Black Sheep

Dysfunctional family systems, queer folks, and why the holidays generally suck

Envy Adams Ⓒ 2010 Bryan Lee O’Malley and Universal Pictures. Used under fair use.

It’s two days before Christmas. I’m at my mother-in-law’s house, typing away on my laptop next to her Christmas tree in an embroidered red dress. I am, by a fair margin, the most feminine person in the house.

While she’ll never admit it, my femininity makes her uncomfortable, and that discomfort has been increasing as my transition has progressed. MIL is a t-shirt-and-jeans sort of gal, and having a trans woman visibly out-womaning her grates on her at a deep level. It’s taken me a couple of visits to her to realize this. It doesn’t make much sense to me; B— is a t-shirt-and-jeans sort of gal too, and never had trouble like this.

But MIL’s family Does Not Talk About Important Things. Her house, her rules. So, I’ve been taking up little space, being quiet, and working. Grey rocking her, as my therapist would say, a new strategy for the holidays this year. I’m not really here for her anyway, I’m here to see my nieces, my brother- and sister-in-law, so I’m hoping a little distance and disengagement will settle things down between me and MIL.

My sister-in-law’s family arrives, a flurry of chill Minnesota wind and squealing girls and brightly-wrapped packages—and an extra woman, tall and blonde and bundled against the cold, one I haven’t met before.

“This is [Redacted],” my SIL says from behind her. “She’s the French exchange teacher at the girls’ school I told you about.”

“Welcome,” MIL says, hugging her without asking. From my perch on the couch, I see surprise and discomfort flash across her eyes, there and gone in a moment, before MIL moves on to hug her daughter. I see the exchange teacher settle herself now that MIL has moved on, unzipping her parka and taking it off.

But then, MIL silently spins in place and seizes the poor woman’s arms from behind, leans in, and screams in her ear, a burst of sudden sound out of nowhere. The teacher’s eyes bug out and our eyes lock as MIL releases her and laughs at the exchange teacher’s sudden panic. I try to communicate my wordless sympathy as MIL laughs, well past sixty years old, at her high school prank.

She does this regularly.

To everyone.

Including me.

I have CPTSD, specifically from people shouting at me. I’ve begged her over and over to stop, to leave me alone, that what she does hurts me, for twenty years now.

She always yells at me when I do.

---

It’s Christmas Eve.

I’m writing again, and while the house has turned into a cacophony with four young girls, eight adults, two cats, and a golden retriever in it, my fancy new noise-canceling headphones deadening everything to a whisper. MIL hasn’t been able to sneak up on me since the day I got here as I keep my perch, back to the wall, writing and writing and writing away. I haven’t given her the opportunity.

She’s making lunch for the crew, and the kitchen is a bustle of women. My wife assembles salami florets at the kitchen table, the two nieces old enough to help cut veggies under the careful supervision of my brother-in-law’s wife, my sister-in-law stirs and combines dips for the charcuterie, and MIL bustles around at the heart of everything.

I’d offered to help with the cooking as soon as she’d opened the refrigerator door to get the first ingredients out, as I have every meal for the last twenty years. As she always has, MIL refused and banished me from the kitchen, despite my repeated offers of help. Meal prep is one of the only times she never ambushes anyone.

You see, only women are allowed in the kitchen to cook.

She’s… “accepting.” For some value of accepting.

I’m always invited to family events, there’s always a place at the table for me. She gets my name right. She hasn’t misgendered me in about a year and a half. She says she’s emphatically for trans rights and trans equality. But she makes her discomfort with me known, always, in the little things like this. So, I sit and write, and eventually I eat, and the day passes slowly.

Only a few more days until I can go home.

In the darkness of our bedroom that night, after gifts and a mandatory-participation, whole-family, Harry Potter-themed housewide scavenger hunt, B— tells me that night that she started misgendering me regularly that afternoon, loudly. And looking over at me every time she did it, fishing for a reaction she never got.

Guess she didn’t really understand what the “noise-canceling” part meant. I didn’t heard a word of it.

