We all grew up with some dysfunction, and we’re all who we are today because of it. On today’s podcast, we learn how to heal from a difficult childhood and take destiny into our own hands. Join Dr. James Flowers, Robin French, and our renowned family therapist, Dr. Vaughn Bryant, to find out how you can start healing from the pain of a dysfunctional family.
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Listen to the podcast here
Healing From A Dysfunctional Family With Dr. Vaughn Bryant [Episode 49]
Family Dysfunction
Welcome everyone to Understanding the Human Condition. I’m your host, Dr. James Flowers, joined by my fabulous co-host, Robin French. How are you?
I’m good, how are you?
I am so excited. We’re joined by Dr. Vaughn Bryant, our very own Dr. Vaughn Bryant at J. Flowers Health Institute. Thank you for being here. Vaughn, your career has included more than three decades of service. Like mine, we’ve worked together historically in the past. It’s great to have you here. I want to jump right in. What are some of the characteristics of family dysfunction other than opening it and seeing the photo of my family in the book?
Like Robin was saying in the beginning, we all have a degree of dysfunction. Some of us are more willing to admit it, which actually opens the door to healing. That question is a great one. There are some indicators that we can see from looking into a family on the outside. Anxiety is the first one that pops to mind. Another one is anger management. People will say, “You got anger management issues, or she’s just a worry ward, or she’s neurotic or anxious.” I would say that would be the one that most people can see from the outside.
We all have a degree of dysfunction. Some of us are more willing to admit it, which opens the door to healing.
It’s an indicator that there’s something brewing underneath. Also, we think about boundaries when we’re doing an assessment of family functioning or relational functioning. We look at boundaries and dysfunctional boundaries are very rigid and they’re sometimes enmeshed. Rigid might be there’s no connection but enmeshed is that the person’s way too involved. They’re intruding and invasive. I’d say the other thing too, it has to do about really the nature of the connection. You look at some relationships and you look in families.
I’ve got a big family and I can just look at my own family and there are times when it seems like there’s a real contentious connection between people. It’s adversarial. That’s dysfunctional. With this question, I want to answer about what would be indicators of a functional family because a lot of times, we do talk about stuff like codependency or even substance use disorders. We talk about the disordered part of it, but we rarely really look at what would be a functional or healthy or optimal way. I would say when it comes with family relationships and boundaries is that they’re flexible, that they’re accommodating. They also flow with the developmental trajectory of the individual and the family, which is really challenging to synchronize all that out.
That would be an indicator of a healthy family. Another thing too, when it comes to just that general attitude toward each other, it’s not contentious, but it’s collaborative, it’s cooperative, it’s loving, it’s caring, it’s generous, it’s filled with this desire to serve and even to make sacrifice for the other person. Not to be seen as good, but because there’s this genuine love for the other person. We think of love in terms of passion and stuff like that, which is great. Also, a huge part of love is sacrifice. It’s about a willingness to sit myself down and let someone be elevated for the moment.
Love is not just about passion. A huge part of it is sacrifice.
It’s not always about huge sacrifices. It can be about little mini sacrifices.
Well said, you bet. Just handing the remote over to the other person you’re watching TV with. That’s a sacrifice.
Someone wanting to go out to dinner versus stay at home cooking. One wants to cook. I go, “We’ll stay at home and cook tonight, or yes, let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
Sometimes someone just has to start the little things to break that. What lasting impact does family dysfunction have on us?
The main thing is it is so involved, it’s so influential in personality development. Part of personality is temperament and that is what a person is born with. You’ll notice that if you have any little nieces, nephews, or children you observe or you see them around. Some kids are more talkative than others. Some are shy, some are more adventurous. Those are aspects of temperament that really we’re born with. It’s part of our phenotype. It’s our DNA.
It represents that unique manifestation of our self. The temperament is what we’re born with, but so much of the other stuff, like our beliefs about ourselves, our beliefs about other people, our ability to trust other people, our ability to connect with others, that’s what we learned in childhood. Much of it comes from our experiences in our family. That’s the impact, is it really impacts personality development. It can set in motion patterns of thinking about self and patterns of relating to others just get continued without ever really checking it.
Talking about comprehensive diagnostic evaluations and family dysfunction, it’s part of what you look at as a therapist and how do you weave that part into the evaluation process at J. Flowers and looking at family dysfunction through the patient’s lens?
