Family of Origin Roles Series: The Rebel (From Critical to Curious)
This article is based on the Reimagining Love podcast episode “Family of Origin Roles Series: The Rebel (From Critical to Curious).” To listen to this episode, click here.
Hi there, and welcome back to the blog! This blog article is the final installment of our six part series that we’ve been sharing this winter, which delves into Family of Origin Roles.
We are also sharing a really robust free workbook that takes the themes and concepts we’ve been exploring in this series and walks you through a personal transformation process, through just a few simple exercises. And it’s all rooted in this understanding that the role you played as a young person shapes your beliefs and your relational patterns today. If you’d like to get the workbook in your inbox, head to dralexandrasolomon.com/rolesworkbook and you’ll be able to sign up to receive it. Not only will you get the worksheets themselves, you’re also going to receive emails from me guiding you through the exercises so that you get the most out of them. Later in this article, I’ll be sharing an example of one of the exercises from the workbook, so you’ll get a sense of what’s inside. This offering is all about supporting your healing so you can transform longstanding relationship patterns, using the knowledge you’ve gained about your FOO role. Again, head to dralexandrasolomon.com/rolesworkbook to make sure you get this offering.
This article is all about “The Rebel.” Remember that this work is about getting to know yourself, but it’s also going to help you get to know the people around you. So even if you suspect that you’re not a Rebel, I hope you’ll still read this article. It could help you better understand someone close to you and lead to deeper connection with them. Our plan for this article is we will look at the origin story for the Rebel, the cultural factors that might create and reinforce that Rebel role, the impact of being a Rebel on friendships, work relationships, and intimate partnership, and then interventions– not to fix you, but to liberate you from old stories that you must stand out to keep yourself safe, and/ or to be deserving of attention and love.
Hallmarks and Examples
How do we identify the Rebel within a family system? And how do you know if that was you? With all of these roles, we ask, “How did this child attempt to create emotional safety for themselves and stability for their family?” So here, the common theme among Rebels is that they attempted to create emotional safety in their family system by pushing back or standing out. Here are some telltale signs that you were the Rebel in your Family of Origin. You were often labeled “difficult,” “contrarian,” or argumentative. Your default mode was to push back against your family. You felt different from your family– the odd one out. You had a hard time falling in line with family rules or norms if you didn’t understand why they existed. As an adult, you’re the one to call people out when something’s not right, and you’re not afraid to hold people close to you accountable. You’re usually not comfortable just “going along with the crowd” and like to form your own opinions about things. And, for each of our 6 roles, I am assigning a sort of BUMPER STICKER or catch phrase. For The Rebel, the motto or core belief is this: I’m loved to the degree that I stand out.
I want to share some examples of Rebels in pop culture that my team and I came up with. Think of Kat from Ten Things I Hate About You and how she interrogates all “conventional” thinking, both at her high school and at home, especially compared to her sister, Bianca. Think of Jenny Humphrey in Gossip Girl and how dedicated she is to going against her father’s wishes and stirring the pot. Think of John Bender in The Breakfast Club, who isn’t afraid to cause issues with authority and his fellow classmate. By the end of this article, I bet you’ll be able to think of some examples of your own. Send me an email or a DM and let me know who you come up with!
Origin Story: FOO
So, what forces might have contributed to you being cast as The Rebel? How did you come to be that way?
Perhaps more than other roles in this framework, I think there’s a good chance that the Rebel role emerges during adolescence more likely than childhood. This means that as you reflect, you may feel that you were the Rebel from like 12, 13, 14 onwards, for example, but before that, perhaps you were more of a Struggling One, or an Easy One, or even the Peacemaker in your family. Perhaps as you entered your teenage years and began that process of individuation, and your ability to understand and analyze the system developed, this Rebel part of you came to light. It’s also possible that you were The Rebel from day one, but I just want to name that up top.
