The Dance of Family Dynamics: Understanding Your Role in the System
How Family Systems Theory Illuminates Stuck Patterns and Creates Paths to Healthier Connection
Every Sunday dinner follows the same script. Your sister arrives late, flustered and full of apologies that somehow become criticism of everyone else’s rigidity. Your brother withdraws into his phone, occasionally making sarcastic comments that cut deeper than he seems to realize. Your mother frantically tries to keep everyone happy while your father alternates between lecturing about responsibility and checking out entirely. You find yourself mediating, translating, smoothing over conflicts, exhausted before dessert arrives. You’ve all played these roles for so long that deviating from the script feels impossible, even though everyone claims to hate these gatherings.
At Michigan Wellbeing, we use family systems theory to help individuals and families understand these entrenched patterns that keep relationships stuck in painful loops. Developed by Murray Bowen, family systems theory views families as emotional units where each person’s behavior affects and is affected by everyone else’s, like dancers whose movements are interconnected even when they appear to be performing solo routines. When neurodivergence is present in the family system — whether diagnosed or unrecognized — these dances become even more complex, with family members often unconsciously organizing around neurological differences in ways that both help and harm.
Understanding Your Family as an Emotional System
Family systems theory revolutionizes how we understand family problems by shifting focus from individual pathology to relational patterns. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with dad?” we ask “What function does dad’s anger serve in the family system?” Rather than labeling your sister as “the irresponsible one,” we explore how the family system maintains her in that role and what would happen if she changed. This perspective reveals that what looks like individual problems are often systemic patterns that require systemic solutions.
In family systems, behavior that seems irrational individually makes perfect sense systemically. The child who acts out might be expressing the family’s collective anxiety. The overachieving teenager might be carrying the family’s hopes for redemption. The spouse who becomes physically ill during conflict might be unconsciously regulating the system’s emotional temperature. These aren’t conscious choices but systemic adaptations that maintain family equilibrium, even when that equilibrium is painful.
The concept of homeostasis explains why families resist change even when current patterns cause suffering. Systems naturally seek balance, and familiar pain often feels safer than unfamiliar health. When one family member begins changing — perhaps through therapy, diagnosis, or life circumstances — the system initially works to pull them back to familiar patterns. The newly sober parent might face family sabotage not from malice but from systemic anxiety about change. The adult child setting boundaries might encounter escalating pressure to return to old roles. Understanding this as systemic resistance rather than personal attack helps maintain changes despite pressure.
Differentiation: Finding Yourself Within the System
Differentiation of self — the ability to maintain your own thoughts, feelings, and values while staying emotionally connected to family — forms the cornerstone of healthy family functioning. Low differentiation manifests as either emotional fusion (losing yourself in relationships) or emotional cutoff (disconnecting to preserve yourself). High differentiation allows you to be fully yourself while remaining lovingly connected to family members who might be very different from you.
In neurodivergent family systems, differentiation becomes particularly complex. The autistic family member might appear highly differentiated due to social communication differences but actually be emotionally fused in less visible ways. The ADHD parent might seem independent but be entirely emotionally reactive to family dynamics. Neurological differences can mask or complicate differentiation levels, requiring careful assessment to understand what’s neurodivergence and what’s systemic enmeshment.
Developing differentiation doesn’t mean becoming emotionally distant or selfish. It means taking responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing rather than requiring others to manage your feelings. It means expressing your thoughts even when family disagrees rather than automatically conforming or rebelling. It means maintaining connection during conflict rather than cutting off or attacking. For neurodivergent individuals, this might require additional support to navigate social and emotional complexities that neurotypical family members process more intuitively.
Working toward differentiation often triggers family anxiety as the system adjusts to your changing participation. Family members might interpret your self-definition as rejection, your boundaries as punishment, or your emotional regulation as coldness. At Michigan Wellbeing, we support clients through this challenging process, helping them maintain changes while managing family reactions with compassion and clarity.
