Several years ago I was privileged to be in an audience addressed by Peter Steinglass, the head of the Ackerman Institute in New York City. Peter’s theme was issues of financial capital in wealthy families. Peter brought into my consciousness something that Sigmund Freud said that concretized my undertaking of just how difficult the healthy integration of financial capital into a life turns out to be. Peter explained that Sigmund Freud said that the two greatest sources of a happy integrated human life, were for an individual to learn to love and to work, with work defined as calling, and the two greatest detractors to his or her happiness were issues involving sex or money, with issues of money, the most difficult. Peter went on to suggest that we modems have come a long way in the last half of the twentieth century from Freud’s nineteenth and early twentieth century views in being able to speak about sex and to integrate it with some success into our adult lives while money remains for most of us a great issue. Not least, he suggested, because money remains the one subject in all cultures about which no wellbred person can speak. It is the remaining taboo subject. How, one can well ask, can people learn how to deal with a complex subject that, as Freud says, risks your happiness, when you cannot talk about it? We are all extremely fortunate that we have people like Peter Steinglass and the other great voices, living and dead, in this field who are now helping us to begin a dialog on the issue of money and its integration into a healthy life. Thank you Peter!
So, with money the great issue, what insights does the science of psychology offer to guide a family in trying to integrate it successfully into its life?
FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY THE MULTIPLE INTERACTIONS OF RELATIONSHIPS
Let’s begin our journey, by looking at those family systems that are composed of relationships within families and where the most significant part of the capital held by family members is inherited from earlier generations either in the form of an on-going business enterprise or invested financial assets. Thus these will be families who are at least in their second and third generations. Let me add that the ideas discussed here will also be helpful to families with first generation wealth if they use them to help form the family governance systems they will need to avoid the problems I’ll elucidate and if they give the members of their families the education they will need to make those systems work. What do these systems of relationship generally look like? In my experience they are frequently two sets of interconnected webs. A first set of relationships linking the individual family members to each other as members of a family of affinity and a second connecting them as the joint owners of financial capital. On the individual side, family members have roles I define as “me” roles, for example, as parents, children, spouses, in-laws, grand-parents, great grand-parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, frequently first, second and third, and godparents, and step relationships of multiple kinds.
On the side of joint ownership of financial capital, family members have roles I define as “we” roles, for example, beneficiary, trustee, protector, owner of an interest in a family private trust company, board of director member of a private trust company, employee of a private trust company, stakeholder owner or manager of a corporation, partner (limited or general) of a family partnership, or of a limited liability company or partnership, member and/or manager of a family philanthropy, member of such a philanthropies grants committee, etc, etc. Often the numbers of such roles held by an individual family member will be significantly increased because of the multiplication of certain types of entities required by the families’ financial management system for its financial assets.
One of the things I do when I join a family’s journey is to graph for them the picture of all of these relationships. If you can, please imagine that most such family members have between 18 and 21 sets of relationships between their “me” and “we” roles which together comprise their individual webs of relationships within their family systems. If you are a member of such a family, please do this exercise for your family relationships now before continuing reading. For you professional readers, please do such a graph now for a family you represent where you act as their personne de confiance. Please note the picture should tum out looking like plates of interwoven spaghetti.
OK let’s continue. My guess is that each of you quickly got to 18-21 separate relationships and then didn’t go further to add to them by the multiple numbers in each such category such as multiple brothers and sisters, individual cousins, etc.; or family limited partnerships as examples simply because you “got the picture” that the complexity of human and financial relationships within families with significant financial capital is extraordinary, really awe-inspiring. When we add, as Psychology 101 teaches, that managing each relationship in our lives will require a lifetime of practice, we realize why family relationship management is really as difficult as we have always thought. We also now have a way of articulating our suspicion about the complexity of our family relationships in a concrete non-emotional way. We further realize why family governance, the art of making joint decisions, is so startlingly difficult as we understand perhaps for the first time how many relationships get triggered every time a family has to make a decision.
Adding now to that awareness are two further realities that make the problems of good family joint decision making even more difficult. These are the need for family members to be able to distinguish the boundaries which define each relationship, and the need for each family member to be educated on the roles and responsibilities which define each such relationship and the practice of it.
One of Psychology’s major teachings is about the importance of good boundaries for good relationships. Robert Frost’s admonition in one of his poems “that high stone walls make good neighbors” comes to mind. I imagine that we all know, and have examples in our families, where important relationships of ours had good boundaries and these relationships worked well and ones where we had poor boundaries and they worked equally badly. Can you imagine, however, what it is like to have 18-21 relationships with close family relatives and to try to manage the boundaries of each of those relationships well without any of them slipping over on to other relationships with the same person and then confusing both relationships? For example, a parent is speaking to a child while also being the trustee of a trust of which the child is a beneficiary, and the owner of a corporation in which the child is an employee. I’m sure you see right away that the boundary issues within families of the type we are discussing are very difficult to manage. Later in the chapter I will discuss a practice to help you manage these well.
Now to the same example let’s add the fact that most of us have no real way of gaining education to be great parents of children, except on the job training. We have no courses to attend to become excellent beneficiaries, because they don’t exist, and, few to become excellent trustees, and, no courses to become great stakeholder owners of family enterprises, and, few to become excellent managers of family enterprises. So when we add the lack of education most family members of financially wealthy families have about how to be excellent role players of the multiple roles they are called on to play in family financial decision making with the difficulty most human beings have with boundaries, we often have chaos or inertia when it comes to the doing of family governance.
The final complexity for families with significant financial capital in the management of their multiple relationships is that so few of their advisors understand how truly complex their family decision making systems are. Most advisors come from professions in which the study of complexity theory, of psychology, and, of organizational dynamics, are not required subjects and so their learning about family systems comes from their own form of on-the-job training. This is a tragedy for the families they serve since so few are prepared, without these studies, for the problems of family relationships they will encounter. The lack of such knowledge leaves them unprepared to understand the boundary issues they themselves create within these webs of relationships every time they create a new entity to deal with the proper ownership and administration of the family’s financial capital. This last reality is often the straw that breaks the family’s relationship back as the family members receive a new entity comprising a whole new set of family relationships without the education to understand their roles and responsibilities in operating it and without understanding the new boundary issues the new entity demands be managed if it is to thrive.
So what do we all too often have in the governance system of a family? An incredibly complex set of human relationships with little or no education of the family’s members on how to fill the roles and responsibilities of each of their relationships within the system, leading to very poor boundaries with all the confusion, at best, that follows. Family systems with these infirmities ultimately exhibit tremendous fatigue as family members try to make the decisions required by each relationship, necessary for the well being of the family. Entropy, in the form of the exhausted decision making progress of these families governance systems, is on exhibit in the center of these families as it works its will.
So for families in this situation of incredible complexity what can Psychology do to help?
MURRAY BOWEN
Let’s begin with the seminal work of Murray Bowen and his Family Systems Theory. [1] Murray Bowen was a clinical psychologist who specialized in working with families. He actively practiced from 1940 into the 70’s. Prior to that time there were very few psychologists whose practices focused nearly exclusively on the family. Bowen saw, in a pioneering way, that families were systems. He realized that by applying the newly emerging scientific theories, of systems, and, of complexity, to family relationships he could determine how their complex webs of relationships functioned. He saw that in those cases where the families needed therapy he could apply ideas from those disciplines to help them achieve well-being. Bowen then established a laboratory to work out his ideas. In a series of discoveries, using intricate questioning of each family member, and, through close observation of their behaviors toward each other, he was able to develop definitions and descriptions of many unhealthy family behaviors and then offer therapeutic suggestions for their improvements. While his contributions to the psychology and health of families and their systems of decision making are seminal and multiple and should be studied in their entirety by all family leaders and their personnes de confiance there is one area of his work that I will discuss here because it is particularly helpful in achieving healthy families. Bowen introduced the concept of triangulation to family systems theory [2]. What Bowen suggests is that while in the universe the triangle is the strongest form the triangle in family relationships is the weakest. He brilliantly saw that if he could find the third party to what otherwise appeared to be a two-person relationship, and if he could determine how that third party interacted to disable the relationship of the other two, he could often work to “blowup” the unhealthy triangle created thereby. He did this by helping the two parties see that their relationship was being disabled by the third. This new awareness of “triangling” changed forever family therapists understanding of how a form of dysfunctional behavior could arise in a family. This theory also helped bring to life the idea of a “family” system since three parties interacting is one definition of a beginning system. Today the ideas of triangulation and family systems have been adopted in the clinical practices of all family therapists leading to real reductions of suffering in many families. Further, these ideas have spread into all kinds of human relationship work since triangles are just as prevalent in all human systems as they are in family systems.
