When I was training to be a hospital chaplain, one of the most valuable things I learned about was family systems theory. Broadly speaking, it’s the idea that families function as a unit to reach their goals, and everyone in the family—even the kids—has a role to play. The system strives to maintain homeostasis, which is basically whatever the most powerful members, usually the parents initially, consider to be “normal” home life. Family systems theory (Kerr and Bowen, 1988) is a theory of human behavior that defines the family unit as a complex social system, in which members interact to influence each other’s behavior. Any change in one individual within a family is likely to influence the entire system and may even lead to changes in other members…. Patterns of interaction between family members create, maintain, and perpetuate both problem and nonproblematic behaviors. Everyone has a part to play When we’re growing up, we take on the role our families need from us (hero, black sheep, drama queen, etc.) in order for the unit to function in a way that the most influential members of the unit find acceptable. When we become adults, we subconsciously seek situations where the roles we know how to play are needed. This is why, after a breakup, you go, “Wow, I learned my lesson,” and six months later hey, you’re dating the same person, only with better hair. (Hopefully.) It’s also why, when you visit your parents, you suddenly feel like a kid again: everyone has their roles and you play them, almost without thought. It’s a familiar phenomenon to anyone who’s had the liberative experience of getting healthier, healing trauma, or coming out as trans, and then having their friends or family reject them. Often, we need others to be a certain way for us to be happy, whether it’s good for them or not. Even if the change they make is one that frees them to be more themselves, sometimes, we can’t look past the loss of the person we needed them to be. What do you mean “parents are just people” The reason this concept is so comforting to me is that it acknowledges that the stories our families tell us about who we are—the stories that we co-create to justify our roles—are just that. They’re less about who we actually are, and more about the needs of the systems we come from and those of the people within it. And that, somehow, is easier to forgive. As a kid, the story about me was that I was sensitive, sad, and reserved. Very serious. A worrier. “You didn’t like to snuggle,” my mom still tells me. “You hated to be picked up. You were just a very cold child.” To anyone who’s ever met me, this is a hilariously inaccurate description. I’m introverted, but not that introverted, and anyone who’s seen my face on literally any day but my worst ones is mystified by the use of the words “cold” and “sad.” I smile a lot, I touch people all the damn time, and I have no trouble being effusive. I’m not an optimist, I don’t think, but I definitely don’t come across as gloomy, serious, or a downer. I’m sensitive, sure, but not cripplingly so. I don’t know why that story about me—cold, sad, a loner—is useful for my family to tell, but to this day, it hasn’t changed much. The trouble with stories I’ve always liked Joseph Campbell’s concept of mythology. Instead of “myth” as “a fictional tale,” Campbell defines myths as sacred stories that we tell ourselves to understand our world. Myths aren’t literally true, but in another sense, they’re truer than true: they’re our values, crystallized into narratives. My Cosmic Dad (that’s exactly what you think it is), who’s a longtime pastor, likes to say, “Myths are true stories that never happened.” It’s OK that our families make up a mythology about who we are to serve the systems that raise us. The problem is that sometimes, we forget that they’re just stories. They can feel true, but one story is no more true than another. The good news is, if we’re lucky, we get to rewrite them. I’m scared of winter Another part of my family’s story about who I am—and this is one I’ve repeated myself—is that I’m prone to depression, particularly in the winter. “I can’t live anywhere cold,” I used to say. “It’s not the cold so much as the lack of sunshine.” I repeated how, as a teenager in Chicago, I sat in front of one of those fake sun lamps every morning while I ate my cereal, “Like a sad, carb-loading plant.” My mom always laughs, and we bitch about winter from her living room in Tampa. For a long time, this myth saved me from having to consider moving back to the Midwest. I “couldn’t.” I was “too prone to depression.” I spent all of my twenties and most of my thirties hopping from Sertraline to Lexapro to Wellbutrin to whatever was new on the market. But then I got sick of the side effects. I also started working out to deal with my anger. And then I realized that the family story about how my depression was “cured,” centered on how I stopped functioning when the family dog, a pug named Dewey, got hit by a car. I was in college, and for some reason, Mom told me about it in graphic detail—even though the family story about me has always included the word “oversensitive.” When I came home that weekend to sit by Dewey’s grave, Mom left my sister with me while she went out shopping, even though I asked to be alone. My sister, ten years younger, circled me as I cried on the ground, saying “Why are you crying? She wasn’t even your dog.” (My sister, too, had a family role to play.) When I went back to school, I found that I couldn’t study. I’d get to the end of a page and couldn’t remember what I’d read. Mom said I was “clinically depressed, just like your father,” and sent me off to a shrink. She was trying to help, but she didn’t realize that attributing normal grief to an immutable chemical condition—essentially labeling a normal reaction as “abnormal” and in need of a cure—further entrenched the idea that whatever I was feeling was wrong, inconvenient, and something to be changed as soon as possible. I don’t think I’m “prone to depression.” I think I grieve normally and react understandably to people ignoring my boundaries. And even if I am “sad” or “sensitive,” I’m tired of letting an old, old myth—one I didn’t write, and one that was never meant to serve me—limit who I allow myself to be. Winter is coming (not zombies though) (I hope) Today I noticed the light changing. I’ve also been noticing my increasing obsession with moving back to California. It has the taste of panic. I’ve tried to attribute this to political change, but I don’t think that’s the only reason. When I see the golden light and feel the very slight chill in the air, something’s screaming, “You can’t handle this. You have to get out. Depression in the winter is who you are!” But I moved back to the Midwest because when I lived in California, the fall broke my heart with homesickness. And you can’t have fall without winter. That’s why fall is awesome: it’s the feeling of things dying, dropping off that are already dead, like leaves tearing free of the trees, before lying dormant for a while. Maybe I will get depressed. Maybe this will suck. But I’m no longer someone who takes others’ words for who she is more than she believes her own story. That’s my new myth, and it’s true because I f*****g say it is. Others needed me to be “someone who gets sad easily.” But in my entire adult life, I’ve never experienced myself as that person. In fact, the people who have always told that story about me are the only ones who have ever told it. It may be that this is an awful winter. But it’s not like I’ve never weathered (ha ha) one before. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit constitutionallymidwestern.substack.com
