Family Systems
All families tend to develop unique systems for
- integrating family members
- making decisions
- allocating resources
- using time
- setting priorities
- resolving conflict
Certain archetypes tend to recur
- Single-authority (patriarchal, matriarchal, single-parent)
- Shared parental authority (partners as a team)
- Shared authority (parents and children, especially older children)
- Function-based authority (e.g. one parent makes financial decisions, another makes child-care decisions)
- Leaderless
Functional families show certain characteristics
- All are included
- All are valued
- All are heard
- Roles are clearly understood and flexible
- Behavior has consequences
- Rules, boundaries and norms are understood
Dysfunctional families show different characteristics
Inclusion is conditional, inconsistent, used as a weapon to compel compliance or to punish. In the absence of normal expectations and normal uses of authority, the dysfunctional family uses love -- in various expressions from physical intimacy to inclusion to sharing -- to exert power over others. Congregations do the same and need to be called on it. Inclusion and reconciliation aren't optional for a Christian community.
Not all needs matter. The family is selective about whose needs get met. Some use bullying, some passive-aggressive behavior. Certain categories, like children or newcomers or minorities, are seen as having secondary needs.
Family members are assigned roles, not of their choosing, such as:
- scapegoat
- rebel
- hero
- caretaker
Family members are rewarded for staying in role and punished when they venture outside role. The roles are stifling.
Members guess at what is normal. In the chaos of the dysfunctional family, members don't develop adequate understandings of normal behavior. They assume that certain behaviors, like shouting or gossiping or withdrawing, are normal, and they are confused when they encounter systems that don't behave like that.
No one tells the whole truth. Falsehood is perceived as safe, truth as dangerous. Instead of truth-telling, members prefer innuendo, conspiracy and manipulation. They tell truth-tellers to stop being honest and open, as if they were endangering the family.
Consequences are inconsistent, often disproportionate. Authority figures are perceived as "playing favorites." Threats are common, follow-through sporadic. Members are kept off-balance. When a consequence does ensue, it might be oversized -- a huge punishment for a small infraction -- and might be followed by grandiose efforts to "make up."
Norms and rules change by whim. Authority figures maintain control and inspire fear by changing the rules often and for no apparent reason.
System often exists to feed one member's addiction (father's alcoholism, mother's drug addiction, child's anorexia or self-destructive impulses). As family members often discover later, when they attain recovery and a new normalcy, enormous energy in the dysfunctional system goes into sustaining addictions. "Staying out of Dad's way" was actually a way to enable Dad to keep drinking. "Don't call pastor on Saturday, he's tired," was a response to hangovers or unexplained absences.
Churches tend to behave like family systems. It's the human-to-human system that we know best. We tend to replicate the system of our family of origin, because we know how to play by those rules.
Unless wise and assertive leaders intervene, a church system will tend to be a collision of different family-system styles and expectations. This will play out in many bways:
- Perceptions of the pastor
- Some will see the pastor as a partner with certain roles to perform.
- Some will see the pastor as a parent figure and therefore as a danger, lover, obstacle to self-gratification, tyrant, or whatever they knew as a child.
- Some will see the pastor as a child, to be trivialized and controlled.
- Perceptions of other church members
- Church members can fall into roles such as scapegoat or hero
- Certain members will want to be the pastor's "partner" in managing the "children," even to the point of intimacy.
- Responses to the dysfunction
- Members will "partner up" to seize control of the family. Some will find in this partnership the intimacy they lack at home. First task: kill the leader.
- Members will take sides against each other. Older members, for example, will claim the privileges of seniority. Younger members will play on their energy and children's needs. The well-to-do will freeze out the have-nots, and the have-nots, if mobilized, will return the favor.
- Arguments will arise about other people's morality, life choices, sexuality and beliefs - all the while avoiding self-examination and repentance.
Leaders need to understand such dynamics if they are to handle information (formal and informal, statistics and rumors, praise and complaint) and to make appropriate responses to outcomes.
Leaders need to set a good standard in how they manage their own life as a leadership cadre. If the leadership circle is dysfunctional, the whole system will become unhealthy.
A critical relationship to ground in health is the partnership between clergy and key lay leaders. In dealing with a dysfunctional system, this relationship is the place to start working for health.