While many readers may now wish an example of triangulation, I have elected not to offer any. I have made this decision principally because an example of a case where therapy was needed could be misinterpreted by a reader, whose situation seemed similar to the case discussed, as somehow defining him or her as ill, when only a clinician can make such a diagnosis. It is my hope, instead, that the triangulation concept will be so powerful that you’ll think of immediate examples in your home, your work, your charitable and civic endeavors, or your sporting organizations and that your own experience of “triangling” will offer you all the examples you’ll need to understand it.
Seeing your family as a complex system of human relationships and then availing yourself of the learning about family system mentioned above and adapting its wisdom to your family will help significantly with your family’s process of joint decision-making. It will help you understand what your family system consists of, how the relationships within it actually work, and with those building blocks how its decision-making process works.
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1. For those who wish to go deeper in Bowen’s theory the books to read are his Family Theory in Clinical Practice and his disciple’s Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve, or, the education to have, is to study at the Georgetown Family Center, in Georgetown, DC.
2. As I am not a specialist in Bowen’s work I hope my limited knowledge will adequately explain these ideas. No reader should rely on my explication to analyze his or her own situation but rather should seek guidance from a trained professional in this work.
ALLIES, FRIENDS, OTHERS -A SYSTEM OF LABELING RELATIONSHIPS
A second area where Psychology has offered me a useful tool to help families is a system I learned of labeling different relationships when we are about to engage in decision-making. This process asks us, as we enter our own systems of intra-family decision making, or enter such a process with another family or social system, who are our “allies”, who are our “friends” and who are “others.”
You’ll appreciate right away that there are no enemies to be labeled in this process, why? Because in the many, many years of a family’s journey those who might seem to be enemies today may well be our allies tomorrow. For a family of affinity making an intra-family decision, for the decision to be a seventh-generationally positive one-all individuals and family members’ boats must rise. Thus there can be no enemies in a family of affinity. We can dialogue and disagree, that is useful to good decision making to assure that all arguments are on the table, but, having family enemies, no, that is not a possibility for a family of affinity if it is to be successful.
This system offers a very helpful tool to the process of good decision-making by helping us see the different points of view likely to be presented when a decision is made. It helps us define everyone who will take part in the decision making process by categorizing those who are not likely to be in favor of our position, as “others,” those who are neutral, as “friends,” and those who as “allies” are likely to agree with our position. Empowered with this knowledge of the likely views of all the participants in the process we should be able to find those most likely to help us achieve the outcome we seek. The process, also, in my experience, frequently uncovers “friends” we didn’t know we had who become “allies” and requires us to fully appreciate the views of “others” who might become “friends”. Considering deeply each of the decision makers points of view enhances our ability to determine where consensus is likely to appear while helping us ask ourselves whether our arguments and those of our allies are really the best for the whole family or whether better arguments are held by “friends” or even possibly “others”. As I said in my book “Family Wealth”[3] in discussing rules for family meetings, listening affirmatively, speaking one’s truth without fear of blame or judgment, and not being pre-committed to outcomes are critical foundational tools for family’s to achieve successful decision making. Preparing for meetings using the allies, friends, others process not only sharpens one’s sense of where a good decision lies but helps us prepare to participate in the dialogue of the decision making at the meeting in a way that will enhance our ability to use these three other meeting techniques to achieve the best possible decisions for our families’ well beings and their futures.
ILLUSTRATING THE FAMILY SYSTEM
A third technique I use to help families facing the making of an important decision combines psychology, complexity theory, and my view that families have transitions and not transactions.
Here is how it works. I illustrate a family’ system as appearing like this
* Note
With this picture of a family and its system in mind I apply it to each family I work with as I enter their system. My first step, starting with an empty circle, is to bring into my consciousness the name of each person in the family and then to place a dot with that person’s name on it inside the circle. In this way I gradually bring the entire family that exists inside the circle into my consciousness. Second, I imagine the connections between the dots and how strong the principle of fusion is acting in the human relationships represented by the connections. Third, I apply to the names and relationships the specific titles that describe the roles the various family members will be playing in deciding the question in front of the family. For instance, if it’s a trust decision, who are the beneficiaries and who are the trustees inside the circle who will be affected by the decision? [4] Fourth, I consider whether anyone in the two exterior circles will be in the decision making process and who they will connect to. Fifth, I consider what transitions the family is in and how the decision to be made will integrate into those transitions in the most gentle, evolutionary way. Sixth, and finally, I list the members of the family who will be most affected by the decision and ask myself, of the three or four goals each person might have for the decisions outcome which of those goals is likely to be the highest priority for that person. [5] I try to get into that family members’ psyche to help understand where he or she is likely to stand on the decision by trying to understand what he or she is most likely to wish to personally gain from that decisions outcome. By starting from the macro, the whole scope of the family system, moving to its relationships, then including its transitions, and finally the aspirations of those within the system, I gain a deep insight into how their system can best work to achieve the optimal outcome for the family’s well-being of the particular decision at hand. Of course, my having this knowledge is useless unless I can communicate it to the family’s elders and help them learn and apply its technique to the family they lead. I find this isn’t difficult since the best outcome for the family suggested by my process is usually mirrored by the intuitive answer the elders have reached on their own, that’s why they are the elders.
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3. “Family Wealth: Keeping it in the Family”
4. Please note that trustees are always family of affinity members inside the circle regardless of whether
5. Goals, for example might be egoic, self-esteem, a personal financial goal, status in the family, and status outside the family.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SYSTEMS THAT ENHANCE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
I now turn from systems issues in Psychology to issues Psychology offers wisdom on to accelerate the individual journeys to happiness of individual family members. Let’s begin with the giants of modern Psychology who have turned their minds and spirits to the question of the stages of development of a human being’s life. However, before we begin let’s give a tip of the cap to their forebearers, the Hindu and Buddhist sages and the Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle whose work on stages of life Fve covered in other writings, particularly in my book my book, “Family” [6]. I mention them here in the hope that as the reader journeys through this section he or she will remember that to thoroughly grasp everything said on the question of the full development of the mind, body, and spirit of an individual human being there is much to be learned from Eastern and Western thinking, both ancient and modern.
The modern psychologists whose work has informed me most are Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Daniel Levinson, Jeffrey Jansen Arnett, Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, James Hollis, Abraham Maslow, Helen L. Bee, James Hillman and Alan Jones and John O’Neil. I will list below the works of each of these authors which I suggest as reading to discover their brilliant insights into the developmental stages of a human being’s mind and spirit [7]
Carl Jung’s, Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Psychology and the East; The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious
Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder’s, The Psychology of a Child
Erik Erikson’s, Childhood and Society, Identity and Life Cycle, and The Life Cycle Completed.
Jeffrey Jansen Arnett’s, Emerging Adulthood,
Alexandra Robbins’ and Abby Wilner’s, The Quarter Life Crisis
Daniel Levinson’s Season of a Man’s Life and Season’s of a Woman’s Life
James Hollis’s, The Middle Passage, from Misery to Meaning in Midlife and Creating a Life, Finding Your Individual Path
Abraham Maslow’s, Toward a Psychology of Being
Helen L. Bee’s, The Journey of Adulthood
James Hillman’s, The Force of Character (This is the book on the third stage of life. Hillman’s metaphor that the lines in our faces are the stories of the development of our characters is beautiful.)
Alan Jones’s and John O’Neil’s, Seasons of a Man’s Grace
Since I feel it would not be useful to the reader to diarize each of these authors work, I will only summarize here the work of Abraham Maslow and Erik Erikson. I will cover a particular section of each of Carl Jung’s and James Hollis’s work in another section below.
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6 “Family; the Compact Among Generations”
7 The developmental stages of the body I leave to students of biology except as they are a reflection of the growth or deterioration of one’s mind and spirit. This latter stage of deterioration is addressed by some of these authors and defines the Hindu fourth stage of life, the dissipation of the body.
