Getting Off The Family Merry-Go-Round

A number of readers like to tease me about my June-time preoccupation with marriage and family issues. I plead guilty. It comes from doing a lot of June weddings back in the days when churches had a lot of them, and when more of them lasted. So, ready or not, here we go again:

One frequently used image for life today is the image of a merry-go-round that never stops. The rides look like so much fun at the beginning, but quickly prove tedious and tiring, opening out on a frightening vista of frustration, repetitiveness, and hopelessness. Better that your life should be a cabaret, old chum.

The feeling that life is just a big merry-go-round can be like the feeling of getting somewhere and then discovering that you have only been moving relentlessly back to your initial starting point. Many people who feel like this want desperately to break out of the habits and routines that make all of their experiences déjà vu all over again, but lack both the hope and the confidence to bring it off. They keep getting attached to something that seems attractive initially but that turns out leaving them stuck in the “same old, same old.” A bad career choice, or a destructive relationship, or alcohol and drugs, or unaffordable vacations, not to mention the frantic pursuit of wealth and fame, will do it almost every time.

The merry-go-round is an especially powerful image of what many family relationships and family systems are like: a disparate bunch of people, holding on to their precarious sense of self-identity for dear life, bringing old ways of doing things to new challenges, while blaming each other that nothing ever seems to get better for them. At the center of this unhealthy process is the failure of family members to acknowledge and cherish the uniqueness of their respective personalities, values, and interests as sources of power, renewal, and excitement for each other. Instead, they become increasingly inflexible and defensive about the necessity of everyone else’s being more like they are and doing things more like they do.These family members work harder and harder to accomplish less and less, and wind up back at the same place faster and faster.

There are many contributors to dysfunctional relationships --- whether among family members, in the work force, or between friends and acquaintances in general --- than just the failure to respect peoples’ individual differences. Insecurity, self-centeredness, skill deficits, poor role models, and just plain stubbornness represent only a few. But one of the biggest contributors still is allowing differences of style, functioning, and values to work against rather than for the quality of all relationships. To illustrate:

Liz, a future-oriented, highly imaginative “dreamer”settles down with Arnie, a no-nonsense, practical, just-the-facts, here-and-now kind of guy. Both wonder why their relationship, when it is going anywhere at all, only seems to be heading “south.”

Brad seems never to know what he thinks and feels about something unless he talks it out in the company of others. By contrast, Brenda thinks everything out in her head before she offers even a first word to anyone else on the subject at hand. When they are thrown together on company business, Brad criticizes Brenda mercilessly for her coldness and aloofness, and Brenda retaliates by humiliating Brad for his invasiveness and boorishness.

Jack, a conflict avoider, becomes joined at the hip emotionally with Joan, a conflict confronter. Joan eventually bails out of the relationship with Jack, only to go on to forge a new one with Jerry, whose approach to dealing with conflict is neither that of avoidance nor confrontation, but of mediation and negotiation. Jack, Joan, and Jerry continue to insist that his and her own respective approach is the only right one, and wonder why they have so much difficulty getting anything settled for very long.

The basic form that all collisions like these take is --- you guessed it --- going around and around and not getting anywhere. The primary reason that the collisions keep turning out this way is that each party to them is convinced that when the other party becomes more like he or she is, all the problems will go away. The marriage relationship is an especially apt illustration: many people marry their opposites, personality-wise, and then put untold time and energy into re-making their spouses in their own own image. How God images each is never factored into the equation at all. And that’s a pity, because finding out is the single best way to stop family merry-go-rounds long enough for everybody to get off, and discover together a ride that everyone can really enjoy.