Features
Forsaking the Family
Simon Parke
Lauren is crying in frustration. Now in her mid-thirties, she
has travelled half way across the world to escape her controlling
and judgmental mother but the mileage seems to have made little
difference. By phone and email, Lauren is still bombarded with
demand and reprimand and it’s upsetting her. When she recently
refused Skype contact, her mother felt slighted and was furious.
Lauren regarded it as one invasion too many and knew she had to
stand firm; yet still felt guilty about her negative feelings
towards her mother.
As we reflected together on the situation, we saw that Lauren
was playing the kind adult to her childish parent but it was hard:
‘I’m an adult, I’ve left home and live on the other side of the
world,’ said Lauren, who is a successful PR executive. ‘But when
she makes contact, I might as well be seven and still trying to
please her.’
Families, like the poor, are always with us. But just how honest
are we about them? And what are the family values worth fighting
for?
FAMILY POLITICS
Unlike the previous generations of politicians, the present crop
must have a view on family life. David Cameron places great
emphasis on the family and sees marriage as the heart of it. At the
Welsh Conservative Conference in 2009 he said: ‘We want to see a
more responsible society, where people behave in a decent and
civilised way, where they understand their obligations to others,
to their neighbours, to their country – and above all, to their
family. Families are the most important institution in our society.
We have to do everything in our power to strengthen them.’1 At his
national party conference last October he said: ‘Marriage is not
just a piece of paper. It pulls couples together through the ebb
and flow of life. It gives children stability. And it says powerful
things about what we should value. So yes, we will recognise
marriage in the tax system.’
His coalition partner, Nick Clegg only half agrees. Speaking on
Sky News in December 2011, he said: ‘Getting married is probably
the best thing that ever happened to me’. ‘But as a liberal I think
there are limits to how the state and government should try to
micromanage or incentivise people’s own behaviour in their private
lives.’ Earlier in the day, in a speech to the Demos think-tank,
he’d said: ‘We should not take a particular version of the family
institution, such as the 1950s model of suit-wearing, bread-winning
dad and aproned, home-making mother – and try and preserve it in
aspic. That’s why open society liberals and big society
conservatives will take a different view on a tax break for
marriage.’2
MARRIAGE ROWS
Ed Miliband also opposes the pro-marriage stance of Cameron. At a
London event in May, 2011 he insisted that marriage was not a
crucial part of family life. ‘I am pro-commitment,’ he said, ‘but I
think that unlike David Cameron, I am not going to say that those
families that aren’t married are automatically less stable than
those families that are.’3
The leftward-leaning Labour MP Diane Abbott, however, is
concerned about what she perceives as a lack of interest in
‘family’ in her party: ‘Some of my colleagues are sceptical of Ian
Duncan Smith’s family narrative,’ she says, ‘and I share that up to
a point. I’m a single mum… and don’t want to feel second class
because of it… but we shouldn’t abandon talking about the family
to the right and extremist religious nut jobs.’ Off the record,
another parliamentary source in the Labour party went even further
when reflecting on the summer riots: ‘We’ve got to do police but
family is equally relevant and if we don’t tackle that we will be
out of touch. This is not just a post-riots issue, it goes much
deeper.’4
Politicians may not do God but the certainly do family. And when
they do, they talk mainly about marriage. There’s a reason for this
as research suggests marriage provides a more stable background for
children.5 Where marriage breaks down, there’s plenty of anecdotal
evidence of crisis and dysfunction. I listened recently to someone
working in a school on a ‘sink’ estate. She said that hardly any of
the children’s parents were married and that a very high percentage
were from multi-parent families. By that, she meant that brothers
and sisters all have a different surname. These children have very
little support at home, she said, ‘probably because their parents
put themselves first.’
ATOMS SPINNING
Parents staying together is a factor in healthy families but is
not the heart of the matter. The breakdown of marriage is only one
tree in the forest for in the end, it’s not the quantity but
quality of adults around the child that is most crucial in their
healthy development. The plain fact is that like Lauren, four out
of five people who come to see me for therapeutic help as adults
had two parents who stayed together but who, out of ignorance or
psychological laziness, passed on the poor parenting they received
to the next generation. If we imagine renewing the family is about
saving marriages, we are mistaken. Two parents can leave you as
damaged as one.
But what of the church in all this? It’s been common during the
last 20 years to hear Conservative politicians berate the church
for not giving a clearer lead in family life. There’s an element of
comedy in the fact that while politicians preach family values the
church focuses on politics. When Rowan Williams reflected on
societal unease in his 2011 Christmas address, he didn’t blame
family breakdown but a breakdown in communal trust: ‘The most
pressing question we now face, we might well say, is who and where
we are as a society. Bonds have been broken, trust abused and lost.
Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop
that serves his community or a speculator turning his back on the
question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive
adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the
picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.’6
A HOLY
ELEPHANT
But when it comes to family values, the church is aware of an
elephant in the room – and the elephant is Jesus. The church
follows a man who is unique amongst religious leaders for disowning
his mother and choosing a public place in which to do it. Imagine
it! Today, the pressure on people to buy a cheesy mother’s day card
is enormous. How could you not want to say thank you to this most
central of figures in your life? Yet the gospels record an incident
when Jesus doesn’t play this family game.7 He’s talking to his
followers when his mother, brothers and sisters turn up and ask to
speak with him. Their aim is to dissuade him from his increasingly
public ministry – a role that has taken him, the eldest son, away
from the home. His response is shocking. He refuses to go and meet
them and says: ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Whoever does
what my father in heaven wants him to do is my brother, my sister
and my mother.’ Blood family is ignored and a family of affinity
encouraged.
Even in our supposedly liberated times, these 27 words spoken by
Jesus would be considered unacceptable. Only the lowest of the low
can disown their mother, surely? Yet in the patriarchal Jewish
society of 1st century Palestine, where the 4th commandment
required you to honour your father and mother, the words were even
more shocking.
GOODBYE AND HELLO
But here’s the interesting question: is there a moment in our
development when each of us, like Jesus, needs to forsake the
family? Do we sometimes have to say goodbye to our family in order
to say hello to them again?8
And it get’s worse for the church, for lurking in the Old
Testament scriptures, amongst many family horror stories, is the
darkest incident of all: the tale of Abraham setting out with his
son Isaac in order to sacrifice him to God.9 It’s a tale of
appalling child abuse told as if it is all rather divine. Here’s a
story of a father who agrees to kill his son when asked by the
Almighty. It’s a story which includes a death march: the three-day
walk of father and son, with the son deceived about their
destination and plans. As a parent I am repulsed by the idea and as
a child, I am terrified. A walk together is usually a trusting and
close affair but not on this occasion.
We then reach the moment which the storyteller, perhaps
unsurprisingly, skims over. Abraham finally turns towards his son
and using both his physical strength and the authority vested in
him, forces him to climb up onto the altar. He then ties him down
with cord. It will need to be tight, otherwise his son might
wriggle in an attempt to evade the plunging knife. How would you
handle this if you were the parent, if you were Abraham?
There is no dialogue recorded for this part of the story. Is
Isaac literally dumb-struck? He’s unaware of the fate his father
has planned, though he must be weeping inside with confusion and
fear. Finally, the knife-holding hand of the adult is raised and
the truth is clear to young Isaac. His father, the man he trusts
above all others, is about to kill him.
OBEDIENT NAZIS
What is there to commend this story? If it is a story about the
merits of blind obedience, then we might equally celebrate the
obedience of those who faithfully carried out orders in Auschwitz
or Treblinka. What ethical check on obedience exists if child
murder can be applauded when carried out obediently? And more
crucially: what of the feelings of the child? Do you ever recover
from such an incident? Presumably your only path of survival – one
still common today – is to deny within that it ever happened. ‘My
father would never have done that. I must be making it up.’
The psychologist Alice Miller, reflecting on this story,
believes that the Fourth Commandment – honour your father and
mother – has had disastrous outcomes for the family. Writing on her
website, she said: ‘Over 100 years ago Sigmund Freud subjected
himself without reserve to the prevailing idea of morality by
putting all the blame on the child and sparing the parents. His
successors did precisely the same.’ She believes psychoanalysis is
now more open to the child’s story but in these attempts is still
‘largely thwarted by the Fourth Commandment.’10
She quotes the Auchwitz commandant Rudolph Höss: ‘Above all, I
was constantly reminded that I was to comply with and follow the
wishes or commands of parents, teachers, priests etc, indeed all
grown ups including servants and that I was to allow nothing to
distract me from that duty. Whatever they said, went. These
fundamental values of my upbringing became part of my flesh and
blood.’ We note that the Nazis were pro-marriage and pro-obedience
towards parents; we note also that for them as for many today, the
family was a sacred cow that could not be questioned. In such a
climate, as every psychotherapist knows, for a son or daughter to
take on their parents is the ‘last battle’ and to be avoided at all
costs, no matter how much of themselves or their past they have to
deny. People will blame everybody – and particularly themselves,
exhibited commonly in depression – before blaming their parents.
BREAKING THE CYCLE
But this is not a counsel of despair. I am optimistic for
families. The harm done by one generation need not be passed on to
the next. As wonderful parents across the country show, a damaged
child does not need to become a damaging parent. And we break the
cycle of destructive family settings when we become aware of our
own experiences as children. Did you have difficult parents?