ABRAHAM MASLOW
Abraham Maslow in his book Toward a Psychology of Being postulates that human beings pass through various development stages in their evolution toward self -actualization. Maslow, further, postulates that a human being has different needs at different stages of life and that as these needs move from the most basic upward to the more complex, they form a hierarchy of needs. Here are Maslow’s words: [8]
TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING – Pages 199, 200 Basic need gratification is too often taken to mean objects, things, possessions, money, clothes automobiles and the like. But these do not in themselves gratify the basic needs which, after the bodily needs are taken care of, are for (1) protection, safety, security, (2) belongingness, as in a family, a community, a clan, a gang, friendship, affection, love, (3) respect, esteem, approval, dignity, self-respect and (4) freedom for the fullest development of one’s talents and capacities, actualization of the self. This seems simple enough and yet few people anywhere in the world seem able to assimilate its meaning. Because the lowest and most urgent needs are material, for example food, shelter, clothes, etc., they tend to generalize this to a chiefly materialistic psychology of motivation, forgetting that there are higher non-materials needs as well which are also “basic.”
Ibid Page 172
It must be remembered that the basic motivations supply readymade a hierarchy of values which are related to each other as higher needs and lower needs, stronger and weaker, more vital and more dispensable. These needs are arranged in an integrated hierarchy rather than dichotomously, that is, they rest one upon another. The higher need for actualization of special talents, let us say, rests upon the continued gratification of, let us say the safety needs which do not disappear even thought in a non-active state. (By inactive, I mean the condition of hunger after a good meal.)
Ibid Page 17 3
Therefore these healthily regressive value-choices must be considered as “normal,” natural, healthy, instinctoid, etc., as the so-called “higher values.” It is clear also that they stand in a dialectic or dynamic relation to each other (or, as I prefer to say, they are hierarchically integrated rather than dichotomous). And finally we must deal with the clear, descriptive fact that lower needs and values are pre potent over higher needs and values most of the time for most of the population, i.e., that they exert a strong regressive pull. It is only in the healthiest, most mature, most evolved individuals that higher values are chosen and preferred consistently more often (and that only under good or fairly good life circumstances). And this probably is true largely because of the solid basis of gratified lower needs which, because of their dormancy and inactivity through gratification, do not exert a regressive pull backward (And it is as obviously true that this assumption of need gratification assumes a pretty good world.)
An old-fashioned way of summarizing this is to say that man’s higher nature rests upon man’s lower nature, needing it as a foundation and collapsing without this foundation. That is, for the mass of mankind, man’s higher nature is inconceivable without a satisfied lower nature as a base. The best way to develop this higher nature is to fulfill and gratify the lower nature first. Furthermore, man’s higher nature rests also on the existence of a good or fairly good environment, present and previous.
Maslow goes on to explain the nature of a human beings growth to the highest stage of his or her development, self-actualization a process he defines as moving from “Becoming” to “Being” and what the characteristics of the stage of self-actualization are.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION: GROWTH Ibid Page 155
I have published in another place a survey of all the evidence that forces us in the direction of a concept of healthy growth or of self-actualizing tendencies . . . . . This is partly deductive evidence in the sense of pointing out that unless we postulate such a concept, much of human behavior makes no sense. This is on the same scientific principle that led to the discovery of a hitherto unseen planet that had to be there in order to make sense of a lot of other observed data.
There is also some direct clinical and personological evidence as well as an increasing amount oftest data to support this belief …. We can certainly now assert that at least a reasonable, theoretical, and empirical case has been made for the presence within the human being of a tendency toward, or need for growing in a direction that can be summarized in general as self-actualization or psychological health, and specifically as growth toward each and all of the sub-aspects of self-actualization, i.e., he has within him a pressure toward unity of personality, toward spontaneous expressiveness, toward full individuality and identity, toward seeing the truth rather than being blind, toward being creative, toward being good and a lot else. That is, the human being is so constructed that he presses toward fuller and fuller being and this means pressing toward what most people would call good values, toward serenity, kindness, courage, honesty, love, unselfishness, and goodness.
Ibid, Page VI
A much better term is ‘self-actualization” as I have used it. It stresses “full-humanness,” the development of the biologically based nature of man, and therefore is (empirically) normative for the whole species rather than for particular times and places, i.e., it is less culturally relative. It conforms to biological destiny, rather than to historically arbitrary, culturally-local value-models as the terms “health” and “illness” often do. It also has empirical content and operational meaning.
However, besides being clumsy from a literary point of view, this term has proven to have the unforeseen shortcomings of appearing a) to imply selfishness rather than altruism, b) to slur the aspect of duty and of dedication to life tasks, c) to neglect the ties to other people and to society, and the dependence of individual fulfillment upon a “good society,” d) to neglect the demand-character of non-human reality, and its intrinsic fascination and interest, e) to neglect egolessness and self-transcendence, and f) to stress, by implication, activity rather than passivity or receptivity. This has turned out to be so in spite of my careful efforts to describe the empirical fact that self-actualizing people are altruistic, dedicated, self-transcending, social, etc.
Ibid, Page 210
36. Self-actualization does not mean a transcendence of all human problems. Conflict, anxiety, frustration, sadness, hurt, and guilt can all be found in healthy human beings. In general, the movement, with increasing maturity is from neurotic pseudo-problems to the real, unavoidable, existential problems, inherent in the nature of man (even at his best) living in a particular kind of world. Even though he is not neurotic he may be troubled by real, desirable and necessary guilt rather than neurotic guilt (which isn’t desirable or necessary), by an intrinsic conscience (rather than the Freudian superego). Even though he has transcended the problems of Becoming, there remain the problems of Being. To be untroubled when one should be troubled can be a sign of sickness. Sometimes, smug people have to be scared “into their wits.”
Ibid, Page 157
Among the objectively describable and measurable characteristics of the healthy human specimen are-
1. Clearer, more efficient perception of reality.
2. More openness to experience.
3. Increased integration, wholeness, and unity of the person. 4. Increased spontaneity, expressiveness; full functioning; aliveness.
5. A real self; a firm identity; autonomy, uniqueness.
6. Increased objectivity, detachment, transcendence of self.
7. Recovery of creativeness.
8. Ability to fuse concreteness and abstractness.
9. Democratic character structure.
10. Ability to love, etc.
Ibid, page 157
In addition, there are subjective confirmations or reinforcements of self-actualization or of good growth toward it. These are the feelings of zest in living, of happiness or euphoria, of serenity, of joy, of calmness, of responsibility, of confidence in one’s ability to handle stresses, anxieties, and problems. The subjective signs of self-betrayal, of fixation, of regression, and of living by fear rather than by growth are such feelings as anxiety, despair, boredom, inability to enjoy, intrinsic guilt, intrinsic shame, aimlessness, feeling of emptiness, of lack of identity, etc.
10. ibid, page 194
This inner nature, as much as we know of it so far, is definitely not primarily “evil, but is rather what we adults in our culture call “good,” or else it is neutral. The most accurate way to express this is to say that it is “prior to good and evil.” There is little question about this if we speak of the inner nature of the infant and child. The statement is more complex if we speak of the “infant” as he still exists in the adult. This conclusion is supported by all the truth-revealing and uncovering techniques that have anything to do with human nature: psychotherapy, objective science, subjective science, education and art. For instance, in the long run, uncovering therapy lessens malice, fear, greed, etc., and increases love, courage, creativeness, kindness, altruism, etc., leading us to the conclusion that the latter are “deeper”, more natural and more intrinsically human than the former, i.e., that what we call “bad” behavior is lessened or removed by uncovering, while what we call “good” behavior is strengthened and fostered by uncovering.
Ibid, Page 204
25. Growth has not only rewards and pleasures but also many intrinsic pains and always will have. Each step forward is a step into the unfamiliar and is possibly dangerous. It also means giving up something familiar and good and satisfying. It frequently means a parting and a separation, even a kind of death prior to rebirth, with consequent nostalgia, fear, loneliness and mourning. It also often means giving up a simpler and easier and less effortful life, in exchange for a more demanding, more responsible, more difficult life. Growth forward is in spite of these losses and, therefore, requires courage, will, choice, and strength in the individual, as well as protection, permission and encouragement from the environment, especially for the child.