---

There’s a Christmas Morning tradition in my wife’s family: everyone’s gifts are opened on Christmas Eve, and then stockings are stuffed overnight “by Santa.” It’s never anything significant—candy treats and maybe a small kitchen gadget, that sort of thing. Just a nice little delight to wake up to.

Holding B—’s hand, I leave our bedroom in my pajamas as four little girls squeal about Santa and the stockings. The adults smile knowingly at each other as we assemble on the couch, beholding row after row of stockings. I’m still bleary with sleep, having been woken early by the girls, so I snuggle B— and doze a bit as everyone else assembles their coffees and themselves.

Finally, after about ten minutes, the girls are released upon the stockings, to deliver them to their recipients before they’re allowed to open theirs. One drops off B—’s stocking, chocolate peeking out the top. Another gives a bulging stocking to the exchange teacher. A third drops one off for the dog, a red squeaky toy falling to the ground and immediately set upon by the eager pup. And then the oldest of my nieces walks up to me, hesitantly, holding the last stocking. My stocking. Her distress is plain on her face, brows knit in confusion and fear.

Because my stocking is empty. Utterly empty.

Only my stocking is empty.

“Go open your stocking,” I say with forced cheer as I take it without any fuss. I don’t give MIL the satisfaction of a glance her way. I’m sure she’s watching for the reaction she hasn’t gotten from me since I arrived.

Inside, though? Inside, I rage, that this woman enlisted a child to act out her passive-aggressive disapproval of me, to make sure everyone in the household knew, saw, understood. That she wouldn’t talk to me like a goddamned adult about her problems. That she refused to listen when I tried to mend fences over and over.

We leave that afternoon, “ahead of an ice storm.” Everyone knows why we’re really leaving. Nobody says a word about it. After all, MIL’s family Does Not Talk About Important Things. The French exchange teacher’s eyes lock with mine as B— and I hug the family goodbye one by one, and I see the sadness and horror in her eyes that nobody else has the courage to acknowledge.

I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law since. I don’t intend for that to change.

Family systems

It seems… pretty ludicrous, when I lay it all out like that, huh? Just, the sheer scale and scope of passive-aggression, the casual disrespect—you’d expect that kind of bullying from a mean girl in high school, but not a grandmother in her sixties. And you’d expect any of the six adults in the house who weren’t me or my wife—and it should be noted that B— tried, unsuccessfully, to rally her siblings to my defense—to call out this behavior, which they definitely wouldn’t have tolerated in any of the four little girls in the house.

So… what the hell gives? And, worse yet: why, am I guessing, does this sort of family dynamic sound awfully familiar to a lot of you?

Before we can get to an explanation that makes sense, I’ve got to lay a little groundwork first.

First, we need to start with a basic principle in psychology: people act rationally as they perceive the world. If they seem like they’re acting in a bizarre or outrageous way, you’re just not understanding the rationale for their actions. Now, that doesn’t mean that that rationale is fair or kind, but there is always an A—>B—>C chain of thought going on in there. This even applies in really extreme cases, like when people are experiencing command hallucinations.

Remember: if it seems irrational, you just don’t understand the rationale.

Second, in this article we’re going to be talking about a type of complex system: the family. Now, systems can be part of the natural world or something people make, but what makes a system a system, for our purposes, are these things:

1. Every system has at least one input and at least one output. In other words, they take something, transform it and, in transforming it, make something different.

   1. A good example everyone should know is the food web. Sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are used by plants to grow, which are eaten by animals, which are in turn eaten by other animals, all of whose remains feed fungi, which free up nutrients that more plants can use to grow later.

2. Systems have a bunch of different pieces inside of them which each affect the input in different ways. Sometimes they act alone, and sometimes they cooperate with other parts of the system.

3. There can be subsystems inside a larger system (and sub-subsystems inside those subsystems).

4. Systems usually produce, at least in part, whatever it is that they need to keep the system as a whole going.

5. Systems can adapt to unexpected additions, either by folding them into themselves or to expelling them.

   1. A great example of this is that when early cellular life absorbed mitochondria, a symbiotic relationship between them where two forms of life became one.

6. Finally: in any human-made system, anything that that system produces, even when it seems undesirable, is an intentional creation of that system.

