Edward S. Hume, M.D., J.D.
General Psychiatry
Family Rules vs. Social Rules
Updated 2002/08/09
Did you ever notice how many people treat perfect strangers much more nicely than their own family? It's no accident. It involves the application of two different sets of rules of behavior: those you learned in your family on how to relate to each other, and those you learned in your interactions with non-family persons on how to treat people who are not in your family.
Robert Frost, in Death of the Hired Man, said,
'Home is the place
where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you
in.'
Exactly so. Your family is stuck with you, so you treat them however you please. You can let it all hang out; no matter how offended he gets, you brother is still your brother and blood is thicker than water. Also, they understand you and aren't offended by your otherwise antisocial ways.
Strangers, on the other hand, have to be treated with some civility and courtesy. Scream at them and they probably will just go away ("Don't go away mad; just go away" cuts both ways, you know).
The point of this is that familial relationships are not voluntary. Social relationships are voluntary. Lord Acton (does anyone know who this guy was?) is supposed to have been the first to say, "Power corrupts." When ‘power’ is understood to refer to a form of involuntary relationship, one can see how power leads to abuses: the normal ultimate feedback available in a voluntary relationship --- voting with your feet --- isn’t there. So, in dictatorships one sees the development of duplicity, passive rebellion (passive aggressive behavior), and other behavior that in an interpersonal relationship would be called psychopathological.
So, the family is where the psychopathology is. It's where one gets hurt before one learns to defend oneself. H___, it's where one learns defenses in the first place. It stands to reason, then, that if one is going to have a dysfunctional relationship, it will conducted by familiar family rules.
Strangers won't put up with that. So social rules actually are more conducive to such things as friendship and the development of intimacy. Relationships usually take a turn for the worse when the participants accept each other as family members and relax into family rules. Even if the participants do not come from pathological families, the odds are fairly high that their family rules will differ, and clashes can result. And it is much worse when one or both participants come from psychopathological families.
I propose that we try to develop and maintain our intimate relationships in the context of social rules. These rules generally cause us to respect each other's feelings, to treat each other kindly, and to refrain from hurting each other. For example, social rules would preclude our screaming at each other, putting each other down in private or belittling each other in public.
How to tell if we're on the right
track?
I thought you'd never ask . . .
Three Questions for Behavior in Intimate Relationships
1. Am I treating this person at least as well as I would treat a complete stranger?
2. Am I doing anything negative to this person that I would not do to a complete stranger?
3. Am I doing anything negative to or with this person that is like what we did in my family while I was growing up?
Let me know what you think.
ehume at this domain
So after I wrote most of the above, Richard Robinson wrote me with the cite to Robert Frost's Death of the Hired Man. It actually brought me to tears.
Think about this: one set of family rules means that Silas is cut off from his brother. Another, less pathological set of family rules allows him to come home (to the family that has adopted him: his employer) to die. In between, he carries around his own copy of his family-of-origin's rules (or, as per William Glasser, his 'quality world'), and his failure to meet his own expectations keeps him on the move. Many of us wise up as we get older; mature and grow out of our family rules. We decide that certain past outrages were simply manifestations of the imperfectability of man, and we forgive estranged family members. Better that than the death of the hired man, unloved by his own family.