To see how we might achieve our highest selves and to live our lives with the characteristics Maslow enunciates would be to be truly alive, awakened, and living with beginner’s minds. To imagine every member of our families of affinity with his or her human and intellectual capital developed to this level is a beautiful painting of minds, bodies, and spirits in transcendence. Let us hope each of our families will have every individual within them in such a state.
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8 All of the Quotations included here are from “Toward A Psychology of Being,” second edition by Abraham Maslow, N.Y.,Van Nostrand Reinhard, 1982.
ERIK ERIKSON
Erik Erikson in Chapter Seven of his book Childhood and Society postulates that we human beings have eight defined stages of life. Erikson calls these the “Eight Ages of Man”. He postulates that at each of the developmental levels, or stages, of our journeys, there is a dichotomy of developmental choices, one positive and one negative, that defines each stage. He also demonstrates how if we can develop and integrate the positive aspect of the stage of life we are in and carry that into the next stage, we will develop to our full capacities over a lifetime. Sadly, if we are overcome by the negative aspect, often through a negative crisis that occurs at that stage of our development, and we then carry that negative aspect forward, it will seriously impinge on our ability to develop in the future stages of our lives. The Eight stages and their two aspects, commencing with the newborn and continuing on to our eighties and beyond are:
1. Basic trust vs. Basic mistrust [9]
2. Autonomy vs. shame and doubt [10]
3. Initiative vs. guilt [11]
4. Industry vs. Inferiority [12]
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion [13]
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation [14]
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation [15]
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair [16]
Erikson gives us a psychological and cultural anthropological developmental model for the evaluation of self and how that self expresses itself in society at each stage or “age” of a human beings developmental life. Erikson brings psychology to us as an evolutionary tool seeking to define for us what we should expect as our minds and spirits evolve throughout a lifetime. In his seventh stage, he develops the concept of
“generativity.” This stage seems closely correlated with Maslow’s highest stage of self-actualization where altruism is one of its most salient characteristics. As I have said in various writings, particularly, in “Family,” I believe we human beings do have a gene for altruism and, therefore, we are not simply selfish genetic beings. Maslow and Erikson in their work on our psychological developments clearly agree and indicate that their studies of our species most fully individuated and self-actualized members express this quality as a defining characteristic. It is not surprising to me that all religious traditions come to much the same conclusion when defining for their members the highest spiritual development to which they can aspire. For me this is represented in Buddhism by the Boddhisatva who represents as a fully evolved human being, pure compassion as he or she seeks to help all sentient beings cease their suffering. It is a happy thought for me that our greatest spiritual teachers of the past and our greatest modem thinkers on the development of we modems agree about how we homo sapiens express our highest stages of being human. [1 7] They agree that we seek to become altruists to express through love, and the joy which is its expression, our desire to help others and by doing so we help ourselves attain happiness.
MID LIFE CRISES – Let’s tum from the bliss of full self-actualization and generativity now to the question of the mid-life crisis, its reality and its developmental possibilities for true human happiness in the second half of life.
PERSONAL – In “Family Wealth” and in “Family” I discussed my mid-life crisis and elaborated on its contribution to the second stage of my life’s utility to better serve others and its contribution to my well-being in mind, body and spirit. I also began the autobiographical part of “Family” with Dante’s description of the mid-life crises as the “finding of himself in mid-life in a dark wood with no place to go” because it best described how I experienced the beginning of my mid-life crisis. As discussed how Dante’s great poem recites the journey of his spirit from the profound depth of total despair of spirit exemplified by the “dark wood” through the clearing out of his old self to achieve the emptiness needed to receive the new knowledge necessary for the next stage of his spirit’s development, and finally the bliss of achieving a newly awakened self. Such are the toils and tasks of the mid-life crisis and such its promise. I believe Maslow’s description of the process of growth related earlier is a modem elucidation of this process and its outcome. I believe he and Dante are describing a process that corresponds to the path and purpose of ritual to effectuate our passages through our live’s transitions. This is the path that all ritual follows: the psychological breaking away from one stage of life that when complete offers an opening for us to receive and incorporate the new information for the next stage of life we will need to live fully in it and then our return to the stream of our lives with that information fully integrated for our use in living the next stage of our lives.
While none of us probably looks forward to the deep cleansing of a mid-life crisis, it is clear from the work of these great men and many others that for our fullest development we must accept its challenges for our well-beings.
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9 Pages 147-251
10 Pages 251-254
11 Pages 251-254
12 Pages 258-261
13 Pages 261-163
14 Pages 263-266
15 Pages 266-268
16 Pages 268-269
17 For those wise elders who are interested in how Erikson’s seventh stage might manifest in their lives and in the greater society there is a remarkable set of essays on this subject contained in a book called The Generative Society edited by Ed de St Aubin, Dan P. McAdams, and Tae-Chong Kim. Would that we could all live in a world founded on the characteristics of Erikson’s seventh stage of life!
CARL JUNG
I tum now to the work of two authors, Carl Jung, and his disciple, Gail Sheehey. I believe Jung’s work to be the deepest modem effort to describe the process of human development and Sheehey’s explication of Jung’s work the means to bring it to a lay reader in a remarkably accessible way[18].
Let’s start with Carl Jung [19]. Jung advises us that in mid-life men will be asked to confront their shadow female sides, their anima, and women to confront their shadow masculine sides, their animus’s. Jung suggests that these are the most important moments of possibility for our development of ourselves. That if the crises these confrontations normally produce are welcomed and if the work of the integration of our shadow sides is done well, then in the second halve’s of our lives we will achieve the highest development of ourselves and the high orders of happiness that can result. In this modem explication of the two sides of our human selves the masculine and the feminine, and the need for their integration, we discover the path to become a whole human self. I am in complete agreement with Jung, based on my own experience of life, that this is the most critical work we do. If we skip this work by stuffing the crises that brings it to us in our late 40’s, we miss the deepest learning about who we are and the happiness that comes to us from that awareness. As I have said throughout this book, Socrates admonition “To Know Thyself’ is our individual journey’s task and it is in this work that we are most likely to fully discover ourselves.
Embracing the crises when it comes and going deep into self and psyche to discover its gifts and then returning with the new understanding of ourselves we gain is the classic story that so many famous mythic journeys of development of the spirit recount to us. Jung was deeply influenced by these myths, both Eastern and Western, and, by their studies of journeys into the unconsciousness self. He saw that these myths recounted precisely the paths to wholeness most needed for our deepest well beings. The journey inward to discover self fully is the task of every human being. The optimal moment for that journey comes when we find ourselves in mid-life in a dark wood with nowhere to go.
Another aspect of Carl Jung’s work that follows from the mid-life crisis links it to the spiritual teachings of Buddhism and Judaism about what the task of a male and female spirit are to seek to achieve as their highest callings.
Buddhism and Judaism teach that the perfection of the male spirit lies in its becoming pure compassion and the female pure wisdom. Western readers will quickly feel that this is somehow very strange since the general Western view is that men are defined as wise and women as compassionate. Yes this view is correct of how the West has defined the full achievement of development. However, as you now see much of the World’s wisdom tradition disagrees.
How does Jung enter the discussion? Jung offers the view that the male who has fully integrated the female side of himself seeks in the second stage of life to learn and integrate compassion first for himself and then for all others with whom he is in relationship. The female who has fully integrated her male side moves in the second stage of life to seek calling and the learning of who she is through work and to be a warrior for peace. She becomes wisdom as she fully integrates all the parts of herself in that process.
Jung knew that the Greeks depicted Athena as the goddess of wisdom, that the Jews depicted female energy as Sophia as (Wisdom) and that the Buddhists in their tankas depicted female energy as wisdom and male energy as compassion as they show the congress of the two energies to form a whole.
Perhaps in seeing how the wisdom traditions understood the highest development of our natures, and combining their views with what his own studies reported, Jung came to see that the definition of the second stage of men’s work was in relationship leading to compassion while women’s was in work as calling leading to wisdom. Both the opposites of their journey’s in the first stages of their lives.
As with so many other ideas in this Reflection, this is ancient thinking about the human condition, as it actually is, based on the observations of thoughtful people for thousands of years on how we human beings behave and what we become when we achieve our highest selves.
