Family of Origin Roles Series: The Struggling One (From Scapegoat to Self-Advocate)
This article is based on the Reimagining Love podcast episode “Family of Origin Roles Series: The Struggling One (From Scapegoat to Self-Advocate).” To listen to this episode, click here.
This article is the first of six articles (based on solo episodes of the podcast) that we’ll be sharing here over the next few months about Family of Origin Roles.
Welcome back to the blog! The introductory episode of the podcast came out a few weeks ago, so if you didn’t have the chance to listen to that, I’ve linked it here.
This article is all about the Struggling One role.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 Struggling One, 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. In this article we will look at the origin story for the Struggling One, the cultural factors that might create and reinforce that struggling one role, the impact of being a struggling one on friendships, work relationships, and intimate partnership, and then interventions– not to fix you because you’ve struggled in your life, but to liberate you from old stories that you’re a burden or that you take up too much space so that you can advocate for yourself without shame and create the joyful life and relationships you deserve.
Quick reminder that at the end of this series, we’ll be sharing a worksheet with tailored journaling prompts and practices for all of the roles, so if you’d like to receive that later this winter, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter. Or, visit dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to get added to the list.
Diathesis Stress Model
Before we dive into this conversation, I want to name right up top that this article about The Struggling One is a bit different, and in order to tee up this whole conversation, we need to talk about two important concepts called the “diathesis stress model” and the “recursive relational framework.” Put a pin in those fancy terms for just a moment.
This series is all about how systemic dynamics create or amplify individual tendencies, right? What we’re looking at is that you are the way you are in lots of your relationships today because of how your family needed you to be when you were little. We are talking about how stuff that is relational becomes internalized and lives within an individual. Stuff that happens to you becomes part of you such that you bring this tendency or way of being into other relationships.
And the Struggling One is the one in the family who is labeled the problem, the squeaky wheel, the difficult child. But when we talk about this role, we need to be careful. It is sometimes the case that a kid in a family develops behavioral problems or symptoms as a way of distracting the parents from their pain or their conflict or their unhappiness. In other words, the child’s behaviors emerge as a direct response to family problems. The individual is taking on patterns in the service of the system. Just like the Perfect One took on performance and excellence in the service of the system. And just like the Easy One took on the signature shoulder shrug or the retreat to the basement in the service of the system. But with our Struggling One, we need to be careful. Maybe these behavior problems have developed in the service of the system. More likely the “diathesis stress model” is at work. What is the diathesis stress model? In the field of psychology, it’s the understanding that nature and nurture are inextricably bound. There's something inherent in the child (nature), and the environment activates it or amplifies it (nurture). In other words, a vulnerability inside a person interacts with or meets up with difficult life experiences (like a dysfunctional family environment) to create a mental disorder or emotional challenge. The bad news is that we never get to find out the exact blend of nature and nurture in why we come to be the way we are. The good news is that our healing does not rest on us knowing this.
Note that the term diathesis stress may remind you of another popular term that you may have heard which is epigenetics. The term was actually coined in 1942, but it has become more popular in the last 20 years. Epigenetics is the study of how the environment actually has the power to alter our gene expression, like our DNA. And, “the environment” is a big bucket that includes everything from environmental toxins to traumatic experiences.
Recursive Relational Framework (RRF)
When I talk about individual problems in a relational context, I talk about what I call the Recursive Relational Framework (The RRF). I don’t actually think I’ve talked about this much in my public facing work, which is surprising because I love this idea so much and talk about it in many of my classes. Imagine two circles: Circle one says “individual challenge” and Circle two says “Relationship dynamics.” Now imagine an arrow that goes in both directions between the individual challenge circle and the relationship dynamics circle. Let’s talk about the first arrow, the one that goes from the Individual Challenge circle to the Relationship Dynamics circle. When a member of a family system has a “problem” (ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, depression, etc), there is an impact on the entire family dynamic. We are deeply relational creatures. The family is a system. When something happens to one person, there are ripples throughout the system. What about the arrow that goes from the Relationship Dynamics circle to the Individual Challenge circle? This arrow reminds us that how a family system responds to a family member’s challenge has the power to alter the course of the individual challenge itself.
Think about an individual with addiction. When family therapy is part of that individual’s treatment plan, the risk of relapse is decreased. When the family learns how to relate in healthier ways to the individual with the addiction, this alters the course of the individual’s journey with addiction. How powerful is that? There was research back in the 1990s that if you have a woman who was diagnosed with depression and she reports conflict in her marriage, couple therapy is more effective than individual therapy to treat her depression. The depression lives inside of her, but changing the relationship dynamics has the power to alleviate her depression.