One of the first things I do after I get someone’s basic date of birth and history of present illness is I draw a genogram. A genogram is a tool that as family therapists we use to map out. It’s like an organizational chart of the family. I like to map out three generations and I learn a little bit. I learned about who they were closest to. I learned about other kinds of patterns that may have manifested in their sibling group or their parental group or even the grandparents. That’s a big part of it too because a lot of times people’s symptomology really makes sense when you understand the context in which they live. It’s functional in that system, but then you pull them out of that system, it’s dysfunctional.
Healing From Dysfunctional Childhood
That’s right. Oftentimes, patients want to change their family of origin, but we cannot really change the family we’re given. What can you do to heal from a bad or dysfunctional bad or dysfunctional childhood?
The first thing, as I said earlier, is to come to an understanding and awareness of what is optimal relational functioning. What is functional family life look like? Sometimes when people kind of get enlightened on that they become really angry and they’ll lash out at their own family of origin which more power to you sometimes that’s part of the healing process to find your voice.
It’s also important not to get stuck there and to move forward into, “It is what it is. It happened and now what wisdom can I extract from this experience so that I can do something different today that will alter the trajectory of my future.” That’s how generation patterns, get stopped, they get reversed, or they get corrected. You’ll see it sometimes. I know you’ve seen this, that some people come out of a tremendously dysfunctional relationship, or family.
Maybe there was a substance use disorder, and that person became a teetotaler. They don’t drink at all. Sometimes it’s just part of the natural evolution of the family, or of humanity, that we do learn from our mistakes. A lot of times, we need help from an outside person, a professional. That’s how we do it in the comprehensive diagnostic evaluation. Help them to understand those patterns and then equip them with healthier ways of moving forward.
Struggles In Healing
Where do you see our clients going wrong when trying to heal some of the dysfunction from the past?
I have this saying that I have used to really organize a lot of the way I think about families and about individuals and that is people have symptoms, but systems have problems. I think a lot of times people go wrong when they try to treat a symptom. When the symptom is not the problem. It’s only an indicator. It’s like the warning light on a dash. The cause is something much deeper. For example, I’ll talk about anxiety.
Anxiety, it’s the plaque that clogs the arteries of relationships. Many times people have these internal kinds of expectations of perfection, or sometimes they’re external, that they may have had a parent that was really demanding, highly critical, had a certain expectation of what they were supposed to look like, this, that, and the other. The person’s in this constant state of anxiety because they know they’re not measuring up to what is expected or what the expectations that other people are.
They’re not being who other people want them to. They don’t have the freedom to just be themselves. They may think they have an anxiety problem, but they don’t. The problem is they’ve got an inaccurate perception of their own self-worth their own sense of expectation of life. Me personally, I had a revelation probably it was back when we were working together and it didn’t necessarily have to do with you. I don’t know maybe the J. Flowers’ vibe was just working on me.
You were flowered.
I don’t know fifteen years maybe twenty years ago we were working at a hospital together and I can remember being up in the chapel at that hospital and it was a quiet place in the facility and I was just going through some stuff personally. I had to do with a family of origin and just a feeling or a sense that I had screwed up or that I wasn’t measuring up, I wasn’t meeting the demands and I just had this spiritual awakening. It was that I’m not good enough. I know a lot of people are cringing right now, “Don’t say that.” No, yes, say that. The problem that I had carried, the burden I had carried with me for so long, and I’m not blaming my parents for that, it was that I wanted so bad to be good. How do you like that?
I’ve never heard that.
I wanted so bad to be good that I tried everything to get other people’s admiration or affection or recognition. The thing was I got people’s admiration recognition and affection and I got people’s rejection, and I got people’s criticism and I got people’s critical evaluation. What I realized is that I’m not good enough. I’ll never be good enough. If I can have an internal sense of what’s adequate, and I can hit that mark every day. Some days I’m going to peak.
I’m going to be above adequate. I might even be exceptional for a day or two but I cannot keep it up. The other reason why is because the people that are judging my performance have their own measuring framework. I think that’s a big part of the curing the cause. The cause of that anxiety and insecurity was not the problem. It was the symptom of a deeper problem, which was this inaccurate perception of adequacy and this expectation that I had to be perfect or exceptional.
As you know, we all think you’re exceptional.
We do.
Generational Trauma And Dysfunction
We see exceptional things. Let’s talk about dysfunction as it relates to generational trauma. We often repeat the toxic behaviors of our parents and our grandparents and what have you, and it lives on. How do you overcome that?
