Loyalty Within Boundaries: Being Known and Being Safe

Question:

One of the roots of attachment is to be known. Another root is loyalty and belonging. Does this mean that parents' secrets should be known to their children and parents should share information about the siblings to one another?

Answer:

Loyalty to the family legacy both past and future can preserve a sense of pride. Disloyalty in the family is rarely defined or understood yet is the greatest source of hurt that gets in the way of emotional regulation or feeling emotionally safe inside the womb of relationship. The dynamics of trust, fairness and entitlement are ultimately disturbed and maturation compromised.

The family context has always been promoted as where the experience of relating, giving and receiving begins and a place from which to express honest emotions and thoughts. What has been lost is the sensitivity to the damage that can unfold as the result of unintentional destructive interventions into an intricate system that requires both being known and being kept safe.

Parenting practices which are loyal to ensuring the honour and separateness of each child provide an emotionally supportive environment in which children can mature. Being heard and known is necessary to gain a sense of self before being able to figure out how best to fit into the larger world. A parent's capacity to maintain boundaries among their children is critical in the growth and maturation of each child. It is the parent and eventually the primary partner who is intended to know one inside out not the siblings nor their partners nor FaceBook friends. Exposure of anyone's vulnerabilities hurts.

Vertical relationships are those in which the parent is positioned at the top of the hierarchy where children of all ages can enter without judgement to share their joys, hurts and confusions. Information flow is from bottom-up, never top-down. Parents who share their personal secrets with children (top-down) disturb the ties that bind and the confidence that the child (of any age) has in feeling safe inside the family. Usually this is possible until the parent is fragile or old-old. Horizontal relationships or those among the siblings can be supportive but it is up to the siblings to choose what they want to share; the parent who "knows all" must protect the integrity of each sibling by not taking information from "one house to another".

Parents were never intended to call in the support of their children in order to problem solve within the family. Parenting is all about giving life and then fostering life to individuals who can alone and together cope with life itself. In order to do this, it is a delicate balance between providing a place to be known and cultivating a place to be safe.

Copyright, Susan Dafoe-Abbey, 2014. This article in its original English or in translation may be used for educational purposes.