Out of the Chaos Patterns Emerge

I noticed that families in crisis had certain characteristics in common, like blaming or avoiding each other. At first I assumed, as most people do, that the crisis in the family had caused these behaviors. As I went deeper into a family’s history, however, I realized that it was actually their blaming and avoiding each other that helped create the crisis, not the other way around.

Then suddenly, I began to notice these same patterns in ordinary families who were not in crisis — not yet. It was as if I had become a fortune teller, able to predict the trouble that lay ahead for certain families. But, thrilling as it can be to foresee the future, it is actually a curse if you can’t do anything to change it.

By the time these families of hospice patients were in crisis, I was deeply frustrated to find it was often too late to do much. I wondered what could be done to preempt some of these problems before they reached a critical stage. I vowed to find some kind of preventive medicine for families. I sought ordination as an Episcopal priest and began to study family systems at the postgraduate program of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family (formerly part of Georgetown Medical School).

As a minister, I found that people confessed to me some things they would not tell their doctors or therapists. Clergy often have access to a family’s most private moments, from the joy of weddings and baptisms to the agony of a divorce, kids out of control, or the death of a loved one. The New York Times reports that over 40 percent of Americans seek counseling from their clergy, while only 21 percent go to social workers, psychologists, or psychiatrists.1 It’s from these candid revelations that I’ve been able to piece together the patterns that make a marriage go bad or lead a child to have problems. I also learned what we can do to help preempt their occurrence in our families.

Learning from Other People’s Mistakes

Every story you will read in this book comes from a real family, although I’ve changed the names and details to protect their privacy. This is a collection of my best insights from almost fifteen years of observing families around the world and hearing real-life confessions of what parents wish they had known before their families descended into crisis. This book centers on three questions:

1. What causes a good marriage to go bad?
2. What causes a child to develop problems?
3. What can you do to prevent these developments in your family, before it’s too late?

This book is preventive medicine that can help couples stay happily married and raise happier kids at the same time. If your marriage or your kids are already in trouble, this book will help you understand how you got there and help you to dig yourself out. Unfortunately, to get to the good news, I have to begin with some bad news, which may be a bitter pill for you to swallow. All my time observing families abroad and listening to families at home has convinced me of one thing: Your children’s problems are much more connected to your marriage than you probably realize.

Our marriages affect our kids in many ways we’ve barely begun to acknowledge as a society. I know this is terrible news for those of you who try to shield your children from any marital problems you are facing. But we can’t deny that kids pick up on everything.

Perhaps you don’t want to believe there’s any link between your marriage and your children’s problems. I acknowledge that my news seems disheartening at first, but ultimately this book offers a liberation you never thought possible, if you can move beyond the initial shock.

Our marriages are in bigger trouble than we think. The press has reported that the divorce rate has leveled off, but that’s a misleading statistic. The media usually reports divorce rates on a per year basis, but, as marriage expert John Gottman notes, what really matters is the odds a marriage that begins in such-and-such a year will eventually end in divorce. And that rate continues to climb rapidly. For example, a couple married in 1890 had only a 10 percent chance of divorce. In 1950 it had risen to 30 percent, and couples married in 1970 had about a 50 percent chance of splitting up. But a couple who got married in 1990 has an estimated 67 percent likelihood of getting a divorce. That means a more recently married couple probably has less than a 30 percent chance of staying married.2

Less than 30 percent.

Couples Living in Emotional Divorce

Many of us like to kid ourselves that we have a good marriage and would never divorce, but a legal divorce should not be our only concern; there are many subtle ways we commit emotional divorce from our spouses every day. We avoid touchy topics that make one or both spouses uncomfortable. We avoid making important decisions because we know that discussing them is likely to end in an argument. We avoid sharing our thoughts, feelings, or dreams with our spouse, because it may make us vulnerable to attack or ridicule. Eventually, many couples may end up more like roommates than lovers.

The trouble is that as we move away from our spouse in an emotional divorce, we never remain alone for very long. We always move toward something or someone else.

Moving toward something else may mean watching too much TV, becoming obsessed with work, or developing an addiction.

Moving toward someone else does not always mean an extramarital affair. Many emotionally lonely parents find themselves becoming too emotionally attached to their children, often to the children’s detriment.

This is not to say emotional attachment to one’s child is unhealthy — quite the contrary. The key is to recognize the difference between a healthy attachment to one’s child and an unhealthy “marriage” to one’s child. When parents seek to meet their own relationship needs through their child, the child ends up bearing an emotional load that the child is not suited to carry. All this parental attention seems child-friendly, but anxious overparenting can lead to serious developmental issues for a child.

Understanding our tendency to marry our children offers freedom from passing our baggage on to our kids. In the first part of this book, I’ll help you understand this tendency as clearly and simply as possible. At times it may be a painful journey, but I’ll do my best to support you while you take this...