Overgrown through our families 

Sometimes in everyday life, moments of mutual misunderstanding creep in. It seems that you or the other person took something for granted, which was not at all self-evident for the other person. In these moments, a rift appears in our relationship with the other person for a split second, a rift from which the feeling of being strangers to each other escapes.  

These things we take for granted form the canvas against which our lives unfold. They establish a certain basic framework within which our lives can take place. We usually don't notice that each person has their own individual framework.  

This is partly because our ideas about what is natural and what is not are broadly similar. When someone is ill, I show consideration; when someone does me a favour, I say ‘thank you’. This seems trivial, but it is not. It is the basis of what we call civilisation. The lowest common denominator. 

On the other hand, we rarely talk to others about what we take for granted. And so we often fail to notice that there are areas in which our ideas of appropriate behaviour diverge.  

Where do these gaps originate? Where do these cracks in our connectedness come from? 

Unlike personality traits, which are determined by both genes and environmental influences, attitudes have a low heritability. This means that we learn them in the course of our lives, especially in our childhood.  

Our family and the way our family members communicate and interact are decisive factors in what we later take for granted in our interactions with other people. The framework we apply to our lives is, in a sense, laid down for us at birth and becomes more and more detailed as we grow older. Although we too eventually become the craftsmen who work on this framework, the basic model comes from our caregivers. 

‘The family isolates us.’ This was written by psychoanalyst Alfred Adler in his book ‘Menschenkenntnis’ in 1927. He goes on to say more specifically: ‘[...] we cannot reconnect with other people because, for lack of a better understanding, they seem too foreign to us for too long.’ 

Adler's statement suggests turning the image of family on its head. Family is generally regarded as a stable relationship pattern that provides an educational and socialising framework for its members.  

But what if we do not socialise, but isolate ourselves? What if we do not mature into modern human beings within the family, but become feral? And what if we do not even notice this until we meet another feral person and are unable to communicate with each other? 

Well, fortunately, the situation is not quite that dire. But Adler identified a problem back then that has only grown in significance since then. The increasing isolation of members of every society from one another – keyword: loneliness epidemic – also means that families and their children are coming into contact with each other less and less. They go their own ways in their self-created wilderness.  

This creates a sense of strangeness when people come into contact with each other and, contrary to expectations, realise that the other person has been socialised (or isolated?) differently from themselves. In these moments, this strangeness represents a divide, a divide that can be overcome through openness. But when there is a lack of openness, all that remains is alienation, and the obvious conclusion is that the other person is simply strange – or that you yourself are strange (that's a question of self-esteem). Then it seems only natural to withdraw further, to isolate oneself more, to surrender to one's own self-created wilderness.  

And here it becomes clear why this problem has only increased since 1927: it reinforces itself. If we perceive strangeness in our interactions with our fellow human beings and shy away from it, our children will do the same. Because parents are always role models. Their behaviour is decisive for that of their children. 

This means that alienation and isolation are effects that can persist and intensify over generations if they are not overcome.  

So how can we overcome them?  

The key word is tolerance of ambiguity. This means allowing contradictions and ambiguities. Neither I nor my counterpart are so fundamentally different from each other that communication cannot work. Neither I nor my counterpart are strange just because there is a misunderstanding. 

However, the most important thing we can do to counter this alienation is actually one thing above all else: to recognise that we are all a little bit overgrown through our families.