Research has shown that families who sit down to meals together at least three times per week are healthier and their children are better students.
We all should avoid using dinner time to bring up an entire day's worth of family conflicts and unfinished business what can link to stress and set up a metabolic pattern that favours indigestion.
The digestive system of a child it is very sensitive to family stress and that why the way a child is fed and the environment in which she is fed profoundly affect how her body assimilates her food. The way which a family deals with control, issues, conflict and all other emotions associated with them is often obvious around the family dinner table.
Read what Dr Christiane Northrup wrote in her book Mother- Daughter Wisdom (creating a legacy of physical and emotional health):
In fact what happens in your dinner table is a metaphor for dynamics within your family system.How does your family interact? There are two characteristic patterns of relating that can engender illness within a family. These are enmeshment and disengagement. Both are characterized by rigid maladaptive interactions in which conflicts are never resolved.
ENMESHMENT - NO SEPARATION ALLOWED!
I this kind of families, boundaries between individual members are weak or missing. A change in one family member or in the relationship between two members reverberates throughout the family system.
In Denises family, her mother and father usually pass like two ships in the night, having grown apart emotionally. Her mother makes up for this by being overly involved in her teenage son's life.
As dinner starts, mother and son are deep in conversation about who he should take to a dance. They discuss the pros and cons of a number of different girls. The son offers much more person information than most adolescents would be willing to share. Denise, who is ten , listen in desperately tries to take part, but she is definitely on the sidelines. Partway through the meal, her father walks in. After a perfunctory hello, her mother ignores him and continues to talking to her son. Denise feels bad and pushes her plate away, having lost her appetite. Her body has picked up from the fact that her father is excluded. She gets up and brings him a plate of food, thus assuming the ity for his care. When the son finished eating, he announces that he has to go to football practice. As soon as he leaves, Denise's mother stands up and says to the father, 'Can you believe who John is thinking of taking to that dance?' They then discuss their son social life in vivid detail. Denise's brother is clearly the linchpin of the household, the person everyone talks about and centres of their lives around.
Denise feels left out but understands at some level that the only way to fit into her family is to worship her older brother as much as her mother and father do.
In enmeshed families, everyone knows everyone else's business.
In healthier families, each member has his or her metaphorical room and is allowed and expected to close or open their door as needed. In enmeshed families, there's no privacy - either physically or psychologically. Anyone can barge in at any time. As a result, individual family members can't grow as individuals. When a personal boundary is crossed, a child may feel the need to act inappropriately parentally towards one of her parents. This is exactly what happened to my patient Claire.
Starting at about the age of eight, Claire became the real-life Cinderella of her family - before the prince. Because her mother worked, she was expected to clean the house, prepare the family meals, and clean up afterwards. Her older sister did next to nothing.
Finally, her spine collapsed under the weight of this kind of responsibility, which was too much for any child. She developed a very severe scoliosis and required surgery. Under normal circumstances, this would have separated her from her role in the family. However, separation in a enmeshed family isn't allowed.
When a family member tries to individuate - or forced to by illness - other family members can't deal with it. While Claire was in the hospital, her father lost weight. He wanted her to hurry up and come home so that she could cook and serve! Instead, because of the body cast and her mother's work schedule, she went to live with a relative for six months. She eventually healed and returned home, but the entire experience changed her profoundly. She was expected to go back to her usual role as though nothing had happened, but the unresolved conflicts, especially with her mother, began to erupt shortly thereafter - when Claire entered puberty.
TYPICAL PATTERNS IN ENMESHED FAMILIES
The royal we. Your mother refers to family members as 'we' or 'the family' as though the family weren't composed of individuals. She avoids the word 'I' and expects you to do so as well. ('But we always serve crown roast of pork on Christmas Eve') Having an identity separate from the family is discouraged.
Recognition through serving the family. Female family members, in particular, get their sense of accomplishment and worth from serving the family in some way. Girls often strive for recognition by learning how to bake breads, biscuits and other high-glycemic carbohydrates that the family loves.
