Family Craziness Cycles

All these stories are about people you know you don't know.

I know someone whose family went for counseling back in 1974. Things were not good in this family. The father was overbearing, occasionally physically violent and almost always mentally domineering and emotionally abusive, the mother was a doormat, and the anger and roughness on the children from the head of the household was making everyone a little nuts. He believed he had the right to be that way... God had put him in charge.
"I have SPOKEN!" he would thunder at regular intervals. And "Children! Obey your parents! It's in the Bible!!"

It was really difficult for the kids because their mom was too intimidated to stand up for them with their father. They got anxious. One or two of them acted up in school. The oldest one cried a lot. She hid in the bathroom at school and sometimes threw up from anxiety.

And a mandatory reporter (a teacher) figured out that something wasn't right in this home, and notified the proper authorities.

Which is what prompted the counseling. (get help or lose your kids...)

So they went to their first counseling session.

And when the counselor asked them why they were there, the father said, "We're here so you can help my family. There's something wrong with all of them. I can't understand it. I'm fine.  But they're all crazy."

The family didn't benefit much from counseling and soon gave it up, because the father wasn't willing to examine his own heart/motivations and figure out what was really going on. He decided one evening that the reason 'everyone was out to get me' was 'because of that bastard counselor filling your heads full of lies.'

I don't know how the case ended up from a legal standpoint, but I can tell you that the kids from that family all had issues the last time I checked. And lots of them.

Another family I know had a nutty mom. Nutty like dragging the children out of bed at 3 AM to re arrange furniture and tear down walls to make rooms bigger.

Nutty like making them all stay home from school to clean the house and then screaming at them all day and not allowing them to eat or drink.

This same person built a bunk above the hot water heater in a utility closet for her daughter. Now the daughter had a perfectly good bedroom... but Mom thought this was a better idea.

This mom had four children of her own, and when she was married for the second time, the children of the man she married were relegated to definite stepchild status. One of them was required to make an appointment through her if he wished to spend any time with his father.

She eventually moved on with her brood, but the damage had been done between that boy and his dad because Dad had allowed the stepmother to ruin his relationship with his son. They never got that relationship back.

I knew a girl whose dad was a drunk. A secret drunk. Until they started finding his empty vodka bottles around the house. Hidden in strange places.

They staged an intervention. He promised to get help and do better. And went nuts one night and tried to cut off his son's ears. Dad went and got help after that, but life was never the same in the family, they were all afraid of him.

And he killed himself. Last time I checked, two of the four kids had done the same thing. Taken their own lives.

One of the others had spent so much time in court and in jail for domestic violence that she eventually lost her children and husband.

I knew a boy in high school who was horribly abused by his stepfather. And when people found out, it was reported. And the stepfather went crazy and came to that boy's home blasting windows out with a shotgun and trying to kill everyone who lived there.

He crashed his car while trying to get away and died.

Good riddance.

I know there are millions of stories like these out there.
And that many stories never get told.

That kids live in violence and silence and are never helped. And they grow up and perpetuate the cycle.

I can tell you that at least four of the people who grew up in those families are more or less okay now. But that they still hurt over the things that happened so long ago. And that sometimes, scars don't heal.

So here's my point, if there really is one. I'm not sure there is.

How do people grow up and become this way? I know that way back in the 40's some little boy or girl didn't say to himself/herself when I grow up I am going to abuse my children or I'm going to drink and go a little crazy and try to blow away my family.
I know in at least two of those cases that the parents themselves were abused children. And that they loved their children, but didn't know what to do.

And does every family have its own brand of crazy? I am trying to recall even one family I knew growing up that didn't have something I found weird or scary going on.

And then I wonder. When my kids grow up, will they think our family was crazy? Vow to themselves to do a better job with their own kids than what they got?

A person could drive herself nuts with this circular thinking, huh?

That is, if you assume that person isn't nuts already.