THE FAMILY AS A SCHOOL OF CHARITY
That idea, while not entirely wrong, is not quite what people like Thomas a Kempis (The Imitation of Christ) had in mind when they said that families are schools of therapy.
What a healthy family does is de-fantasize us, challenge us, dispel our illusions, demand unselfishness, and help us carry our pathologies. Practically, this means that if we give ourselves over to the rhythms of family and community life, we will constantly be corrected in how we perceive ourselves, deflated in our egoism and inflated self-importance, asked to be less selfish, stretched in how we see the world, and exposed in our faults.
At the same time, if the family is healthy, we will also be met at that deep place in our hearts where we need the familiar, given a home (in the real meaning of that word), and helped to deal with our sickest secrets. This latter point is especially important.
Anthropologists tell us that one of the major functions of family is to help carry the pathologies of its members. They also point out that in previous cultures, where the family unit was much stronger than today, there was much less need for private therapy than there is now. Family life was the essential therapy for its members. That is an important truth.
Without family, I am truly alone before my inner sicknesses and sins. Today that is often not understood. We have a virtual library of literature on dysfunctional families. Valuable as that is, it generally fails to point out that all families and communities are dysfunctional. Thus, the question is not so much, “Is your family dysfunctional?” but rather, “how dysfunctional is it and how are we helping to carry each other’s pathologies?”
Families are schools of charity – and also our primary clinics for therapy. To live in a family is to be in therapy.
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