If I had a dime for every time I read about dysfunctional family dynamics, I could take you all out for lunch today. It dawned on me that family dynamics are often built on predictable patterns of learned behaviors. The dynamic isn’t strong, flexible or inviting. A huff and a puff can blow the house down.
We are fast approaching a delightful, aspirational precipice in family cultures – we are shifting to dynamic, flourishing ecosystems.
No more dysfunctional dynamics that are nothing more than confining structures that keep us limited. We have a far better mental image to wrap our heads around – a thriving, evolving, dynamic ecosystem. What I love most about this new reframe is that it has an aliveness to it, it feels fresh and invigorating. Family members all have an active part in the ecosystem that supports a healthy, vibrant, nourishing support system.
It is with very vivid clarity that I recall the common references to icebergs when I first dipped my toes into my own personal growth fifteen years ago. Images of each of us having a lot of frozen stratifications just under the surface that were a drag on how we moved through life. Layers and layers of unprocessed emotions, lived experiences never validated, limiting beliefs and heavy protective armor. Our personal Titanics destined to sink us.
That is precisely what the old dysfunctional family dynamics created. A drag on what should be an ever-evolving flourishing ecosystem. I can drop right into that image and feel instantaneously better.
This is the precipice I want you to imagine. An evolutionary cliff-hanger.
We can keep doing what we’ve been doing for centuries or we can shift the culture.
Daniel Coyle offers the path forward in his newest book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy and Fulfillment. His research has revealed that we were operating so myopically, reactively instead of proactively. In that old family structure of unhealthy behavioral patterns, we created stories to make sense of things that made no sense. Why did we feel so unsafe, unseen and unworthy in our own homes and families?
Daniel invites us to reverse engineer family ecosystems. We were meant to work together, harmoniously, rooted in diverse interactions, unlocking each other’s gifts and capacities rather than keeping them dormant.
Dan Coyle gathers us all up on the magnificent edge of that precipice and invites us to see far and wide into a flourishing ecosystem. He gleefully reminds us that “disorder is not the obstacle – it is the doorway.” And then he adds, “if you know what’s going to happen, you’re doing it all wrong.”
This is how Dan Coyle paints a mental picture of an active, proactive, ever-evolving, flourishing ecosystem. A family dynamic that does not create massive icebergs, but rather one that expands, nourishes and explores.
Dan introduces us to the “jigsaw method” of teaching and learning that becomes the catalyst for healthy family ecosystems. Here is the template for the jigsaw method:
- A shared horizon. A vivid common goal. Our family’s North Star.
- Ownership – the ability for each family member to take meaningful responsibility for a piece of the whole. We can all own our piece of the puzzle, both learning and teaching it (on an ongoing basis).
- Autonomy – the absence of coercion. Within the safe boundaries of family values, each family member is free to make choices.
I invite you to think about how self help and personal growth frameworks were organized around freeing ourselves from old stories, learned behaviors, and outgrown behavioral patterns. We had to find and sort the pieces of our puzzle in order to organize them in a way that helped us live more as our authentic selves. This is hard work, hardly fun and confusing. We spend so much of our precious time untangling from old, generational dysfunctional patterns.
In a fresh contemporary ecosystem, we don’t work against our nature. We work with it, together with our family members. The best Petri dish for experimentation, exploration and self-discovery.
Over the past two decades, thanks to neuroscience, psychology and intentional integration of our emotional intelligence – we have made enormous advancements in our human evolution. We are on the precipice of transformational improvements for our quality of life, our ability to tap into our gifts and capacities early in life and build on them in healthy ways.
Look out on the horizon and imagine a thriving, flourishing ecosystem. Use that inspirational and aspirational mental image to shift your own family dynamic away from the old and into the new. Foster a flourishing, healthy, actively stimulated growing environment for your family.
