Is “then” harmful to your “now”?
“I am still breaking the chains of generations old dysfunctional family patterns,” a friend posted.
I replied: “That is one of our major evolutionary goals for each generation. I can see it in my offspring, as I can see it in myself. I believe that failure to break those chains is frequently the cause of much pain in life.”
Then I started thinking further. Time changes our perspective. What appears to us to be an undesirable family tradition may simply be what was necessary at that time.
Part of becoming an adult involves choosing how we want to be, as we separate from those who raised us. When we believe that our parents or others in our family line were dysfunctional, often in ways that were (or seemed) damaging to us, sometimes we are right, and then there is work to be done so that we do not continue the pattern. On the other hand, sometimes even those who we think must have been totally “over the edge” were simply living in line with the customs and constraints of the times in which they lived.
Generations in the kitchen
There’s the old story of a newly married couple… he questioned why she cut the ends off the meat before cooking pot-roast. He said it was wasteful. She explained that she did it because that is what her mother did. Later, she found that her mother did it because her mother did it, so, therefore, that must be the right way to cook pot-roast. Eventually, visiting her great grandmother, the bride observed that great grand-mom did NOT cut the ends off the pot-roast. Questioned, great grand-mom laughed, and said,
“Oh, yes, back then I had to cut the ends off. I didn’t have a big enough pot for the whole thing, but now I do.”
It was not a method chosen because it was right, but because it was necessary, yet it continued for generations.
There are people in my family tree who saw life through the eyes of Victorian England and colonial India because that was the world they lived in. Family separations, including children as young as six in English boarding school, were not signs of lack of love, but necessities due to lack of appropriate educational and medical facilities where the parents were “posted” by the government. Following that tradition and because my parents needed to be out of the country, I was in boarding school for a couple of years. A few years ago, when I mentioned that to a friend, her immediate reaction was “Child abuse.” Yet it was not abusive. Actually the education level was higher than when I was later sent to a local school, and, although firm (or possibly strict) the staff were kind and encouraging.
My friend saw through eyes that were adjusted to the present times, and the culture in which she lives. Back then my mother’s eyes saw something different.
Language changes through generations
A second spur to writing this piece came – on the same day as my friend’s post – from an article in the magazine The Sun (which I strongly recommend). In it the mother of a child with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome writes about the way in which language to describe what are now called “intellectual disabilities” has changed over the years. With today’s eyes, as she comments, we are trying to move away from “the r word” and toward “intellectual disabilities.” However, she notes, “in the 1950s the word retarded was progressive, an improvement over feebleminded, imbecile, moron.”
Back then we did not have the medical knowledge to distinguish between many forms and causes of intellectual disability, so they were lumped together, often under the labels used to describe the most extreme forms. We look back and, sometimes we shudder. Perhaps it would help if we were to remember that much of what we condemn from the past came from lack of information, not from evil intent. So is often the case with our forebears.
I still believe what I wrote in response to my friend’s post. We need to recognize that not all family traditions are healthy for us, and we owe it to future generations to break away from those that need breaking.
However, there is a second reason for this post. I believe that in the process of breaking, we need not condemn either our families or ourselves for behaviors that may, in their time, have been what was taught by their ancestors’ examples, or may have been the very best that could be done at that time. Perhaps we need to accept without condemnation that some of the things we now need to change did not, in their time, seem so much “dysfunctional” as “necessary” (pot-roast included).
That was then, and this is now. Let’s choose to live in the now.
Diana
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