Protect family secrets: The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 5

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.
5. Thou shalt protect family secrets.

Sample Situation: A member of the family commits suicide. Since this is not acceptable to discuss even in the family, all pictures, memorabilia, and anything else which would indicate that this family member had ever lived here must be discarded. After all, no one in our family would commit suicide, would they???

Application: Our family doesn't have any problems, does it? Even if we did, we don't have to discuss or deal with them. After all, they're not that important. We can simply deny their existence so that we don't have to deal with the grief.

Motto: Life's too painful to have to deal with the pain and the problems. Just ignore them, they'll go away.

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This may sound a lot like Commandment 4, but there is a subtly significant difference: Commandment 4 is primarily aimed at keeping secrets about individuals: you can’t tell anybody that you are a scapegoat or that Daddy is an alcoholic or that Mum takes drugs or that sister is promiscuous; Commandment 5 focuses on keeping secrets—denial—inside the family, lying to ourselves to protect the image of the family not only to outsiders but to ourselves as well.

Off the top of my head I can think of several instances of this in my family—no effort required. From my early adulthood onwards I was aware that I had lived with my maternal grandparents from about the age of 2 to almost 4. I didn’t know why and there was an unspoken disapproval about asking. Nobody talked about it. In the family photo albums there were no pictures of me or my younger brother during that period. It was just a big hole in the continuum of my life. It was not until someone on my father’s side of the family brought it up that the story of my being abandoned by my mother for adoption at the age of 2—while she kept my infant brother—came out. But still, nobody was forthcoming with any details and over time I had to piece together what I know of the story from random remarks made by family members, which had the odd effect of opening a few doors into long forgotten memories.

I wasn’t allowed to talk about it nor was I allowed to ask questions. When I did, my stepmother took me aside and hissed that talking about “those times” made my father sad, so I was not to bring the subject up, ever. My mother, of course, denied it ever happened and her parents would only say that I lived with them until I was almost four years old, but never why. And so now my mother and father are dead, my stepmother and my grandmother also gone, and I never learned the whole truth. This was one family secret that pretty much stayed a secret: nobody alive today knows all of what really happened back then.

Another secret is still being actively kept a secret and I have only been able to glean the barest of details. My brother’s son apparently has been in prison…more than once, according to some sources…but this is “not discussed.” Furthermore, I heard from one source that the son has essentially been spurned by his father as a result, although other family members keep in contact. Given that this brother was the GC in our family, it does not surprise me that he behaves towards his only child the way NM behaved towards me...if your kids do something you don’t like or disagree with, abandon them. So, my nephew is presently the central figure in another Family Secret that must be kept quiet not only to the neighbours, but to the rest of the family as well. It reflects poorly on my brother that his son is a felon, and we are never, ever allowed to reflect poorly on the Ns in our lives without paying a heavy penalty.

When my oldest son was 21, he was mugged in a parking lot and left for dead. While he was in a coma, his sister flew to Boston to take the role as “next of kin” (why I didn’t do it is a whole other dysfunctional family saga). When she arrived she met my son’s girlfriend who was heavily pregnant. She advised this young woman to abandon my son and when her baby was born, list the father on the child’s birth certificate as “unknown.” I know this happened because my daughter told me what she did, and the girl took her advice.

When he came out of his coma and went through rehab and was able to function again (although he has permanent damage to the right side of his body), he wanted to see his child. I am not proud of the fact that I did not tell him the truth right away—I fully expected the girl to reconsider and when that didn’t happen, I expected my daughter to own up to what she did, re-contact the girl and re-advise her. I kept expecting my daughter to “do the right thing” by her brother and fix that which she had broken, but it became of those Family Secrets—only my daughter and I and the child’s mother knew the truth and they weren’t talking. Eventually I came out and told my son the truth…now I am a “liar” and am “trying to stir up trouble” because nobody will admit the truth.

When my NM died, she divided her estate between my GC bro and my daughter, NM’s Mini-Me. I did not attend the reading of the will, by my GCBro, who was executor of the estate, read to me the portion of the Will pertaining to me over the telephone. NM specifically named me and my two sons and GCBro’s son saying we were disinherited for reasons we already knew (which was bullshit in the case of at least two of the specifically disinherited individuals). Did my daughter, who inherited a six figure sum, tell her brothers the truth? No, she told them that NM had left half of the estate to her and her brothers but she was to be the administrator of the funds.

