I am not a mental health professional, but given the track record of that profession it only undermines my authority on this subject about as much as saying that I am also not a Ouija board. If you want the perspective of the mental health industry I’ll give it to you: your problem is that you want to bonk your mom. No matter what it is: insomnia, nervous tics, the fear of paper clips — yep, you want to do your mom. Freud said so. OK, I might be oversimplifying a bit. There is more, it could also be your wounded Inner Child, I almost forgot about that one. You might need to repeat some affirmations. Here are some good affirmations: “I am worthy of more than hocus-pocus psychology” and “I am mature enough to handle the plain truth without therapist manipulations and psychobabble.”

Now that we’ve dispensed with modern psychology, let me, a true expert by virtue of intimate experience, elucidate for you just exactly how dysfunctional families work. First, you start with at least one, but most likely two, parents who are koo-koo. More precisely, their families are dysfunctional, and they have been indoctrinated into the family mythology.

Keep in mind that as a child, your family is your whole world, and you know nothing else. So when, oh let’s say, your mother’s side of the family pretends they are descended from royalty, a cut above, clearly better than their crass lower middle class neighbors who don’t even have the decency to cover their living room furniture in plastic year round … well, you buy into it. Or, when your father’s side of the family is proud country folk who have keenly penetrated the truth that education is just a way for lazy people to avoid honest work — that has a lasting impact. The dysfunctional family works ceaselessly to reinforce these types of ideas, and soon we will see why.

So as a kid, you enter crazy world. Your family is barely even middle class, but your mother walks around with her nose in the air like the Queen of England. She saves the boxes from Macy’s so that she can package her K-Mart bought gifts with a touch of class. You watch your own sister start putting on airs at a very young age, cherishing a doll that was made of real porcelain … well, at least the face was. It was a high class doll, not just some plastic piece of junk. You watch your father try to win the approval of his bumpkin family, who seem embarrassed that he is a teacher, which is a woman’s job after all. Why couldn’t he be more like his brother, who worked for the telephone company wiring up homes, or his other brother who was a brick layer? Why did he have to embarrass the family by refusing to do real work? Why couldn’t he be a real man?

OK, never mind these completely random examples that just happen to be an exact description of my family. Most of us grew up with some form of crazy. It was up to our naive yet powerful human brains to make sense of a lot of loopy and often contradictory information. The human brain simply MUST make sense of the world, it is imperative for survival. So it does. How does it make sense of crazy? That’s right, it makes YOU crazy. Putting cheaper gifts in Macy’s boxes becomes a normal, even a good thing to do. It isn’t insane or dishonest at all. You are just trying to make the world a better place and add a little class to what might otherwise appear to be a shoddy little life. If your well-educated father is obsessed with sports, physical fitness, and being a macho man, quietly and sometimes not so quietly expressing his disappointment with his nerdy, weakling son, who was pretty much EXACTLY LIKE HIM … well OK, says the human brain, we must be ashamed of our lack of physical prowess, we must overcome it! In this world, using brainpower is lazy and dishonest. Got it.

So, there it is. A kid from a lower middle class family must be high class while wearing poorly sewn homemade shirts made from orange and green bargain bin fabric. An intellectual, scrawny kid must avoid books and education as much as possible to pursue athletic glory. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well I failed, and failed hard. This probably didn’t do my Inner Child any good at all. But maybe the bigger problem was how my family responded. After all, had I been dusted off, treated kindly, and perhaps advised to just be myself and maybe pursue a more fitting sport, like badminton, or had it been suggested that I was a smart kid and maybe I should look into taking advantage of that – well, then I wouldn’t have had a dysfunctional family.   Unfortunately, when you fail in a dysfunctional family it is because you are a failure. Yes, I embarrassed the family. I failed to be high class macho man. I wasn’t who I needed to be: Bond, James Bond.

Yes, my mother’s family was certain, in their fake furs and factory seconds of expensive clothing, that they had fooled the world, but I was just an embarrassment who would eat my entire dinner with a salad fork. For my father I played football and got broken bones. I boxed and got punched out. I ignored my school work and hung around with blue collar tough guys, who never accepted me because I was such a dork and a pansy. It was so bad that a few kind souls tried to pull me aside and talk to me, but I didn’t want their observations. Telling me that I was a trying to be something I wasn’t, and ignoring my actual strengths, was not going to help me become accepted in my own family. I knew what I had to do. I had to be the exact opposite of myself!

But why, oh why must dysfunctional families be this way? Well, what I noticed is that in dysfunctional families, there are always a few at the top who ARE acceptable. Why are they acceptable? Because they are controlling the family mythology! They decide that to be acceptable one must be high class, and by whatever delusion necessary, they meet this criterion, BUT YOU DON’T. Or they decide that to be acceptable one must be a good honest country boy, but by being too educated and wearing loafers instead of work boots YOU FAIL. The dynamics of the dysfunctional family aren’t designed to make sense, they are designed to boost the self-esteem of the controlling few at the expense of everyone else. Basically it is a clique of bullies dominating a group that nobody really chose to be in, just like in high school. One of the notions these bullies push the hardest is the importance of family, and family must always stick together, and you must always forgive your family and keep going to family gatherings no matter what.  Yes, family is like high school, only you must attend forever!

Did you notice how I have simply and accurately explained how dysfunctional families hijack impressionable young minds and make people crazy, all without claiming that anyone secretly desires to do the horizontal boogie with their parents? It wasn’t some sin or any kind of subliminal desire on your part that caused you harm, it was being indoctrinated in cult-like fashion into a system intentionally designed to destroy your self-esteem. You didn’t decide to reject yourself – the controllers of your dysfunctional family rejected you to make themselves feel elevated. They raised themselves up, and put you down. It would seem this game has been passed down through countless generations. Unlike healthy families, in dysfunctional families success is defined as something other than being what you are, and instead you must be something unobtainable, or even imaginary, particularly since those doing the judging have a vested interest in your failure.

In the cruel system of the dysfunctional family, some cope, like the women my mother’s family, by pretense and self-delusion. My aunt, the Queen Bee anointed as the judge of what was high class, was the only one who was never outside of the inner circle. The others had to strive to be like her and curry favor. In my father’s family, where his older siblings set the standard for being honest country folk, my father and his younger siblings coped by living out in the middle of nowhere in country style homes, waiting year after year for the family to all gather at their house – the prized seal of acceptance. This only happened once or twice, and nobody stayed very long, which was a sign of rejection.

As for how I cope, I’m going to go have a martini, shaken, not stirred, and thwart an international crime syndicate while seducing a few supermodels.