I personally find the idea that my work in this stage of my life is to learn to be fully compassionate, is exactly what my heart longs for. I also find that the women I respect the most (particularly Jacqueline) are those of true wisdom.
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18 Gail Sheehy Passages and New Passages
19 Author’s note: Nearly all modem psychology is based on Jung’s work. Jung was Sigmund Freud’s greatest student until he broke with Freud. Jung went on to disprove much of Freud’s work and to develop his own philosophy and practice of how the mind and the unconscious work. The books of Jung’s I’ve noted offer a way into his work for those wishing to go deeper.
GAIL SHEEHY
Gail Sheehy, Jung’s disciple, in her books, “Passages” and “New Passages” carries us through each of our live’s stages, and the questions they pose, as most of us perceive and characterize them. Sheehy’s distillation of the exhaustive interviews she held with many people in order to define the nature of each stage, helps each of us comprehend each stage, and the behaviors that define it, in a very gentle and accessible way. For those readers seeking a non-academic understanding of why they seem to feel and act differently at different stages of their lives, Sheehy’s books are the way into developmental and anthropological truths that explain those feelings and why we act as we do whether we are in our teens or our eighties.
There is one aspect of Sheehy’s work that I want to bring into our discussion of the midlife crisis. In “Passages” Sheehy offers a remarkably helpful picture.
You’ll note that in the lower diamond the male journey is defined as the journey of work as calling and the female journey as the journey of relationship. You’ll also notice that at the top of the lower diamond the male and female lines intersect and then continue to flow into what I define as the upper diamond but now with the male journey being that of relationship and the female of work as calling. In this beautiful picture Sheehy illustrates Jung’s great observation about the male’s journey in the first and second stages of life and the female’s reciprocal journey in her first and second stages of life. The point of first intersection is where the mid-life crisis occurs as male and female each move toward the integration of their female and male shadow sides and the journeys that follow. It also occurs to me that if both parties reached their 80’s and came back together at the top of what I believe would form an upper diamond as a second intersection what stories they would have to share of their lives journeys to wholeness, one of compassion and one of wisdom.
Here’s an example of what Jung and Sheehy are describing. In a wonderful little book by Robert Fisher, “The Knight in Rusty Armor,” we have a depiction of the male who starts out in shiny armor, admired by his lady. A man whose armor in midlife turns rusty in the eyes of his lady as she moves from her relationship side to the integration of her male side of work and finally to his armor in a good state again as he and she reconnect with their individual work done. I’ll bet many readers are saying, “Wow, I’ve been on this journey in my life with my great love, I only wish I’d been given this book by him or her.”
I was incredibly blessed by the love of the second stage of my life giving me this book with the love and affection that came from having done her journeywork. That does not mean I don’t get “honey do” lists, fail to accomplish them and receive the admonition about my rusty armor. But we can laugh about it and that is what makes all the difference. Sheehy’ s double diamond I hope offers each of you a way into Jung’s gift to us about the likely nature of our psychological journeys and where they are leading our spirits. I hope each of you will be awakened by it.
ROBERT JOHNSON
As a further help to our awarenesses of the Jungian journeys of men and women there are a series of remarkable short books by Robert Johnson, perhaps the greatest of Jung’s disciples and a great psychotherapist and humanist. I keep multiple copies of these books and give them away to younger male and female friends on the first stages of their journeys. They are called, He, Understanding Masculine Psychology, “Transformation, Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness,” “She, Understanding Feminine Psychology,” “We, Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love,” “Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth” and “Owning Your own Shadow, Understanding the Dark Side of Psyche. “
ERICH NEUMANN
Another useful book on this topic is by Erich Neumann, “Amor and Psyche, the Psychic Development of the Feminine.”
SUSAN PIVER
Finally, regardless of the ages at which a new couple is formed Susan Piver’s, “The Hard Questions” is the book I give away to every new couple. This book offers in the questions it poses all the ones we wish we knew to ask each other. Piver also makes the wonderful observation that great relationships aren’t founded on agreement but rather on understanding each other’s philosophies on the things that we believe in our deepest selves to be true, and then working with each other to find good answers to the most important questions that suit us both. I thank a dear friend for giving me this book. It has helped Jacquie and me and many others.
WOMEN’S STAGES OF LIFE MODERNITY
Staying on the subject of men and women’s psychological journeys as described by Jung and Johnson and illustrated by Sheehy, I want to tum to an issue that is of great strain in our modem life. The issue of the trap in which young women in the first stages of their developmental lives find themselves. The trap of the competition within themselves of career in this stage of life and of relationship as life partner and mother. To let you know how much suffering this trap creates in the families I serve, let me begin with a story. When I am with a family for the first time, I ask each family member to write a resume to be shared with his or her family members. I don’t tell the family we are going to do this exercise so their responses are spontaneous rather than rehearsed. I explain to them that there are no right answers, only their answers, and that all I ask is that they be as deep and as expansive in considering their answers as possible. By the way, the men will write half a page and the women multiple pages. Perhaps John Gray, Deborah Tannen and Harville Hendrix are on to something. Here are the questions:
(a) What was your big dream when you were 14 or 15?
(b) What are you truly passionate about?
(c) What do your friends know about you that your family doesn’t?
(d) If your family could give you one present, what would it be?
While each of these questions always elicits information that most family members don’t know about each other, particularly the dream question, the question that’s germane to the trap I’m discussing is the question of a gift. In every family where there are young women who are parents between the ages of 25 – 45 often but not always with careers, I write down what at least one of these young women will ask for. I put the answer face down in front of me. Every single time at least one of the young women affirms my prediction. She asks for one day, by herself, in silence. The suffering represented by such a request is real and deep. In some terrible way the path of our young women’s lives are in such states of chaos, of freneticism, that they are drowning psychologically in the clamor and constant movement that defines them.
How did this happen? In some wonderful ways the women’s revolution of the last half of the 20th century emancipated our Western women by opening many new career opportunities to women that had been closed and by fostering a healthy climate for women to pursue education and careers. In fact I believe that the resulting changes in the percentages of women pursuing educations will lead to a social revolution in the twenty-first century as this century sees women’s accomplishments carry them into the senior levels of all professions and areas of human activity. All of this history is to be applauded. However, as with Heisenberg’s theory of, “Unexpected Consequences,” the pursuit of education and career carried with it an unexpected competition with Jung’s observation, as elucidated by Johnson and Neumann, that a woman’s journey in the first stage of her life is the journey of relationship. So here lies a trap for our young women. On one side, the women’s revolution calls them to “work” as calling while their psyches call them to relationships. Unfortunately, the voices raised most strenuously about women achieving status through “work” appear not to have studied Jung and his disciples, or if they did, chose to ignore him. So now we have the suffering of the trap with our young women burned out psychically by its demands and finding all too often, as they tell me, including my daughter, Ellen, they “have no time, no time for anything” and “absolutely no time for me!” How can we help? Since if we do nothing we will imperil these young women’s sense of self with all the deterioration of their human and intellectual selves it implies. They are crying for help. I suggest the first step in helping is acknowledging that the trap isn’t a time and motion study issue to fix but rather a deep psychological wounding growing out of our lack of awareness of Jung’s work and that of his disciples. Let me hasten to say that I am not leading you to the logical conclusion that women shouldn’t pursue education to whatever level they wish or that they should opt for partnering and parenting over “work” as calling. I am not!! Rather I am asking all family members in seeking to enhance the journeys of their young women to understand Jung’s observation and be sure their young women understand what Jung suggested is the journey of a woman’s first stage of life.