By the way, as we’ve been sharing this series and as I’ve used this framework with clients, we’re noticing that many folks find themselves at the intersection of two roles, or feel that their role evolved as they went through developmental stages of childhood and adolescence. My hope is that you’ve read all these articles and have a great sense of each of the roles. While you may lean heavily towards one, if you notice parts of yourself in another role, that’s really helpful information! You can think about whether there was a major circumstantial change or family challenge that prompted the role shift, whether it was more about your coming-of-age, etc., OR whether you inhabited two roles at once.
When we talk about The Rebel, it’s important that we clarify what “rebellious” really means. When we think about rebels in movies or TV, like some of the characters I mentioned earlier, we often think about someone who appears outwardly rebellious in their dress, who questions societal norms, who is a “troublemaker” or “anti-establishment” in some way. That is certainly a possible profile of a Rebel. But a reminder that when I talk about the Rebel in this framework, it’s about the child who rebelled within a specific system—the family system.
Systems that are thriving tend to have a high threshold for individuality and self-expression (in dress, in thought, in interest). Systems that are dysfunctional/struggling tend to place a high value on conformity as a means of attempting to create stability, so when someone is different, it is noticed… and it is viewed as problematic/threatening/unacceptable. But what is seen as “rebellious” depends on (1) what the normative characteristics of that system are and (2) how an individual might stand apart from those characteristics. For example, an artist in a family of scientists is going to seem “rebellious” within that community, or the other way around—a scientist in a family of creatives. The system doesn’t really understand how to make space for and celebrate that difference of theirs, particularly in a chaotic or rigid system that doesn’t embrace difference and hold space for non-conformity. A child’s “rebellion” could also just be due to their being different by nature, which feels unfair, but they may have been cast into that Rebel role nonetheless. Maybe they’re the only one who has a different sexual orientation or gender identity for example. This is all to say, you didn’t have to be breaking school rules or wearing edgy clothes to be the Rebel. It was about your resistance to conform to the features of your particular family system.
In each of these role explorations, we’ve been observing how the adherence to the role in an attempt to create stability for the family system and an attempt to create emotional safety for the individual. So let’s look at both. How exactly does having someone who is different and disruptive serve THE SYSTEM? A Rebel in a family system functions like a guard rail or a course correction for the system. Your willingness to call bullshit may have gotten the adults somewhat back in line, at least for a moment.
How would being a rebel be an attempt to create emotional safety for you as an individual?
Part of how a kid attempts to create emotional safety is via attention. Kids need attention. Attention is like air and water. It is a matter of survival when we are little because if we disappear or are left behind, we die. In a healthy family, you get attention just simply because you exist! In a struggling family, you gotta hustle for attention. For the Rebel, standing out or pushing back may also have been the only way to garner attention in a chaotic family system where the adults didn’t have time or emotional bandwidth to focus on the kids. While some kids might respond to that lack of attention by becoming “Perfect Ones” in the hope that their performance will ensure a steady stream of affirmation, others might become “The Rebel” because even though they’re seen as a problem by the parents, at least they’re getting attention.
It may also be the case that you adopted this Rebel role because you had tried to create emotional safety in other ways, and those other ways just didn’t work. So you went another route. You began to push back against the systems, you started to call out the system, you created a protective shell. The Rebel was a fallback stance, an alternative route to emotional safety when other routes hadn’t worked.
Rebels might also emerge within a system that has highly critical authority figures. If for example your mother was extremely tough on you, and you felt like nothing you did was ever enough, you may have formed that Rebel shell, responding to every demand and wish with push back and disdain, as kind of a protective measure. You may have thought to yourself, consciously or subconsciously, “They’re going to criticize me no matter what. At least I know what they’re going to criticize me on, rather than it being a sneak attack/surprise.” It would feel far worse to try to fit the parent’s ideal and fall short again and again. So this child takes another route—they opt out. The idea is, you can't hurt me anymore and therefore I have some approximation of emotional safety.