Since I believed she was going to share the money, I let her lie stand. No point in stirring up trouble where it’s not necessary, right? And so my NM’s perfidy became another Family Secret, my brother, daughter and I all aware of the terms of NM’s will, but my sons and other family members kept in the dark. Why did she do this? I assumed at first that she wished to continue to fiction of my grandmother’s virtuousness in counterpoint to my revelations of the truth about her but I realized sometime later that this gave her a stranglehold on her brothers and cemented their loyalty to her. But still, she planned to share, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

My oldest son, the one with the brain injury, approached his sister a year or two later and asked for enough money to buy himself a new car, his old one having become highly unreliable. It was with great indignation that he phoned me, demanding that I call her and reprimand her for spending “his” money on her brand new McMansion. It was then—and from me—that he learned the truth. So another Family Secret bit the dust and there went another nail in my coffin...I was again a “liar.”

When I was a girl, illegitimate pregnancies where considered shameful events that often became Family Secrets. The offending daughter would be shipped off to a home for unwed mothers, her baby taken from her and given to strangers to adopt, and when she resumed her place in the family, nothing more was to be said about it. Alternatively, the girl married and had her baby and people counted on their fingers and whispered behind their hands, but this became an “open secret,” where many people knew but no one acknowledged.

It was no surprise, then, when I turned up pregnant and 17 and unmarried, that NM wanted me to either abort my pregnancy (illegal in all 50 states at that time) or go to a maternity home and come home without the baby. My adamant refusal was a shock to her, as I had never stood up to her before. NM was doing her best to create another Family Secret, a fiction in which my child never existed, that only a select few family members knew I had been pregnant and NM’s image remained unsullied (as this reflected poorly on the parents of the pregnant girl—they shared her shame). She failed…I got married to a man who was not the baby’s father and that became the Family Secret—she refused to acknowledge that I did not meet the man until I was four months pregnant and even made up stories that I went off to his apartment when I was supposed to be at the movies with a boy from my high school class (she even told me this in a letter, saying she followed me to such places which, of course, never happened because, among other things, I had not yet met him and he didn’t have an apartment, he lived aboard a US Navy ship!)

This Family Secret continues to be believed by my daughter even though I have been able to present her with at least three witnesses—including my first husband—to corroborate what I had to say. Ironically, that baby my mother tried to force me to abort in Mexico (another Family Secret that was not believed when I told), that same child she tried to force me to give up for adoption, is my daughter. That baby I fought so hard to keep alive in utero and whom I adamantly refused to give up for adoption, became NM’s Mini-Me, believed all of NM’s lies, inherited half of NM’s estate and took up the mantle of the N-Queen in the family when NM died.

Every family has skeletons in the closet but dysfunctional families create them…and they hide them so well, you may not even be aware that they exist. If you live in an N family, you may be so blindered, as I was, that you do not even suspect the existence of a dark little secret even in the face of clues like nobody talks about a certain time frame, no pictures in the family album, the subject is changed when you bring something up.

Keeping family secrets is damaging to everybody involved. Those who must keep the secrets must deny reality and truth to do so; those who are not privy to the truth operate under deceit without even being aware; those who insist on making and keeping the secret avoid rightful consequences. Honesty and transparency are always the best policies, but in the dysfunctional family, they are anathema: secrets that protect the image of the family--or certain family members--from the stain of an unpleasant truth are the order of the day.

If you come from a dysfunctional family—and all families that have a narcissistic parent are dysfunctional—you are probably helping to keep a Family Secret or two…or there may be Secrets being kept from you. Uncle Bob who died a hero in Desert Storm? He committed suicide; Cousin Alice, that quiet, withdrawn little mouse of a woman who follows your overbearing aunt like a shadow? She hasn’t always been quiet and withdrawn…she was forced to have an abortion when she was in her teens and her mother has been punishing her every day for it since…more than ten years. Your brother Zach whom everybody thinks is in Africa bringing Jesus to the heathens…he’s gay, and after your father threw him out for being a “goddamned faggot,” he moved to San Francisco. Your sister Katie is in a psychiatric hospital because she quit taking her meds for her bipolar disorder, not working her way around the world like your parents told you. Relatives with mental illness, criminal behaviour, converts to religions or adherents of lifestyles your family disapproves of, suicide, interracial marriages…all of these and more are fodder for the Family Secrets machine.

