Intimate Worlds:: Life Inside the Family

What you may have long suspected, the research shows to be true: A good 70% of families in America are what is now popularly known as "dysfunctional" or worse; Intimate Worlds should be required reading for . . . . anyone in a family, that fundamental blueprint for life and society, for better or worse. Scarf poignantly shows how most of us could use a revised or entirely new blueprint to authentically thrive in life and pass healthy boundaries and life and relationship skills on to emotionally stable children. Psychoanalytically and sweetly eloquent, the dustcover flap (somewhat paraphrased below) says it well. A highly recommended landmark work. ~~ Scarf explores the many factors that go into the formation and functioning of a family, showing us the ways in which families actually operate, and how family life can be improved. She combines clear analysis with unforgettable stories about real families to expose the core issues that every family must deal with: power and how to manage it; intimacy and how to achieve it; conflict and how to resolve it; individuality and how to become wholly oneself while retaining a sense of belonging. She outlines the five structural blueprints that characterize most families' patterns of being and relating, taking us inside intimate family worlds at each of these five levels of health and development [as described by the superb Beavers Systems Model Scale]: A destructive dysfunctional family, typified by lies, secrets, chaos, doublespeak, confusion and powerlessness. A borderline family, where minimum order over chaos is maintained by a petty tyrant. A midrange family [60% of families], where life is somewhat productive yet "close, loyal" members are controlled from within by an internalized guilt-producing abuser holding members prisoner inside "a good family" and anyone else "different and bad" and "threatening" outside of it. An adequately productive but ultimately enmeshed midrange family. An optimal family, where flexibility and reality-based coherence flow in honest, individuating balance for all deeply authentic, highly individual and independent yet authentically intimate unique members -- who take great joy and delight in each other's unique personalities and achievements, glasses half full not half empty. Changing unproductive and destructive patterns is the goal of the illuminating insights and exercises Scarf presents. ~~

Ms. Scarf presented various case studies of families in various orders of emotional disarray and distress, and provides solutions to patterns that develop in families. Her categories are helpful and she makes us rethink our behavior in the family setting- how are we hurting the ones we love?