There is nothing like bringing home a close friend or partner to shine a spotlight on the unspoken rules by which every family, your family, lived and lives.

Every family that lives with one another for some time develops a set of patterns for emotional engagement that soon feels like the “family rules.” These expectations for behavior may start within a marriage and strengthen their grip as children are brought into the home. Once the children catch on to these patterns, they begin to live by them. Only family members know how that family works, even though no one may have ever spoken these powerful expectations out loud.

Many of these rules are quite helpful, and create a kind of emotional shorthand that members count on. Some rules families frequently live by are: this family lets one another know our whereabouts; this family goes to church/synagogue/mosque; this family values education; this family values friendship, and this family works hard. Others might be less helpful. They might be expressed as: this family avoids conflict; this family never questions mother/father; this family relies on men for money, women for support; this family doesn’t live outside our region; this family keeps secrets, and this family doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.

With these internal rules, members keep the connections of their family relationships, even unhealthy ones, intact. Once we bring another person into close relationship with this family system through marriage, the rules become more obvious; our new partner has no way of knowing or observing these internal rules except by bumping into them. Because they don’t have the years of unconscious training in working within the boundaries of these family expectations, newcomers invariably stir up distress and even conflict by disregarding these rules or even openly disagreeing with them. This is one way newcomers remain permanently on the outside of their partners’ family systems.

This is where the partner, whose family of origin is the one getting stirred up, has to bring his or her best self to the party or he/she will end up offending and damaging the new family and partner. If the rule is “no one can challenge the way Mom behaves,” Mom can run roughshod over the new wife of her son and her son gets caught between his loyalties toward his family of origin and that toward his partner. Because the loyalty to one’s family of origin is older and deeper, chances are that is the one that most easily wins.

In families where emotional connection has never been particularly intense or expected, this kind of division of emotional importance happens automatically. Parents have children, raise them, and expect that once their children marry, the old family changes. The new has come, and everyone has to adjust. In more emotionally intense, enmeshed, or distressed family systems, blending a new spouse and/or grandchildren into the mix may require an our-way-or-the-highway kind of behavior from the newcomer that can make for chronic distress for everyone.

I counsel couples who find themselves in conflict over family rules to think about loyalty as an emotional quality of relationships that can and must be shared unequally. One can be loyal to both one’s family of origin as well as to a new spouse, but the most successful marriages have partners who transfer their primary loyalties to their new partner. Mom or Dad may still be core relationships, but if there is any important conflict, decision, schedule, or issue to decide, the default must move to the spouse and couple.

If you and your partner seem to be in constant conflict over your visits back to visit your parents, your time spent with siblings, or the ever-present sense that you care more about pleasing your parents than you do your spouse, check in with yourself regarding that unequal balance of loyalty. If you feel miserably caught in the middle, it’s time to shift your focus. Unplug some of that urgency from your family of origin and give it to your new partner and children. And, of course, if it’s just not as easy as that for you, consulting with a local marriage and family therapist will help you more easily make that emotional transition.

With the advent of easy plane travel, many larger businesses have grown to include regional, national, and even international customers and work sites. People who work at the higher levels of industries often find their jobs are not done just at their desks, no matter how well connected they are electronically. Business relationships, decisions, and inspections can’t all be done without physically being on-site, and long-distance and extended travel are part of the job.

You may look upon that lifestyle with envy. Well, don’t. Having worked with dozens of families and couples who have held jobs like this, I can tell you, from their experience, that these jobs can take a very heavy toll on satisfying family relationships. Before you make that big job your goal, I hope you’ll first consider what it can demand from your life.

1. Physical toll: Traveling is exhausting no matter what class of seat you have on a plane. When you travel, your body is in a constant state of adjustment to different food, water, accommodations, climate, work expectations, and time zones. Any kind of steady, healthy patterns of sleep, exercise, nutrition, and relationships are interrupted, and it’s rough to try to keep up with good health habits somewhere else.
2. Exit/reentry transitions: Life keeps moving on in your home, despite the traveler’s schedule. When you’re trying to pack, with your mind on the journey ahead, the family may feel your absence even while you are still home. Arriving home can be worse, as you’d love to be welcomed home with excitement, while the one who has been at home may want nothing more than to be relieved of the additional responsibilities he or she has been shouldering.
3. Parenting patterns: When one parent in a family travels for work, the remaining parent has to temporarily become a single parent. Leadership around finances, yard work, car repairs, play dates, and school assignments have to shift to the parent who is home. Children can get accustomed to the traveling parent being the “fun” one who comes home with gifts and days off, leaving the at-home parent as the disciplinarian and enforcer, who becomes used to making parenting decisions solo.
4. Emotional isolation: After spending enough days of the month away from home, it becomes very easy to live two lives: one on the road and the other at home. Even with regular phone, text, email, and Skype connections to those at home, the relationships that develop with those who share the travel with you can become more real to you than the ones you leave behind. Isolation, prestige, repetition, or intensity of the shared work adds to that other-worldliness. It’s at this level of isolation that I have seen long-term affairs, addictions, mood disorders, and health issues surface. These issues are not easily or often repaired.