Payback for individuation. If you chose to pursue an activity that is not approved by the family, you will experience a 'payback' of some kind showing their disapproval. You're guilty when you follow your own heart and not the previously approved activities of the family. One of my friends became a vegetarian during college, letting her family know about her new preferences. But when she came home for her holidays, her mother served a pot roast on the first night. And when my friend didn't eat it, her mother said angrily, 'well, just don't know what you want any more,' and cleared the table abruptly.
Keeping it close to home. Everyone in your family lives within a small radius of each other. The vast majority of your social life revolves around family, such as birthdays, christenings, and anniversaries, and adult children are expected to turn up regularly for Sunday dinner at 'home'. If they don't live close by, they call each other every day.
The family loudspeaker system. When anything happen in your life, everyone in your family knows about it within a day. Family members often talk through another person. Mediating go-betweens are usually female, with the matriarch of the clan serving as harmonizer.
Abandon ship. Enmeshed families tend to have poor boundaries and weak alliances that are easily broken through triangulation. Let's say that a mother and daughter have decided that the girl should have a new outfit for the first day of school. It's expensive, but perfect. But then her father comes home, hears about the outfit, and decides that he can't afford it. Instantly the mother abandons her former alliance with the daughter and sides with the father. The girl is left feeling abandoned, but if she tries to protest, her mother says, 'why can't we all just get along?'
Decision through family polling. People in your family can't make a move or decision without running a family poll first. If you try to make a decision on your own, there's retribution.
The human smoother. You or your mother have been trained to be 'smoothers' or harmonizers' whose job is to get any potential conflict back under the rug as soon as possible. You use vague, non-specific language to avoid conflict while tangentially alluding to it. For example, your mother is having a problem with your father, but she won't talk about this directly or even admit that two of them are having a problem. Instead, she will say, I'm just unhappy when there are fights in 'the family'. Families who demonstrate this behaviour tend to agree on things instantly and deny any conflict. When one member begins to individuate in any way, they make that person 'the bad one' and then spend their time scheming about how to re-enfold the one who 'got away'.
Holidays on command. Neither you, your mother, nor other family members have ever spent major holidays away from home. If you don't arrive the day before the holiday, everyone has something to say about it. The holiday meal itself is a 'command performance' that you skip at your peril. And you'd better overeat to show your appreciation, because mum 'put so much effort into it'.
Parent as social organizer. Your mother orchestrates the social obligations of the family members and then, through guilt, coerces you to fulfil them. For example, you are expected to invite your parents friends to wedding, even if you don't know them. You're also expected to go to your parents friends funerals and other major life celebrations of people whom you don't know well or even care about.
The wounded puppy syndrome. Family members attempt to elicit nurturing sympathy, or protection by acting meek, weak, or defenceless. Dragging a metaphoric wounded paw deters and avoids conflict. Example: you announce that you are going out with friends on Christmas Eve after the family goes to church. Your mother looks at you with tears in her eyes, and says, 'Oh, I was so looking forward to sitting around the fire as a family this evening just like old times.
DISENGAGEMENT - NO INTIMACY OR SPONTANEITY ALLOWED!
These families are overly boundaried, the opposite of enmeshment. There is a lot of distance and privacy among family members, unbalanced is placed on formal 'rules'. Communication is guarded. Emphasis is placed on formal 'rules'. Conflict is suppressed or ignored.
Joan came from what she now refers to as a 'sanitized' family.
Her mother, a woman who was trained in 1950s-style home economics, prided herself on serving well-balanced and attractive meals, taking care to put the food on each plate 'just so' before presenting it to her family. Second helpings were discouraged because Joan's mother believed in making 'just enough' . When Joan and her brother were little, they weren't allowed to have dinner with their parents.