The bottom line here is that if you are a Struggling One, you likely had an identifiable problem or challenge. All of the members of your family were impacted in some way by the problem you faced. That’s not a blaming statement. That’s just a descriptive statement about interconnectedness in a family! And the way your family members related to your individual challenge shaped your experience of your individual challenge.
Were people critical of you?
Did family members mock or minimize your experience?
Were you expected to do everything that your siblings were able to do or were accommodations made?
If accommodations were made, how did the Big People in your family talk to you and your siblings about why things were different for you?
Did the Big People in your family want to wrap you in bubble wrap because you were seen as fragile? Were you sheltered? Were you protected in ways that created or amplified fear inside of you?
How did they talk about your challenge– to you and to people outside of your family? Was there secrecy and shame? To what degree did they advocate for you? To what degree did they teach you how to advocate for yourself?
The family dynamics set you up to have a particular relationship with your individual challenge, shaping your self-esteem, your feeling of agency, your feelings of self-worth, your ability to advocate for yourself, etc. And there are likely echoes still today.
One more piece I want to name here is that the struggle of the Struggling One could have been any number of things. It could have been a mental health challenge like anxiety, depression or an eating disorder. It could have been a neurodevelopmental challenge like ADHD or a learning disability or autism spectrum disorder. It could have been a physical disability like being blind or having cerebral palsy. It could have been a medical illness like diabetes or cancer or asthma. Maybe the struggle was something that you dealt with as a kid or a teen, but it’s no longer part of your life today. Maybe the struggle has been and will be with you for your whole life. Maybe it ebbs and flows in how central and/or debilitating it is for you. I’m naming this to reiterate the trickiness of this Struggling One role. There are so many variations on the theme of struggle. I worry about hurting your feelings in some way as we go along because you likely have an understandably tender relationship with your struggle– tenderness in ways you’ve been misunderstood, left out, underestimated, overestimated. Tenderness in what you’ve had to grieve. Tenderness in your triumphs. I hope I’m able to be gentle as we go.
Hallmarks and Examples
How do we identify the Struggling One 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 the family?” So here, the common theme among Struggling Ones is that they attempted to create emotional safety in their family system via their needs, whether that was by choice or not. Here are some telltale signs that you were the Struggling One in your Family of Origin:
You were the “the problem child” or “the sick child”
Your family rallied around you to address your challenges
You’ve never felt normal or like you really “fit in” because of the ways you are different than others
As an adult, you worry a lot about letting people down,taking up space, or being a burden
People give you feedback that you’re demanding or “too much”
You've had to figure out how to love yourself along with your limitations.
I want to share some examples of the Struggling One in pop culture that my team and I came up with. Think Beth from Little Women, and the way her illness is a focal point for the family. Think Nessarose from Wicked, who is seen as helpless by her father because of her disability and often feels like she’s on the outside. He instructs her sister, Elphaba, to protect her at all costs when they arrive at school. Think Kit Kat in the movie About Time, the quirky and loving sister of the main character, Tim. Her family worries about her as she struggles with addiction and unhealthy relationships. She has a quote: “Maybe, just maybe, I'm the faller. Every family has someone who falls, who doesn't make the grade, who stumbles, who life trips up. Maybe I'm our faller.” Think Charlie Brown! He struggles to feel “normal” amongst his peers, suffers lots of rejection, and grapples with a persistent low mood (especially around Christmas time!) Think Roman Roy from Succession played by Keiran Culkin. Think Elsa from Frozen whose family struggles to know what to do with her special powers. Think Mikey from The Bear. How about Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh whose low mood draws a lot of attention from his community? How about Sarah Braverman and Crosby Braverman, two of the characters in the TV show Parenthood? And, for each of our 6 roles, I am assigning a sort of BUMPER STICKER or catch phrase. For The Struggling One, the motto or core belief is this: I am loved to the degree that I need things from people. 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 Struggling One? How did you come to be that way? As I mentioned up top, we have to be careful with the extremes. Those extremes would be:
Everything is explained by the system.
Everything is organic/endemic to someone’s personality.
Our work here is to live in that shade of gray between those extremes, where the inherent stuff and the relational stuff are forever shaping each other. And remember: we don't need to understand the exact blend of nature and nurture in order to heal and create shifts in our tendencies.
So for Struggling Ones, here’s the hard truth: like it or not, you took up a lot of space in your family systems. There was a lot of focus on your limitations, your behavior, your needs, maybe your grades or your social life. There were persistent questions, “What’s going on with you?” maybe “What’s wrong with you?” maybe “What are they gonna do about you?” You were seen as the moody one, the difficult one, or the problem child. Maybe your parents met your symptoms with sympathy and empathy. Maybe they took you to a therapist. You all know I’d give those parents a high-five, andat the very same time, if you were sort of “dropped off in a therapist's office,” it reinforced the story inside of you that you're different from other family members. That you were the problem. That was probably an incredibly lonely and isolating experience, realizing that there was something about you that made things harder, that required more care and attention, that separated you from your siblings or other people in the system.
