Edited by Ana Rodriguez and Patrick Ryan
8 ICSA TODAY
are often expected to provide protection. The father’s role is to
provide, and the mother’s is to raise the children.
In Catalonia, the part of Spain I come from, this is still true,
especially in rural areas. The first male offspring is the heir and
will rule the family’s land. He will become a farmer. The second
offspring will go to the city, where he will become a merchant
and, if things go well, will open a shop. The third offspring will
go to college. The education that is given to each child takes into
account his future role.
The more fixed these roles are, the less freedom there will be for
the persons who adopt them. These roles may prevent family
members from developing their own personalities and natural
strengths. An intelligent, creative woman may be forced to
suppress those strengths and stay home with her children while
her husband, who may be more of a caregiver, is forced against
his nature to run a business. Both will be recognized by other
family members only when they play their roles. Accordingly,
they may lose their skills to function in other roles.
Roles in cults. As in dysfunctional families, members’ behavior
and even thinking in cults is highly likely to become stereotyped,
developed not in accordance with the person’s natural skills and
character, but in service to an outside source of control. We who
work with former members of cultic groups often hear about
careers aborted because they did not serve the purpose of the
group. Artists either are compelled to give up their art, or use it
exclusively to promote the leaders’ purposes. Mothers abandon
their children to minders who abuse or neglect them. Patty
Hearst was changed from a socially conscious young woman into
a terrorist. These are extreme examples of the kind of change
that takes place in people whose names we never hear, in more
mundane but no less tragic ways.
Tension Among Forces: Healthy and Unhealthy Responses
In a functional family or organization, the group is influencing
an individual’s behavior, but an individual’s behavior is also
influencing the group, which means that individuality also plays
a role in shaping the group. This tension of forces drives both
the group and the individuals in it to grow. The tension arises
from individual differences trying to unfold as much as from
the dynamics of a group or controlling leaders trying to force
members to conform.
Thus, in a healthy family, a child with musical talent may be
permitted to pursue that passion, even if the parents’ preference
was that the child become a doctor, engineer, or farmer. Parents
respect their child’s identity as it really is, not as they wish it were.
They do not force their child into a role that is unnatural for the
child. Nevertheless, in the process of the child and the parents
trying to assert their initially different views, some degree of
tension will arise. Dysfunctional families are that way to a great
extent because they are not able to tolerate this tension, so they
suppress it.
In a healthy family, as in a healthy group, the identity of the
individual is honored, even when it may conflict with the needs
or desires of the group. Sometimes individuals may compromise
because they care for the collective. Such compromises, however,
emerge from within the individuals involved and are not imposed
from without.
In a dysfunctional family or group, the force of the group
annihilates the separateness of the individuals in it. The people
who hold the power in the family or the group decide what is
good for the individuals in the group, ignoring that it might be
bad for the individuals who make it up.
Dysfunctional Outcomes
To summarize, the potential dysfunctional outcomes presented in
this paper, when left unresolved, include
• Fusion or disconnection. Persons who cannot find
freedom within a family may feel that the only way
to be free is to cut all ties, that the only alternative to
being enmeshed is disconnection. Often, they carry this
behavior into other life relationships these individuals
will relate to people in other parts of their lives either by
fusing with or by completely disconnecting themselves
from others.
• Controlling or being controlled. Those who leave an
enmeshed family or a cult may relate to others in ways
that reflect the control dynamic to which they are
accustomed:
o “I will try to control you. I want to know what
you are doing at any given moment, what
you are thinking about, what your problems
are. I need for you to be dependent upon
me.” Interestingly, in this type of relationship,
the person exerting control is actually more
needy than the person being controlled.
This is the dynamic of the cultic leader, who
depends upon controlling his followers to
support his grandiose sense of himself.
o “I will [paradoxically] require you to control
me” (this is the complementary position of
the previous example): “I will allow you to
know everything about me. I will let you know
constantly about my actions. I will share with
you all my problems and worries and will let
you solve them.” People who were taught by
their family that being controlled was the
condition for being accepted and loved may
repeat that behavior as adults in social life
and in romantic relationships. Likewise in
cults, members are made to believe that the
leader’s control over every aspect of their lives
demonstrates his love for them.
• Rebellion. Similarly, those who leave an enmeshed
family or a cult through rebellion may relate to others in
ways that reflect this need to rebel:
o “I will reject you through constant criticism and
disdain. I will defensively attack you because I
expect you to try to control me.”

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Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge Patrick Knapp’s help in both
inspiring the thoughts in this article and helping
me with their development. After reading his
paper Nothing Need Go to Waste, in which he claims
that his dysfunctional family of origin played a role
in his enrollment in a cult for more than thirteen
years, I shared my ideas with him, and he shared
his with me.
About the Author
Jose Fernández Aguado is a
psychologist at PEHUÉN Psicologia
y Formación, in Barcelona
(pehuenpsicologia.com). He has
been a couples and family therapist
for nearly twenty years. You can
reach him by email at jfernandez@
pehuenpsicologia.com n
o “I will [paradoxically] communicate that you
should reject me because I am unworthy, volatile,
and untrustworthy.”
Integration: The Alternative to Dysfunction
One way to describe the opposite of dysfunction is integration.
Integration is a healthy relationship between different parts of the
self, different members within the family or group, or different
people belonging to different families or groups. Integration implies
differentiation but not disconnection between the related elements.
Instead, there are contact and harmony between the elements,
which retain their individuality but strengthen the whole.
It is not the purpose of this paper to suggest how people in
dysfunctional families or cults may learn to relate to people in a
healthy way however, a suggestion can be made through the image
of a knotted rope, as in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Image of knotted rope.
The colored strands visible on either end of this rope are held
together by the knot. Each strand retains its full color but is only in
proximity to the others no single strand can rely on the strength
of its neighbor. They are not integrated. The strands between the
knots, in contrast, are woven together in such a way that their colors
are all still visible, but they combine to form a whole stronger than
the individual strands.
Something similar happens in healthy families and groups, in which
individuals are the threads working in harmony with the family or
group, which respects the individual’s color, while the individuals
gain from their integration into the whole.
Integration means differentiation without disconnection—what
happens in healthy relationships. On the contrary, dysfunctional
relationships are characterized by the basic polarity of those in
the relationship being either undifferentiated (enmeshed) or
disconnected. It is as if the members had only two modes for
relating to others they have no other options in their repertoire. n