Families Are Complex

Families are complex.

That isn’t exactly a groundbreaking statement. We all know families are complex. But I think we often say it without really allowing them to be complex.

We still look for the right version of what happened. We want to know who caused the problem, who misunderstood whom and whose feelings make the most sense. We want one explanation that brings everything together.

Families rarely work that way.

People can live in the same home, experience the same events and come away with very different understandings of the family they grew up in. Two children raised by the same parents may describe two different childhoods. One may remember a parent as protective while another experienced that parent as controlling.

This doesn’t necessarily mean someone is lying or remembering incorrectly. We experience families from our own position within them. Our age, temperament, needs, relationships and understanding at the time all matter.

Parents have their experience of the family. Children have theirs. One does not automatically cancel the other.

Separation can make this complexity even more visible. Parents may have very different understandings of what happened within the family, why the relationship ended and what their children need now. The child may experience parts of both parents’ stories, neither of them or something entirely their own.

Listening to a child’s experience is not asking the child to decide which parent is right. It is recognizing that the child is also living inside the family and has a perspective that belongs to them.

A parent can know that everything they did came from love and still have a child who was hurt by some of it. A child can recognize how much a parent sacrificed and still need to talk about what was missing. A parent may have done the best they could with what they knew at the time, and their child may still carry something from it.

We have a hard time holding those things together. We think that if the child was hurt, the parent must have been bad. Or if the parent loved the child and tried their best, then the child should not have been hurt.

But love and hurt can exist in the same relationship. They do all the time.

Good intentions matter, but they don’t decide another person’s experience. Being hurt by someone’s behaviour also doesn’t mean we automatically know what they intended.

“I was trying to protect you” and “I felt controlled” can both be true. It is when we insist that only one can be true that we stop being able to hear one another.

Families also develop stories about people. There is the sensitive one, the difficult one, the responsible one, the strong one and the one everyone worries about.

Those stories often begin somewhere real. But we can continue relating to people through old stories long after they have changed. The sensitive child becomes the adult whose pain is still explained as oversensitivity. The child who made poor choices becomes the adult whose decisions are always questioned.

Sometimes we know our families so well that we stop looking.

We believe we already know who they are, why they behave the way they do and what their choices mean. Because we have so much history with them, our understanding can feel like the truth.

We may even be right sometimes. Parents may see something in their children before the children have words for it. Adult children may also recognize things in their parents that the parents have never examined.

But seeing a possibility is not the same as knowing another person’s experience.

There is a difference between asking, “Could this be part of what is happening for you?” and telling someone, “This is why you do it, but you don’t understand that yet.”

If they agree with us, we were right. If they disagree, they are defensive or not yet self-aware. There is no answer they can give that changes what we have already decided to believe.

Children begin their lives needing parents to teach, guide, correct and protect them. We are supposed to do that.

But we are not raising children to remain children.

We are raising human beings who will eventually have minds, values, relationships and lives of their own. They may take everything we taught them and still arrive at a different conclusion than we did.

We may see risks they do not see and believe we know what choice would be better for them. Sometimes we may be completely right.

But even being right does not give us ownership of another adult’s decision.

We can disagree, express concern and decide what we will or will not support. But if our adult children have to make the choice we would make before we believe they are thinking clearly, we are still asking for obedience.

This becomes even more complicated when adult children create families of their own.

The original family has not disappeared, but it has changed. The family created by the parents becomes the adult child’s family of origin. The adult child may now have a family with its own needs, decisions and centre.

That change can bring real grief for parents. We may no longer be the first person called. Our advice may not carry the same weight. Holidays may need to be shared. It can feel as though we matter less.

And if we don’t recognize that feeling as ours, we may turn it into a conclusion about them.

“I miss you” becomes “You don’t care about your family anymore.”

“I feel less important” becomes “Your partner has changed you.”

What feels like rejection may actually be our adult child taking responsibility for the life they have created. What we experience as secrecy may simply be their privacy.

This doesn’t mean adult children are always right or parents are always the problem. There is enough responsibility to go around in most families. Each person has a side of the street.

We are responsible for what we say and do. We are responsible for listening when someone tells us how our behaviour affected them. We are also responsible for examining what in our reaction belongs to our own history, fears, and sensitivities.

When family members begin sharing less or creating distance, it is easy to experience that as rejection. Sometimes it is. But sometimes people create distance because they no longer know how to remain close and still be themselves.

They may have tried to explain their feelings, motives or choices many times. Eventually, they stop. Not because they have nothing to say, but because saying it changes nothing.

So they stop sharing the parts of themselves that are continually questioned, corrected or explained away.

The more honestly we understand our past and pay attention to who we are in the present, the more choice we have about who we become. Self-awareness does not automatically make us better. It allows us to do something different with what we see.

We can keep what was good, change what caused harm and become more intentional about what we pass to the next generation.

Hopefully, we can do that while remaining connected to the generations that came before us. Not by staying who they need us to be, but by allowing those relationships to change as we do.

That is not always possible.

Sometimes the work is no longer about keeping every relationship intact. Sometimes it is making sure the same unexamined patterns are not carried forward.

I don’t think families need to agree on one version of everything that happened. But there has to be room for more than one experience and enough curiosity to consider that we may not completely understand the people we know best.

And hopefully, enough room in the family for us to remain connected as we become ourselves.