The family conditions how we are in many aspects. Our parents, brothers, grandparents and even uncles and cousins teach us values, customs, our native language and way of relating to others, aspects that make up our identity and personality.
However, for better or worse, the family also conditions our emotional stability, offering us a stable and healthy environment in which we can develop adequately or, on the contrary, an environment marked by insecurity and uncertainty, which destabilizes us.
The importance of the family in mental health is a fact a reality that we are going to explore and analyze below.
The family plays a fundamental role in the lives of most people. There are many situations in which important decisions are made based on the family, what it has taught us throughout life, its well-being and the way we relate to it once we are adults.
The relationships with our family unit greatly determine our way of being and how we relate to other people, being a factor that also has a great impact on our mental health.
In all families, events occur that test our mental health and condition it. There are minor ones, such as a momentary argument between our parents, and there are more serious ones, such as a divorce or the loss of a parent at an early age. Experiencing these situations when we are young influences our emotional stability, and we can live in a particularly intense way and, if it does not end well, lead to psychological problems.
The family: an environment that conditions our lives
The family is an environment that conditions our lives and, of course, our mental health. The ideal environment for a person to grow is always a healthy and functional family, regardless of its structure and whether or not there are blood ties between its members. Today we know that the fact that a family has a father and a mother, is single-parent or is a homosexual marriage does not determine the health of the individual, but rather the parental style that parents exercise towards their children.
Every functional family is one in which fathers and mothers know how to educate their children well, they raise them in an environment in which affection and love is present, but without letting the boys and girls do whatever they want. in desire The key is knowing how to give love while being responsible in caring for children, applying a democratic parenting system. and fulfilling the three main functions that every good father and mother must fulfill: protection, care and affection.
If as children they gave us adequate protection, care and affection, we also learned that they are what we should give to our children. , which works as a protective factor both when it comes to developing mental disorders and our children developing them. On the other hand, if these needs have not been satisfied, it is more difficult for us to offer them to our children without the help of other partners in parenting, since we cannot provide what we do not have or receive, unless we learn it in an conscious and voluntary once we are adults.
Just because we have reduced parenting to three basic functions does not mean that they are easy. Giving protection, care and affection to our sons and daughters is a complicated task, which requires deep reflection, patience and self-knowledge, in order to identify errors that we can make in our way of parenting that, although we do not realize it, can affect in a very negative way to the health of our children. Although all good parents want the best for their children, this does not mean that they fulfill it, even if they do not do so with bad intentions.
For example, comments like “you’re stupid,” “don’t be dramatic,” “you could do much better,” and so on, far from “motivating” them, can make them think that they are worthless, that they are not valued even by their own parents. and, taking into account the importance that our parents and other authority figures acquire in our growth, this greatly affects their mental health, especially their self-esteem, self-concept and way of relating to others.
Furthermore, children, whether children or adolescents, learn to behave according to what they see in their parents. If a son or daughter behaves disrespectfully towards their parents, far from thinking that it is because they are a bad person or because they are a black sheep, it is quite likely that they behave this way because they believe that their parents do not respect them or, also, because His parents have behaved disrespectfully both towards him and towards other people in the family environment, such as grandparents, brothers, uncles or cousins.
Mental health of a family with a member with psychopathology
In most cases, when a family member has a mental disorder it is a serious setback for the family. , especially for the person who is going to be in charge of taking care of it. Family members can feel very overwhelmed and stressed when they see how a person they have known all their lives changes, stops being what they were before and now requires a lot of care. The psychopathology of a loved one is experienced as a loss and, at the same time, as the acquisition of a heavy burden.
Family members of people with mental disorders are more likely to experience feelings of pain and loss, which, although they increase and decrease throughout life, end up becoming deep and intense chronic pain. Live in a constant roller coaster, whose ups and downs depend directly on the relapses and remissions of the psychopathology of the family member in charge.
Like families in general, families that have a member with a mental disorder represent a diverse group. Each family member has unique experiences, needs and concerns. Thus, each family can behave differently with their family member, depending on the diagnosis and the resources they have.
Over time, although with great difficulty and with the help of psychologists and support groups, family members who care for the member with a mental disorder end up accepting their symptoms, learning to cope with the disorder and manage it in the best possible way. However, This does not take away the deep emotional pain, stress and anxiety that they experience as a consequence of having to care for a mentally unstable person. problems that can cause them to also present a mental disorder.
This is especially noticeable in families whose member with psychopathology has a personality disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and has little awareness of their disorder. It is hard to have to put up with a person who is inconsistent in his behavior, who changes his mind constantly and who, on top of that, blames others for his mistakes or even invents that he is receiving some type of aggression when, perhaps, it is him. or she who, without realizing it, exerts psychological abuse on the people who care for her.
Family as the origin of psychopathology
Families that do not know how to deal healthily with moments of crisis and do not offer an environment of peace and emotional stability end up weakening. In fact, these types of families, Instead of promoting the healthy development of each of its members, it can become a risk factor for their mental health. Abuse, mistreatment, addictions and overly authoritarian upbringing contribute to the appearance of traumas, frustrations and various psychopathological symptoms that will end up crystallizing and becoming a mental disorder in adulthood if not treated.
A television program that reflects this sad reality is the American documentary series “My 600-lb Life.” This program tells the story of people who have type IV obesity and who have become bedridden, unable to move freely even to relieve themselves, and who need surgical intervention to survive in the long term.
People who reach weights greater than 250 kilos do not reach this weight due to pure carelessness or laziness. A person doesn’t reach a body mass index of 80 by sitting on the couch one day, opening a bag of chips, and eating until one day they realize how much weight they’ve gained. The “stars” of this program have eating problems, an addiction to food that is the result of having had a childhood marked by violence, economic poverty and, in many cases, addictions and sexual abuse from people close to them.
The relationship between the program participants and their families is extremely dysfunctional, and not only because of the family past but also because of the present. The family, far from being an emotional support for the person with extreme obesity and a motivator for change, often shapes the environment that has led to this situation, causing a lot of stress that pushes them to eat.
In other cases, it usually happens that the parents feel a lot of guilt for what happened to their child during childhood, especially if their child was sexually abused by an uncle or family friend and they didn’t realize it or they themselves were drug addicted and neglectful parents. To compensate for not having been there for them during their childhood, it often happens that parents become “enablers”, bringing and cooking the food themselves, since their adult son of almost 300 kilos is bedridden. and he can’t go shopping on his own.
All this shows the power that the family has in the development of psychopathology and its conservation. Dysfunctional childhoods serve as an important origin of mental disorders, and dysfunctional adulthood contributes to maintaining psychopathology. Families with toxic, dysfunctional and pathological dynamics mean that patients, in this case morbidly obese, cannot progress or achieve their goals in the short, medium and long term.
