Disagreement, Rejection, and Abuse Are Not the Same Thing

Most families disagree about something. That alone does not make a family unbearable.

We all have different parts of ourselves that we bring to different situations, and that is normal. You are not the same person at work that you are with your closest friend. You are probably not the same person with your mother that you are with your partner. Some amount of adjusting is necessary in every relationship.

And then there are relationships that require you to conceal so many integral parts of yourself that you simply cannot maintain them. Not because you refuse to compromise, but because there is very little left of you once you have edited out everything that would cause a problem.

There is an ocean of grey area between those two situations.

It would be wonderful if all of our families shared the same religious, political, and philosophical beliefs. It would be wonderful if we all shared the same hobbies and interests. Some families are lucky enough to experience this. Many of you are part of families that seem to be a random mix of people who would have never been friends, never chosen each other, and never spent a holiday in the same room if they were not related.

This is where it gets tricky. You have to be able to tell the difference between peaceful cooperation, disagreement, rejection, and abuse.

The Scale: Peaceful Cooperation, Disagreement, Rejection, and Abuse

Every family has some level of disagreement.

Not every family is rejecting or abusive. These four things sit on a scale, and most families move around on it. You might have peaceful cooperation with one sibling, ongoing disagreement with another, and something closer to rejection with a parent, all inside the same family.

Bowen called the pull toward closeness, approval, and agreement the togetherness force, and it sits opposite our drive to be a separate person with our own mind. Both are normal. As anxiety in a family goes up, though, the togetherness force takes over, and the pressure to conform rises with it. Your difference did not change. Their capacity for it did.

The further along the scale you go, the less the relationship is about difference at all and the more it is about power. And when who you are and what you believe lands in the rejection or abuse range, maintaining that relationship becomes much, much harder. Not impossible in every case, but no longer a matter of tolerance and better communication.

Peaceful Cooperation

This is the goal for most families. You understand one another, you show curiosity about each other's lives, and you coexist. Many families are able to get here. Peaceful cooperation does not require agreement. It requires that difference is a known and accepted fact of the family.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that a good family means everyone is equally close to everyone. That is not how people work. It is okay to enjoy spending time with the family members you actually get along with and share interests with. It is okay that you and your cousin text every day and you and your aunt exchange birthday messages. It is okay to sit next to the sister who makes you laugh. Gravitating toward the people you have something in common with is not a betrayal of anyone else, and it is not evidence that the family is broken.

Where this goes wrong is when the pairings harden into camps, when the people who get along start using each other as proof that someone else is the problem, or when one member ends up with nobody. This is why curiosity matters so much, and why getting to know each other is not optional in families where people are very different. You are looking for common ground. It might not be a shared belief. It might be that you both think the same relative is impossible. It might be that you can genuinely appreciate how dedicated your father is to something you have no interest in, or how happy your brother's ridiculous hobby makes him. That is usually the meeting point. Not agreement, and not a compromise where everyone gives up half of what matters to them, but one thing you can honestly admire or enjoy about each other. Families that make it through real difference tend to have found several of those commonalities.

Disagreement

Real disagreement means people hold different opinions and can share them kindly and respectfully. It also means they have some sense of when to share those opinions and with whom. Your uncle knows that Thanksgiving dinner is not the moment. Your sister knows which topics she can raise with you directly and which ones are going to need a longer conversation.

In families where disagreement and difference are actually tolerated, there is curiosity about the people who are different from you. They may not agree with the choice you made, and they are still interested in why you made it.

In many families, what is happening is not really disagreement at all. It is one person, or a whole group of people, working very hard to convince you that they are right, to change your mind, or to convert you. The conversation is not an exchange, it is a campaign, and it does not end when you say you see it differently. There is no real celebration of who you are underneath it.

However, some families handle differences by pretending it is not there. Nobody fights, nobody argues, and nobody ever acknowledges that you believe something else. This looks like tolerance, but it is often denial and it can feel more like neglect.

There is also a very big difference between disagreeing about ice cream, the weather, and how someone spends their Saturdays, and disagreeing about whether a person should exist or have the same rights as everyone else in this country. A lot of family advice puts those two things into the same category and tells you to find common ground. It is entirely different when the disagreement is about your marriage, your body, your children, your faith, your safety, or your right to participate in public life as a human being. That is not a difference of opinion about a topic. It is a position about you. When a family member holds that position and shares it with you regularly, the relationship is usually already functioning somewhere in the rejection range.

Many of the people in the Family Cyclebreakers Club spend years trying to be more tolerant, more understanding, and more generous toward a family member whose actual position is that they should not get to be who they are. Tolerance is a skill for handling difference. It is not how you deal with someone who believes you should not exist or have rights.

Rejection

Rejection is what happens when your difference costs you your place in the family. This usually looks like being iced out, being ignored, left off the invitation list, talked about behind your back, and being told you are crazy, too sensitive, or brainwashed. People may stop communicating with you for stretches of time, or there is a constant, ongoing effort to change you because the version of you that currently exists is not acceptable to them.