Human relationships need physical proximity, regular conversation, shared patterns of caregiving, humor, health, and equality to thrive. Trying to have all these while traveling for a job is like trying to juggle three balls when all you’ve ever managed were two. If you are struggling with any or all of these issues as a family or couple, I encourage you to reach out to a family therapist in your area, who can help you manage the human challenges of traveling this much. While it’s not impossible to thrive, it is tough. Best buckle up. The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign.

Families need to be together. After all, the family as a group exists to provide support, nurturance, food, shelter, resources, and a stable future to each member. While most families have their ups and downs, even stressed, impoverished, chaotic families want to live with one another. When is it in the family’s best interest for members to separate from one another? Can leaving the family home for a short while ever bring healing to the relationships in the long run?

Family separations occur in American culture in formal and informal ways. Formally, families can legally be ordered to separate by the courts because of domestic violence, child sexual, emotional, or physical abuse or neglect, chronic drug or alcohol abuse, and/or failure to educate and when there is a threat to the life, health, and well-being of one or more family members. Typically, less-intrusive assistance has been attempted at many levels before a court order occurs, including weeks or months of child-centered school counseling, family therapy, marriage counseling, social work support, addiction treatment, spiritual community support, or elder advocacy.

All of these actions occur at local, county, and state levels because we as a society believe that we have a stake in supporting and sustaining healthy families. State laws vary but generally have been written with family reunification as the end goal of this intervention process, wherever possible. Violent fathers, neglectful or addicted mothers, and abusive siblings can and often do change and grow into healthier, happier parents, spouses, siblings, and grandparents. We want families to get along well and have what they need to contribute to the world. No one benefits when families are so chaotic and dysfunctional that it takes dozens of people and thousands of hours and dollars to try to help.

[fat_widget_right]More informal separations occur every day, particularly among highly distressed married couples. Unable to live in the same home without physical or emotional pain, one member of the couple leaves the home temporarily and lives elsewhere. Unlike a formal, legal intervention of family separation, this kind of separation is less likely to change the marital interactions at all. What it usually does is create less fighting and conflict in the home, while increasing the stress of the separating spouse and any children in the family. The only person who may feel any relief is the remaining spouse, and this relief is generally temporary. The focus is shifted to the dozens of life details that, once shared, have to be renegotiated, from grocery shopping and bill paying to getting a child to baseball practice.

Unless a separated couple gets professional support and assistance immediately, the family begins to reshape around the absence of the separated parent. Children feel neglected and forgotten, no matter how diligent the separated parent is in spending time with the children. There is just no adequate substitute for living together, and the children’s behavior often suffers. The couples will simply shift their conflict away from one another in the short term and have no real plan of action for getting everyone back together. Because separation only tones down conflict and doesn’t solve it, I almost always suggest that separated couples who want to remain married work at getting back together as soon as possible, and always with professional family or marital therapy. If this is not the chosen path, statistics predict this couple will end up divorcing.

Separation is often a necessary choice when family behaviors become violent, abusive, or dangerous. But in nearly all cases, families should be helped to heal and reunify as soon as possible. Separation is not the best course of action unless it is the only course left for health, safety, or stability’s sake. Every one of us needs to feel like we belong and to be part of a group of people who know, appreciate, sacrifice for, and value us most of all. At our best, these are our families. It’s worth the effort to make them as healthy, whole, and loving as possible.

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Harness the Power of the Marriage Bond

Families are amazingly resilient relationship groups. While many of us have enduring trouble with some aspect of our families, past or present, all of us are part of some form of family all our lives. Most of us organize our lives around the needs, priorities, goals, and problems of our chosen family. Whatever differences and conflicts we may have with other nations and peoples around the world, the human family is the way all of us organize.

Family therapy is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to understand, theorize, and imagine ways to help families function better with more flexibility, healthier communication, and more functional roles, responsibilities, and shared connections. When family relationships are strained beyond the members’ capacity to respond, having a trusted, compassionate, and trained relationship coach or mentor can really make life happier, easier, and healthier for all involved. Licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFT) have specialized education, training, and supervision in helping families increase their ability to function in a positive, enjoyable way—at least, that’s the goal.

