With the family being the closest of all our relationships they can be both empowering and possibly the most challenging. The family has a whole dynamic of its own with each member having roles and functions that balance and maintain the entire family unit, and just as the individual has a system of survival mechanisms, so does the family have its own method of surviving, which can have both a positive, and negative impact on our lives. The least stressful family units are those which allow for individual growth and independence, these are called open family systems. 

OPEN FAMILY SYSTEMS

This type of family will make room for the differing ideas and activities chosen by the individuals within it. The individuals can grow and change because one member's survival does not depend on another’s beliefs or actions. Here the individuals within the family have each created their own personal activities outside of the group, and are focused on living their own life. This type of family will encourage and accommodate this independence, making alterations and adjustments within the unit to maintain the needs of the specific member. Here, equal and adult relationships are formed, and ultimately this openness becomes the new defence mechanism that will maintain the wellbeing of all relationships within it.

CLOSED FAMILY SYSTEMS

When a family has a closed system, this means that the members within it are relying on each other to function. This might be considered the typical state of every young family, with children depending on their parents and the parents relying on each other. However, during the development of this family, this closed system can become extremely stressful and an obstacle if it inhibits the growth of the individual.

In a closed family system, as the children grow and make their own choices, the relationships within them tend to erode and become conflicted. Often in this type of family expectations run high, with independence being seen as a threat, and difference or uniqueness as a lack of love or respect for the family culture. The survival mechanism of this type of family unit does not promote the individual identities within it, because movement or change in any one member, will have an influence on and require change in all the other members. The defence mechanism will require members stay rigidly within their roles, beliefs and behaviours if it is to survive. In its extreme, there may be a dominating abuse of power here, with one-or two-members having control over the others. Feelings of disloyalty may arise when members approach the need to be more of their individual, to leave and to grow. This closed system is particularly apparent in families that hold fundamental or extreme beliefs. Where sexual abuse or domestic violence takes place, and in families that maintain a status quo based on recurring family cultures.

THE GROUP

Being involved in groups is an essential human experience. Groups are an essential source of collaboration, alliance, and teamwork, but they can also be all-encompassing. 

As women, we can be taught to be overly compromising and compliant, we can therefore easily find our self, surrendering to the group mind, power plays and agendas that outdo our own, especially when we are young. Groups that are beneficial to us are those that support our individuality and autonomy, groups that encourage our personal power and success.

Like the closed family system, negative groups will demand our allegiance to beliefs and ideologies that are not suited to our own, having a self-serving bias that demands an adjustment on some personal level to meet its criteria. This type of collective may have powerful dominion over our individual, encouraging and influencing us to separate from other vital parts of our life.

We may fall into this type of collective because we have lived in a closed family system and have not yet established the skill of living independently, or they may offer a support structure when we are at our lowest and most vulnerable. When we have lived through a negative closed family system, in particular one that has impacted our self esteem and abused our relationship, we can easily fall back into those same victim states and roles. If we are casualties on some level, we can be both attracted to dominating and abusive figures, and they too will sense and be attracted to us. It is no solution to keep going from one dependent relationship to another, in the hope we are fixed by someone else. The impact on the Self can be so detrimental we simply surrender to the forces that propel us along without our permission. Any real sense of Self may be lost, and things tend to have a life of their own. Without clarifying who we are, our expectations and our boundaries, we may find ourselves surrendering to further intimidating situations that are difficult to manage and particularly in the case of the female - surrender in the acts of abuse, psychological, violent and/or sexual. If we want to fully navigate our way through relationships and groups, we need to have a solid sense of who we are, and where our life is heading, from an early age.

LIVING WITH PURPOSE

The individual embodies our personal needs, desires, hopes, dreams, goals, ambitions, and our limits. These things clarify and authenticate who we are: What we expect to get from every other level of experience. What is acceptable, and what is not acceptable. This individual is the defining factor, whether we will be in a good position to direct the outcome of our experiences, or whether we will be propelled along involuntarily. Defining and clarifying our individual Self and living with the purpose of fulfilling our highest human needs is probably the most empowering thing we can do for ourselves.