   1. A good example of this is medical bankruptcies in America. Our healthcare system causes bankruptcy in almost half of everyone diagnosed with a major illness within about three years, which seems horrible—but by doing so, insurance companies and for-profit hospital systems make lots of money. So, those medical bankruptcies are not only an intentional creation of our healthcare system, they’re the expected output of it.

Still with me? Cool. Let’s talk about family systems.

A family system is what we get when members of a family put emotional energy into their shared interactions to care for each other, learn, ask for help—all the good and normal stuff a family does. One very simple version of this is when a parent helps a young child learn their first words. That parent puts lots of emotional energy into loving and nurturing the baby, celebrating their growth, and encouraging them to become more and more verbal.

It gets more complicated as more people get added to the system, and as the members become more equal and with less simply-defined goals. Let’s say there’s another family with two parents and two young children—five and nine years old, respectively. The parents both want to raise their kids to be happy and healthy, but they don’t always agree on how that should happen. Say, one believes in a sterner, more discipline-focused approach, while the other prefers a more lassez-faire, hands-off approach. For clarity: neither of these approaches is inherently right or wrong.

Those parents come into conflict again and again, a power struggle to decide what’s best for the kids. That power struggle consumes some of the emotional energy put into the family unit, turning it into conflict which the kids observe. In turn, the older child learns that loud arguments are how one person solves a disagreement with another, and starts yelling at their younger sibling when the five-year-old (very understandably) doesn’t do what the nine-year-old wants.

It’s an “undesirable” product of that system, but it’s both predictable and expected. It’s what that particular system is built to do, and until the system itself gets changed—say, by the parents agreeing to move their arguments behind closed doors and owning their errors to the kids, or seeking couples counseling to resolve their struggles—that product will keep getting made and reinforced.

A good, healthy family system is pretty simple, in principle: parents put a lot of different kinds of emotional energy into nurturing and supporting their children, in a one-way, caregiving parent-child relationship that lasts the entirety of the parent’s life. The product of that system is growing, resilient, capable children, who become adults, and are treated with respect and increasingly as equals to their parents as they grow. When people come into conflict, which is normal and healthy, they listen to each other and try to grow together.

Dysfunctional family systems, on the other hand, are usually built around children having to either be caregivers to their parents, or the dumping-ground for the “undesirable” things that the family system produces.

Family Dysfunction

Probably Tolstoy’s most famous line is this: “all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The reality is, mostly, the opposite.

Happy, healthy family systems exist in a huge spread of different configurations. Some have one parent, some have a whole clan. Some cluster around shared interests, some celebrate the difference of each member. They’re weird and sonderful and joyous and supportive in all the best ways.

Dysfunctional family systems are, sadly, pretty consistent—and, the more we’ve researched dysfunctional family systems over the years, the simpler and more consistent that dysfunction turns out to be.

First, we need to define emotionally immaturity. What’s emotional maturity? Simple—the ability to confront, talk about, and meet both the emotional needs both of yourself and of those you care about without treating one as inherently more important than the other. In other words, the ability to talk and listen openly and honestly, and use those talks to balance what folks want and need from the family system. An emotionally immature person, on the other hand, is someone who can’t consistently regulate their own emotional state, which is just a complicated way of saying that they can’t manage their anger, joy, sadness, need for attention, and so forth. Because they can’t, they use other people as sort of external emotional hard drives that they can plug in to to get that emotional regulation.

So, start with a parent who’s emotionally immature. They turn to the family system to extract some sort of emotional energy from it, but they put their emotional needs above the needs of some or all of the rest of the family system. When there are kids who are part of the system, the most common way that they do this is by using the kids to provide for their emotional needs, rather than the other way around. There are a few very common roles that that parent can force their kid into when this happens:

1. The Golden Child/Mastermind: When a parent wants or needs to live vicariously through their children, they might hold up one child above the others as an example to be admired and/or followed. A golden child works hard to live up to their parent’s expectations, even when those expectations are impossible. A mastermind, on the other hand, recognizes that their parent is living vicariously through them and turns their parents’ emotional immaturity into a weapon that they can wield to get whatever they want both inside and outside of the family. The two are, basically, mirror images of each other.