Rejection isn’t always screaming and exiling a person, it can also be very quiet. It happens in families who would never raise their voice and who would be genuinely offended to hear the word used about them. In a family that disagrees, you are still in the family. In a family that rejects, your membership depends on you not being who you are.

Abuse

Abuse is a different category. Yelling. Name-calling. Punching, kicking, hitting, slapping. Condemning someone for who they are. Isolating a person from the rest of the family or from their own support. Depriving someone of safety, money, housing, food, medical care, or anything else they need in order to be okay. Threats. Controlling where someone goes and who they see. This is not a disagreement that got heated. If this is what is happening in your family, safety comes first, and that usually means getting support from someone outside the family system before you try to have any further conversation inside it.

Why Families Want Sameness

Pressure to conform tends to go up when a family does not experience much real closeness.

In families where people are actually vulnerable with each other, difference is less dangerous. Something else is holding the relationship together besides matching. When that is missing, or when the family is anxious about something like money, an illness, a divorce, or the state of the world, sameness becomes the fix for that anxiety. If we all believe the same things and live the same way, it can feel like closeness. It is a way to manage fear.

You can see this most clearly in high control religions and high control groups. The promise is that the more homogenous everyone is, the more connected and accepted you will be. People who grew up inside that, or who found it later, often create the same arrangement in their homes, because it is the only version of belonging they have experienced.

Unfortunately, in most of those families there are one or two people for whom the shared beliefs are truly genuine. And then there are several others who are thinking: this is not who I really am. The family looks unified, but most of the people in the family are just managing their fear of being the one who gets pushed out.

Is The Family The Problem?

Most people want to know whether their family is the problem. Sometimes that is the answer. Sometimes the more useful question is: is the difference hard for you?

When you feel reasonably secure in who you are and what you believe, someone else believing differently is information about them. It is interesting, maybe annoying, and it does not threaten anything. When you do not feel secure, every difference starts to feel like a threat.

Are the people in your family actually rejecting you, or are they simply not like you, and that feels intolerable?

Do you leave family events feeling hurt by something that was said, or feeling unsettled that people you love see the world in a way you cannot make sense of?

Are you trying to get them to understand you, or are you trying to get them to agree with you?

Pretending Will Not Get You Closeness

A lot of people try to become whatever the family needs them to be. They don’t discuss certain topics. They edit the story before they tell it. They play the role, sometimes for years, sometimes desperately, because it seems like the price of staying in the family. The expectation is that acceptance will follow and they will finally feel close to these people.

It almost never works out that way. You might be “accepted,” but the acceptance is for a version of you that you constructed for them. You cannot feel close to people who do not know you, and being included does not cure loneliness when you are putting on a performance. This doesn’t mean there has to be a big confrontation. Sometimes you just need to build enough confidence in yourself that you know who you are whether or not they approve.

Even if they never accept me, I know what I believe and I am not confused about it.

Often the person pushing hardest for you to conform is anxious. That does not mean you have to tolerate how they treat you, and it is not your job to soothe them. But something does change when you stop negotiating. When you say some version of this is who I am and this is who I am going to be, calmly, and then keep saying it, some people back off. They were trying to enforce sameness, and you are not doing what they wanted, so it stops paying off.

You Need Somewhere Else To Be Yourself

You can tolerate a lot more difference in your family when your family is not the only place you have to be yourself and to get that connection. Friends, a community, a creative outlet, work, or places where you get to be your full self can really help. When the family is your only source of identity reinforcement, every conversation carries far too much weight, because their approval is the only approval you have access to. When you have somewhere else, you can let your uncle be wrong about you and go home to people who know better.

Having other outlets for parts of your identity will help you learn that you are not crazy or weird or so unusual that nobody is ever going to accept you. People can be born in the same family and have completely different values, beliefs, and personality. That happens everywhere, including in yours.

Practice This

• Say what you like without needing them to agree. Tell a family member about something you enjoy, something you are into, something that has made your life better. Then stop talking. Do not explain why it is reasonable. Do not scan their face to see if they approve. Do not defend it before anyone has attacked it. Start somewhere low-stakes, a show you love or a restaurant you always pick, and work up from there.

Many of you learned to do one of two things in your families: hide what you love, or oversell it until somebody finally agrees. Instead, just say it plainly and own it.

• Ask questions when someone else shares something they are into. What do you like about it? How did you get into it? What do you get out of it? What is the best part? Then listen to the answer as information about that person.

Say you have a family member who has found a lot of value in going to church. It has improved their life, and they enjoy it. You are not religious, and you have no interest in going. You can still ask them what they like about it, what it gives them, what the people there mean to them. You might find out they love the singing, or that Sunday morning is the only time all week they are not on their phone, or that they made their closest friends in that building. This stops working when the questions get treated as an opening. You ask what she likes about church and the answer turns into a pitch, or a comment about what happens to people who do not go. Or she starts telling you that you have to come in order to have a relationship with her. It also stops working if you turn every conversation into you explaining what is wrong with it.