Triangles: The Basic Building Block of Family Systems
How Triangulation Works in Families:
Two people experience tension in their relationship
They involve a third person to stabilize their dynamic
The third person becomes the focus, reducing original tension
The pattern repeats whenever anxiety rises
Original issues never get resolved
The third person carries the system’s anxiety
Relationships become indirect and unclear
Emotional energy gets displaced rather than addressed
Common Triangle Patterns in Families:
Parent-child alliance against other parent
Siblings united against “problem” sibling
Grandparent-grandchild bond that excludes parent
Parent confiding in child about marriage problems
Extended family involvement in nuclear family conflicts
Work or addiction becoming the “third” in marriage
Therapist or diagnosis becoming triangulated into family
Pet becoming emotional focus to avoid human conflict
Triangles aren’t inherently destructive — they’re how systems manage anxiety. However, chronic triangulation prevents direct relationship resolution and often damages the triangulated person, especially when that person is a child carrying adult emotional burdens. Recognizing triangles helps you stop participating in them, forcing more direct communication and authentic relationship development.
In neurodivergent families, triangulation might center around the diagnosed family member. Parents might focus on their autistic child’s needs to avoid addressing their marriage problems. Siblings might unite in resentment about accommodations for their ADHD sibling rather than expressing individual needs directly. The neurodivergent family member becomes the repository for family anxiety about difference, failure, or inadequacy, carrying burdens that aren’t actually theirs.
Multigenerational Transmission: Patterns Through Time
Family systems theory recognizes that patterns transmit across generations through what Bowen called the multigenerational transmission process. Levels of differentiation, ways of managing anxiety, relationship patterns, and roles pass from generation to generation, often becoming more intense with each transmission. The anxiety your grandmother couldn’t process becomes your mother’s depression becomes your panic disorder. The grandfather’s emotional cutoff becomes the father’s workaholism becomes the son’s inability to commit to relationships.
Understanding multigenerational patterns helps make sense of seemingly irrational family rules and reactions. The family’s intense reaction to academic failure might stem from grandparents who lost educational opportunities. The prohibition against showing weakness might originate from ancestral trauma around vulnerability. The family’s chaos or rigidity might be multigenerational responses to historical instability. These patterns aren’t consciously chosen but unconsciously absorbed and transmitted.
When neurodivergence runs through generations — often undiagnosed in older generations — these patterns become even more complex. Each generation’s adaptation to unrecognized neurological differences becomes the next generation’s normal. The grandmother’s “nervousness” (undiagnosed autism) leads to the mother’s hypervigilance, which creates the daughter’s anxiety disorder. The grandfather’s “wanderlust” (ADHD restlessness) becomes the father’s inability to maintain stable employment, which becomes the son’s deep shame about his own ADHD traits.
Breaking multigenerational patterns requires conscious awareness and deliberate choice. You must recognize patterns, understand their origins, and actively choose different responses. This isn’t betraying your family but evolving it. When you heal patterns, you free not only yourself but potentially future generations from unconscious repetition. Therapy provides crucial support for this challenging work, offering perspective that’s impossible to gain from within the system.
Sibling Positions and System Roles
Birth order and sibling position significantly influence how individuals function in relationships throughout life. The oldest child who managed younger siblings might become overfunctioning in all relationships. The youngest who was babied might struggle with independence. The middle child who mediated might become the perpetual peacemaker. Only children might struggle with peer relationships but excel in adult interactions. These patterns shape not just childhood but adult functioning in marriages, friendships, and work relationships.
Neurodivergence complicates typical sibling position patterns. The oldest child with ADHD might not fulfill typical responsible oldest expectations, forcing younger siblings into premature responsibility. The autistic middle child might not play the typical social connector role, reorganizing family dynamics around their needs. When one sibling has higher support needs, other siblings might experience role confusion — simultaneously older in responsibility but younger in attention received.
These sibling dynamics often persist into adulthood, affecting everything from career choices to parenting styles. The sibling who managed their ADHD brother’s chaos might choose controlling partners or chaotic ones, recreating familiar dynamics. The sister who was overlooked due to her autistic sibling’s needs might struggle with self-worth or become fiercely independent. Understanding these patterns helps siblings develop more conscious adult relationships, both with each other and in their own families.
Emotional Cutoff Versus Healthy Boundaries
When family relationships become too intense or painful, emotional cutoff often seems like the only solution. This might manifest as physical distance, emotional withdrawal, or complete cessation of contact. While cutoff reduces immediate anxiety, it doesn’t resolve underlying patterns. The issues you cut off from your family often resurface in other relationships — marriages, friendships, or with your own children.
