I'm someone who comes from a family where there was abuse. I'm still living in a really dysfunctional environment. I had the realization recently that I enable the people I live with and live my life as if my body was theirs to control.
I find changing my habits really hard. I didn't realize it before but it's because I know there's going to be some sort of punishment/fallout for trying to take control over my diet and body.
There's a term called clustering, it's used to describe how abusive and dysfunctional families keep the other members in check. Basically, a family will respond with violence (which can take many forms, starting small... taunts, verbal harassment, all the way up to suicide attempts) to a threat to perceived "family homeostasis", which would be "the way things are", and the family might be accepting of silly myths, incredibly inappropriate behavior I would say because it might serve certain key "powerful" family members who, honestly, might just be assholes, lack empathy, possibly due to a Cluster B disorder.
I read about clustering here. An excerpt:
I dubbed this phenomenon "clustering." Try to imagine what it would be like if everyone you know and loved started to come after you like that. If you do not think you would wilt, you are kidding yourself. And that would be true even if you came from a family that was relatively functional to begin with. Imagine having been invalidated like that for your whole life.
As I said earlier, however, that would only be the first thing that would happen if someone with BPD started to act better. The next thing that happens is that the parents start to act out in alarming and frightening ways. I'm talking about such things as the parents making suicide threats or actual attempts, increasing their drug or alcohol abuse to higher and higher levels, worsening their level of domestic violence, throwing other family members out on the street penniless, or abusing or neglecting any children left in the home. You know—minor, inconsequential stuff.
In the article they provide an example where a family clusters against a sick family member (one with BPD), but you can be targeted for clustering without being mentally ill. It can happen to scapegoated people in dysfunctional families, but also to any other member. At least from my own observations on my family, I would say it can happen to anyone, what matters is that there's a power imbalance, which is why unpopular scapegoated members run into this type of issue so much.
Understanding this behavior (clustering) has helped me pinpoint why I feel anxious whenever I try anything new. It's because I grew up with a really controlling family and to this day the family I have to interact with on a daily basis can be very mean and underhanded about a lot of things, unfortunately.
But they don't even have to do anything for me to be overcome by anxiety when I try self improvement. I find that I'm wired at this point in my life to fall into having to ask for permission regarding any small change.
I don't know, even when your family falls into the category of normal, on a smaller scale you might still be being held back by your history or the behaviors of those around you and looking at it from the perspective of the phenomenon described in the article might help you grow out of old bad habits.
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