2. The Mascot responds to tense family situations with humor, or is the butt of family jokes and pranks, to distract people from the family’s problems and allow them to pretend that they’re not as bad as they are.

3. The Parentified Child may be the most harmful role for a child to get trapped in, as they’re required to help manage their parents’ lives and emotional stability for them. This not only disrupts the caregiving relationship that’s supposed to exist between parents and children, it fully reverses it. It’s especially damaging because a child is not physically able—we’re talking in terms of brain structures here—to handle the emotional and practical complexity that the parent is demanding that they handle.

When a child refuses to take on one of these roles, is unable to live up to them, or challenges their emotionally immature parent’s behavior openly, there are usually only two outcomes for that person:

1. The Lost Child, unable to meet the emotional needs of their parent, often because they’re highly sensitive or neurodivergent, withdraws from the family system as much as they physically can—and this withdrawal is tacitly endorsed by the family system, which withdraws most of their emotional investment from the child.

2. The Black Sheep, on the other hand, becomes the scapegoat for all of the family’s problems. They’re assigned the blame for the family’s problems, and are often punished severely for them—a whipping-boy or -girl. Typically, they’re made into the black sheep simply because they speak the truth about their family’s problems out loud. That act of exposure disrupts the emotionally immature parent’s ability to control the rest of the family system and extract the emotional energy they need from it, and as such it absolutely cannot be tolerated.

More important, though, is the function that lost children and black sheep serve for a dysfunctional family system: they’re the permanent example that the emotionally immature person in control of the family system can use to keep everyone else in it in line. “Side with me or you’ll be made into another scapegoat.” “Don’t fight back or you’ll be expelled from the family entirely.”

Their existence becomes an explicit threat to the rest of their family. It’s entirely rational, and incredibly cruel.

And no, there’s no way out.

Once someone’s been scapegoated or exiled, accepting them back would require the emotionally immature person in control of their family to admit not only that they’d been wrong about something massive, but that the black sheep had ultimately been right, fully reversing the power hierarchy. They’d have to surrender control over the entire family system, which would mean their emotionally immature needs would no longer get met.

Because then everyone else could stand up to them without consequence.

What dysfunction becomes

Whew. That’s a lot of really heavy stuff. Let’s break it down into something a little more bite-sized.

To be a good parent, someone needs to be really grown up, and a lot of parents aren’t really ready when they do become parents. Some buckle down, do a lot of growing. Others, instead, keep on doing what they’ve always been doing, except to their kids and partners. When their behavior gets challenged, instead of being mature and reasonable about it, they lash out at the person—usually the kid—so they don’t have to face their own emotional immaturity, and either expel them from the family or project the blame for their behavior onto that kid.

What does it look like, in practice? “You’re just too sensitive.” “It was only a joke.” “Be a man.” “Who do you think you are?” “I guess I was just the world’s worst parent, then, huh?” Power flexes, and the parent never accepts the blame for their own actions.

But here’s the thing: asking someone to stop hurting you, in a measured, reasonable way that respects their autonomy? That requires emotional maturity. Holding a boundary and separating yourself from a person who regularly hurts you? That requires emotional maturity.

And emotional maturity is hard.

When Tolstoy claimed that every unhappy family is different, he missed the central truth that all dysfunctional families share: in a dysfunctional family, the only person whose needs are consistently met is the one with the most power. Everybody else is hurting. All the time.

That golden child? Those impossible expectations usually turn into a hard-to-shake, omnipresent anxiety, and a sense that nothing they do will ever be enough. They struggle to celebrate their own achievements, and are prone to burnout and emotional collapse.

The mascot? Usually ends up in codependent relationships, minimizing their own emotional needs. Their forced humor puts them at higher risk for depression, and their elevation of others’ needs above theirs puts them at higher risk for the worst outcomes from serious physical illnesses, because they frequently delay treatment when they’re feeling bad.