It’s also important to note that the tendency to rebel against a system can be very adaptive. It might have been the way you saved yourself from falling into whatever patterns of dysfunctional relationships or addiction or underfunctioning that the other people in your family slipped into. In that situation, it was lonely to have been the rebel, but if that was part of what helped “get out” and chart your own course, it was also a survival strategy that worked. As we’ve discussed before, the more chaotic or rigid the family system, the more intensified the roles are going to be. If you had some of those Rebel-like qualities within a thriving family system, where debate was part of the family culture and was a route to connection, your tendency to stand out, disagree, or push back may have been tolerated or even valued. By the way, that's a quality that I want parents to cultivate in kids.
Families that invite self-expression and healthy debate are cultivating critical thinking skills in their kids. I was recently watching Michael Pollen’s MasterClass, and he talked about how the family dinner table, when debate and dialog and self-expression are valued– is the seat of democracy. It’s a bold statement for sure but one that I agree with.
Families that invite individuality and self-expression are also inoculating their kids against future maltreatment. If a kid knows their voice matters and their hot take matters, they are less likely to be taken advantage of by a partner or a boss who doesn't have their best interests at heart later in life. If you teach your kids to comply just because someone tells you to comply, you're setting them up later in their lives to be taken advantage of. In fact, being rebellious in that kind of thriving/healthy system might not even make you a “rebel”! Being a Rebel in a struggling family system is going to kick up a lot more dust than in a family system that can handle disagreements and questioning of authority. In a brittle or overwhelmed system, any debate or questioning feels threatening. The system is fragile, and the message is that people need to “get with the program” to ensure it doesn’t fall apart.
CULTURAL/GENDER
Now we’re at the important part of the article where we explore how your role as the Rebel might have intersected with other aspects of your identity or experience, or your family’s situation. We touched on this earlier, but if there was something about you that made you different from the other members of your family, for example if you were the only queer one in a family of straight folks, or you were an adopted child, you ought not to have even been seen as rebel, because your difference was just one part of who you were, but you may have found yourself in that role, especially if the family couldn’t make space for your different experiences.
I also think about the Rebels who emerged in situations where the family system itself was “other” within their country or community, whether because they had newly immigrated to a country, they were the only family of a certain race or ethnicity in their town or school, or they were a religious minority. To a family that is feeling the pressures of assimilation as well as the need to preserve and hold onto their cultural identity, a Rebel child’s push back might feel even more threatening to the system. It’s impossible to make any sweeping statements here, but if you identify as a Rebel, I encourage you to think about the cultural circumstances of your childhood and whether those specific conditions may have impacted how your Family of Origin could or couldn't handle your rebellion.
When it comes terms of gender, particularly if we’re talking about the Rebel coming into their own in adolescence, a Rebel who identified as a girl and a Rebel who identified as a boy likely faced different reactions to their rebellions, and may have experimented with different behaviors to get a rise out of the system or question authority in order to feel powerful. They in turn would have faced different cultural ramifications. Perhaps the boy was feared as the “tough guy” or respected as being a free-thinker or independent. If you were a girl and your rebellion involved you leaning into your sexuality or becoming a bit more front-facing regarding your sexuality, you might have been more punished for that. If you were playing with amplifying your sexuality in order to feel powerful, and/or in order to express a little bit of a middle to your family, you may have faced the cultural ramifications of slut shaming in a way that a boy would not.
INTERPERSONAL
Let’s fast-forward now to the present moment and look at how the Family of Origin role of the Rebel as an adult– at work, in friendships, and in relationships.
WORK
In a previous article in this series, we talked about Karpman’s drama triangle because it’s a helpful framework for looking at group dynamics. The idea here is that in any dysfunctional or chaotic group dynamic, folks tend to fall into one of 3 roles: the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer. The victim has a helpless approach, feels they are at the mercy of life, doesn’t take responsibility. The rescuer constantly intervenes on behalf of the victim, feels tired and vigilant. The persecutor blames the victim and judges the rescuer, they are critical and rigid.
