It Runs in the Family: Character Building and Transgenerational Therapy

The Ancestor Syndrome by
Anne Ancelin Schützenberger

I recently read Anne Ancelin Schützenberger’s book The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree (*Amazon affiliate link in case this post makes you want to read the book yourself). Not my usual type of reading material! This book was mentioned in passing in another book I read for a university course years ago. The concepts discussed in the book sounded fascinating, and I’ve been meaning to read it for years.

As a non-fiction book intended for psychotherapists, it’s not the easiest read to a lay person, but I did gather from it some interesting insights that I found helpful as an author. This book inspired me to dig deeper into how family dynamics and transgenerational traumas affect the characters I’m developing and writing. In this blog post, I’m sharing some of the insights I learned from the book.

Note: I am not a doctor or a therapist or in any way an expert in transgenerational therapy. This blog post is simply intended as a tool to help writers create fictional characters. Please do not use it for diagnostic purposes. Also, this is a very brief introduction to this topic. If you want to use these ideas when building your characters, please do your own research.

 

What Is Transgenerational Therapy?

So what is The Ancestor Syndrome about, and what is transgenerational therapy? Anne Ancelin Schützenberger (1919–2018) was a pioneer in the field of transgenerational therapy and one of the founders of Anne Ancelin Schützenberger International School of Transgenerational Therapy. Transgenerational therapy is based on the notion that unprocessed traumatic events can manifest themselves in subsequent generations: The trauma that people experience affects their children and grandchildren. According to the School of Transgenerational Therapy, “We repeat what we don’t repair.” Psychological challenges can thus be repeated in painful cycles over generations. Transgenerational therapy aims to break these cycles by helping the client reflect on the parallels between their own life and the lives of their ancestors.

 

What Use Is This Theory for a Writer?

Along with several other writers, I would argue that psychology in general is extremely helpful for writers, as it helps you understand people, their motivations and behavior better. For more, read these blog posts by The Write Practice and Writers Helping Writers. Transgenerational therapy looks at how people’s ancestors and families affect them, and how trauma is not limited to the person who experiences it but can affect later generations as well. Transgenerational therapy can thus help us understand how we are all the products of our past. For a writer, that can mean using the theory to develop the character’s backstory and motivations, or to think about how the problems and conflicts the characters are facing stem from their family and ancestors.

You can use the concepts to brainstorm how family relationships and dynamics affect the characters. What conflicts arise in dysfunctional families? How does the family background affect the character’s relationships with other people, at work or in romantic relationships? These questions help you understand character’s motivations and behavior better, and help you build a more interesting (and conflict-ridden) backstory. Using these concepts may make the characters’ current conflicts more believable, as they are rooted in their childhood and background.

Here are four concepts Schützenberger discusses in her book.

1) Loyalty and Family Accounting

Schützenberger talks about family “book-keeping” as a way of gauging the justice or injustice of family affairs. For example, if one member of the family gets the inheritance, the house, money, or any item considered consequential, this may lead to a felt injustice that the injured party remembers and reminds others of, possibly for generations. On the other hand, if one family member helps others in times of need, this debt may stay in the family until it’s paid off, possibly after generations – such as a grandchild of the helped family member returning the favor to a grandchild of the helper.

Family loyalty extends to family secrets, things that should be kept in the family. But while the secret cannot be spoken of, even in the family, it simultaneously cannot be forgotten – it is as though the members of the family simultaneously cannot forget and are forbidden to remember. These suppressed emotions lead to an “illness of secrets,” which manifests itself through averted gaze, sudden outburst of anger, and slips of the tongue. Schützenberger notes that “we experience unspoken things with more ease and comfort when they are named and spoken about.” Unspoken secrets and unspoken truths become a more serious trauma in the long run.

 

2) Crypt and Phantom

In its extreme, family secret can become a “phantom” that haunts the family, emerging from its “crypt” within one family member. The concepts of phantom and crypt originally come for Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Török’s 1978 study. The secret is often a death that is difficult to accept or an event which is considered “shameful,” such as bankruptcy, imprisonment, mental illness, suicide, adultery, or incest. The family refuses to speak about the event or the person who has disgraced the family, leaving a phantom or a ghost hidden or poorly buried as if in a crypt within a family member (the crypt-carrier). Eventually, this phantom emerges from the crypt and manifests itself after one or two generations. This manifestation, the haunting, is the phantom’s return in the form of uncalled for acts and words – as if the crypt-carrier was a ventriloquist speaking and acting in the place of the shunned and forgotten person. The secret the family has tried to bury thus continues to affect the relationships in the family for generations.

 

3) Double Bind

Double bind refers to a situation where a person is confronted with two or more conflicting messages that contradict each other. This message verbally affirms one thing while at the same time expressing through, for example, body language something completely different, such as a parent saying that they love the child while corporally punishing them or encouraging the child to express emotions freely but mocking or chastising those emotions. Double bind can also be an order, but you must disobey it in order to obey it (e.g., “go out with your friends” when the real message is “clean your room”). Double bind creates a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, where whatever decision you make, it’s the wrong one. This can lead to low self-esteem, stress, confusion, and emotional and psychological issues in the long run.

Childhood with a parent who uses double bind messages can affect a person’s future relationships. They may start using the same double bind strategy later in life, leading to communication problems in adult relationships, whether at work, in romantic relationships, or with their children. Or it might lead to inability to trust that a partner is saying what they mean, even if the partner has completely open and honest communication style. Within romantic relationships, the double bind can lead to feelings of resentment toward a partner or learned helplessness.

 

4) Parentification

Another concept related to parent-child relationships is parentification. Parentification refers to a situation where a child or adolescent becomes the parent of their own parents and is obliged to take care of the family. Instrumental parentification involves making the child perform physical tasks such as cooking or cleaning to an extent that is not appropriate for their age or is overly burdensome (e.g., prevents the child from going to school). Emotional parentification means that the child has to take on developmentally inappropriate support roles, such as becoming a confidante in the parent’s romantic relationships or a mediator and a peacemaker between parents or other family members.

Parentification can lead to behavioral problems, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, and it is also linked to eating disorders in young women. As a result, parentified children may develop a so-called Atlas personality, feeling like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. This may lead to compulsive caregiving and inability to assert their own needs later in life. On the other hand, if parentification is temporary or not a heavy burden, parentification may also enhance empathy, altruism and responsibility.

 

Final Thoughts

Hopefully you found these concepts as interesting as I did! I’ve already written a short story (unpublished as of yet) based on the concepts of crypt and phantom, and when reading The Ancestor Syndrome I realized I clearly have at least one character who seems to have been parentified as a child and has an Atlas personality. I can definitely see myself coming back to these concepts whenever I want to write dysfunctional family dynamics.

Let me know in the comments if you found this blog post helpful! Do any of the concepts mentioned here ring a bell when you think about characters you’ve already developed?

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