The first part is being willing to really embrace the negative reality. There’s a great book. I know I’ve heard you talk about Henry Cloud before. He writes these books on boundaries. Probably 20 years ago, after he wrote a whole very successful series on boundaries, he wrote one on integrity. It was like the seven qualities of integrity. One of them is this ability to embrace negative reality. This ability to recognize that, “Stuff’s broken, and things are out of sorts.” To do it, again, as I talked about earlier, there’s this really short window where I give people permission to be mad as hell, to be pissed off, to just be furious, then to move toward healing.
I’m going to give you an example. One of the clinical techniques that I learned in the second half of my career, actually I first heard about EMDR when I was in graduate school, back in the ‘80s, or ‘90s I guess. That’s when it was developed in 1990, or 1987, 1989, something like that. I went through intensive training on EMDR and I actually heard a lecture from Dr. Francine Shapiro. She was the one who developed the procedure. She was talking about the work that she had done with perpetrators of sexual abuse.
I know this is a scary and taboo topic. She talked about her use of EMDR with them. One of the realities that she observed in her research was that many of the victims of sexual abuse, these ones that went on to perpetrate abuse in the next generation, when you ask them, “What do you think about your dad or the guy that perpetrated?” “My dad, he was just doing the best he could.” There was this desensitization to the horror of what had happened to them as a child. In that desensitization, they became well desensitized to the experience that the victim has.
I think that’s one of the things with exposure to dysfunction, desensitizes you to it, and you don’t have that flashback reaction. That’s a big consequence right there of going through those. For the healing part, it’s important to get angry. Again, I don’t really promote any experiential like anger expressive type therapy. I don’t really believe in that but I do believe in the processing of that emotion. EMDR is a beautiful way of doing it. Let it flow out. I do believe that when a person’s in that trauma, there is a state of fear.
Now when the threat subsides, a lot of times that fear evolves into anger. Anger is like we can work with that because now you have this sense of advocacy for yourself. You know that was wrong and you’re actually standing up for yourself. It’s in that anger it’s important to do something productive and allow yourself to formulate some new principles about life. “People did this to me and it makes me angry. I’m going to develop a new way of relating to others.” That’s going to be an oppositive or kind of opposite.
When a person’s in trauma, they’re in a state of fear. When the threat subsides, that fear often evolves into anger.
Breaking The Cycle
That’s a great segue to what I was going to ask is how can we stop repeating the cycle of dysfunction in our families?
This may sound really corny, but it really begins with that internal work with self and really comes into terms with self and forgiving self, loving self, empowering self, trusting self, and believing self. Until a person really has that secure sense of self, they’re really not going to be able to confront some of the difficult conversations that are going to happen with other people. I’m going to say another quote, and I came up with this back in the day when Twitter was really popular.
I tweeted this out probably about 5 or 6 years ago. One day, I was just sitting there thinking, or I had a conversation with a friend and I said something, and he was like, “That was good.” I said, “I’ll tweet it.” This is what it was “The people who hurt us are rarely involved in our healing.” See, that’s another thing. A lot of times people feel compelled that they got to go back to these people who hurt them and somehow work it out.
People have asked me too about forgiveness. I remember at one point, I used to have that philosophy. You have to forgive to move on. Somebody told me about the horrendous abuse they were a victim of and I changed my mind I said, “There are some things that are unforgivable. I’m a give you that one. You don’t have to forgive.” The people who hurt you are really involved in your healing. It’s an internal thing. You heal yourself and spirituality is a very valuable resource for people to work that out and healthy relationships with others are another way.
What’s an example of something that is not forgivable in your mind?
I’ll just say that example. That example was a person who was sexually abused by their father. Now they were grown and they had kids of their own and they were struggling with that. “I don’t know. People in the family tell me I need to forgive them and bring my kids around.” I said, “No, that one, you can hold on to that.” Her or his, I cannot remember, their anger and unforgiveness about what that person had perpetrated on them was protecting the next generation. Sometimes really saying, “You know what? We’re done. I’m not going to forgive you, we’re not going to make up. I’m going to move on.” That’s one example.
Sometimes people sit in the victim role. I often talk about moving from victim to victor. What’s the victim or survivor mentality? How do we move beyond that victim into victor or moving into a healthier space?
It starts by finding safety because many times if the victim is still in a situation or circumstance where the threat is present, they’re still a victim. The first thing is to stop the assault, find safe refuge somewhere, escape, or surround yourself with people who are supportive and protective of you. Move toward that healing process and come to terms with and recognize the fault, the error, in some cases the evil that was perpetrated against you, and allow yourself to have that healthy degree of anger. To learn how to reorient their set.
