Relationship Advice: Family Warning Signs

Young men often hear this piece of advice:

"When you're dating someone, make sure you meet her mother before you get too serious. Because then you'll know what your girlfriend will look like 30 years from now."

We think it’s a pretty shallow thing to say, but there IS some truth in the idea that knowing about a prospective mate's mother--and his or her entire family, in fact--can be a valuable thing.

We're all a product of our surroundings to at least some degree, and we usually spend our most formative years in the family environment.

That's why "family matters" can be so important in relationships.

A loving, supportive peaceful family usually breeds a loving, supportive, well-adjusted child who may grow up to be your husband or wife.

A chaotic, dysfunctional family characterized by conflict and turmoil tends to breed...well...a frog or a nightmare.

Emotionally troubled people aren't responsible, of course, for the environment they were born into. But the effects of living in that environment may torment them psychologically the rest of their lives. They don't deserve what happened to them, and it isn't fair.

But it also isn't fair for you to have to deal with pain you didn't create, can't control, and in all likelihood, can't cure--no matter how much you want to, or how hard you try.

So how do you know someone may be struggling emotionally or psychologically, trying to cope with the pain they've suffered, at the stage of a relationship when they’re on their best behavior?

It's difficult, because very often people who grow up in dysfunctional situations can become very very good at covering up the super-heated emotional cauldron they've lived in. On the surface, they give few clues to what they've been through.

The “Wounded Child”

If you counted the number of people who have spent time “on the couch” in a counselor’s office because of some variation of “wounded child” disorders, you’d need a lot of digits before you hit a decimal point.

The so-called wounded child is a child who was, obviously, emotionally deprived or injured somehow during their formative years. The consequences of this deprivation or injury reverberates throughout their lives, and shows up repeatedly in their adult relationships.

And not in a happy way.

We’re not psychiatrists, psychologists, or counselors and don’t claim to have any credentials in these areas. We won’t try to give advice.

We’ll just tell you what we’ve seen in our own experience.

Many of these circumstances we’ll discuss in the next few pages tend to overlap and often occur in combinations. We’ll separate them here only for the sake of giving each “wound” a little space of its own.

Dysfunctional parents. If he grew up in a family where one or both of the parents abused chemicals, watch out.

Be especially wary if he talks about spending a lot of time alone while the parents were gone at night.

The most common chemical—but definitely not the only one—is alcohol. And in the last few years, there’s been more and more research into the impact on adults who have lived in a home where alcoholism was prevalent.

The homepage of the Adult Children of Alcoholics website says

“We had come to feel isolated, and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process. All the same we would mistake any personal criticism as a threat.

We either became alcoholics ourselves, married them, or both. Failing that, we found other compulsive personalities, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment.

We lived life from the standpoint of victims. Having an over developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We got guilt feelings when we trusted ourselves, giving in to others. We became reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.

We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. We keep choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with alcoholic or dysfunctional parents.

These symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism or other dysfunction made us 'co-victims', those who take on the characteristics of the disease without necessarily ever taking a drink. We learned to keep our feelings down as children and keep them buried as adults. As a result of this conditioning, we often confused love with pity, tending to love those we could rescue.

Even more self-defeating, we became addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable solutions.”

That passage above describes the problems, and the potential for disaster in a relationship, better than we ever could.

On a similar note,

Did he have to take over parenting himself because the biological parents were unavailable or emotionally detached? This seems to happen more with women, we think, especially if a girl in the family is suddenly saddled with taking over the “mother” role to one or more male siblings. But young boys can also have to become father figures to their brothers and sisters.

We think kids raised in such circumstances often feel they have to hold together a family that’s falling apart. That’s an enormous responsibility for pre-teens and teens. It seems to them that everything in their lives is out of control, and consequently, they grasp desperately to gain control in everything they do.

And you know what that makes them by the time you meet them, don’t you?

Can you say, “control freak?”

Replacing the new family with the old. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “better to dance with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

Even a single male who seems to have survived a dysfunctional childhood will probably seek the familiarity of chaos once he enters into a marriage, and especially when there are children.

In other words, they create the same kind of atmosphere they grew up in because that’s the devil they know (see the last sentence of the passage above from the Adult Children of Alcoholics website).

We suspect this is the reason you hear so many women complain, “He’s just not the man I married.”

And you have no clue it’s going to happen before the wedding.

This, we believe, is one of the big reasons so many marriages go from “I do” to “I’m done.”

One parent died, detached, or deserted. It’s been our experience that children who grow up with only one parent are more prone to relationship problems.

This one’s pretty obvious, so we won’t dwell on it.

Although it’s not true in every case, of course, odds are high that anyone who has been raised by one parent, and only one parent, may not understand what a healthy relationship really is, or how one works.

That can spell trouble for anyone who becomes involved romantically with such a person.

Did he have parents who were impossible to please? It’s one thing to ask your children to achieve certain standards, make certain grades, wear certain clothes, choose certain kinds of friends.

They have a name for expectations of this sort. It’s called parenting.

But there’s also such a thing as over-parenting, and in our opinion, it’s dysfunctional.

Over-parenting may take a couple of different forms.

Some parents are never happy and no matter what their kids do, it’s not enough. You can probably cite examples of your own (it’s a fairly common event), but one that jumps to our mind is the mother, played by Nancy Marchand, in the popular HBO series, The Sopranos.

If your Prince tells you about how he never seemed to be able to get his parents approval, or you meet the parents and find them to be over-demanding, over-bearing, and overly critical of their adult child (and possibly you) there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have some challenges ahead.

He had—or has—“helicopter” parents. The term “helicopter parents” has grown in popularity in the last few years, and we like the description.

These are parents who “hover” over their child and attend to their needs long after the child is old enough to attend to those needs himself.

Helicopter parents, it seems to us, drive their kids in one of two directions.

The child grows up thinking someone will (and should) do everything for them and they shouldn’t have to do anything for themselves. They never become truly independent.

On the other hand, the child takes the opposite stance and doesn’t want anyone to do anything for them. They insist on doing everything themselves and resist any attempts by anyone to help them. In this case, they become too independent.

In relationships that require cooperation, sharing, and a sense of partnership, neither approach offers much promise.

Was his childhood “too happy?” It’s also a warning sign, in our opinion, if he brags about how wonderful his childhood was. Mom was June Cleaver’s idol. Dad never raised his voice, lost his temper, chased other women, or was late for work a day in his life.

The family had dinner together every night, they never bickered, argued or got mad at each other. When they weren’t singing at the dinner table, they were praying.

Listen carefully to the way he talks about his friends. Does he criticize them for talking down about their parents and blaming their parents for everything bad that’s happened in their lives?

When you meet a guy like this, you’ll probably think “What a nice change of pace. Finally…someone who didn’t grow up in dysfunction and chaos.”

But be careful. Ask yourself, is such a childhood possible? “Is my Prince stuffing the truth somewhere down deep his subconscious, trying to convince himself of something that didn’t really happen?

Try to get to meet his family, and if you see things with your own eyes that don’t fit in with the story you’re getting from him, be careful.

At some point, reality may intrude in this fairy tale, and your Prince’s world may be shattered when he comes to grips with the fact that his “royal family” isn’t quite as royal as he thought.

When the walls of his mythical castle come crashing down, there’s going to be a lot of rubble, and your relationship might be the first thing to get buried in it.