Karpman also created the Empowerment Triangle to capture the dynamics in thriving relationships. Here, the victim becomes the creator (moving from helpless to agentic, “I can do it!”). The rescuer becomes the coach (moving from pity and overinvolvement to assisting and asking questions like “How do you want to handle this?”). The persecutor becomes the challenger (moving from blaming and criticizing to creating the conditions for growth and learning).
So where do we locate the Rebel in these triangles? In a chaotic system they may have been the persecutor, and as they heal or enter into a healthier dynamic, they can serve as the challenger. The challenger is a vital part of any system. They’re a thoughtful force who can prevent group think, they see things clearly, and they’re brave enough to point out problems so that everyone can change and evolve for the better. In a work setting, the Rebel could potentially be at risk of busting people's chops, being controlling, argumentative, and overly critical. But a rebel is a vital member of a team when they are able to (1) practice discernment, knowing when to speak up and when to hang back and (2) craft their observations with tact so that the message doesn’t get lost in the delivery. At worst, a Rebel can be a sort of workplace bully who shuts people down. At best, a Rebel can push the group to be better and think bigger. They also help create an environment where people feel empowered to speak up and share different opinions.
What's really helpful is for you to learn how to embody the role of challenger and for you to be working in a space that appreciates the concerns that you raise, rather than punishes you for the concerns you raise. But it has to be a “both/and.” The rebel has to learn how to refine when and how to raise concerns. Remember: this work situation isn't your family of origin. You don't have to do the things in this work setting that you had to do back then. You can be discerning. You can say your concerns softly but clearly. And you ideally need to be in a system that values and appreciates having a member that's not afraid to rock the boat a little bit… where you are viewed as innovative, not insubordinate.
FRIENDSHIPS
Your friends are likely drawn to you because of your individuality. You have your own style, your own way of doing things, and interesting takes on everything from the hottest new TV show to a friend’s new relationship. These are great qualities that make you you!
What can be a challenge for the rebel is learning that there are times and places where your hot take isn’t necessarily warranted or helpful. While your response might be, “well that’s just who I am, I tell it like it is,” you’ll notice that this quickly will wear people down, especially if they are more sensitive or grew up in a family system that didn’t argue or debate. A while back, I did a two-part series on Reimaging Love. One episode was called: “People-Pleasing vs. Brutal Honesty: When & How to Share Feedback with Your Partner” and the other one was called “When Having ‘No Filter’ Hurts a Relationship.” If this is a growing edge for you in your relationships, be sure to listen to those episodes.
It can be really hard for the Rebel to take a seat. After all, they’ve formed their identity and sense of safety around rocking the boat. So what I ask Rebels to do when it comes to their friendships is to bless that rebel part who lives inside of you, thank that rebel for the ways in which that part of you learned to protest to keep you safe back then. And let that rebel know that they get to rest, because guess what? It's freaking exhausting. Exhausting to be putting in that emotional labor of feeling like you have to speak up at every moment, and you can't relax and you can't just let things unfold. You (and your friends) will be better off if once in a while, you let that rebel rest.
INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS
Now, let’s talk about the Rebel in intimate relationships, beginning with dating. For the Rebel, the process of dating carries with it a threat…because at some point along the way in your upbringing, you made a decision or got the message that you have to have your own back, and that that's your best route to safety. Falling in love and becoming interdependent confronts that whole story— that it’s risky af to let your guard down, that you have to be different from, that you have to be an outsider, that you have to stand apart from. Making a new connection, and particularly falling in love, will require the rebel to be in a process of healing and recovery, actively tending to that fear that the only way to be safe is to be different and to stand alone.
As a Rebel, when you are seeking out relationships, I want you to find a connection where differences are celebrated, certainly, but where your uniqueness doesn’t have to be proven again and again. Where it’s safe to maintain your special sauce, but it also feels safe to agree and conform.
A rebel is used to finding fault as a way to be safe, and they certainly will bring this into a relationship. The cool thing is, the reward you get for cultivating a healthy relationship is you don't have to critique it all the time. You had critique your dysfunctional family in order to hold on to your sense of sanity, in order to hold on to your sense of self. But the reward you get here is you don’t have to. You can just let it be good.