One thing that I’ve seen happen with trauma is that many times people will develop philosophies that they’ll attribute to an entire generation or group or people. The reality of it is if a basketball coach molested me when I was twelve, it’s not a healthy or rational thing to make the assumption that all basketball coaches are perverts or molesters or all coaches are molesters or adults aren’t safe. A big part of that healing too is being able to experience meaningful connections with safe people. I’ll tell you one more example. I remember working in a clinical setting one time where I was the only male therapist. It happens. James, you know this.
Yeah.
There was a female survivor of sexual trauma. The clinical director said, “You cannot work with her because you’re a man.” I challenged her on that. We worked through it and we talked through it. I said, “Look, did the client say she didn’t want to meet with me?” She said, “No, actually the client wanted to meet with you because she was in your group and she thinks you can help her.” I said, “Has it ever dawned on you that maybe having a safe relationship with a male who’s nurturing, caring, compassionate?”
It’s part of the healing process.
You said it. It’s part of the healing. That therapeutic relationship that we facilitate in therapy as well as those healthy relationships with other safe people in a family. It could be a brother or sister who was also a victim. Now you band together and you’re a group of survivors.
What do you say to people who use the excuse of their past as an excuse for their poor behavior? How do you stop them from self-sabotaging again and again?
I do that because it was my mother’s fault. I do that because it was my father’s fault.
I remember saying something once in a family therapy setting to a parent, and they had a child that was an adult child who had a pretty serious, severe personality disorder. The parents were all stuck on this thing, this feeling it was their fault. They feel like they have to fix it. I told him and I said, “What happened before that person was say 18, 19, 20, may have been your fault. Once that person becomes an adult, it’s their responsibility.” That’s the thing. It may have been another person’s fault, but now it’s my responsibility to do something different, to make my life different, to march toward recovery and ultimately wellness.
A lot of times we see that part of that being forgiveness. Talk a little bit about forgiveness and the role of dysfunctional families and moving on and moving into a victor role.
Forgiveness is a beautiful thing. Have you seen Downton Abbey?
Yes.
I have just gotten into that show.
What? Just now?
Yes.
You’re a few years late.
It’s taken me about three weeks.
Better than ever.
I know.
It’s taken me about three, maybe two months. I’m like on the edge of the final episode of the sixth season. There’s a beautiful example in here about forgiveness. There are such beautiful nuggets of wisdom in that show. The dowager? That woman’s brilliant. Anyway, so Lord Grantham, at one point, maybe in season 2 or 3, he has a little tryst with one of the house servants. Lady Grantham doesn’t find out about it. About 2 or 3 seasons later, Lord Grantham is out on some hunting expedition, but he comes home early.
One of the guests that they had there at Downton Abbey was really taking an interest in Lady Grantham. After everyone goes away and scurries back to their room, this man comes into Lady Grantham’s room and she’s like rebuffing him, tell him to get out. Right at that point Lord Grantham comes in and is just furious. They get into a fistfight. Anyway, a couple of days later Lord Grantham just gave her the cold shoulder, just totally iced her out.
Angry. Resentful.
Yes, iced her out. Now she did the brilliant move and I mean ladies and gentlemen, this is the move if this stuff happens. She goes into her husband’s bedroom after he had been just a cold a-hole for about a week or two, and he wouldn’t share the bed with her. She said this to him. She said, “If you have never even looked with any sense of affection toward another woman or ever entertained any of her flirtations toward you, then you’re entitled to sit in that bed. If you have, I expect you to be in our bed tonight.” In the next scene, you see Lord Grantham is walking in the bedroom.
That is great.
That’s the thing about forgiveness.
We need to play that.
If we really examine ourselves, we realize that we are so guilty of things that we’re holding other people that we’re holding back forgiveness. It’s about examining yourself and realizing that, and I can speak for myself. I have been a generous recipient of grace in my life and forgiveness. I have been forgiven far more than I’ve been persecuted or held accountable for. That’s a beautiful thing to remember.
Post-Traumatic Stress
It is, absolutely. That was a great analogy as well. Thank you. What does post-trauma distress look like?
There we go. Downton Abbey again. The seventh episode of the sixth season.
She is good.
She is.