For a young woman to fail to be made aware of this deep wisdom is a tragedy since it leaves her without a fundamental building block to use to measure why she feels as she does. With this information she will be able to make more deeply informed decisions about the choices she will make in the first stage of her life and likely, therefore, make ones that lead to a higher quality of life. Jung’s observations may also be helpful to her as she looks at the issues of the second stage of her life. Since “work” as calling is likely to be a part of the second stage of a woman’s life she can look forward to a career in that stage of life as likely to be more developmentally her cup of tea than in the first stage. Given that most women’s life expectancies when they come from the top economic tiers of society are about 90, it gives a woman something to consider. Again, I am making no suggestions whatsoever of what any woman should choose as her life journey, or any man for that matter. I am simply hoping that Jung’s gifts to us about how our psyches develop, and the gender’s journeys of their developments are concepts that families have available to use in mentoring their young women so the trap will be unsprung in their lives with the happiness that will generate.MEN’S JOURNEY’S IN RELATIONSHIP
Now a gentle sequel back to men’s journeys. I remain confused by the new term our children use to advise Jackie and I that a new grandchild is coming, “we” are pregnant. Yes, I realize I am old fashioned in deploring this term for its biological fallacy. I do appreciate that it is likely to be more psychologically fulfilling to the couple who “are” pregnant. However, if Jung is correct that men’s journeys in the first stage of life are about “work”, as calling as paralleled by women’s journeys of relationship, I have to assume men are confused by the term at best. However, as an 18th century man who struggled into the 20th century, and one who has done his parenting, I am aware that this part of 21st century thinking I do not have to understand.
SECOND GENERATION ISSUES OF DEVELOPMENT
Now I want to tum to a critical psychological question the state of mind and psyche of a second generation member of a financially wealthy family. Much has been written about the first and third generations of families but surprisingly little about the second. I imagine this is because the first’s exciting lives of creativity and discovery often lead to articles in Forbes or Fortune and frequently biographies. The third on the other hand fills up books on dysfunction as it dissipates its way to family oblivion. Where are the books on the second generation? If they exist, I haven’t found them. Yes, in books like “Titan” about John D. Rockefeller, Sr. there is much to learn about his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and in books about Henry Ford about his son Edsel. But books that try to describe the journey and psyche of the second generation of a family, no they don’t exist. For me this is a deeply troubling reality since I believe it is the second generation of a family that is most critical to its long-term success. It is its performance that determines whether a family develops a system of joint decision making that will carry it to its fifth generation and beyond. It is in its generation that leaders from behind are first discovered and developed. It is this generation that must develop a family system and its governance that can be replicated in every generation after it so no generation, ever psychologically, becomes the third.
YIN/YANG IN BALANCE
I want to suggest that the second generation comes to life with a challenge to integrate successfully into its journey two inter-relating but vastly different realities; on one hand its individual dreams and on the other its inherited responsibility to be stewards of another’s dream. [20] Very recently I was given the gift of a way of illustrating this remarkable journey of second generation, here is the picture:
It was in the Yin/Yang symbol that I saw both sides of the journey and psyche of a second generation family member. I suddenly saw why this generation’s journey is so complex as it asks for a twin journey, one chosen and one inherited. A journey in which both sides of a second generation’s family members self must constantly live both his or her Yin and Yang sides with both always connected and each always separate. Only the psychic depth of the Yin/Yang symbol fully expresses the complexity of a second generation family member’s journey.
How then might this reality, this unity of two interconnected but separate consciousnesses, healthily express itself in such a way that a second generation family member will achieve the highest degree of self-awareness, of freedom of self, of happiness in his or her life?
First, what process often doesn’t work to achieve second generation member’s happinesses? At the beginning of their adult lives second generation family members often face two seriously damaging psychological developmental dilemmas, (a) their first generation parents will seek to have them learn financial capital management to become steward/conservators of what they, the parents, have tangibly created as a representation of their dreams, to the exclusion of learning anything useful to their own human and intellectual development and to their own dreams realizations and (b) their parents as larger than life discovers and creators, will seek to have them live their parent’s dreams to the exclusion of their own dreams. [21] Both of these psychic dilemmas if accepted by second generation members as their destinies almost always doom their lives as they will never individuate. Why? Because they will never seek to bring their own dreams to life. This is a tragedy for a family since it will lead to exactly the plateauing and stasis that the proverb describes in a family’s failed growth of its human and intellectual capital in its second generation and with it the entropy that will fully emerge in the next generation. If either, or worse, both of these demands by the first generation of the second dominate a family’s life the proverb in my experience always wins.
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20. Please note that you may be surprised by this reality having perhaps never considered the second generation issue this way. Perhaps this will be less surprising when you realize that only a tiny percentage of the world’s population inherits (comes into life with this reality) large financial capital and so it is not an issue of large consequence to social scientists. It is however the critical issue for those of us serving such individuals.
21. The nature of the power of a Founder’s dream is often not fully appreciated. Let me offer a view of just how extraordinarily powerful it is. Let’s ask each other of the nearly seven billion of us on the planet how often in the morning, of the billions of dreams we dreamt the night before, any one of us can remember even one dream from the night before? Actually very few of us. Next of the few who remember such a dream how many could remember that dream three days later? Very, very, very few. Next, of those who can remember such a dream, for how many will that dream remain in their consciousnesses’ to become an idea? Very, very, very, very few. Next for those for whom such a dream becomes an idea, how many of those ideas become material in any form, including, as an enterprise? Very, very, very, very, very few. Finally, of those ideas that materialize, how may produce great financial fortunes? Such a small number of all those billions of dreams dreamt every night as to be statistically impossible. Yes, these are impossible dreams – powerful in their impossibility – absolutely awesome!!
YIN/YANG IN DEVELOPMENT
What might work to achieve second generation member’s happinesses? I believe that there is a fallacy that needs illuminating in the thinking of a great many people who help families, founded on the desires of their first generation clients, which is the almost universal definition of second generation members as steward/conservators alone, rather than equally as individual dreamers with dreams of their own of discovery and creativity. I have heard and read many platitudes offered by pundits on family well-being about the need for every family member to have a dream and for the family system to be organized to support proactively the successful fulfillment of each such dream. However, I have very rarely experienced those same pundits actively setting up systems that accomplish this goal. All too often these systems only promote the development of the Yin part of second generation members characters, theirselves as steward/conservators of another’s dreams.
This is a case where the walk must follow the talk. That is that a family’s system must be constructed so that the Yang side of personal dream leads the interconnected Yin/Yang second generation selfs development until each individual second generation’s dream emerges.
As an example of how such a system works, remember my first question on the family resume, what was your dream at 14 or 15? This is the type of question that tells a person that his or her dream matters. It is the question the first generation needs to be asking its second generation children when they are 14 and not when they have a first family meeting when they are 70 and their children are in their 40’s. It is a question that needs to be asked by the second generation’s aunts and uncles, its mentors, and by its privy councilors, its most important advisors, as discussed in my book, “Family,”.
In my opinion it can’t be asked often enough. Yes, you say fine, you are right, except that the first generation is so caught up in its dreams that it has no time to ask anyone else such a question. Yes, there’s the rub and the risk of the happiness of second generation members it poses and forecasts. Regardless, this question and the many that flow from it that might lead to the dream’s fulfillment are the only antidote I can see to the second generation fulfilling only the stewarding and conserving of another’s dream part of its developmental challenge with the negative outcomes such a result has historically prophesied for a family’s well-being.
It also seems to me that if a second generation family member finds his or her dream and with the family’s encouragement apprentices himself or herself to a master to bring that dream of calling to life, it doesn’t foreclose he or she activating his or her Yin side. In fact it would seem to me that with mastery of that dream and the mastery of self that flows from it will come a natural opportunity later on in his or her life to initiate his or her Yin side using the same apprenticing process to learn to be a dynamic steward/conservator of another’s dream, perhaps even the dreams of the next generation! [22] However, having the Yin follow the Yang so the Yang process is not sacrificed, I believe, makes it more likely that he or she will achieve the healthy balance of the two challenges he or she comes into life with in his or her life as a second generation person.
If a family can develop in its second generation members mastery of their Yin/Yang selves, to be dreamers and inheritors, I believe it will have effectuated the growth of this generation’s human and intellectual capitals in exactly the way needed most for its second generation members to become dynamic generators of all of the forms of a family’s capital. Again, to do this well the dreamer must lead, to be followed by the inheritor, to be followed later in a positive spiral by the inheritor investing in the new dreams of the next generation. If this process is learned and practiced in the second generation and then consistently applied in every generation thereafter, I believe a family can avoid the curse of stasis in the second generation which the proverb describes. Equally no future member of the family is likely to exhibit third generation behavior if the current second generation family members follow the same initiatory practices for the generation following them called for here. I hope you can now see that every succeeding generation faces the same Yin/Yang challenge. The families who will do best will recognize it, will embrace it, and will actively manage it toward theirs and their individual members highest flourishings.