As helpful and healing as family therapy can be, there are certain life problems that are so detrimental to individual functioning that they should be addressed in individually therapy before family therapy can begin. These include:

1. Addiction. Major, active addiction is so distracting and distressing to personal functioning, that the condition must be in treatment and under stable recovery before family therapy can be helpful. Most LMFTs will expect that drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions, and eating disorders get identified and treated before the whole family is under care. Sexual addictions, in my experience, are often only identified when a couple or family is well into therapy, and so may be initially hidden. However, they too are best treated individually if the addiction has been identified in the beginning.
2. [fat_widget_right]Severe mental health conditions. Major mental health issues such as bipolar, severe depression, anxiety, schizophrenia or other disabling conditions should be under treatment before family treatment is begun.
3. Family violence. Chronic anger, violence, and abusive behaviors are so threatening to family life that attempting family therapy can actually cause more hurt unless the violence is first prevented, controlled, and stopped.
4. Affairs. Secret or not, ongoing emotional and sexual affairs unbalance a family so that therapy is not possible unless they are completely stopped. Most family therapists will ask about affairs in their initial phone conversations or meetings with couples and the adults of family groups and will defer family therapy in cases of ongoing affairs.

Even if your family may be in the midst of one of these problems, a family therapist may be a great local resource for finding the help you need. If you are worried about your family, have run out of your own ideas, and energy for making a change is running low, please consider seeking out the professional help you need to get your closest relationships back on track.

Family harmony is a dream we all share. Wouldn’t it be great if we could function, day to day, like our favorite television families? Sure, life would come along with a one-two punch, but because we are so connected, in sync, funny, and resilient, by the end of the day we would land on our feet, together. Whether you relate more to the family of The Cosby Show, Malcolm in the Middle, or Family Guy, those families always come out wiser and still united in the end.

Real families aren’t so predictable. Marriage, child rearing, going to work, moving across the country, cleaning the house, going to school, loaning or borrowing money, having medical problems, dealing with one another’s moods; this is family life. It’s a messy marathon, and some of us find the experience more painful than others. Into some families comes divorce, or alcoholism, or mental illness, perhaps poverty or abuse. These families struggle to be connected and have positive relationships. And with enough pain, some of us walk away from our families and never look back.

There are times when it may be wise to create some emotional distance from our relatives. We don’t need to be intensely involved with every member of our family all the time. Our family systems have their own sense of rhythm. Varying closeness and distance is a natural process that brings balance in the dance of maintaining manageable emotional energy. We all do it, and it is a function of every close relationship we have.

Some of us have the experience of deliberately cutting off connection, particularly with one or both of our parents, for an extended period of time. We have another argument, the phone gets slammed down, and something inside us closes. We have run out of energy to explain, defend, and extend ourselves and we just need a rest from that intensity. Such periods of distance and recovery are common in families. You may be in one of those periods right now. It may feel like a burden has lifted, and you vow you’ll never go through that, whatever that was, again.

But here’s the thing: while shorter times of disconnect won’t interfere in your life, years of emotional shunning can. When we cut out a key family relationship from our life, it takes quite a bit of energy to keep that emotional door closed. And, any positive emotional energy that that relationship could provide us with is gone. While the bad stuff is not active, neither are the benefits. We compensate for that missing support, interaction and connection by leaning more heavily on other close relationships, like our marriage, our children, and our job. Our other relationships can take the extra expectations for awhile, but they can’t provide extra emotional stability indefinitely. Those relationships can get stressed. And then instead of one cut-off relationship, people can find that they are being distanced or shut out by other key relationships. Loneliness, isolation, and distress can erupt, seemingly, “out of nowhere.”

I believe that we are better-balanced human beings when we strive to maintain some measure of openness and connection with all the key people in our family system. It’s like the water pipes that feed my basement sink. In Minnesota, winter temperatures can dip well below zero. I’ve discovered that when the temperature is that low, the pipes to that sink can freeze. Frozen water pipes are one problem I don’t want. I have learned that if I keep the faucets slightly dripping on the coldest of nights, I prevent a huge problem. Drip, drip, drip: that’s all it takes to keep my pipes working. Drip, drip, drip is all the energy you really need to expend to keep connected to the most difficult family members in your life. You don’t need to open your emotional “faucets” very far to prevent your own emotional system from freezing up.

This can look like a birthday card, a call on a holiday, an invitation to a family event. It can mean returning an email graciously, showing up for an anniversary dinner, knowing your parent’s cell phone number. It means simple connection, the kind that keeps families functioning, particularly at times of high anxiety or emergency. I don’t want to have the first connection I have with my mother for years be in the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital.

For me, it boils down to this: we need each other, particularly our core family members, to be in our emotional world. Don’t cut someone off from your life completely. The relief you feel is short lived, and the pain can last a lifetime.