An extract from the new book by bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel

The phrase “nuclear family”, meaning two married parents and their children, no longer fully describes the 19 million families who live in the United Kingdom. Families come in many forms: single-parent families, same-sex families, adopted families, extended families, polyamorous families, blended families, families with no children and families made up of friends in which there are no blood relationships.

In the past, a family’s central purpose and function was to raise children. A big shift has taken place socially in that more mothers are working and have fewer children.

Since we live longer, rearing children takes only half of our adult lifespan. We therefore live as adults in our family for much longer than we did in the past, carrying with us the burden or gifts from it. Every person living in these different models of family will have their unique response to them, which will be informed by their genetics, environment and experience.

I wanted to look beneath the skin of some of these types of families to find out what went on and to ask questions: what is it that enables some families to thrive despite enormous adversity when others fragment? What predicts family breakdown? Why do our families drive us mad?

This book aims to explore those questions and deepen our understanding of them. It isn’t about how to raise perfect families. They don’t exist. Families operate on a spectrum of dysfunction and function depending on internal and external stressors.

Instead, I tell the stories of the lived experience of eight families as they face a particular challenge, charting them through multiple generations. The level of influence of one generation on the next is often underestimated. The unresolved stressors of one generation can be passed down to intensify the daily pressures of life for the next.

Families are in constant flux, which is why they are so complicated and why they are such hard work. While the older generation is facing old age, their adult children are dealing with their own offspring leaving home, and those young people are adapting to and stepping into adulthood.

Nowadays what was seen as the normative four-stage life cycle – establishment (marriage), expansion (children), contraction (children leaving home), dissolution (partner dies) – is by no means the case for everyone. Relationships often end in divorce, children choose not to leave home or return home after some years, or perhaps there are no children.

We see from the stories that follow that at times families need to pull together, and at others to step back. It is this dance – the moving in and out as a family, seeking harmony while allowing for differences – that supports stability.

I am fascinated by families for good reason: families matter. Family is the single most important influence on a child’s life and their outcome. They carry that reliable love into adulthood, as it strengthens their emotional, physical and spiritual well-being, which enables them to live a happy, healthy and productive life.

At its best, family is the safe place where we can be our whole selves, with all of our frailties and fault-lines, and still be loved and deeply understood. Ideally, it is a place where the roots of our development are fully known, the atmosphere we grew up in acknowledged.

At the centre of our well-being is relationship. The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our relationships. As a therapist informed by the attachment theories of John Bowlby, I see that all our “relational stuff” began with our family. It is the centre of how we learn to relate to each other and how we manage emotions in every aspect of our lives – ourselves, love, friendship, work – as well as family.

The basis of our beliefs and values is programmed into us through our family, whether we follow or rebel against that family system. Most importantly, we gain our sense of our own value from our family: we come innately to believe we are of worth, or not.

When they are “good enough”, as Donald Winnicott, the eminent paediatrician and psychoanalyst, termed it, families form the bedrock of our lives, a foundation that keeps us steady when we face the brickbats of life. When functioning well, we can turn to our family in adversity, and for team support. When the external world feels fractured and alienating, home and family can be a refuge to heal and rebuild our strength.

We may not see our family, but they are still part of us, genetically, in our memories and our unconscious. We can never leave them, as we can a partner or a friendship.

This is an extract from Every Family Has a Story: How We Inherit Love and Loss by Julia Samuel (Penguin, £13.94). Buy a copy here.

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