The Family Context
As biological entities, our lives are shaped most by our immediate social environment. For many of us, this also constitutes individuals that share genetic traits and attributes with us. Socialization patterns and our own psychological development are set into motion through our earliest involvement in family that set the stage for what it is we can anticipate later in life.
Family gives us a sense of belonging and identity. The family context models relational patterns including those between significant others. An individual finds their place in the family with behaviors being reinforced and repeated in this initial context that will come to be generalized to some degree in other contexts. In behavioral terms, one’s early family experience offers a discriminative stimulus that has influence throughout life. Life rules and expectations, both spoken and implied, are set forth by early family experience.
Family also provides us examples for how to engage with the outside world. Things that occur to the family in the family’s experience, also directly and indirectly occur to the individual. Cultural identity is determined through family experience. This often includes the blending of different cultural influences. When an individual is taken in by a family from a different cultural background from one’s birth family, it offers an opportunity to identify with both or either culture. This can also influence the individual’s feelings of connections relative to both the family as well as the outside world.
Early family experience also determines social access, socioeconomic status, real and perceived social risks, and material resources or scarcity, as well as setting the foundation for faith life and meaning making.
Family Constellation
Family Constellation is a concept that is used in Individual Psychology that relates to one’s sense of belonging relative to the family unit. Just as travelers my be guided by constellations in the night sky, we rely on our initial family constellation as a reference or a guide to rely on in navigating future social interaction.
Every constellation is formed through their proximity to other stars. In family constellations, it is our proximity to other persons early in life that matters most. We see ourselves relative to others that become fixed in our emotional life, even if these may fade with time or experience. Factors such as birth order may play important roles in how we come to see ourselves relative to others, with these patterns of identification having the capacity to stay with us through life. Family can be a nebulous term, in that conditions for family membership themselves are shaped by other variables such as community life and culture.
Although we may be members of the same family with someone, our identities within families may emerge in response to one another, sometimes putting us in wildly different life trajectories, with a symmetry or order that can only be fully understood through considering these earlier family dynamics. Unlike the constellations in the sky, family constellations are in actually always changing, with each family constellation changed by the addition of each new member. Still, our overall sense of belonging and purpose in life can be shaped in a generally fixed manner and through repeating patterns in life, as we consider the individual’s early family life.
Family Atmosphere and Family Values
Individual Psychology is also interested in understanding how family conditions and values impact upon personal growth and development. Family atmosphere is a term that has appeared in Adlerian thought and literature. This term applies most directly to the conditions of a family environment. Like conditions experienced in our physical environment, families can be defined in qualitative language descriptive of the social relations. Are things warm and sunny in family interactions, or is a family cold and distant? Terms like this can offer us important information about one’s family experience. As an ecologically oriented psychology, Individual Psychology is interested in the conditions of a family’s interactions, and how these come to be experienced by the individual. Sometimes people find their family atmosphere growing up as the ideal standard for future relations, and sometimes they may be compelled to find or create a different set of conditions. We tend to habituate to certain environments, whether or not these are what prove to be best for us. Change and growth often requires a us to be deliberate about seeking out and facilitating the right social atmosphere in our chosen relations.
Family Values also offer conditions that shape the development of the individual, influencing expectations, priorities, and personal conduct. Family values set for us the rules to live by. Sometimes these are clear and consistent, and sometimes they are temperamental and arbitrary. In the end, family values has less to do with what is stated, and more to do with what is reinforced, acted upon, or punished. The values we inherit through our family experience later can serve a quite dominating role in how we live outside of the family setting. Growth sometimes requires us to adopt a different set of values to live by, but this can be quite awkward and difficult, with a tendency to revert to and impose familial values from childhood on relationships that form later in life.
Culture, community life, and socioeconomic conditions can all influence the atmosphere and values of families.
Gender Guiding-Lines and Role Models
Gender guiding lines and role models are important aspects of our early life.
Gender guiding-lines refers to ways we come to view gender in the example of our parent figures. Through the influence (or absence) of our parents, we construct what it means to be “male” or “female”. Throughout life, we may feel pressure to live up to or avoid these examples. In fact, rigid application of these throughout life constitutes a psychological and social risk factor for individuals that often exists as a critical blindspot.
Fortunately, early family life also provides other examples of how to “be” male or female in other family members and in persons outside of the family. In fact, role models provide for us the example of how to avoid the pitfalls of imposed gender duality altogether. Role models can serve to expand the constraints and limits offered to us in our family of origin.
Although gender has been historically approached in bimodal manner (male or female) with pressure inherent in family systems to meet certain standards, our evolving times have allowed us a broader spectrum in coming to understand and accept ourselves. Our sexuality and sexual identity is uniquely our own.
When our families do not provide us with models of how to be, we seek these examples outside the family in the broader world beyond.
Equal Partnerships
Adler felt that this area of life was so important that he identified Love as one of three necessary tasks of life. Adler was critical of the power imbalance between males and females in the world, and saw marriage as an area in which power imbalances frequently manifest. His psychology worked from an egalitarian perspective, seeking to assist couples in working together in an equal partnership.
Adler’s views developed during a time period dominated by heteronormative relationships, which date some of his thinking about relationships. However, the necessity of equality between partners and cooperation remains the bedrock for what it takes to be in a psychologically healthy committed relationship.
Also crucial from an Adlerian standpoint is the capacity for each partner to be able to function generally autonomously from their partner. Partners often “balance” one another’s characteristics, but each partner needs to have capacity to meet life’s expectations on their own. We all need help from one another at times and withholding help and support during times of need is manipulation. However power dynamics that place one partner always “in charge of” the other sets up unhealthy dependence that undermines the couple’s capacity for partnership,
Chosen Families
In the end, we look to support the development of healthy supports in the relationships that are fostered with others going forward. Whether or not an individual decides to establish a committed partner, raise children, or remain on their own, the relationships fostered in extended family, friends, and neighbors are key to a happy and fulfilling life. It is the people that we surround us, that determine who and how we will be.