Neurodivergent individuals might be more prone to cutoff when family dynamics overwhelm their processing capacity. The autistic adult might cut off family to reduce social demands. The ADHD individual might impulsively cut off during emotional dysregulation. While sometimes cutoff is necessary for safety, often it represents an inability to maintain differentiation within challenging relationships.
The alternative to cutoff isn’t enduring abuse or dysfunction but developing healthy boundaries that allow connection without fusion. This means learning to stay emotionally regulated in family presence, maintaining your values despite family pressure, and limiting interaction without complete disconnection. It requires tremendous emotional work but ultimately provides more freedom than cutoff, which maintains emotional bondage through avoidance.
At Michigan Wellbeing, we help clients navigate the delicate balance between necessary boundaries and emotional cutoff. Through family systems work, clients learn to maintain whatever level of contact feels sustainable while not allowing family patterns to dominate their emotional life. This might mean structured, limited contact rather than complete cutoff or full engagement.
Changing Your Dance Steps
Changing your participation in the family dance doesn’t require anyone else’s cooperation or even awareness. When you change your steps, others must adjust their movements, even if reluctantly. This unilateral change power means you’re never completely helpless in family systems, even when others seem committed to maintaining dysfunction.
Start by observing your typical moves in the family dance. Do you automatically mediate conflict? Absorb others’ anxiety? Rebel against family rules even when they don’t affect you? Sacrifice yourself to maintain peace? Once you recognize your patterns, you can consciously choose different responses. This isn’t about blame — you developed these patterns for good systemic reasons — but about conscious choice moving forward.
The key to sustainable change is moving slowly and expecting systemic pushback. If you’ve always been the family mediator, suddenly refusing might create chaos that pulls you back. Instead, gradually reduce mediation, allowing others small opportunities to manage their own conflicts. If you’re the family scapegoat, slowly stop accepting blame while maintaining compassion for the system’s need to assign it somewhere. These incremental changes allow the system to adjust without extreme destabilization.
Creating Healthier Family Systems
Healthy family systems balance togetherness and individuality, allowing members to be deeply connected while maintaining separate selves. They manage anxiety without chronic triangulation, address conflict directly rather than through proxies, and adapt to change while maintaining stability. These systems support both belonging and becoming — you can be fully part of the family while growing into your authentic self.
Creating healthier systems doesn’t require perfection but rather consciousness about patterns and commitment to gradual improvement. It means celebrating differences rather than enforcing conformity, addressing problems directly rather than through triangles, and allowing family members to have their own relationships without interference. It requires tolerating anxiety about change while maintaining faith in the system’s resilience.
For families with neurodivergent members, healthy systems require additional consciousness about different processing styles and needs. This might mean explicit communication where neurotypical families rely on implicit understanding. It might require structured family meetings rather than spontaneous processing. It might mean accepting that family members show love and connection in diverse ways rather than enforcing single expression styles.
Your Ongoing Family Dance
Family systems work isn’t about achieving some final, fixed healthy state but about ongoing consciousness and adjustment. Families constantly evolve as members age, develop, and face new challenges. The patterns that work when children are young might need adjustment as they become teenagers. The dynamics that function when parents are healthy might require modification as they age. This ongoing dance requires flexibility, compassion, and commitment to growth rather than perfection.
Understanding your role in family systems provides profound freedom — not freedom from family influence but freedom to choose your participation consciously. You can’t control the music or other dancers, but you can control your own steps. Sometimes this means dancing differently within the existing choreography. Sometimes it means stepping back to rest. Sometimes it means teaching others new moves through your example.
Your family system shaped you but doesn’t define your limits. The patterns you inherited aren’t your destiny. The roles you played can be renegotiated. With consciousness, courage, and often professional support, you can transform your participation in the family dance, creating ripples that might ultimately transform the entire system’s movement. Even if others never change, your different dancing changes your experience of the dance itself.
Ready to understand and transform your role in family patterns? Michigan Wellbeing offers family systems therapy that helps individuals and families recognize inherited patterns and create healthier dynamics. Contact us today to begin changing your steps in the family dance.
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Ready to start your journey? Contact us today to schedule an appointment.
📞 Call or Text: (248) 266–5775
📧 Email: info@miwellbeing.org
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