Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / The Psychology of Control. EP 7. How Family Secrets Turn Into Psychological Control

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The Psychology of Control. EP 7. How Family Secrets Turn Into Psychological Control · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Chardon, adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the podcast series from inside the consulting room is currently focusing on the psychology of control.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is episode seven.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I apologize for not having posted for a little while.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've been out of the country and have now returned so I can continue with the series.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Whilst I was away though, I thought a lot about some of the work that I've done, some of the podcasts that I've produced in terms of relational dynamics, which of course this current series is about.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to do some more on the nature of control through avoidant behaviour.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this next episode is strongly influenced by those kinds of things.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what I want to do is try and isolate that particular component and look at it in the context of the recognition, the reckoning, and recovery, those three stages that I've talked about before.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll start with this one, which is really back to the theme of families and what happens.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think what we have to do is not see aspects of control and isolation.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: We have to see them in terms of how they affect family systems.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So every family has things that are difficult to talk about.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's normal.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: But some families contain something quite different.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like a silence that's so powerful that everyone begins to organize themselves around it.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody says it directly and nobody names it openly, and yet somehow everybody knows.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Could be the drinking, the affair, the violence, the manipulation, the emotional instability, the fear.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Things which we know about, but we certainly don't talk about.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And over time the silence itself becomes part of the structure of the family.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And children learn what must not be mentioned or questioned or exposed.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually reality itself becomes divided.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what is lived internally and what is performed externally become two completely different things.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is about the family secret, not simply hidden information, but the psychological organization of silence.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because some families do not survive through truth, they survive through suppression, through denial, minimization, avoidance, and a kind of collective emotional management.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And within these systems, children often learn something that is psychologically dangerous, and that is that truth may threaten attachment.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: In families organized around secrecy, there is usually an unspoken rule, which is do not disrupt the system.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do not expose what everyone is working so hard to contain.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this rule is communicated without words.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's communicated through tension, emotional reactions, withdrawal, guilt, fear, or punishment after honesty.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually people stop talking truthfully together.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're dishonest, but because honesty has become psychologically unsafe.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of the greatest misconceptions in families, and something I hear a lot, is the belief that children are unaware.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sorry to tell you this, but they really are aware.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And although they might not understand everything cognitively, emotionally they know.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: They know when tension enters the room, when fear exists beneath politeness, when affection is false, when people are pretending and when something is hidden.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps most importantly, they know when reality is being denied.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now this creates a profound problem for the developing child because the child experiences two realities simultaneously.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's the felt reality, which is something is wrong, and the spoken reality, everything is fine.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And when those realities repeatedly contradict each other, the child begins doubting their own internal experience.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is psychologically devastating over time because confidence in self-perception begins to collapse.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so the child starts learning what I feel may not be trustworthy.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's me.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Silence in families is never empty, is always psychologically active.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And children growing up around chronic secrecy often become hyper-vigilant, anxious, emotionally burdened, confused, or excessively perceptive.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is because the mind is constantly attempting to understand what can't be acknowledged and what can't be processed verbally.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's often carried emotionally.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: In many controlled family systems, one child eventually begins expressing what the family can't tolerate psychologically.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this may happen through anger or behavioral disturbance, addiction, collapse, confrontation, or just complete emotional breakdown.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens is that the child might become identified as the problem.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: But psychologically, they're often expressing the truth of the family system.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: The symptom-bearing child frequently carries the unspoken conflict, the denied pain, the suppressed rage, and the emotional contradiction everyone else is avoiding.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you think of the family I spoke about recently, where everything just broke down, the system was so avoiding or avoidant of the truth.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: It couldn't be spoken, instead, it got acted out, and one member of the family became the conduit and was then regarded as the problem.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now we need to understand something important here.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Families don't maintain secrecy because they are fundamentally bad, they maintain it because exposure feels psychologically catastrophic.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: The secret protects against shame, collapse, humiliation, fragmentation, loss of identity, or the destruction of the family narrative itself.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why families sometimes defend dysfunction with extraordinary intensity, because psychologically the truth threatens the entire emotional structure.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Many control families become highly invested in appearance, outwardly successful, respectable, close, functioning, but internally frightened, divided, disconnected, and psychologically unstable.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And maintaining the appearance becomes part of the control itself.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because if the external image survives, the internal reality can continue being denied.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: But secrets create pressure psychologically.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Contradictions accumulate, symptoms emerge, children deteriorate, relationships fracture, and reality leaks through.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, many systems reach a breaking point.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Something's exposed, something becomes undeniable, the abuse becomes visible, the child collapses psychologically, police become involved, safeguarding begins, and suddenly everything the system spent years avoiding becomes impossible not to confront.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the saddest realities in my work is how many adults are still psychologically organized around protecting family secrets.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're still minimizing, denying, still feeling guilty for acknowledging reality, still fearing emotional consequences for honesty.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because the child inside them learned long ago truth is dangerous.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now this doesn't look like a particularly happy state of affairs, but as listeners will know by now, I try and move from naming things and describing them and their consequences through to some kind of resolution and recovery.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because recovery really suggests the notion that we're not stuck, we're not static, we may not know how to recover, but recovery is possible.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it begins here with some simple things, and the first of those is naming reality.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not aggressively, not vindictively, but truthfully.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: This happened.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: This affected me.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: This was real.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is happening.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that moment matters deeply because secrecy loses power once reality can finally be thought about openly.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps one of the most tragic things about family secrets is not only the original damage itself, but the years of psychological distortion that's required to keep the damage hidden.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: The silence, the pretending, the emotional self-betrayal, the slow abandonment of instinct and perception.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Families built around secrecy often insist that they're protecting themselves when in reality they're protecting the very thing that's destroying them psychologically.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because what is denied in families doesn't disappear.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It waits and eventually it finds another way to speak, usually through symptoms, collapse, through children, and through some kind of destruction.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because the truth that can't be spoken is often the truth that organizes the entire family from within the shadows.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes these things become visible, apparent outside of the family, not the family dysfunction, but the individuals within it who will maintain that controlling behavior through their own secrecy with others, their relationships with friends and others will carry the same quality.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And quite often what comes to light is a contradiction.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the contradiction is often that secrecy, avoidance, and vagaries in how people behave and what they say start to not match.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you will find such people being evasive.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what that suggests is that this is not about the family, but about who the person is and how they manage their relationships all the way through.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And how that person is in a family, their own family, where this is very likely to be being acted out.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the family will form, they will organize themselves around that, the secrecy of the individual, the inability to be emotionally and psychologically open and honest.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult when we come into contact with people like this.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, in my work, I do come into contact with it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's interesting because one of the principles I work under is I don't do secrets.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And with patients, it is very important for me to be able to name what I see.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I see you doing, this is how I see you being, this is how what you're telling me and how you're telling me doesn't match.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And these aren't criticisms.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is like holding up a mirror to uh that has reality written all over it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because actually, what I tend to find is that once the words have been spoken, and indeed once the patient can say the words, they can't be unsaid, and ultimately nothing bad happens.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We we speak openly and nothing bad happens.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if we conceal, that takes a lot of effort.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: When people learn it's okay to put into words the thoughts, the fears, the the emotional turmoil that they're trying to avoid, when they can put it into words, something dramatic changes.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Something really important happens because then that person has become authentic.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: People who avoid people who have to rely on secrecy are inauthentic.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So in closing, I will be, I just wanted to mention that I'm going to be doing some, I don't know if this is a correct language, video casts as well as podcasts.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And these will be short, probably five minutes or so, and I'll use TikTok for God's sake, as if I know how to do that.children's consultancy.com, but also on my my Facebook page.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this has been helpful.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.