Growing up during the Great Depression had left an indelible mark on my father’s persona. He was a successful self-made man who did everything he could to outrun the memories of the relative poverty he experienced in his family of origin, living in an apartment over a movie theatre in Cedarhurst on Long Island’s south shore. His father had died when my father was seventeen and he saw it as his responsibility to drill the importance of personal responsibility into his children.
Materially, we always had what we needed, but anything we wanted beyond my father’s definition of “necessary” involved doing extra chores to make the money to pay for it. When I was eleven and wanted my first pair of high quality leather basketball sneakers, I had to earn the money to pay the difference between the $9.00 cost of canvas Converse and the $16.00 Adidas Superstars that I coveted (at the time, only Adidas and Puma made high-end hoops shoes).
My mother grew up in the itty-bitty town of Oxford in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, about ninety minutes southwest of Philadelphia and in close proximity to Kennett Square, the self-titled “mushroom capital of the world.” It was the epitome of small town life in Middle America where everyone knew everyone, and the Police Department, as my father described it, was a “hellava nice guy.” My mother’s otherwise typical upbringing contained the bizarre experience of sleeping in a crib from the time she was an infant until the age of seven. As she would joke, who knows how long she might have been stuck in that crib if her younger sister hadn’t come along seven years to the day after my mother was born to supplant her.
Stay-at-home moms were the norm, and with the four of us my mother had a very full-time gig. She was a combination homemaker and chauffeur, shuttling us around to a wide array of activities in the family station wagon. Still, during my childhood it wasn’t unusual for my mother to spend hours at a time in bed grappling with her own chronic pain and/or resting, with the aid of prescription painkillers and tranquillizers.
Ours was a liberal, progressive Jewish family, where great trust was placed in the omniscience of the medical establishment, education was prized, expectations for academic achievement and athletic performance were sky-high and without respite, and guilt was wielded like a weapon. My father routinely drilled me and my brother and sisters in various forms of mental gymnastics. When we were all together, these experiences often resembled group interviews and included all manner of subjects. The ability to respond intelligently and articulately was applauded, with extra credit given for the clever deployment of puns and double entendres. These exercises proved an excellent and occasionally ego-deflating training ground for cognitive quickness and verbal alacrity. Often they contained elements of fun, but they were nonetheless competitions and we all played to win.
Regardless of what’s presented to the outside world, every family has challenges; its own gestalt of craziness and dysfunction on a continuum that can range from the stuff of nightmares and flashbacks to normative hurts that can still cut deeply and leave nasty scars. To paraphrase a comedian I’ve known personally since my adolescence: normal families are families we simply don’t know that well.
Mine was a normal dysfunctional family. The too-close-for-comfort birth sequencing among my siblings and I made for limited psychological space to accommodate competing developmental needs, creating an extremely intense and emotionally crowded environment. There was nothing approximating the sorts of horrific, post-traumatic stress-inducing abuse that children in too many families are subjected to. Just the more usual wounds to the spirit so common in many families where parents are doing the best they can with what they have at any given moment.
Corporal punishment was a primary parenting option when I was growing up, and it was employed intermittently in our family. After getting slapped across the face for one willful indiscretion or another I found it hard to not cry. Sometimes there was a time delay after I got hit, and it was only after I thought about being smacked in the face that tears appeared. From a very young age I had a rudimentary awareness that I wasn’t crying because it hurt physically; it was about the emotional injury. Those slaps to the face somehow represented a diminution of me as a person—it was a serrated affront to my psyche, and that hurt seemed bottomless.
By early elementary school, unconsciously, I had already begun to practice the art of living a double life. At home I was an oppositional-defiant hellion. Fueled by a reservoir of anger, I broke or just ignored most of the rules my parents tried to establish. And yet, whenever I went to a friend’s house to visit or for a sleepover, the hosting parents would report what a polite and well-behaved child I was, leaving my own parents wondering, “Who the hell are they talking about? They must have Danny confused with someone else!” This occurred time and again. Occasionally my parents would express their frustration and confusion aloud to me, though neither they nor I had any answers.
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Family systems theory views families in their entirety as an organism. Families form systems or entities that are much more than the individuals who comprise them. Every family has its own rhythm and flow, and family members develop particular ways of acting and reacting with each other and with the outside world. These specific patterns of interaction between family members give each family system a particular equilibrium and style related to such areas as expectations (spoken and unspoken); how feelings are expressed (or not); how conflict is managed (or avoided); how family issues are communicated in the world outside the family system; and what roles and responsibilities family members are assigned—consciously and unconsciously. These dynamics shape the personality styles and behaviors of each family member.
Change in any part of the system creates ripple-effect changes in all parts of the system. Think of a mobile hanging from the ceiling in a child’s room: when one part moves, all of the other parts move in response to it. When one family member is overly responsible and controlling, this shapes the behaviors of other family members. They typically respond by becoming somewhat less responsible. The equilibrium of the family system shifts as each member changes and adjusts accordingly. When a parent struggles with chronic pain (or addiction or any other serious chronic condition), his or her parenting is affected.
Virgina Satir was a social worker and psychotherapist who was a seminal figure in the developing field of family therapy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her original work regarding family roles was adapted by Claudia Black and Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse in the 1980s to describe the roles taken on by children in dysfunctional family systems. The framework they developed applies to many families, but especially those wrestling with momentous challenges such as addiction, trauma, physical and/or emotional violence, depression and other forms of psychiatric illness, physical and developmental disabilities, and chronic pain or serious physical illness.
These roles and their related behaviors represent unconscious psychological survival strategies that children use in order to cope with the stresses within their family. While each child in the family generally assumes a primary role, the roles themselves are far from set in cement. Family members can take on aspects of different roles, or migrate from one role to another over time and psychosocial stage of development. These roles are attempts to bring greater consistency, structure, and emotional safety into family systems that are experienced as unpredictable, chaotic, or frightening. They include, Hero, Lost Child, Mascot, and Scapegoat.
The Hero is the hyper-responsible child present in virtually every dysfunctional family. Usually, though not always, the hero is the oldest child. Children who assume this role are high achievers, getting excellent grades in school and excelling in sports and/or other extracurricular activities. Their behavior is exemplary—they comply with the rules and provide a model that parents, teachers, and coaches wish others would follow. Accordingly, the Hero elicits outsized approval and praise from both parents and outsiders. The family Hero