The parentified child? Struggles to make secure, lasting attachments, leading to a string of broken friendships and failed partnerships. When their parent had frequent emotional outbursts, they’re at higher risk for CPTSD. If they’re neurodivergent too, they often find themselves prone to burnout as adults.

And the consequences for the black sheep or the lost child? All of the above, at higher rates than any of the individual roles, plus more. They’re the darkest, really. A grim punishment for being the person in the family who had their shit most together.

Paper-thin veneers

Holidays bring dysfunctional families into a high-stakes version of their everyday reality, where a big event that everyone is expected to participate in demands emotional investment even from whose reluctant to buy back in. All the roles that the family grew into are doubled-down-on, traditions are emphasized, and people are told to knuckle under and subsume their own emotional needs “for the family.” The Racist Uncle gets to say whatever he wants at Thanksgiving, while everyone else is expected to “not talk politics.” Mom holds up her Golden Son’s middling achievements while ignoring everyone else’s.

And yes, my mother-in-law gets to commit childish, high school-grade acts of casual harassment on whoever she wants so that she can delight in their pain and fear.

The “happiness” of a dysfunctional family is almost always a paper-thin veneer, something that the emotionally immature person with power over the rest of the family projects because their needs are being met. And everyone else, including (and maybe especially) the adult kids?

Well, they grew up with it all. It seems normal.

Most of them think that this is just what a happy family is like.

I was made into a black sheep by my mother-in-law because I refused to play the mascot to her emotional immaturity. And when I asked her to stop in calm, measured conversations, again and again over the course of decades, she only ever escalated, because my refusal to play that role meant that she was not extracting the emotional energy from me that she wanted in the way that she wanted. And my needs? To hell with whatever my needs were. She wanted my emotional energy, at any cost.

Emotional energy she felt entitled to.

So she made me into the family’s black sheep, until I removed myself.

Why holidays suck for us

When lost children grow up, they generally don’t go home for holidays, and with very good reason. Black sheep, on the other hand, usually try to maintain those family ties, so every time we head back in for the holidays, we step back into that tired old scapegoat role—one where, the more we fight to be treated decently, the more sharply and loudly we get dumped on.

If you’re reading this far, I’d be willing to bet money that you’re your family’s black sheep. And that you dread family holidays every year.

This is why.

You’re being used—made an example of—to keep the rest of the family feeding emotional energy into the least-well-emotionally-regulated person in the family.

Yes, it is intentional.

No, it’s not because you’re broken or wrong.

Yes, it probably is because of your queerness, at least in part. If you’re queer, the odds are pretty good that you’re not the only queer person in your family, whether anyone else will admit it or not. After all, somewhere between 30-50% of transness is genetically heritable, and sexuality is similarly tied to your genetics. Those genes came from somewhere.

And that’s the point. Control. Unending, never-challenged control.

I wish I had advice for you, the way I normally do in my articles. Some sort of way to finesse or reframe the problem, to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. The problem here is that you can’t change anyone else. They have to want to change, of their own accord.

The best you can do is understand them, in my experience, because understanding where their immaturity is coming from and what needs they’re serving takes most of the sting out of their attempts to control and hurt you.

And work to heal. It’s never too late to heal your hurts.

Even though that’s a crappy price to pay for someone else’s bad behavior.

That’s not to say that the people who’ve been hurting you can’t or won’t ever change. They definitely can. People can grow into emotional maturity at any age. But that decision has to come from them, for their own reasons. It can’t come from you. It can’t come from the emotionally immature person’s spouse, their parentified child, their mascot—even the golden child can’t make them change.

But the emotionally immature person has to want something better. They have to want to take accountability for who they’ve been and what they’ve done. It’s a hard thing, owning that much pain and failure. Many people don’t, and it’s not a surprise; emotionally immature people are emotionally immature because they’re not taking responsibility for their own emotional state and the actions that state spurs them to take.

Some do. Not many. But some.

Like I said, emotional maturity is hard.

So, in this darkest and coldest time of the year, be gentle with yourself. Gather up your found family, where you can. And even when there’s a hole in the heart from all the family love and care that you deserved and didn’t get, remember:

You’re still beautiful.

And none of this is your fault.