own if you’re able to be self-aware, and review how the dynamics in your own family work. It can turn out to be an excellent road map for you to understand how you interact with the world and how you interact with your family.

Once you look at your role and specific family dynamics, if you seek therapy, there are multiple techniques for family therapy and as a counselor, I find these fun to dig into -but that’s a post for another time.