They are fed earlier in the evening, often before their father got home from work. When he did come home, the children were cautioned not to 'bother' him because he worked so hard. They were expected to play quietly on their own while Joan's mother and father enjoyed a prolonged cocktail hour before dinner. This further separated the family members from each other by 'medicating' them.
Joan remembers that when she was finally allowed to join her parents at dinner, she was often burting with enthusiasm, longing to share the details of her day with her father. But she had to do this with restraint, and only after she was 'called upon' to speak by her father.
Her father routinely tapped her elbow with his knife to move it off the edge of the table. And he often said, 'Is this the way you're going to eat if you're invited to an official function?' Dinner was served in courses, so Joan's mother spent most of the time going backwards and forwards to and from the kitchen rather than participating.
TYPICAL PATTERNS IN DISENGAGED FAMILIES
Take a number. There's no such thing as a spontaneous dinner conversation. Family members have to talk 'in turn', not all at once.
Keep your voice down. This type of family valeus order and control above else. Therefore, singing or laughing out loud at the table is discouraged. Loud talking discussion are also frowned upon.
Rigid rules. How one folds his or her napkin and uses utensils is far more important than family fun or interaction. The table is often set 'just so'. The serving bowls, plates, and utensils are deemed more important than the food itself.
No seconds allowed. The concept of abundance around food is lost on this type of family. Each member gets a small amount of each dish. There isn't enough for second helping. In fact,, second helping are considered 'excessive'. On the other hand, you're also expected to 'clean your plate'.
Don't ask, don't tell. Members of overly boundaries families don't ask each other how they're really feeling, nor do they share their true feeling with each other. Anything stronger than the mid-range 'I'm fine' type of feeling is considered too messy and difficult to control.
Feelings are dealt with through addictions. Disengaged families often use alcohol, food, or cigarrettes to push down spontaneous, unacceptable emotions. The remarks and behaviour that emerge under cover of alcohol are supposed to be forgotten or excused.
We've always done it that way. Disengaged families tend to follow the same holiday or birthday rituals year after year - going to the same places, having the same people over, cooking the same 'traditions' over and over again.
The cold shoulder. Because real emotions aren't discussed, rigid families have a host of physical signs that signal members not 'go there'. They ignore emotional 'outbursts' of any kind, and give those who engage in them the cold shoulder. This kind, of passive-aggressive behaviour guarantees that no conflict will even be addressed, let alone resolved. When asked a question they don't want to answer or address, parents often simply remain silent.
Here comes the judge. Rigid families think they're morally superior to others and convey this through a 'nose in the air' attitude. Hearing a constant stream of disapproval of others' minor behavioural slips makes a child anxious. The whole whole word is boody-trapped with rules, but because they are unspoken, the child is left guessing at what is expected of her. If she inadvertently breaks one of these unspoken rules, she's reprimanded by being told 'you should have known that that would upset daddy,' and so on.
Taking hostages. If you don't conform to the rules and regulations, you are ignored, scapegoated, criticized, or belittled. For children, attention is like oxygen. They need to thrive. But in a rigid, controlling family, they must 'de-self' themselves to get it. (For example, the father tells his daughter, 'your mother worked on this dinner all day. So you're going to eat it and like it).
Shark-infested waters. Rigid family system are often run on unexpressed anger that lurks right beneath the surface. Children are very intuitive and know this. So they will learn how to deflect this anger to make sure it doesn't get expressed directly or, worse, land on them. (For example, they work at being especially pleasing to Daddy or Mummy by saying 'I love you', or by being the perfect little hostess who is always very helpful.)
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL FAMILY - RELAX
Don't be surprised if you identify with a number of the patterns describe above. There's no such thing as a 'perfect' family that is completely free from unresolved emotional patterns. After all, some of these patterns have been handed down for generations! However, we're less like to repeat them once we're conscious of them, so it's solve to heal them as best you can so that they are not passed on to your daugters. This is a lifelong process. Just do the best you can and let the rest go.
