By Emily Dzioba
Talia’s post is a tough blog to follow, right? The girl can WRITE! But I would also like to go to grad school, so I’m hopping on board with these posts and claiming some words of my own. I am also realizing you haven’t heard me talk as much as Talia, so let me just say it’s a pleasure to meet you here (again).
My approach to these blogs is to share my “shower thoughts” after the episode; to point you in a direction that is intellectually connected to the work we’ve done, but also just to write think pieces. Those who know me in real life know I love to just gab and ruminate about concepts and facts and things, and now I have an audience beyond my friend group! I think it’s obvious Talia and I both have a propensity and passion for research (I wrote 10 pages of research for my Anton Chekhov episode, AKA something I’m not getting paid to do, just because I love the guy.) While I’ll be dropping references, this is a space I’m taking for me to coherently babble without the pressure of intense research. House rules established? Cool. Here we go.
I have three siblings: I am Emily, they are Christopher, Katherine, and Samantha-- or, if you spend time in our house, we become the monosyllabic “Em, Chris, Kat, and Sam”. If you listened to the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime episode, you already know my sister, Katie (Katherine). We’re all about three years apart, Sam and I having nine years between us despite looking like carbon copies of each other. Lots of ground covered, as we are a mid-twenties, early twenties, late teens, and mid-teens bunch. We all still live at home with our parents (Sam, Katie, and I actually even share a room), and despite COVID, we have managed to not kill each other yet... or honestly get into any big fights, now that I think of that. Gold stars for the whole team.
My bonds with my siblings are the most important relationships I have in my life. I have felt for a long time that they quite possibly take up the largest part of my heart. Among the years full of fun, pleasant, and happy memories, many past incidents of economic insecurity and circumstance have left us with a fierce pack bond- it often feels like it’s us against the world because it kinda is. One of my fantasies as a teenager was of having enough money and stability to buy my own place, with rooms for us all-- a place where they could visit me whenever they want, and we would keep all of the lights on in every room (because we could afford it), and play board games and just laugh together.
Times have changed for us somewhat, but the sentiment is still very strong.
In Curious Incident, one of the key themes in the piece is family. Katie and Talia took us on a lovely tour of all the twists and turns that the story has, but I don't think we delved too deep into this theme. Christopher’s father has been lying to him his entire life about his mother; not only is she not dead, but she is alive and living in London- soooo close by. That is a scenario that I could never put myself into, even in imagining it. I’m sure I would have experienced this aspect of the play and book very differently if I was an only child, a parent, a teenager, an adult older than I am now. But who I am when revisiting the story with Katie and Talia, a 24-year old woman with a fair share of life experiences in her tote bag, was so profoundly struck.
What lengths do we go to to take care of the people we love? What would we do to keep rumors and secrets and the harsh truths from them? At what point is our instinct to shelter and protect damaging?
In hand with that, one thing I’ve been thinking about more actively over the past few months is the concept of dysfunctional family dynamics and their intersection with trauma. Casual thoughts for the casual, sorta-working artist, right? Undoubtedly, being home full-time has exasperated many situations for many people; the time to be introspective and not be running around commuting and working three jobs has landed in my own lap. I recently followed Nisha Patel (@browngirltrauma) on Instagram, and her informative posts about trauma have been greatly affirming. Her personal practice focuses on Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families, as well as advocating for therapy and de-stigmatization of mental illness in South Asian families. While not entirely applicable to me, I deeply respect her professional insights, and really have appreciated the introspection she adds to my feed. Give her page a visit!
Now, I am totally not airing my family’s laundry on this blog, but the idea of dysfunction is something that I think is applicable to many relationships without us even realizing they may be out of whack.
Brown University (yes, we get #IvyLeague up here) has this great resource that describes all of these dynamics well. I would be remiss to try to reframe it, so I recommend just getting it from the horse’s mouth. I also really like what’s said here on Everyday Health. Even more can be found specifically on enmeshment and trauma bonding here. What’s barebones essential to know for the purposes of this post is that dysfunctional family dynamics are usually borne out of stressful environments: homes of addicts, abusers, uninvolved parents, rigidly controlling parents, uncommunicative parents, divorced parents. These environments create long-lasting effects on children such as:
Difficulty with emotional or sexual intimacy
Alcohol or drug abuse
Trust issues
Poor communication skills
Clinginess in relationships
Oversensitivity
Obsession with perfectionism
Feelings of abandonment or isolation
Feelings of powerlessness
Feelings of worthlessness
Sound familiar? Take a breath. It’s okay. A lot of us can connect with this. You’re not alone.