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22 While I’m not sure yet I’m coming to the view that dynamic steward/conserving of another’s financial capital may well be a third stage of life work; the stage when we are developmentally most concerned with legacy. This is not to suggest that financial literacy is not a crucial developmental task in the second stage of life it is. Rather it is that concentration on doing this task may simply be more natural in the third stage of life.
SPECIFIC PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES
I will now tum for the balance of this chapter to specific psychological issues which I have observed in families and to the author’s who have both informed me about them and of their preferred therapies for their positive resolutions.
CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT
I will begin with the work of a very dear friend and colleague, Lee Hausner. Lee is in my view among the most competent family therapists and family psychological counselors in our field. In addition to her work as a therapist, she is a great family educator. She is one of the few of us who can move seamlessly from the negative side of the calculus, where family dysfunction lives, to zero where families have beginner’s minds, to the positive side where family systems function to help all of a family’s capitals grow. While Lee is an authority on many of the areas I will discuss, I want to cite her here, for her work on parenting the children of families of financial wealth. Her book “Children of Paradise,” just released in a new edition, is the bible to which we all refer for our learning on this question. Lee’s book is one I always keep 6 of on hand as I give it away more frequently than any other. While there are so many helpful insights in the book, I want to cite two statements that Lee makes that show her deep love of children and their possibilities. She calls out to parents to love their children unequivocally and she asks them to help them become competent to the level of their individual capacities regardless of anyone else’s, especially their extremely high achieving parents. How true her call is.
Next, I want to mention five books on raising boys and girls; Don Kindlon’s and Michael Thompson’s, “Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys;” Mary Pipher’s, “Reviving Ophelia, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls;” Daniel Elkinds, “The Hurried Child, Growing Up too Fast too Soon;” Kenneth Kaye’s “Family Rules, Raising Responsible Children Without Yelling or Nagging;” and Robert Cole’s classic Volume V of Children of Crisis, “Privileged Ones.”
THE SPECIFIC ROLE OF MOTHERS
I’ll add here a saying among professionals, “You will only know if you are a family when your mother dies.” While fathers are important my professional experience is that this saying about mothers is frequently true. Mothers are the glue of our connections; they are our story tellers, and our mediators. Families will do well to honor their mother’s roles in these critical functions by recognizing the need to develop successors to them if they are to have systems in place to fulfill them when mother leaves them.
STEP-PARENTING
Next, on step – parenting and the issues of being a stepchild, a remarkably helpful book on this subject is by Grace Gabe and Jean Lipman-Bluman, “Step Wars.”
WOMEN’S DEVELOPMENT
Next on psychological theory on women’s development, Carol Gilligan’s, “In a Different Voice.”
FATHERS
Next, Mark O’Connells’s new book on the nature of being a father, “The Good Father, on Masculinity and Life in the Family.”
ENTITLEMENT AND FISCAL INEQUALITY
The next area I want to touch on are two significant issues in family dysfunction, the issues of entitlement and of fiscal inequality (when a woman has greater financial capital than her male partner). For discussions of those two topics, please see my Reflections called “The Nature of a Gift,” and “Fiscal Unequals,” respectively, which can be found on my website www.jamesehughes.com.
In addition to the above, Charles J. Sykes’ “The Victimization of America,” is helpful to a deeper understanding of entitlement and its symptom victimhood. Sykes work should be used in an understanding of a family’s psychological profile, especially in assessing its third generation’s state of psychological well being, as entitlement is a special curse of that generation.
FAMILY SYSTEMS WITH RESPECT TO
INDIVIDUAL FAMILY MEMBER ABSENCES
A very important play as a metaphor in family life is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” This is a play about nothingness in which the actor’s wait for someone else to arrive to solve all of their dilemma’s and this someone never arrives. This pattern is a sad reality of life in many families. These are families who cease acting and growing as they wait for a family member to come to their meetings, a family member who isn’t coming. Many times, as a family’s personne de confiance, their most trusted advisor, I have had to give the family the advice that their inclination to wait until everyone they consider a family member is present to act is wrong, and will destroy them. Why? because that person isn’t coming and, while they wait, entropy is eroding their energy. Patience and gentle requests to join a family gathering to family members, who are uncertain if they are members of a particular family of affinity, is right and correct behavior. As I’ve said so often no family can have enough human assets. Equally, to wait for a family member with whom we share only genealogy and biology but who joined the journey of another family of affinity is to waste our energy in a fruitless exercise. Godot doesn’t come and the play ends. Please don’t let your family play end waiting for someone who isn’t coming.
SIBLINGS
Next I want to mention Frank Sulloway’s remarkable book, “Born to Rebel,” which is the best scientific study we have on sibling relationships within a family and particularly the effect of birth order.
THE ELDEST CHILD SYNDROME IN THE CONTEXT OF A BUSINESS
Now let’s tum to another syndrome of dysfunction. This is a family system in which a business enterprise has been created by a male first generation family member and in which this business is emotionally treated by him as his eldest child. After you have read Sulloways’ wonderful book and understood the likely behaviors of children as a consequence of birth order, imagine a family system in which the eldest most loved child is not a human child but a virtual child, a business enterprise. Even those of you who haven’t read Sulloway’s book almost certainly have formed views about the likely behaviors of first, second and third children and how each is likely to individuate and integrate into the family system using those behaviors. Now add to your experience and knowledge of sibling birth order by asking yourself what it would be like if those behaviors were to be dominated by a non-human eldest sibling whom your father loved most. I’m sure you are saying that would make a family’s normal evolution and the expected development of its children’s adult personalities extremely difficult. It would be likely to be traumatic and emotionally chaotic for all. You would be right. In this field we professionals recognize this syndrome and discuss it among ourselves. What is surprising to me is how few therapists I talk with have had this syndrome taught to them. They have had to discover it case by case in their practices. I’m hoping that by opening the subject here it will flow into the consciousness of all the therapists that help families with enterprises. I’m also hoping it will flow into the consciousnesses of all families in the first generation with business enterprises they founded. Let me hasten to say that while I haven’t seen a case yet of a female first generation enterprise founder with this problem, the growth of such individuals in the flourishing of the current women’s social revolution is likely to produce one.
THE INTERACTION OF THE DREAMS OF FOUNDER
PIONEERS AND THOSE OF NEXT AND LATER GENERATIONS
Next I want to discuss Ivan Lansburg’s book, “Succeeding Generations.” In this book Lansberg discusses at great depth the first generation’s dream. How that generation takes its individual dream from the dream to the idea stage and how, as it lives its dream out and, if the idea born from it is powerful enough, an enterprise emerges. He goes on to explain, as I feel I have understood him, that an enterprise has a life force strong enough that when it crosses the boundary from dream to idea and then goes on to become a flourishing business enterprise that it begins to evolve organically on its own and becomes a life form that the second and third generation members of the founders family will have to integrate into their lives.
Since I have discussed the multiple issues the living out of someone’s dream pose to the well being of a family in this Reflection I will not repeat them here. Rather I am introducing Lansberg’s idea of dream as a way of helping solve the “business as eldest child syndrome.” Should a family, or its personne de confiance, find itself or the family he or she serves living out this syndrome I have found it very useful for the family to read Lansberg’s book. I suggest they do so to understand the extraordinary energy and the power and force such a dream represents when it comes to life as an organic being. One has only to remember how few dreams ever reach the idea stage and how few grow from there to be born as enterprises, which are themselves able to flourish, to see how unusually energetic such a dream must be. If the second generation members of such a family can visualize and experience the nature of their parent’s dream and the process by which it consumes him or her, they can often begin to achieve clarity on the nature of their position in their fathers or mothers hierarchy of children. This realization won’t solve the problems in their family’s or their individual lives the syndrome creates, but it will open a dialogue within the family on the reality of the “business as eldest child” syndrome and how it is working its will within their family’s system and in their individual lives.
GENOGRAM AND THERAPY
Next, Fredda Herz-Brown’s, “Reweaving the Family Tapestry,” and its elucidation of the Genogram. This is an excellent book on family systems and how they work. I especially recommend chapters 4, 5, 6 as a way for family leaders and their senior professionals to understand the process skilled therapists use to understand how an individual patient fits within a family system and how that patient is likely to achieve a good outcome from therapy.
