Take our Family Estrangement Test for the Adult Child

Find a Family Therapy Therapist

Belonging and agency are two essential human needs that work best as partners.

In a win-lose world, belonging can harden into compliance, and agency can go rogue.

Relationships built on mutuality make it safer to belong and to still speak up.

Maren brought a blue folder to the shareholder meeting and never opened it.

Inside were eleven pages Maren had spent most of the spring writing: a plan to take the family’s distribution business into a market her father had dismissed twice. She knew the numbers and was clear on the opportunity. She had walked the plan past two outside advisors, who deliberately poked holes in it before they confirmed it was sound. She set the folder on the table next to her coffee, listened to her brother go through the quarterly results, laughed at her uncle’s joke about the weather, and drove home with the folder on the passenger seat.

When she told me about it weeks later, she said she felt like an outcast. She had spent the meeting silently worrying that her family would shun her for what they’d see as a challenge to loyalty. Meanwhile everyone carried on with no idea what she was thinking and treated her as completely included. That was what confused her.

I’ve thought about her dilemma ever since. Maren described something I see in my practice all the time, especially with people in family businesses. Acceptance from the people who........

© Psychology Today