Difficult parents, according to psychologist Sue Gerhardt, tend to
fall into three categories: neglectful, intrusive or
inconsistent.11
Neglectful parents are often themselves depressed and find it
hard to respond to their babies. Oppressed by their own concerns,
they are withdrawn, offer no eye contact and pick the child up only
to feed or clean them. As a result, the baby develops depressed
ways of interacting, as modelled by the parent.
The intrusive parent will display anger, even if it’s passive.
They’ll resent the child’s demands and express their aggresssion
towards them. Perhaps they pick the child up abruptly, hold it in a
stiff manner or throw it down on the bed. This parent fails to pick
up any signals from the child who will grow up insecurely attached
and emotionally avoidant.
The inconsistent parent – sometimes concerned, sometimes
switched off – forces children into heightened awareness of their
parent’s mood to optimise the chance of getting a response. The
unpredictable behaviour of the parent gives the parent power,
making the child – and later the adult – always available to them
and always needing them. This is known as a ‘resistant’ or
‘ambivalent’ attachment.
EMOTIONALLY AVAILABILE
Talk of family values is always with us. But let’s talk of those
things which make families truly valuable. And most crucial to a
happy home and gracious growing is not the marriage vows or
obedience to parents but the extent to which the parent or carer is
emotionally available to the child, able to respond to their
signals of discomfort or delight and able to soothe and calm when
disturbed. This is particularly so in the first two years of life
when the hard-wiring of the human brain is taking place – the
hard-wiring which will be taken onto the streets and into work in
adult life.
And as the first two years of life are crucial to the health of
the family so is a sense of eternity. Truth is strange to our ears
because it’s so rare but according to Jesus, the family does not
exist in any eternal sense. We recall a scene recorded in the
gospels when those negative towards Jesus were trying to catch him
out over the eternal nature of marriage.12 Desiring to make Jesus
look foolish, they asked this: who will a woman be married to in
heaven if she has been married to more than one person on earth?
Now there was a tricky one for the so-called Teacher to handle!
Jesus is under-whelmed by their cleverness. The premise of the
conundrum is that relationships on earth will continue as they are
beyond the grave, making for hellish chaos, dispute and bad
feeling. But Jesus does not accept this premise. He simply replies
that things will not be like that; that if we look to the eternal
future, we are looking at a different way of being.
AFFINITY NOT BLOOD
The message is clear: our complex network of relationships on
earth will not be polished up a little and then transferred to the
halls of heaven. Concepts such as marriage and family, which so
dominate earthly life, will have no existence there. It will be
different. We’re presented with mystery, certainly but not a
conundrum – and the only ones left looking foolish in this
encounter are those too narrowly obsessed with the confines of the
present ways and structures. But then who can blame them? That’s
what they had been taught from their mother’s knee. They had been
taught that marriage and obedience to the family ethos were
everything. What else could they do but believe it and assume it an
eternal truth?
Families come in all shapes and sizes and no two are the same.
The family is the oldest institution in the world because it’s so
flexible, reinventing itself down the centuries, across the world
and in our own lives in ever-different forms. Families can be both
wonderful and tragic. They have the power to create but also the
power to destroy which should make us cautious about calls to
‘strengthen the family’ for it begs the question: which aspect of
the family are we strengthening?
And so we return to where we started. Lauren is a Christian and
concerned at her negative feelings towards her mother. We laugh
about it not being a concern that Jesus seemed to share and she’s
relieved when I say that she’s not responsible for the
relationship: ‘The child’s relationship with the parent is all down
to the parent.’ This is self-evident. It’s a psychological
impossibility that a child would turn their back on a parent who
has loved them in a consistent and accepting manner. Parents create
their children which is why to a greater or lesser degree, we must
all leave our family, as Jesus did, to find ourselves – and perhaps
to find our families all over again.
For if Jesus disowned his mother in life, he looked after her in
death. In a moving scene, the crucified Jesus creates a new family
– not one of blood but of affinity.13 Speaking from the cross, Mary
is told to take John as her son and John is told to take Mary as
his mother. From this time on, we are told they shared a home
together.
Lauren will create a good family around her, whether one of
blood or affinity, because at some expense to herself, she’s being
honest about her experiences and feelings. In fact, is the most
shining family value that of honesty?
1 As reported in the Daily Telegraph.
2 As reported on Channel
4.
3 As reported in the Daily Telegraph.
4 An interview in the New
Statesman.
4 Research from the Jubilee Centre, in Education
News.
6 The Archbishop’s Christmas
sermon.
7 Matthew. 12.46-50.
8 Forsaking the Family, Simon Parke (White Crow
Books, 2011).
9 Genesis 22.1 -10.
10 The Alice Miller
blog.
11 Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt (Routledge,
2004).
12 Luke 20.27-40.
13 John 19.25-27.