The parent-children unit is the supreme regulating principle of life. If one extends the same concept to the parents of the mother and father, that influence becomes even more powerful. What gives such a presence to the family is a deeply grounded and lasting intergenerational relationship that establishes internal security in its members. Cohesiveness, by connecting the roots of the past with the branches of the present, solidifies the family for the future. More extended families provide fertile ground for nourishing ties that protect their members against the anxiety of aloneness in the world. Cut flowers don't last long, and even the strongest tree can't survive once it is uprooted. The family that establishes deep and wide roots offers fertile ground to the soul.
If the natural ground of the immediate family is lacking certain good, nourishing raw materials, then the soul must branch out to blood relatives and to other long-standing relationships for history and a sense of belonging. Such childhood as well as adult relationships, maintained and nurtured, generate strong ties that give meaning to life. Our fondest stories are about the group activities that we were part of, whether in the army fighting a war or demonstrating against it, playing on a sports team or cheering for it, working on a campaign or for a cherished charity. These events were not necessarily poetic or mythic at the time of their occurrence, but by integrating their memories we give them a voice, an echo that reverberates with the myth of our own family in a larger sense of the word.
All these relationships to others in the community eventually are transmuted to our immediate family, which is the first and most enduring of our ties. We all need to feel connected to our original family, no matter how conflicted it may have been. The family is our initial anchoring point. The deeper the water, that is, the greater the stress, the deeper the anchor must go. We all have families, good and bad, happy or unhappy, functional or dysfunctional. In fact, such polarizations (as discussed at the individual level) may themselves be just myths, fictions that we are unable, or unwilling, to dispel. With the exception of the serious violations, like physical, emotional, or sexual abuse which generate time-release trauma for life, the garden variety of problems a family might face are fundamentally nourishing to its members, helping their growth and emotional enrichment, despite adversity or pain.
The secular experiences of a family, like religious ones, imprint on the individual's soul. They can be ordinary interactions, frequently full of conflicts and contentions, jealousy, envy, and competition and, at times, ugly and dirty. After all, the Bible's Book of Genesis reminds us that Adam was formed out of the dust of the earth. The individual as well as the family is part of the whole of nature, as natural as the mud of the earth. Any attempt to destroy the impurities of nature also removes the fertile soil. Therefore, any excessive "cleansing" of family behavior may make it more socially acceptable but also sterilizes its soul. There are some therapists who, by their clinical reductionism, diagnose a family and prescribe remedies to make their behavior more "normal." By not recognizing the formative mythology in the family conflicts, however, they tend to jump too quickly to figure out problems, and they are able to provide only superficial or antiseptic solutions. This approach is like pulling a thread sticking out in a cloth, unraveling the texture that holds together the individuals in the family, which is intricately interwoven to form a rich pattern. The therapist's role, rather, should be to appreciate that richness and help the individuals search deep in their stories to find the formative myths in the family and connect them with the communal archetypal family. The family that remains differentiated from the myth of the archetypal family is lonely, confused, and alienated. Its members experience themselves as aberrations, disconnected from the past, the present, and the future.
T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity
