You Don't Have to Choose Between Being Yourself and Being Close

In a healthy family, you do not have to choose between being yourself and being close to the people you love.

In highly dysfunctional families, you get to be a full person or you get to belong. No one should have to make that choice.

In this article, I'm not talking about families where someone is being outright abused. I'm not talking about a family that is throwing homophobia, racism, sexism, or religious extremism at a member and demanding they change something fundamental about who they are as a person in order to be tolerated. Those situations require a very different approach, and I don't want anything I say here to be applied to a dynamic where your safety, your identity, or your basic humanity is on the line.

What I'm talking about is the much more insidious version: a family that is simply trying to keep everyone doing the same thing, believing the same thing, and choosing the same thing, and that responds with some level of anxiety when a member of the family does something different.

Groupthink is how many families manage anxiety

In many families, groupthink is the way that the family manages its anxiety. The family needs everyone to believe the same thing, do the same thing, and act the same way, because sameness is what keeps the collective anxiety of the system down. If everybody agrees, nobody has to think too hard about whether they're doing it “right.” If nobody breaks rank, nobody has to sit with the discomfort of being different. So the family, often without ever naming it as such, develops an unspoken rule. We all move in the same direction, and if you don't, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the anxiety your difference creates in us.

Families do this in many different ways, and some are much more obvious and nefarious than others. On the obvious end, a family will just outright say it. If you don't do X, we're going to kick you out of the house. If you don't make this choice, we're not going to pay for your college. We'll only support you if you do this. The performance of the family members is either rewarded or punished depending on what the family demands, and there's no real ambiguity about the terms. You do what the family wants, or the family withholds. It's a transactional arrangement, and however cruel it is, at least you know where you stand.

In other families, this is much more insidious and much less obvious. Family members might just ice you out. Not speak to you as much, be a little passive-aggressive about your decisions, drop comments here and there that let you know you've stepped out of line. If a family member decides not to go to med school, and everyone else in the family has become a doctor, they might say things like, Oh, well, why would you want to do that? That doesn't sound that great. That sounds like a stupid decision. They're not outright demanding your allegiance. They're not saying you're rejected. They're just pressuring you to make a different choice in order to be fully accepted. And you can absolutely feel it. You can feel that you're being excluded, or that you're doing something they wish you weren't.

Sometimes it's even more passive than that. The family will gather together to do the things the group likes to do, and one person is consistently left out. Nobody attends the events that matter to that person. Nobody shows any curiosity about the thing they've chosen or the life they're building. There's no confrontation, no ultimatum. Just a slow, silent fracture. And if the person in question doesn't have a strong sense of self, or is really desperate for the attention and affection of their family, one of two things usually happens. They drift back into wanting to conform, because the loneliness of being on the outside is too much. Or they distance themselves completely from the family, because the only way to be their own person is to stop trying to be it in front of people who won't let them.

Here's what many of these families never quite realize. In demanding conformity, they're actually getting more distance and more difference in return. The very thing they were trying to prevent, a member breaking away, is what their pressure produces. When you tell someone they can only stay if they become smaller, most of them will eventually decide that staying isn't worth what it costs.

Why this is so hard to do

Many people beat themselves up for not being able to just be themselves around their family, as if it should be a simple thing to walk into your childhood home and hold onto every part of yourself. It isn't a simple thing.

The Bowen Center describes families as emotional units. That people who share a family often feel like they're living under the same emotional skin. A change in one person's functioning is predictably followed by reciprocal changes in the functioning of the others. Which means when you decide to be different, the rest of the system reacts, and the reaction isn't personal or planned. It's automatic. When family members get anxious, that anxiety spreads infectiously among them, and as it goes up, the emotional connectedness of family members becomes more stressful than comforting. That's the state many of you are walking into at family dinners, and it's why so many people say they can hold a firm opinion everywhere in the world except in their parents' kitchen. You're operating inside a system that is pulling on you.

This is also influenced by how much self you developed in the first place. A person's family relationships during childhood and adolescence primarily determine how much self they develop. If you grew up in a family where authenticity was punished, where expressing your genuine feelings or interests was met with mockery, dismissal, indifference, or anger, you learned very early that keeping yourself hidden was safer than showing yourself. You learned to keep your interests to yourself so that no one could know you well. You learned that no genuine intimacy could form, only superficial attachment. And you don't just wake up one day and unlearn that. It takes real, structured effort over a long period of time, and it takes doing it while the same people who taught you to hide are still in the room. So if this feels impossible, it's because you are trying to build a self in the exact environment that taught you not to have one. That's not a small task.

Knowing what is actually yours

The first real piece of the work is getting very, very in touch with your own values and why you are making the decision you're making. This part matters because many people, when they try to individuate from a family, do it reactively. They pick the opposite of what their family did just because it's the opposite. And reactive opposition is not the same thing as being your own person; it's still the family choosing for you. You want to make sure you're rooting yourself in your own beliefs and your own values, not doing something simply because you don't want to be like your family member, but because you truly believe it is the right choice for you and something you want to do.