So what do you do about it? You think very, very carefully if you think you want to reveal a truth. Consider what the consequences are likely to be…and there will be consequences…and whether or not revealing the truth you have to speak is worth the penalty you will have to pay. Don’t assume that just because someone instrumental in keeping the secret has died that there will be nobody to defend it…there will be and you will be called a liar and worse. Weigh the pros and cons carefully before you decide to open your mouth and even then, expect that nobody will be willing to believe you. Family Secrets often outlive those who needed and created them…and few people, if any, will appreciate a Secret being spilled.


Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
6. Thou shalt not feel.

Keeping Secrets: The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 4

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

4. Thou shalt keep secrets from others.

Sample Situation: Daddy has a “secret” that only he and his little girl know. Of course, she can’t tell Mommy. If she does, Daddy will hurt you and Mommy might leave and never come back.

Application: A child’s most important duty is to protect the image of their parents and family in the community. Watch what you say and be careful not to act funny around other people either. After all, as family we have to protect each other. If you stay quiet, you’re loyal. If you can't, we won’t love you.

Motto: To really love someone is to show loyalty by protecting their “secrets” at all costs.

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This is the “don’t air our dirty linen/laundry in public” rule taken a step further. And while the example here clearly alludes to sexual abuse of a little girl by her father, it has much wider implications.

First of all, this is the genesis of the DoNM’s feeling of guilt when she feels like sticking up for herself, when she feels ill-used, when she has even the most fleeting fantasy of vengeance or pay-back. When her natural self-preservation instincts come to the fore, she smothers them with guilt, thereby proving her loyalty and love to the family. And they show their love for her in return by not abandoning her.

Of course, there may never have been a conversation about this with her parents, no bargain struck. Over time and through making mistakes, listening to conversations about others, observing the treatment of others, and being given subtle but clear indications of what is expected…and what is at stake…children learn what is acceptable in their household and what is not. In the dysfunctional family, preserving the family’s external image by keeping the internal chaos under wraps is the primary job of each family member. She who will tell the truth—even to other family members—risks not only the wrath of the dysfunctional parent(s) but rejection and emotional abandonment, a terrifying prospect to a child.

There are, of course, children who speak up. I was one of those kids…my NM had already abandoned me, physically, when I was around two years old. I lived with my grandparents (her parents) for nearly two years until a reconciliation between my estranged parents was engineered, and then I was back to her. I was emotionally bonded to my grandparents and to my father, and for my brutal and ignoring mother I had nothing but fear. Whether it was inculcated in me by those who loved me or whether it was something inherent in my character I will never know, but I was passionately aware of and dedicated to “fairness” from my earliest memories, and indignant that my own mother so blatantly treated me so unfairly. It was not an environment calculated to instill a sense of loyalty in me…quite the opposite, in fact, because I was acutely aware that being rejected and abandoned by my NM was entirely possible—she had done it before—and that someone would rescue me as my grandparents had done. No, fear of being abandoned by my NM, fear of rejection, fear of losing her love—I don’t think any of those really informed my behaviour and feelings as a youngster because they were already a part of my life: she had abandoned me, she had rejected me, and it was clear to me that she loved my brother but not me. I knew this when I was five.

I went back and forth between protecting the secrets and revealing them. With the natural narcissism of extreme youth, my primary motivation was self-interest. I wanted to get away from my mother. I don’t remember wanting her to change, I suppose because I was unable to trust her and therefore unable to trust a change to be real. I simply wanted to be away from her. When she abused me I didn’t tell my father because she threatened me with further abuse if I did…after time, she didn’t have to threaten because I knew the penalty: if my father confronted her for abusing me, she would assume I had “tattled,” and the minute he was out of the house, there would be hell to pay.

But I did tell others, sometimes in plain language, sometimes in less obvious terms. In Sunday School, for example, I asked if the Commandment to honour your father and mother applied if they hurt you…an astute, interested adult would have picked up on the veiled reference in my question—nobody did. I quit telling when it became obvious that the response was almost always some variation of “What did you do to provoke your mother?” and nobody believed me when I said “nothing.”

