Remember the wonderfully crazy and macabre Addams Family? (“They’re creepy and wacky, mysterious and creepy/They’re all wacky together…”)
They were the anti-Partridge family, the fabulously wicked reverse Brady Bunch, with two ghastly boys, Wednesday (as in “Wednesday’s Boy Is Full of Woe”), and his fellow criminal Pugsley, who has the unique hobby of stealing road signs. traffic.-for room decoration–and she’s very fond of her pet slug Octopus, named–but of course!- Aristotle.
But in the episode “Morticia and the Shrink,” Pugsley just isn’t himself, and the parents are deeply concerned.
Pugsley ditches Aristotle and replaces him with a puppy, actually plays the All-American game of baseball and, horror of horrors, dons a Boy Scout uniform. Morticia and Ella Gomez’s husband are gripped by the fear that her son is heading back to normal, so they take him to psychiatrist Dr. Black’s office to get him fixed up a bit.
So what is the fear that catalyzes Pugsley’s parents to go to treatment? It’s this precise pattern of thought, so familiar to dysfunctional families everywhere: If pugsleyact normal, why then, doesn’t everyone think the whole family It is normal?
And the answer to this in society is yes, they could. And so the concept of family hero is born, and it’s a role every dysfunctional family wants someone within their ranks to fill, as this family hero’s job is to prove to viewers near and far that the family the hero lives from is very well.
The boy who defines the family’s self-worth and keeps the ugly family secrets hidden is the family’s hero, and what a row they have to dig.
In his book, Codependency: The Dance of Wounded Souls, Robert Burney writes that “there are four basic roles children adopt to survive growing up in emotionally dishonest, shame-based, and dysfunctional family systems.” The children take on these roles because they feel that the dysfunction of the family is so great that without them wearing the mantle of their chosen role, the ensemble could not continue.
You may be familiar with these roles from your own family of origin, or from your own children, and one I’ve discussed before, just by a different name. The roles are the pet or the caretaker, the lost child, the child who acts or the scapegoat. [I’ve written about this role under the name of the ‘Identified Patient’]and lastly, our own Responsible Child or Family Hero.
The hero is usually the eldest son, although in one of the most striking cases I have just seen, he is actually the third, the first and second having been unable to handle this leading role. Heroes tend to be overly responsible and successful. They can be the valedictorian, the prom queen, the starting quarterback, the head of theater – they make it possible for their families to look up to them and feel secure about the well-being of the family as a unit. (“If Sara graduated top of her eighth grade class, we’re obviously doing a lot of things right as parents, aren’t we?” says the thought process.) They could even be parents, taking care of one (or both) parents, in a complete reversal of roles. The continued performance and excellence of the hero validates not only the hero, but the entire family unit.
Not surprisingly, however, this key role in the dysfunctional family comes at a high price. Generally, the hero feels guilty and inadequate, and is tormented by the feeling, despite all his accomplishments, that there is nothing he can really do to heal his family’s pain. Often the Hero will go to great lengths to make her prone to stress-related illnesses. [Most recently I had a family hero in my practice who seemed to feel so guilt-ridden that she wanted to simply obliterate herself, to greatly over- simplify the explanation for her anorexia. She wanted to place no more demands on her family–to only provide, and how she managed to perform as she did academically at such a low weight is a mystery to me.]
It is not uncommon for the Hero to feel isolated and lonely and then have a hard time developing intimate relationships, as he is inexperienced in staying in touch and expressing his true feelings. They seem disconnected from their own emotions to the extent that the praise they receive for their accomplishments and successes becomes an end in itself: they feel no satisfaction of their own and therefore must continue to excel and achieve in order to receive the praise that they receive. defines themselves as ‘good’.
Robert Burney himself provides this choice perspective on the Hero on his website: “The family hero, because of his ‘success’ in conforming to dysfunctional cultural definitions of what constitutes making life ‘right’, is a often the child of the family who, as a member of an adult, finds it even more difficult to admit that there is something within themselves that needs to be healed.
Therefore, it is the greatest success in the family, from an external perspective, who happens to pay the highest internal price, and who tries the hardest to put into words that he might need help.
Even Morticia Addams understood that a girl like this, despite the lavish gifts she bestows on her family, needs support, and soon.
