Why are families so complicated?

Why do I become a teenager again at my parents’ table?

Because the room still runs on an older set of rules, and you learned them before you could question them. Someone uses a particular tone about your work, or your cooking, or how you are raising your children, and you hear it from the position you held at 15 rather than the one you hold now. The answer that comes out is quicker and smaller than the one you would give anybody else.

This is not a failure of maturity. Families are the most rehearsed group any of us belong to. Thousands of exchanges taught everyone where to stand, who speaks first, which subjects get dropped and who will smooth it over when something goes wrong. Those arrangements never got reviewed, because nobody writes them down and nobody has to. They simply run, and they run fast.

Who decided which one I would be?

Nobody decided. The parts got filled, often by the time you were 7, and then everything confirmed them. One child becomes the responsible one, another the difficult one, another the easy one who causes no trouble and therefore gets the least attention. Once a part is yours, the household reads your behaviour through it, which makes the evidence for it accumulate.

• The capable one. Gets told how strong they are, and learns that having a difficulty is a form of letting people down.
• The one who keeps the peace. Reads the atmosphere before anybody speaks, and loses track of what they think.
• The one who carries the trouble. Expresses what the household will not say out loud, and gets treated as the reason for it.
• The one who left. Gains room to become themselves and is quietly held to be the one who stopped turning up.

Where a child took on adult responsibility early, for a parent who was struggling or for younger siblings, the pattern has been studied under the name parentification. A review of 95 studies found the common outcomes to be internal and behavioural difficulties and strain on physical health, alongside real competence and coping in some of those children, with the difference shaped by attachment, sensitivity to rejection and whether anybody else was supporting them.¹ The studies measured very different things, so it describes a spread rather than a rule. It is worth saying plainly because people who carried a household young often arrive assuming they came out of it fine, or assuming they were ruined, and it is usually neither.

Why does nothing I have changed seem to count?

Because the family is working from an older picture of you, and new information gets filed as an exception. You have built a life your relatives have never watched you live. They see you for four days at a time, under conditions designed to produce the old behaviour, and conclude that you have not changed much.

This cuts both ways, and the second half is harder to accept. You are doing the same thing to them. The parent you argue with in your head is often some years out of date, and the sibling you have written off has probably moved too. Recognising that does not resolve anything on its own. It does change what you are looking for when you next walk in, which is a different conversation from the one where you are proving something.

Why do the same three positions keep coming round?

Because each one needs the other two, and families are very good at filling vacancies. Transactional analysis describes a quick rotation that any group can fall into: one person is in difficulty, one steps in to sort it out, and one is cast as the cause. The positions swap, usually without anyone noticing the moment they did.

You can see it in an ordinary Sunday. A complaint goes up about one relative who is not there. Someone defends them, which moves the complainer into the wrong, so the subject widens to something older. 20 minutes later nobody can remember what started it, and two people are not speaking. Nothing here required bad intentions. It only required everybody to take the position they always take.

Does distance from home make it easier or worse?

It changes the shape of the difficulty rather than removing it. Many of the international clients I see in Copenhagen left a country, a language and a role at the same time, and found that only two of the three stayed behind. Visits get compressed into a few intense days where everyone is on their best and worst behaviour at once, and the ordinary contact that would let people update each other never happens.

Distance also gives you something real. The part you play at home has less of a hold when you are not in the building, and a life your family has not scripted is easier to build 1,000 kilometres away. The cost is that you tend to be told you have become distant, and that a visit now carries the weight of a year. Both of those things are true at the same time, which is why so many people describe the flight home with a mixture of longing and dread.

What can I actually change, and when is that not enough?

You cannot give anybody else a new part. You can stop accepting the one that is handed to you, which changes what is possible for everyone in the room. It is slower and far less satisfying than being understood, and it is the only reliable lever you hold.

• Notice the handover. There is usually a sentence, a look or a sigh that offers you the old part. Catching it is most of the work.
• Answer the content, not the position. Reply to what was said and leave the rank where it fell, which is different from pretending you did not hear it.
• Shorten the visit, not the contact. Three days twice a year is often kinder on everybody than a fortnight once, and keeps more of the relationship intact.
• Pick the one relationship you want to change. Working on the whole system at once is how people end up exhausted and nothing moves.

There are families where this is the wrong frame entirely. If someone in it is frightening you, controlling money or access to other relatives, or if contact leaves you unwell for days each time, then the task is not to hold your position more skilfully. If you are the only one carrying a parent who needs real looking after, the fatigue is not a pattern to be understood but a load to be shared, and it is worth getting clear about who could take some of it. And if you cannot work out what you feel about any of them, which happens often, that confusion is a reasonable place to begin rather than a sign you are not ready.

Questions people ask

Can therapy help if my family will never change?

Yes, because what we work on is your position, and that is the part of the arrangement you have authority over. People usually find the visits change before anyone else does anything differently.

Do I have to go back through my childhood?

Only as far as it is useful, and usually less than people expect. Most of the work happens on present-day exchanges, with the history arriving when it explains something you are living now.

What happens in a session if this is my pattern?

We take one recent visit or phone call and slow it down until you can feel where you handed yourself over. That moment is specific, and once you know it you can see it coming.

Is it better to come before a visit or after one?

Either works, and the two give you different material. Before a visit you can plan what you want to be different; afterwards you have the real thing to look at rather than the version you expected.

Will this end with me cutting people off?

That is not the aim, and it is not usually what happens. Most people want less of a particular exchange rather than less of a relative, and getting clear about the difference is part of the work.

If you recognise the part you are handed every time you go home, I can help you look at what keeps you taking it, in psychotherapy in Copenhagen.

Sources

1. Parentification vulnerability, reactivity, resilience, and thriving: a mixed methods systematic literature review, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.