Dysfunctional families have lots of secrets and sometimes the secrets extend outside the nuclear family and are even multigenerational. The secrets can be “open secrets,” like someone in the family is a raging alcoholic but nobody speaks of it or acknowledges it; or it can be a “closed secret” which is held by only a few family members…like sexual abuse in the family or physical abuse or illegal activities. Any secret that might make the family or anyone in it look bad must never be revealed to outsiders.

One of the secrets that virtually all dysfunctional families keep is the secret of the scapegoat. Nobody outside the family is to know that one child has been singled out as the receptacle for blame. If outsiders deduce for themselves or believe the scapegoat’s tale of mistreatment, the family rallies round and rationalizes whatever the outsider observed, often blaming the scapegoat further by calling her a liar, saying she has a “vivid” or “overactive” imagination, or creating a rationalization for the treatment that blames the scapegoat. A dysfunctional family will not even admit to itself that a scapegoat exists in its midst for that would be admitting unjust treatment of one of the members. They cannot acknowledge that one of the family members is a scapegoat, but if one member is treated differently from…more harshly than…the others, that is justified by the behaviour of the individual in question.

The fact of designating one (or more) of the children as a scapegoat plus keeping such a fact secret impacts not only the scapegoat child but the Golden Child as well. The Golden Child not only learns that it is acceptable to blame (and even punish) another for his transgressions and abuse, he learns that his victim should protect him from the consequences of his behaviour by keeping it secret. He further learns that his victim should remain loyal to him in spite of his mistreatment and that he can ensure his victim’s loyalty by threatening abandonment. Not only is this the world in which the Golden Child lives, it is his model for future relationships. But, insidiously, the Golden Child—who, at least in the beginning is just a child—also learns another lesson through this: Golden Child you may be, but blab the family secrets and you will be no better off than your scapegoat sibling. All support and love, privileges and entitlements will be withdrawn. Keep the family secrets or else!

In retrospect, I suspect this is what so firmly turned my brother against me when we were children: when my parents separated and my father asked who we would like to live with, I unhesitatingly chose him. I can still recall how indignant my brother was, like it was totally unthinkable that I would choose our father over our mother. But we were just children and my choice was based on a single very simple fact: she hit me every damned day and he didn’t. My brother behaved as if I had betrayed him, whereas I felt his preference for the person to abused me daily was betraying me. We became adversaries that day, and we have been estranged ever since. I can see my daughter in this as well—she has taken great umbrage at my blog for the very reason that it reveals those ugly secrets, and she has done exactly what Ns do in such circumstances: she has rejected me just as my NM did, calling me a liar and cutting all contact.

In a dysfunctional family, secrets abound. There are individual secrets, the ones kept from other members of the family, like drug use or promiscuity, affairs, destructive habits like gambling or shopping addictions; and there are family secrets, secrets the family conspires—and sometimes the conspiracy is tacit rather than acknowledged—to be kept from those outside the family or, perhaps, a faction of the family that isn’t privy to the truth behind the secrets. Protecting the secrets protects the family in that the silence keeps away those who might take action on some of those secrets, which would change the delicate balance of roles that allows the family to function. To allow an outsider to see the dysfunction is to risk destroying the family, changing it into something different, even forcing some members of the family to change their comfortable, well-known and beneficial roles.

Dysfunctional families exist in that form for a reason: somebody gets something out of it: at least one, but often both of the parents, although one or more of the children may benefit from the dysfunctional structure as well. To let the secrets out risks causing the dynamic of the family to change, which would mean a loss of benefit to those who gain from the dysfunction. That such a change would benefit the scapegoat child is immaterial—the scapegoat “…is the family member who bears the burden of being the cause of all the family problems. Instead of taking responsibility for their own actions, parents place blame on the scapegoat child. The scapegoat function is to distract from the central issue. Focus is shifted from the parents’ issues that are creating conflict to the scapegoat’s bad behavior and actions as the problem source.”  It does not benefit the family to do something that could benefit the scapegoat and it changes—harms, in their view—the family to let the secrets out that let the scapegoat off the hook and brings focus to what it really going on behind those closed doors.

The secrets must be kept—it demonstrates your loyalty to the parents and the family and ensures that they will continue to care for you, even at the cost of the truth and your own sense of self. In the scheme of things, those don’t matter: maintaining the family façade is everything.


Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
5. Thou shalt protect family secrets.