The First Rule of Dysfunctional Families is We Don't Talk About the Dysfunction
Part One of a 4-part series: Why SILENCE is a tool of every dysfunctional and toxic family system and what you can do about it.
Silence is key to keeping people locked into dysfunctional patterns, and the patterns don’t necessarily have to be toxic or abusive for silence to be one of the family rules.
Silence is well-known for its role in families where narcissism and other forms of toxic and abusive behavior is normalized due to the presence of one or more people with a disordered personality. This is well-known because many survivors of highly dysfunctional family systems where toxic and abusive behavior ran the household report their silence was required. They were told if they spoke about the family outside the family they were disloyal and they would be punished for their disloyalty.
Silence also plays a big role in families where the behavior is still dysfunctional, and doesn’t quite cross the line into toxic and abusive.
Behavior that falls into this category includes:
teasing, also known as “just joking”
withholding affection
blaming others to avoid personal responsibility
talking down/shaming
sarcasm
triangulating conversations
What other behaviors would you add to this list?
The reason silence plays a role in these families too is because if the behavior is confronted, your concern is often brushed off or ignored. You may experience everything from a sudden shift in conversation to the silent treatment for a period of time. The goal of the silence is for you to “forget” their bad behavior so they don’t have to face the discomfort of what they did to you and take personal responsibility for their actions by changing their behaviors.
Systems, including family systems, love stability.
This means even when the way people treat each other in the family system is causing pain and breaking connection, people would rather keep doing what’s familiar than go through confronting their own dysfunction.
Silence supports that ability to ignore and to keep the family system feeling stable. It isn’t stable, but it feels stable because the dysfunction becomes normalized.
When you became an adult, you began to see your childhood through new eyes. Whether you grew up in a level of dysfunction where communication needed improving and personal responsibility was lacking OR you grew up in mass chaos with abuse and toxic behavior, you have now seen what you can no longer ignore. How your family interacts and communicates is not healthy and you want to confront it and do something about it, but that silence gets in the way and blocks you.
What can you do when SILENCE is used to block the possibility of healing in your family?
Do not compromise your own truth.
You know what happened and is continuing to happen is not right. Don’t waver from that no matter how much pressure is put upon you to do so. The only way to break the cycle of dysfunction and toxicity and abuse for future generations is for the truth to be revealed.
This may mean only you know the truth and are willing to speak the truth and that is enough. It doesn’t feel like enough, I know, believe me, I definitely know. I know you want to upend the entire system and send everyone to therapy and hold everyone accountable until every member of your family system is healed and relationships are healthy.
While you hold fiercely to the truth, you must also hold loosely to your family members.
You need to seek the support you need to release them to their own journey, even if they continue down the toxic and dysfunctional path. Their journey is not your journey. You get to choose your own path and I promise, even though you are feeling completely alone as you start out on that path, your people will come to you. Your soul family will cross your path and join you on your journey. You will not be alone for long when you stand by the truth.
On a practical note, if you feel like you are meant to confront the behavior, don’t do it alone. Prepare for that conversation by seeking wise counsel in a coach or therapist or pastor. Tell a trusted friend your plan and ask that friend to be available at the time you are talking with your family member so that you have support in real time through a phone call or meeting your friend after the conversation.
The most important thing to remember is silence never works in this situation. The truth eventually comes out. Someone finally decides to leave. The person locked into using dysfunctional and abusive behavior to manipulate and control eventually ends up quite alone except for a few loyalists who kept their silence.
It is freeing to break the silence. It is healing to break the silence. It is your pathway to your peace to break the silence.