That distinction is subtle and it matters a lot. If you can't tell the difference between I want this and I want to not want what they wanted for me, the choice you're making isn't really yours yet. Keep working on it until the reason you can give yourself for the decision is one that would hold up even if your family didn't exist.

Once you're solid on that, the next piece is being able to confidently explain your decision without seeking agreement from the rest of the family system. This is the part that trips people up the most, because most of us were raised to think that a good conversation about a decision ends with everyone nodding. It doesn't always go this way. You can say, I have decided this is how I am going to dress. I have decided this is what I am going to do. This is my decision. I appreciate the feedback. I'm still going to make this decision. They do not have to like it, agree with it, or ratify it. Most of the emotional labor people do in these conversations is spent trying to get the family to bless the choice, and the family often isn't going to do that. You are allowed to make the decision without their blessing and still be in relationship with them. They have to learn how to be in a relationship with you without your strict obedience.

Deciding who to listen to, and when

The other piece of this is deciding who to listen to and when. This one is important, because many people believe that they owe every family member a hearing on every decision, simply because those people are family. You don't. If you are making a decision about going to college and you have family members who did not make that decision, or who made poor decisions in that area, or who you feel are not sound resources for this particular question, you don't have to bring the question to them just because they share your last name. It is worth genuinely evaluating why you are including certain people in your family in your decision-making, and whether their input is helping you or just adding noise.

It’s also important to be reflective about why the family might be reacting the way they are. There can be jealousy inside families. There can be parents and family members who are watching their child surpass them, achieve more than they did, or make choices they wish they'd had the courage to make, and they feel very resentful about that. Parents and family members can be your first bullies. I know we don't want to admit that. It's genuinely painful to sit with the possibility that some of the people who are supposed to be in your corner are, in fact, not. But it does happen inside families, and it's worth asking yourself the hard question. Why does this person want me to fail? Why don't they want me to make this choice?

Sometimes the answer is that your family member feels like they were forced into their own life. They chose a path they didn't really want, and when they see you making a different choice, what they feel is resentment that has almost nothing to do with you. They didn't get to choose, and they don't want anybody else in the family to get to choose either. Sometimes it's a fear that if a family member makes a quote-unquote bad or different choice, something catastrophic is going to happen to the whole family. In families where this is tied to religious or cultural beliefs, it can genuinely feel like life or death. A member marrying the wrong person, choosing the wrong career, coming out, moving away, is experienced as an existential threat to the family itself. The family isn't calm about it because they aren't calm about it. They're afraid.

And sometimes what's happening is that the family is terrified of outside judgment. They are very protective of how they are seen inside their community, their culture, their church, their friend group, or their extended family. They believe, sometimes rightfully, sometimes not, that they will be rejected by that larger world if a member of the family makes a particular choice. This can show up around sexuality, gender identity, who you decide to marry, where you live, what career you pursue, whether you follow the family religion. In some subsets of the world, these roles are prescribed with a level of intensity that's genuinely hard to overstate. So when your family is reacting to your choice, sometimes the pushback is less about you and more about the room full of other people the family is imagining sitting in judgment of them because of it.

None of this excuses their behavior. It just changes what you're dealing with. Once you understand that the reaction is often about their fear, their regret, or their concern with being seen a certain way, you can stop trying to argue them into approval and start holding the ground you were going to hold anyway.

Expecting pushback, and knowing when to actually listen

If this is the first time in your life that you've done something different or stood up against a highly entrenched family norm, expect pushback. If this happens, it’s important you try not to reflexively take it as proof that you were wrong. Sometimes it's about the anxiety your decision has kicked up in the system.

If you do have family members who tell you, I have your best interest at heart, and I think you might be making a poor decision here, evaluate the source before you dismiss it. Are they somebody who has consistently shown you goodwill? Have they been there for you? Are they trying to get you to see another angle in a way that suggests they're actually thinking about you, and not about themselves? That doesn't mean you have to listen to them, and it doesn't mean you have to make the decision they would make. It just means their feedback is worth considering, and refusing to hear anyone at all is also reactivity. Differentiation isn't the same as never taking advice or feedback from others. It's being able to take it without totally collapsing into it every single time or when you don’t want to.

You don't have to be the same to be close

You do not have to be the same as someone to be close to them.

Now, they shouldn't be rejecting who you are as a human being. That obviously doesn't make for a good relationship, and no amount of your own personal work will fix a relationship like this (usually). But if the person is able to say, You know what, I wouldn't have made that choice, but we still have all these other things in common, or I can still support you in this even if I don't love it for you, then you can go on to have a real relationship, and often a better one than you had when you were both pretending to agree.

Families can hold shared values as a group without demanding that every member look, sound, believe, or choose the same way. You can individuate without rejecting the family entirely. Focusing too much on the surface characteristics, what people wear, what jobs they have, who they partner with, is often what moves families apart. Focusing on what you actually value together, and letting the details vary, is often what holds them close.

You are allowed to be a full person and a member of your family at the same time.