A Little Look Into Family Systems

Hello to everyone reading this, and thank you. I want to take some time to talk a little bit about Family Systems and give you all a look into my own unorthodox family unit. There are many of us who haven’t had the privilege of raising or being raised in a proper fully functioning family system, I empathize with you. For those who have been able to raise or be raised in a fully functioning family unit, that is absolutely amazing, I hope you can keep the trend going. I think it’s safe to say that we all understand the basic concept of what a family unit consists of. Now I know that the world has changed its definition of marriage and I respect that, but for me and what I believe, God’s laws don’t change so I’m sticking with His definition that marriage is between a man and a woman (this is not to create controversy). So from that perspective and from those of you who watch a lot of television, we see the family consisting of a husband a wife and a few kids. Some families may also incorporate extended family such as grandparents depending on the situation. My family system was nothing close to that, my family growing up consisted of my mom, my grandmother, my two cousins and me. My cousins were a part of the family since their mom had passed away due to cancer while they were young.

I’m sure you’ve heard family be compared to different things. Maybe you’ve heard it compared it to a zoo, or even to a car. The fact of the matter is each is a system in which all the pieces play their own role to make up the whole. The pieces alone are useless or of lesser value, but when put altogether the value of its entirety is greater than the sum of all the components. You may remember the roles you may have played in your own families. For me I’ve always played the role of the baby, the youngest, the one everyone thought they needed to protect. Within the subsystems I was a part of, meaning my friends and their families I was always that one black kid everyone adopted into their family. For the most part it’s still that way, but as time goes and the system starts to change, roles tend to change. In my family I’ve since become the spiritual leader as well as many of the subsystems I belong to. When we talk of families that are dysfunctional I think of a system that is missing pieces, pieces that may be broken, or a poor attempt at trying to replace a piece that is just irreplaceable. My mom had to both work and cool at home and as good a job as she did, it was frustrating for her at times, it’s just hard to play the role of mom and dad, nurturer and provider.

Every family should also have a set of rules. In my family we had rules, but most of them were implied. My mom told me we were all good kids so she never needed to tell us. We hardly ever got into trouble, and if we got into trouble we got into trouble together. The rules I do remember were to be in bed at a decent hour, never go outside without an adult, always make sure we tell someone where we’re going, and every Saturday was typically the day to deep clean the entire house which took us hours. Other families have some pretty interesting rules and that’s okay, every family should do what’s best for them. For one of my friend’s, his family had a rule that if you went to buy food for yourself you needed to should buy some for everyone else. That’s not something I ever adapted to. Another rule was no TV or video games on Sundays, which a lot of families have different rules for what not to do on Sundays. It’s interesting to see the differences as you spend time in someone else’s home. It’s extremely important to be careful in assuming that everyone does things the same way. No family is the same, so when we visit someone else’s home, realize that family will have different rules from your own. When you’re married, you and your spouse will have come from different backgrounds and will most likely have grown up wit different rules in your home. So don’t assume that someone will automatically know what your rules or even believe that your rules are what’s best in every family, because every family has different needs, and that's okay.