How does my uninvolved family affect my adult relationships?

Hi Mark,

Thank you for your last quick response to my question on handling my insecure man. It doesn't end there. I am 41 and have two children, raising them on my own, which I manage and enjoy.

It's my mother and my relationship – or non-relationship – with her for all these years. We've lived in the same small village for the last ten years and she's had a new family for the past 30 years. I watched two younger brothers, now 21 and 26, grow up in front of me, from a distance. My stepdad is too afraid to get close to anyone because he lost his dad when he was nine and is a loud male peacock! Since I was twelve, he never accepted me as family.

My mom is emotionally detached and in ten years has never looked after my children or spent any time with them, a really long story short. Though they're there, we have no family presence. A mother who is helpful if I need a little cash. When I go to her office (across the road), we get along, but it pains me! I have spoken and written to her my whole life, telling her how I feel, but she is emotionally not available.

I have watched from a distance as the four of them play family on the hill while my children ask why Nona (she doesn't want to be called granny) doesn't love them. She is obsessed with fitness and her career, said she has done her time with kids and has no time, but makes time for all her pleasures.

How do you think this might be affecting my adult relationships? I have accepted my 'family's' ways as just weird. I'm a normal woman full of love and creative optimism.

This question was submitted by 'Carmen'

Mark says...

Hi Carmen,

I think you said it yourself when you describe yourself as a normal woman full of love and creative optimism. A great woman for anyone to have a relationship with. You also have accepted your 'weird' family. In my experience, people who have disengaged, uninvolved families have this affect their adult relationships in one of three different ways:

They feel over-responsible for adult relationships. Because they haven't got what they needed from one source (their blood family), they may try to force intimacy quickly and subconsciously build a 'family' with all its security, reassurance, mutual support, and so on with one person. They may feel it is all down to them to make the relationship work. So a disengaged family may produce someone who feels over-responsible in relationships: "If only I could try hard enough, this will work!" Feeling over-responsible may make the person (with the disengaged family) form relationships with 'lame dogs', those who can't really meet the needs of others because they are so swamped by their own sense of unmet needs. Again, the pattern of trying to get something from someone who just doesn't have it to give is the same. It's a great liberation sometimes to really accept that some people just don't have what you need from them.
They may go the other way and avoid relationships altogether, clinging to the illusion that no relationships can possibly be healthy or secure. They may look for someone to 'rescue' them and make everything all right in their fantasies, but avoid intimacy in reality.
Or they might transcend all of that and form and have healthy relationships despite having an emotionally distant family. We are not damned by our past emotional conditioning.

It's hard to say without knowing you, but you may fall into one of the above (or a bit of all three).

We tend to get what we need in life one way or another. People have 'father figures' if they don't have a father (or a father who can be a proper father). People find 'families' amongst groups of non-related peers. And people find emotional intimacy even with their pets. People get what they need somehow.

Your mother can't give you what you and your children need or want her to give you, but you can all still live really well. The point is, there is no inevitable negative consequence of having come from a less than completely engaged or loving family. You can still have a great and rewarding life and so can your children. I hope at least some of what I've written here makes sense.

All best wishes,

Mark