It takes a lot to break this cycle in our families, and subsequently ourselves. Even leaving these families physically or emotionally will not undo the damage done. It takes various techniques, known informally as reparenting, to begin the work in yourself. And lots of time. But often, putting the responsibility of “fixing” things on yourself makes it worse.
People don’t really change that much, no matter how much you ask.
It’s a good thing and a bad thing.
I was so shocked thinking my family was capable of having dysfunctional qualities. After all, don’t we love each other so much? Isn’t that what matters most? Isn't love something that can get us through anything? Reading the word “dysfunction” probably makes you feel associated emotions of some kind of failure- failure to be emotionally honest with each other, failure to be supportive, failure to cultivate an environment of openness and acceptance. Failure is bad! We must be bad if we have failed!
(Yet, I would argue getting caught up in having that “failure” mentality is counter-intuitive to growth... but again, not a therapist! My therapist has just done a good job shifting my mindset with me! Thanks, Rita!)
Circling back around to Curious Incident: In what world is creating such a huge lie to tell your son ever okay as parents? Seriously?! You can read more about the ethics of lying here, but you know where you stand on it already, don’t you? Because of this, there is never a time where the family dynamic between Christopher and his father is, by definition, functional. Everything is predicated on a lie, exasperating the already tenuous power balance of parent and child. I speculate the long-term effects that this trauma may have on Christopher, who is already engaging in the world in an emotionally different way. There’s also evidence in the book that implies more emotional and physical mistreatment at the hands of his parents. Yet, Christopher’s parents were probably operating from some kind of place of love, care, concern, and/or protection when coming up with this cover. An act of seriously misguided "love" resulted in a whole false reality that gets shaken up. That trust in his dad and newly-discovered-alive mom? Out the window. And we know Christopher, as a core trait, hates lying! He finds it physically impossible! How do you live with your parents after that?
And yet... isn’t Christopher’s mother not being present its own truth? Is it that big of a lie for his dad to tell after all? Is it a lie to say she’s dead when she is metaphorically dead to Christopher? Do lies really spiral that much outside of dramatic novel circumstances? Is it a kindness to have lied to him and just completely erased her? But then what about all of the affairs? Those discoveries are just as shocking… What I’m getting at here is, *maybe* *somewhere* in *some distant timeline* it was okay? Does it depend on the stakes we put on women to play the role of the “mother” and be a good mother? Does it depend on knowing your parents are flawed people and shedding the myth of idealization, comfort, and blind love?
One of the novel’s strengths is in the ambiguity of what is “right”. And Emily loves some moral ambiguity.
I think this novel is one story amongst many stories that share hard realities with us: Love isn’t always enough. Your family is not always your stellar support network. Families are made up of imperfect people, usually trying their best, but often failing.
Many of us learn this as we grow up, but some earlier than others. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I particularly think of my queer peers who are cast out from their homes at such young ages, rejected and fully failed by their blood, and who must find their own families. I think of romantic relationships where love is present, but people just aren’t compatible. I think of the children of divorce, the children who deal with loss of a parent and grief, the children of poverty. We cannot always take comfort in some iteration of love and expect it to sustain us through all odds.
What are we supposed to take away from the Curious Incident about dysfunction, though? I would argue, given the education and psychology we have around dysfunctional families, is that we need boundaries. We need to establish boundaries with our parents, with our children, with our peers, with our friends, with our partners, with our siblings. We need to cultivate environments of open honesty. We need to make it clear what our needs are. We need to see people as their own beings, not as extensions of us. As painful as it would have been for Ed Boone to be honest with his son about his mother, it would have been respecting Christopher as his own person, and not unfairly projecting a product of his pain onto him. These things are hard to realize in action, but true.
Breaking the cycle and reparenting and all of that boundary-setting requires an enormous amount of self-awareness and reflection. It takes time! It’s helped by therapy, which isn’t widely accessible or affordable or de-stigmatized! But I truly think the lesson here is that the less we see our families, friends, and partners as extensions of ourselves and project our wants/desires/needs onto them, the more we are likely to accept and treat them as their own human beings. And the sooner we do that, the more open and honest our relationships can be, and the richer those connections become… even if the result is a departure from the relationship and a subsequently closer relationship with yourself.
Not all of us can start over with a puppy, like Christopher and his dad. But I challenge us to take our own steps, starting our way to get there. Plus, in my opinion, it’s not about the puppy (which is, to be honest, a blatant band-aid solution) or the apartment with four bedrooms and limitless electricity. It’s the journey to figure out the parameters of our peace, and what are the real solutions to get us there.