TRANSCRIPT
I would like to offer a critique of this concept of family-oriented cultures. Often when I travel around the world, I hear people describe their own culture in other countries in the world, other regions of the world, as being family-oriented. “We come from a family-oriented society,” and often they’re saying this in comparison to the culture of the United States. Sometimes people have lived for a while in the United States; they’ve come from other countries, and they say, “Oh my god, America is not a family-oriented society. My culture is a family-oriented society.”
I’ve also heard this concept brought up in relation to the concept I talk about here of breaking from your parents, often as a healthy thing. Breaking away, becoming independent, taking distance from one’s family of origin, becoming strong and independent apart from one’s family. I’ve heard people say, “I come from a family-oriented culture.” They, from other countries, say, “I come from a family-oriented culture,” and what you’re talking about, breaking from your family, isn’t possible in my culture. It’s much more possible in your culture.
And to a degree, this really may be true. But what I have also observed is, yes, to a lesser degree, but it’s also there. America, the United States, where I live, is a very family-oriented culture. There’s all sorts of laws and rules and privileges and levels of societal acceptance that go along with being part of a family. In fact, the family system in our culture, as screwed up as these family systems often are, as exploded as they often are, still is the foundation of American culture.
Yet in other cultures, it’s even more so. And what do I mean by this? Well, when I think of cultures that call themselves much more family-oriented, what I see, ironically, is what this really means. Actually, when I strip away the layers and look at it more closely, it’s actually what it really means is it’s a parent-oriented society, a parent-oriented culture.
And the family system is oriented toward the parents, toward the elders, toward honoring the elders. It’s a family, a society, a culture that looks away from the needs of the child, away from the rights of the child. The rights of the parents are much more important and honored. Even within the family system, the child is supposed to be there for his or her parents. Yes, the parents do some basic things to raise the child, make sure they have enough food, water, warmth, maybe medical care, maybe not.
But when this child grows, he or she learns very early on that his needs, her needs are secondary to the parents. And as they grow up, they grow up to become children, young adults, even adults who are still there for their parents. And this is often what it means to be part of a family-oriented culture. You do what makes your parents happy. In some cultures, even you will marry who your parents want you to marry. You will marry who your parents choose, whether you like them or whether you hate them, whether you despise this person. You will do what is considered for the good of the family, the family really meaning the needs of your parents.
And often the parents are still beholden to the needs of their parents. So the elders, the grandparents, often may be in the most control. They have the most power. And people compare this to what goes on in the United States, and they say, “No, America is not a family-oriented culture.” But underneath the one I see is, yeah, it’s still there. It’s just a little different in America.
Yes, there can be more pressure. I think it’s less so now, but certainly when I was younger, everybody was supposed to get out of the family. Once you’re 18 years old, you’re out, more or less on your own. Maybe, yeah, we’ll give you money to pay for your university, or you go to university and we’ll help you become, well, an adult, maybe in four more years. But personally, certainly by the time you’re done with university, you’re done. You’re out. You have to make your living. You’re independent. You’re on your own, at least financially.
But what I’ve seen is even after that point, once the people become adults, often there’s still a lot of pressure to make their parents happy, give things that emotionally keep the parents satisfied, meet the unresolved needs of the parents, sacrifice their own needs for that of the parent. And then there’s a lot of young people who grow up and become adults who don’t break away. The families don’t let them break away.
Especially, I’ve seen this with families that have quite a few children. Often one child who becomes an adult is deemed the one who will take care of the parents, protect them. Actually, that child, in effect, will become the parent for his or her own parents. That child will never grow up and become independent. Sometimes that child who grows up to take care of the parents gets certain perks, maybe given more money, things like that. Sometimes not. Sometimes they’re given less.
Sometimes that child who grows up to take care of the parents, emotionally, even physically, sometimes even financially, well, becomes kind of like a slave for the family system, that is, a slave for the parents. Their job is to sacrifice their life, their money, their happiness, their independence for their parents. And often that brings a lot of relief to the greater family system. “Oh thank god, someone else is doing it.”
And sometimes that person can get a lot of perks. “Oh, what a wonderful self-sacrificing person. They’ve done such a great thing with their life by taking care of their parents, by never actually becoming independent for themselves.” Often it tends to be women who take that role of taking care of their parents, of being part of this family-oriented society. And that does happen in America a lot.