TREATMENT
Insight is a huge part of transformation. The process of connecting the dots between then and now will help you create needed shifts. You don’t have to do what you always have done. But let’s get more specific now about treatment and how to help the Rebel loosen the grip of this FOO role so they can have a fuller and more flexible repertoire of relational responses.
Partner of the Rebel
I’ll start by speaking to the partner of the Rebel. I suspect you were drawn to your Rebel partner’s free spirit and their ferocity. If you yourself are an Easy One or a Parentified Child, you might really have wanted to “borrow” some of their ability to self-advocate and speak truth to power. If there were times when you were alone in an overwhelming dynamic, joining forces with a Rebel can feel like a long overdue partnership. I’m hearing the lyrics to Jay Z and Beyonce’s old son 03 Bonnie and Clyde in my head as I think about that sort of us-against-the-world dynamic! Alongside the admiration you feel, I suspect at times you experience your rebel partner as sometimes argumentative. A compassion opener for you is to take that argumentiveness a bit less personally, knowing that tendency was something that helped them feel protected when they were young during a time when perhaps nobody was there to protect them. Hold onto that insight. It’s not an excuse. It’s a context. Reminding yourself of this will help you take their pushback less personally. It’s not a personal attack, it’s a skill deficit. Once you’ve reminded yourself of that, you can decide your next move.
Your next move might be offering silent empathy, thinking to yourself, “My partner is showing me how they used to keep themselves safe as a kid.” Letting a moment pass without comment, at times not all the time, is a mercy. You can let a moment pass without it meaning you are self-abandoning.
Your next move might be speaking up, saying something to your partner like this, “You see it the way you see it, and I see it the way I see it, and we're both okay.”
Especially if both of you have read this article, I want to recommend a conversation between the two of you not at a moment when you feel like your Rebel partner’s “rebelness” is in full effect. When we try to hold a mirror up to someone in the heat of the moment, we are likely to get pushback. So at a separate time, say something like, “I’d love to have a conversation about how our relationship can be a place where we can feel like we no longer need to rely on our old coping strategies. I have some thoughts about behaviors I am working on changing, and I’d like to talk to you about how you can support me as I work on some of my growing edges. I also have some observations about ways that you relate to me that I think come from your past. And I want to talk about how I can be a support to you in shifting some of your ingrained behaviors too. Would you be open to that?” If and when your Rebel partner agrees, here are some reminders:
Make sure you actually have some thoughts about your own behavior. That way you are modeling the kind of change you want to see in the relationship.
As you share with your partner the tendencies they have that you think emerged from their Family of Origin role, front load by saying something like, “given the dynamics in your family, this behavior makes total sense. In fact, there's a way in which I’m so grateful you learned how to protect yourself in that way. That coping strategy is part of what got you through and what brought you to me.”
Bring up a specific example. Make sure it’s an example that is irritating but not deeply troubling for you. That way you can stay regulated and calm, and you and your partner can talk about it together in a collaborative way.
Propose an alternative. Rather than just saying, “don’t do that anymore,” suggest what you would have wanted instead.
Ask your partner what the best way is for you to cue them in the future. Is there a code word? A hand gesture or signal? Would they rather have you just be direct but kind? Given that your partner is a Rebel, I suspect they would welcome your directness.
OK, partner of the Rebel, here’s me wishing that your relationship can be a corrective emotional experience for you both and that your Rebel can feel a deep sense of joining and belonging with you that they didn’t get to experience growing up.
Healing for the Rebel
OK, Rebel. Hi! Let’s talk now about how you liberate yourself from the limitations of your old role. This is not about you being broken or bad or wrong. It’s about the fact that you don’t have to do now what you used to have to do then. I want to return to my promise from the top of the show and give you a little sneak peek into the free workbook I’m sharing as a way to tie a bow on this series. As a reminder, you can head to dralexandrasolomon.com/rolesworkbook to get the workbook, along with a series of emails from me guiding you through how to use it. One of the exercises you’ll go through in the workbook is about addressing one of your frustrating patterns, one that is connected to your Family of Origin role. In this exercise, we first share an example of a frustrating pattern and offer three possible first steps to address it. After that, you’ll have the chance to name your own patterns and create a plan for yourself. Here’s the scenario we share:
Alexis has noticed that whenever her partner Ana shares an opinion about a movie or TV show, Alexis compulsively finds a way to disagree with it. She was “The Rebel” in her family of origin, and playing this role brought her necessary attention in a chaotic family system. Alexis doesn’t want to automatically challenge Ana, but when she agrees with her, she feels like she’s betraying her authenticity. However, now that she's identified where this tendency originated from, she’s ready to drop the story and make a change.
Possible first steps for Alexis:
Notice the urge to counter Ana’s opinion and take a deep breath before saying anything. Take note of that urgent feeling inside and remind yourself that it is safe to pause and listen.
Before you leave the movie theater together and before you begin your discussion of the film, remind yourself that you can validate a different opinion without betraying yourself.
Instead of jumping in with a response, try asking Ana a follow-up question. Get curious about her perspective and try to learn more about it.
If you’re interested in doing this exercise, I hope you’ll check out the workbook. These are micropractices, small tweaks that give you a different experience inside your body and that evoke a different response from your partner. Micropractices pack a big punch. We change iteratively, with practice. We’re not going for dramatic personality overhauls. We’re going for small shifts that are about you letting YOURSELF know that you can exhale and blend in and belong. Here are 5 general principles I want to invite you to consider:
Notice the urge you have to jump in and share an opinion. What is it like to take a step back in those moments? What does it feel like in your body? What does it feel like after the conversation is over? Urgency feels so pressing at the moment. What is it like to ride the wave of your urgency? Feel it crest and retreat. When you opted to quiet that urgent expression, what happened next? What was the quality of the connection like with your partner? Did they seem a bit softer? Were they a bit more open? Collect this as data. Observe.
Sometimes silence is the best route to connection. We can be safe and we can be close even if we had a concern that we didn't raise. Not all of the time. But some of the time. As a rebel in recovery, I want you to be able to really land that experience inside of yourself.
Consider what information you might be depriving yourself of when you DON’T take a step back? When you do step back or leave that space, you might gain more clarity around your partner’s experience and perspective.
Increase your use of the word WE and the word US. 2018 research out of University of California Riverside found that couples who use more first person plural pronouns have higher relationship satisfaction. And as a Rebel in recovery you might lean more on “me language” than “we language.” You and your partner are creating this whole culture together. The culture of your relationship. How does that change how you might approach conflict or differing opinions?
Continue to hold onto and express your uniqueness, because that’s important to you! And the cool thing is, now that you’re an adult and you’re safe, these are just ways that you kind of fill your bucket and express yourself, versus when you were little and you had to do those things in order to keep yourself safe. You're not doing it for safety reasons anymore. You're doing it because you get to be unique and self-expressed. You don’t have to, you get to.
I’m going to close with mantras for you, Rebel. I’ve done this with each of the roles across all of the articles. Feel free to write these down in your journal, pin them up on your bulletin board, or record yourself reading them as a voice memo on your phone. Ok, here we go:
I don't have to be different to be safe.
Silence is also an act of love sometimes.
I don't have to attend every fight I'm invited to.
Agreement doesn’t equal self-erasure.
I have nothing to prove.
Conclusion
As a reminder, if you’d like to sign up for the workbook that goes along with this series, you can find that link in the show notes. It’s full of exercises and journaling prompts that are going to support self-transformation, and if you’ve been reading this series, this is the perfect time to dive into that work while all of this is still fresh. Again, you can head to dralexandrasolomon.com/rolesworkbook to get that resource. Thanks for joining me on this Family of Origin Roles journey, and until next time, be well.