Mary’s husband, survived the war. I mean just terrible. World War I. He comes back, recovers, then they get married, and then on like the morning that her baby’s born he dies in a car crash. Her new suitor ends up, he’s a car racer, and she’s having a really difficult time dealing with it. She’s manifesting PTSD right there in the show. It triggers this hypersensitivity to situations and circumstances that remind you of the traumatic experience. Avoidance, that’s another thing. People try to avoid people and places and things that remind them. Another thing is a weird dynamic, but it’s called dissociation. People just check out. Another one’s hyper village. When you say what do you mean?
Checking out dissociation?
Dissociation. It is this defense mechanism that we use. It’s a psychic defense mechanism where we split off fragments of our experience because we cannot quite organize them. We cannot think about them and if we get too close to them then a person usually does like a ricochet back into some dissociative state where they’re not even aware of what’s going on. Those are some of the examples of PTSD, and post-traumatic stress.
Understanding The Human Condition
I love your approach to therapy. I love you being a part of our team. I’m so glad you’re a part of what we do every day because you help so many people. You’re so in tune with what you do. What is your own understanding of understanding the human condition?
That’s beautiful. I don’t think there’s a more noble work that we can do than to continue to endeavor to understand the human condition. In particular, when it comes to family of origin or relationships, I’ve asked people throughout my experiences, work, life, whatever, what’s the most important thing to you in your life? I’ve known people that have planes, boats, and cars. Not one of them said plane, boat, or car.
It’s family. It’s people. It’s a connection. It’s a partner. It’s wife. It’s kids. That’s why it’s so valuable and is such a noble endeavor because really if you were to interview a hundred people on the street right now this is what’s the most important thing in their life. It’s not whatever’s going on in the news. It’s not whether or not their yard’s getting watered or whatever. It’s not even really about money now usually people put finance in those top three but it’s relationships.
That’s how family therapy and doing relational work are so important to understanding the human condition because it is a driver of a lot of the dysfunction, but it’s also in many ways the savior. It is the resource that gets people back to a place of hope and optimism when they experience that love and connection with people who really do care about them. The thing about it is that’s what the therapy with alliances is. It’s a healthy, intimate, empathic relationship that can nurture a person into a place where they can have hope in the human condition again.
I had a therapist call me and actually text me and say, “I’m going to play your show for all the patients in the treatment center.” We have a treatment center listening to us.
I hope they got something out of that.
I was going to say, what do you want to leave patients who are out there reading with and talking about family dysfunction than about dysfunctional families? What would you like to have as a takeaway? Thank you for being our guest.
It was my pleasure. One thing is there’s nothing that we can do to improve your past. Everything that’s happened in your life has made you who you are today but it’s what you do today that is going to define who you are tomorrow. We can undo the past. What we can do is we can dissipate, reorganize, and reprocess some of the ways we’ve integrated those past experiences, those models from earlier relationships into our understanding of life. We can extract the nutrients that are valuable, that are going to fuel us, that are going to resources, that are going to grow us.
Everything that’s happened in your life has made you who you are today, but it’s what you do today that is going to define who you are tomorrow.
We’re going to eliminate the aspects, the stuff that’s really not helpful and it’s destructive, and it’s toxic and we’re going to move forward with a new commitment to really optimal personality and relationship functioning. That is what motivates me through the traffic and get to work on time, is that we get to do that. We get to help people move from a place of hopelessness to a place of hope.
If someone wants to learn how to do that through you, how do people reach you?
I’m not really active on social media. Maybe I’ll start doing some stuff. I used to have a Twitter, I think it was @Vmb3PhD, Twitter, but Instagram @VaughnMBryantIII.
They can also reach you at JFlowersHealth.com.
Yeah. You’re asking about social media. J. Flowers Health Institute, I’m the primary therapist there. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist. I bring that specialization into my work. J. Flowers Health Institute. It’s www.JFlowersHealth.com.
That’s us.
We’re always there. In every way, we are always there. I’m on call this week.
That’s true. Thank you for spending time with us and I want to remind everybody watching and listening that there are numerous platforms that they can find us. YouTube, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please share it on your social media, like, subscribe, and share it with someone that you think will really heal and help with this episode.
As always, we want to remind you that a clear diagnosis is the key to the most effective treatment possible. See you next week, everybody.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks, Vaughn.
Thank you, Dr. Bryan.
Important Links
- Vaughn Bryant’s LinkedIn Profile
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- Vaughn Bryant’s Instagram Profile
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- Flowers Health’s Twitter Profile
- Flowers Health’s LinkedIn Profile
- Understanding The Human Condition’s YouTube Page
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