Dysfunctional Families So Much To Tell You

Authors Avatar

Dysfunctional families So Much To Tell You

        A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehaviour and even abuse on the part of individual members of the family occur continually, leading other members to accommodate such actions…Dysfunctional families are most often a result of the alcoholism, substance abuse like drugs, or other addictions of parents, parent’s untreated mental illnesses/ defects or personality disorders, or the parents emulating their own dysfunctional parents and dysfunctional family experience. - “Dysfunctional family”, Wikipedia

This is the fundamental definition of a dysfunctional family. Dysfunctional families are rather common amongst today’s society. John Marsden’s book, “So Much to Tell You” features a kind of dysfunctional family. “So Much to Tell You” is about a young girl Marina, who keeps a diary of her troubled school year. Marina’s parents recently separated and her father who attempted to throw acid at her mother, got Marina’s face instead. Her father was put in jail and Marina was left disfigured and emotionally traumatized.

The conflicts between Marina’s parents were not just any common petty fights, and they bear a great significance dysfunctional family system. “In my ex-family my mother would yell and scream quite a lot and rush upstairs. But my father just went into a brooding quietness, an ugly silence that went on forever and scared me forever.” This was Marina’s description of fights her parents had, and it palpably highlighted the graveness of their relationship. Often a dysfunctional family is also the result of strained or unnatural relationships between partners or parent and child. This seemed to be the case for Marina, as she stated in her diary, “When I talked to my parents it was so hard and forced. I was always nervous, and scared of gaps and the silence. I would try to think of the things I could talk before I entered a room that I knew they were in.” This shows that Marina’s relationships with her parents were rather awkward, and she could not communicate with them in the relaxed and casual way the way family members do.

Join now!

Growing up in a dysfunctional family can have a great impact on children. These children are known to adopt one or more of these five basic roles, “the good child”, the family hero who often assumes the parental role, “the problem child”, the family scapegoat blamed for everything, “the caretaker”, who holds the family together and takes responsibility for the family’s emotional well-being, “The lost child”, the inconspicuous and quiet one whose needs are often ignored or hidden, and “the mascot”, who uses comedy to divert attention from the increasingly dysfunctional family system. Marina seemed to have taken the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay