The Family

At one point I studied with someone who had been a personal student of Dr. Murray Bowen, the founder of Family Therapy in America.
 
My friend told me a definition of the family he claimed Dr. Bowen had devised. I’ve never been able to confirm it, but according to my friend Bowen said that the family was “a seething cauldron of pathology, from which, with a lifetime of effort, one may partially extricate oneself.”
 
That’s a pretty harsh definition, but I’ve noticed that when I share it with people they usually smile and ask me to repeat it so they can write it down. Obviously, it strikes a chord.
 
The same friend said that Bowen used to display the Norman Rockwell painting called “Freedom From Want,” which is a painting of an old-time Thanksgiving Dinner. The Grandmother brings a nut-brown turkey to a table presided over by a Grandfatherly man. The rest of the family sits at the table talking expectantly.
 
“Now,” said my friend, “imagine that the Grandfather has been abusing his niece for three years. Imagine that the woman on the left has been struggling with her addiction to Valium for ten years, while the guy on the right is wondering how he will pay his gambling debts to his bookie. The man at the end of the table is thinking about how he can slip away for a drink from his hip flask, and the woman closest to him has been having an affair with a co-worker and is getting ready to abandon her husband so she can be with her lover full-time. That’s the American Family.”
 
Not a very pleasant notion over a holiday is it? Still, my friend’s point was that we tend to gloss over human problems in order to enjoy a rosy-colored image of what things are like. While an understandable temptation, that’s not reality.
 
As I go through the holiday festivals I try to keep in mind my friend’s observations. I enjoy the many things that are there to enjoy, but at the same time keep mindful that things have a darker side and that other people are probably more wounded than they seem. I’ve found it a healthy meditation to maintain amid the clatter of tableware and the clink of glasses this season.