BEHAVIORAL DYSFUNCTIONS
A. The Bag Lady Syndromes and General Dysfunctions.
Next Jesse O’Neills’s book, “The Golden Ghetto,” covers many different behavioral dysfunctions in wealthy families, particularly the disease she describes as “affluenza” and what behaviors underlie it. Ms. O’Neill is a member of a wealthy family and is herself recovering from, as she describes, a number of the dysfunctions she chronicles. I recommend this book highly. Here I will use its description of the “the bag lady syndrome” as a way of introducing it to you. Ms. O’Neill explains that it is unfortunately quite a common dysfunction of elderly wealthy women that they come to believe that they are destitute even though they are extremely wealthy. The behaviors they exhibit in this tragic state of mind mirror those of homeless street women who carry all of their possessions in plastic bags. I can attest from my practice that it is very common for elderly women to feel that the only thing they own is the cash in their pocketbooks. Ms. O’Neill’s depiction of this issue, as with all the others she discusses, help us see why a family member may be acting in a peculiarly unhealthy way and help us get them to the professional help they need.
B. General Dysfunction
C. Next, Thayer Willis’ book “Navigating the Darkside of Wealth.” This is another excellent book by a talented family therapist and a member of a wealthy family which chronicles and delineates many dysfunctional behaviors and offers useful therapies for them.
Next, “The Legacy of Inherited Wealth,” edited by Barbara Blouin with Katherine Gibson and Margaret Kierstad, offers many illuminating stories of individuals and families with inherited wealth.
C. Trauma
Next, Peter Levine’s, “Waking the Tiger.” Levine is a psychotherapist who has had success in relieving deep and often life-long psychological blockages resulting from events of trauma. In his book and in a remarkable video, discussed below, which illustrates it, Levine brings into our consciousnesses and imaginations that we have three possible reactions to events of trauma, not just to fight or flee, but most importantly to freeze. In his work he explains that in moments of terror such as responding to impending automobile accidents, sexual assaults, assault of all other kinds, and to any other event that we believe will lead to our deaths, we are deeply programmed in an ancient part of our brains to react to try to save our lives. Often we react by fighting or fleeing and these two reactions are what most of us anticipate doing were we ever to face such an event. In fact, Levine explains much more commonly than we realize our actual response to an event of impeding death from trauma will be to choose to freeze. Levine explains that freezing is the means within the body we evoke to respond to events in which neither fighting or fleeing are options. He explains that when we freeze, we actually freeze the energy represented by our fear of death into our cells. He explains that in nature animals use these three responses depending on the issue confronting them and the options it offers. He then illustrates these three responses in a remarkable video of the likely death of a young gazelle in a cheetah attack. In this video we see the gazelle fall to the ground in the cheetah’s jaws. Then the cheetah instead of killing the gazelle wanders away. Next we see the same event again in slow motion. We now discover that the gazelle, an instant before the cheetah reached it, fell to the ground frozen in fear, capturing in its body the energy of its feelings of fear. After the cheetah walks away, we experience the gazelle coming out of this frozen state and shaking itself violently to release the frozen energy. The young gazelle now free of the frozen energy resumes its life. There are other compelling scenes of similar events.
The problem, for we human animals, as Levine explains is that we have no means of automatically releasing such frozen energy when we experience what we identify as life threatening events and when the response we choose to them is to freeze. Rather we human animals capture this energy in our cells and, unless we have some emotional process to release it, it simply embeds itself there. The biochemistry of this process is of course extremely complex and Levine explains the science in his book. As a matter of psychology Levine explains that this form of energy hidden in our cells often creates, over time, very significant emotional issues as our bodies and psyches have no natural means of releasing it.
He explains that often trauma victims become blocked by it and in many cases are unable to function as a result of it. The wonderful news is that Levine has developed a model of therapy for the release of blocked energy due to trauma. I personally have taken a workshop with him in which I observed his work with one of the participants, a trauma victim of an automobile accident. It was an extraordinary experience to watch him gently have her go back to the moments before impact, visualize them and then move through those events safely and without the accident itself occurring. Then to see her body releasing this energy, much as we had seen with the gazelle, was deeply inspiring. Later we were gifted by another story of the release of deeply embedded frozen energy by a sexual assault victim whose life had been put on hold six years before by the trauma of the event she experienced.
While some of you may be wondering why this particular section of this book is here at all, let me hasten to explain. In my work with families I have, more frequently than you might imagine, encountered family members who just seemed unable to lift themselves out of an event of trauma, many for whom years of psychotherapy had made no difference. Since I had had such an event in an operation at two and a half for tonsillitis, in which I had a near death experience that froze energy within me, and which has traumatized me whenever I have any medical issue, I could relate to these family members easily. Sadly before encountering Levine’s book and his discussion of freeze I had no way to help them. Now I can offer them Levine’s book as a way of helping them consider that their issue might be the unreleased energy of their event of trauma and then to discuss with their healing professionals whether Levine’s model and therapy would help them. I can attest that a number with that new knowledge have found the release they needed and the freedom to resume their lives’ journeys to happiness that it engendered.
D. Tom Sawyering Getting Everyone to Paint the Fence
Next, I want to relate a technique I use to get hard work done in the families I serve. This technique I call, “Tom Sawyering.” I’m sure many of you will recall in Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens) great book “Tom Sawyer, “how the book begins. Tom is in the kitchen with Aunt Becky staring at a bucket of whitewash and a paintbrush and Aunt Becky is staring at him. They have a discussion about the need for the picket fence in front of the home to be painted, why Tom has skipped out on this chore using various excuses on the first two days he was to do this, why he feels today is the most beautiful day of the year and fishing would be just the thing today, and how it resolves with him in front of what looks to him like an infinitely long fence. You’ll then recall he picks up the brush, very unhappily puts it in the paint, and desultorily slaps it at the first board. At this moment Tom is joined by a friend from the neighborhood. The friend says, and I paraphrase, “Tom, what are you doing?” Tom, now painting with gusto says, “Having the most fun in the world!” The friend says, “but, Tom, it looks like work,” and Tom responds, “Nope, the most fun in the world.” You’ll recall that at the end of this story there is a long line of children waiting their tum to paint, each having given Tom something for the “privilege.” Torn is sitting smiling and collecting their fees for his work!!
When family members argue that they are shouldering all the heavy lifting of family work, I often tell this story. They get the message and great things happen as they find their own version of “Tom Sawyering” and get their families lining up to “have the most fun in the world.”
E. The Paradoxes.
I will now finish this chapter with one of the seven paradoxes that I believe lie at the heart of why many families fall to the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves proverbs predicted outcome. 23 This is the paradox of the second generation inheritors of a family fortune seeking to teach the third generation members of their family to be skeptical of other people’s interest in them when they actually teach them that no one is trustworthy. To understand this paradox I ask the reader to try to imagine what his or her life journey would have been like if the persons he or she trusted most as children, his or her parents and aunts and uncles, had taught him or her by their behaviors that no one was trustworthy? Can each of you imagine how truly awful your lives would now be? How impossible it would be to ever form a relationship of any endurance? To ever be able to give yourself fully to another with all the positive learning about yourself it engenders? In essence, never to learn to love and the consequence of unhappiness Freud predicted at the beginning of this Reflection for such a human life? The human suffering caused by this paradox cannot be measured. Of course, learning to be skeptical of other people’s motives is a necessary skill to becoming an adult. I am absolutely in favor of that skill and I applaud it. However, the slippery slope from skepticism to complete lack of trust is a real one, one I have encountered all over the world in far too many families and all families must be certain that they understand it. If one’s own behavior renders one untrustworthy, all the preaching in the world about skepticism won’t overcome it. We have to walk our talk.
So now I close this Reflection on Psychology. I hope the threads to deep insights Psychology offers on human behavior, especially in this system we call family, will help you and your families benefit from its gifts. Since Psychology is, in part, the study of human behavior in relationship, its insights are among the most valuable to our journey together in family. I hope the insights I’ve offered here from my own experience of human relationships and those of the great minds I’ve shared will lead to your families’ achieving higher orders of self-awareness, freedom, happiness and flourishing.
© James E. Hughes, Jr., 2007
Note:
Illustration from the book FAMILY by James E. Hughes Jr. Reprinted by permission of Bloomberg Press. All rights reserved.
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