But yes, America does give people more liberty culturally, on average, from what I’ve seen, to be able to go forth, to be independent, or to do extreme things like I’ve done, which is saying, “You know, my parents were bad for me. My parents are bad for me. They disrespect me. They don’t honor the truth about what my childhood experience was. They actually despise me. They want to keep me broken, and they’re very toxic for me.”
The more I was around them, the worse I felt. And I realized not only did I need to become financially independent, I needed to become emotionally independent. I needed to become relationally independent. They were basically, I’m going to use an analogy, they were like a bad girlfriend that I had that I realized, “You know, this is a really toxic relationship. I need to get away, get away from this. I need to break up, and I need to be healthy.”
And I’m not responsible for a partner who has been treating me terribly, especially a partner with whom I never had children. I’m allowed to break up. And if they keep coming after me, this partner, well, isn’t that kind of like stalking? Well, in a way, my parents were like that bad girlfriend who didn’t accept that I wanted to break up with them, and they kept stalking me, kept harassing me, speaking badly about me, trying to ruin my life by proxy, poisoning relatives against me by saying things that actually weren’t true.
And what’s interesting, and where this analogy with them being like a bad girlfriend, a toxic girlfriend, where it breaks down is if I had a troubled relationship with a girlfriend, actually I’m a lot more responsible for what went on in that relationship than I would be with my parents. Because at some level, I would have chosen that girlfriend. I actually never chose my parents. They actually chose to create me. I was completely, from my own perspective, arbitrarily born into their family system.
So don’t I have a right to break away? That’s how I formulate it. I have a right to break away because I actually never chose to be there. And as I wanted to grow healthier, they wanted me to be more part of this family-oriented culture, which actually we do have in America, meaning they wanted me to stay in denial according to their own denial. They wanted me to continue to meet the needs that they had from their own unresolved childhoods that they’d always required me as a child to meet when I was little, and which I tried so hard to meet when I was little. I tried to make them happy. I tried to fluff up their grandiosity. I tried to believe that.
They were the greatest things in the world, and I fed them back all the things that they told me. But as I grew older, I realized, wait a second, this isn’t what I want. This isn’t the kind of life that I want. So really, I started breaking away. And in a way, I’m very grateful that I lived in a culture that, even though didn’t like that at all, it certainly made that easier than it would be in some other cultures in the world.
Because I’ve seen that in some other cultures in the world that are more family-oriented, to break away from the family in certain cultures can kind of equal a full social death. Where do you go? How do you get out? What do you do if you’re part of a culture that actually you’re part of a caste? You can’t even get out of that. A caste being a bigger extension of this family-oriented culture. You’re part of a tribe; there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nobody who will take care of you. You can’t make it on your own. Inherently, the primary allies that you have in your life, and perhaps the only allies you’ll ever find, are the people in your family system, no matter how good or bad—often how bad they actually are.
Maybe I’m painting this as a little extreme because actually I have known people from some of these extremely family-oriented cultures who have figured out how to break away from their family. And I think from what I’ve seen, it’s actually harder. It takes probably more resilience, more strength, more skill, more of a fighting independent spirit. I think yes, it probably is easier in my culture. In fact, I’m pretty confident that it is easier. But I want to say this: it’s still hard to not be family-oriented. Really, what I mean is parent-oriented in my culture and every culture in the world.
And so to conclude this, just thinking forward, using a little creative visualization as it were, I picture a world that wasn’t so family-oriented in terms of being about honoring one’s parents and honoring the screwed-up sides of one part one’s parents. The kind of family-oriented society I would respect someday would be a family-oriented society of parents who were deeply emotionally healthy, who had resolved their own childhood traumas, who had figured out how to long since meet and heal their own unresolved childhood needs, such that they’re not playing it out from the power position of being parents in the family system of which they are now in charge.
So if I were ever to like a family-oriented culture, it would be a family-oriented culture that had families with parents who were healthy. Parents who were able to fully meet the age-appropriate needs of their children, such that their children were able to grow up and break away and become independent emotionally as part of a healthy and respected process, completely on their own and independently, and with the full respect of their parents, of their greater family system, and of their society.