Listen now: 3 Rules of a Dysfunctional Family – Series 7, Episode 1
In the first episode of our Managing Your Dysfunctional Family series, Lynn, John, and Austin dive into the underlying forces that create dysfunction in families. We see these dynamics in our clients’ stories, and we see it play out in families around us. The result is that people are frustrated, hurting, and they feel misunderstood and disconnected. Their family relationships are strained or completely broken, and they are looking for support and wisdom to know how to navigate this from a biblical perspective.
Every Family is Dysfunctional
The truth is every family has some level of dysfunction. Talking about it openly helps to normalize it. The Bible is filled with stories of broken families, from Cain killing Abel to Abraham sleeping with another woman and creating a blended family filled with anguish and tension.
So if your family is dysfunctional, take heart! All families feel the effects of sin and suffer dysfunction somewhere on the spectrum. If you come from a dysfunctional family, you are no different than the families portrayed in the Bible - broken families that included God’s dearly loved children.
Three Rules of a Dysfunctional Family
The three rules of a dysfunctional family that we’re sharing in this episode come from a book called It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black. This book has been a bestseller and helped millions of people because the author does a great job of explaining dysfunction and educating people on how to grow and heal.
She identifies the 3 rules of dysfunctional families as:
Don’t talk
Don’t trust
Don’t feel
These rules are not posted on the refrigerator, or even spoken out loud, but they become the subtext for how the family functions. We go into detail about these in our podcast episode, but let’s take a brief look at them here.
Rule #1: Don’t Talk
Family thinking under this rule goes something like this: we’re not going to talk to anyone outside the family about our problems, and we’re not going to talk about problems within the family either. Keep your feelings to yourself.
This rule infuses family members with shame, and forces addiction, abuse, trauma, loss, and grief to be dealt with silently and secretly.
Rule #2: Don’t Trust
Children need to be able to depend on parents to meet their physical and emotional needs to develop trust. Most of the time parents are pretty good at meeting physical needs - roof, food, clothes, and education. But many parents fail to meet a child’s emotional needs, and this hinders the ability to trust.
The process unfolds like this: “If the people I depend on (mom and dad) are not safe and I can’t trust them, then my only alternative is to trust myself…BUT…because I don’t have all the capacities and resources I need to make life work, I can’t trust my own decisions either.” In adulthood, your “trust thermostat” is broken, making it hard to form intimate bonds with healthy people.
Rule #3: Don’t Feel
The last rule of dysfunctional families is “Don’t feel”. What does this look like in everyday life? It’s denial of all your feelings because you’ve learned, seen, and experienced that feelings aren’t safe. Therefore, denying/stuffing/ignoring feelings is a way to bring stability and consistency to your world, and to the world around you.
Pushing down on emotions is like trying to keep an inflatable beach ball under water – no matter how hard you try to keep it down, it will come popping back up. Your feelings and emotions will come out in the end, and after a lifetime of denial, you will finally have to deal with them.
How Can You Break Free of These Rules?
If you realize that your family of origin had some or all of these rules, what can you do about it? In the next few episodes of this series, we will be discussing how to break those rules and live in freedom, as well as how to get along with family members who are stuck in dysfunctional patterns. Stay tuned!
Do you enjoy listening to With You in the Weeds? Share this post with a friend and let them know how they can hear substantive content from our experienced team on common counseling questions.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook and listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Check out our Podcast Topics page for a library of episode content on topics that matter to you, and email us at: