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WHAT'S UP DOC!: COMMENTARIES FROM NARAYAN-SINGH

INTRODUCTION to “IT'S ALL IN THE FAMILY”

Why is it that I always feel so responsible for everything? Isn't it strange how things always seem to go wrong where Martha's involved? It's weird how Al always seems to get his way and get away with it, isn't it. These and all kinds of other patterns abound in our lives. What they represent are lifestyles or life scripts that get laid down in the childhood home as survival strategies or parent-pleasings. What happens then is that what was needed for successful functioning in the home becomes a behavioral prison. That is, the style you develop in the home is taken out into the world, and it coerces, cons or casuals (by seeming insignificant) the environment into inadvertently supporting it. The result is that one's personality is cast in stone by this process.

The purpose of this book is to present an overview of the circumstances which have produced this process of script-induction, and to describe a number of personality patterns commonly seen nowadays. For each pattern, there will be a description of its origins, its dynamics, its behavioral/functional playout patterns, its intervention requirements and its larger purpose.

Although personality derives from many sources, such as heredity, health issues, cultural-ethnic-subcultural forces, environmental characteristics, etc., the single most influential factor in the formation of personality is the family in which we grew up. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the isolated nuclear family is in a lot of trouble. Government studies, scientific research, clinical practice, daily observation and even the media recently indicate that the family is under enormous pressures which make it almost impossible to function successfully. The family is being subjected to overwhelming demands that inevitably lead to breakdowns in its weakest links. Unfortunately, the weakest link of all appears to be in the process of rearing the children. Hence, our personalities are becoming increasingly maladaptive, due to the way we were reared.

Many aspects of the situation of the isolated nuclear family make it very difficult to cope with the day-to-day requirements of raising children. One of the most important is the lack of information and training for the tasks and realities involved. The fact is it is perhaps the most difficult and important job in the world, and yet very few people get any training in how to do it before they are up to their eyebrows in it. (For info on this, see Honey, I Blew Up The Kids! by the author). Which is little short of disastrous, because these are the areas which, due to their enormous complexity and importance. require the most preparation and training.

What all too often happens is the good person-bad spouse-worse parent phenomenon. In essence, we are at our worst in the areas of intimacy and parenting. In part, this is because these areas are so completely different in their requirements from those of general public citizen and competent work performance (though the latter should take the rules of intimacy and parenting as their starting point). The other major reason we falter so often in these areas is that they are so intensely difficult in their demands of us, especially given the inadequacy of our preparation and the back-seat position they are relegated to in most of our cultural priorities. As a result, all too often we encounter individuals who are really fine people, but who do the most amazing things with their spouses and their children.

Often under the circumstances we fall back on the only available source of guidelines in these areas, namely what happened to us when we were growing up. So we set up intimate relationships with people very much like dear old Mom and Dad in the way they make us feel, and the patterns we carry out are strongly related to those we witnessed as children. We end up either doing unto others what was done unto us (with minor adaptations and variations) or we bend over backwards to NEVER do what was done unto us, which guarantees that we will pass a lot of it on anyway because we preserve most of the system by doing a 180 degrees opposite trip . . .

The family then becomes more of a contractual and payoff-based system than a commitment and caring relationship. The effect of this is to put both parents in a situation where their basic affection and nurturance needs typically become increasingly denied. They become starved for love . . . to be continued

Excerpt from Narayan-Singh's “It's All in the Family”

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