As I alluded to earlier, there are many different struggles that a child could go through that would qualify them for this role, in conjunction with the family dynamics at play. There are medical diagnoses, physical disabilities, mental health challenges, learning differences, etc. But I also want to note that if you were a particularly moody or emotional child in a family system that didn’t know how to “do” feelings, you might have gotten stuck with this Struggling One label, versus a moody kid whose parents have the capacity to kind of ride the waves and go with it, without sticking a label on a kid's head.
In 2020 there was a book by Dr. W Thomas Boyce called The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Sensitive Children Face Challenges and How All Can Thrive. Based on his decades as a pediatrician, he determined that some kids are dandelions and some kids are orchids. Dandelion kids are hardy, resilient, healthy and can thrive under most circumstances, and orchid kids are sensitive, susceptible, and fragile. They, more than dandelion kids require consistency, support and who, given the right support, can thrive as much as, if not more than, other children.
The theme that unites all of these subtypes of Struggling Ones, is that their neediness was their way of creating emotional safety for themselves and to create a sort of common purpose for the Big People to rally around. That’s going to mean that they’re very likely to feel like a burden, or that they’re too much. Even as a small child, you might have had some awareness of your added challenges, whether it was an added complexity, something emotional, based on a diagnosis or a disability—in any case, you were likely aware that a lot of energy was coming your way.
It may have been the case that your struggles served to distract the Big People from their conflict with each other, so there’s this added layer of convenience. Being “sick” may have kept your parents from being in conflict with each other and may have given them a common cause of sorts. In the world of family therapy, we call this being the “identified patient.” You take on these problems to distract your parents from focusing on their frustration with each other. This theme of distracting or diverting attention will come up again when we explore the Rebel role. But think about it. There’s a brilliance here. When you’re little, there’s nothing scarier than parents fighting with each other, so as little kids we develop all kinds of clever ways to keep that from happening. I remember that my mom and step dad were most likely to fight during family dinner, so what did I do? I talked. Incessantly. From the moment we sat down until the moment we were done. Because if I was talking then they couldn’t get into it with each other. And now what do I do for a living? I talk. Those dots really connect themselves quite nicely, don’t they?!
Cultural/Gender
Now’s the time to spend a moment talking about how culture and gender may have impacted the Struggling One or added layers to their experience. Well, as it turns out, variables like race and gender shape grown ups’ perspectives on kids’ challenges. For example, research has found that girls on the spectrum or with ADHD sometimes go longer without being diagnosed because they're less disruptive in class. We also know that depression in boys often gets missed because it's framed as naughtiness or typical teenager stuff. Kids and teens who are BIPOC are more likely to be misdiagnosed and kids and teens in underprivileged communities can have a harder time getting access to care. These cultural dimensions shaped how the people around the Struggling One understood, or misunderstood, what the Struggling One was going through. And whether or not the Struggling One and their family got the support they needed.
Interpersonal
Let’s fast-forward now to the present moment and look at the Struggling One as an adult– at work, in friendships, and in relationships.
Work
Let’s start with work. Struggling Ones out there, you might be too quick to assume you're the problem, because that’s what you got used to growing up in your Family of Origin. You may feel easily responsible for things that aren't yours. You might also carry a fear that you are a high-risk hire. In the workplace, you may have the added emotional labor and responsibility of figuring out what to disclose to whom regarding your struggle, and what kinds of accommodations perhaps to negotiate with your workplace. Struggling Ones might need to be more discerning about what types of jobs would work for them because they might have different strengths and challenges. It might be the case that it takes them longer to identify where they feel like they can thrive. The great thing is, that means that when you do feel like there's a goodness of fit between you and your workplace, you probably are a kickass, deeply loyal employee. I think that's the gift of this role too. And by the way, the spaces where you might not get the support or accommodation you need would actually probably do well to be more inclusive, more humanistic, and less focused on the bottom line. It’s important to have lots of different types of people and perspectives on a team!
Friendship
Now, let’s discuss the Struggling One’s friendships. As some of you know, I’m the mama of a young adult son who is neurodivergent. And as he was growing up, I remember thinking that there are two types of people that he comes into contact with: people who see him first and then his disability and people who see his disability first. What I want for him, of course, is to be surrounded by the former. I want this for you too, especially if you grew up feeling like your challenge was the center of your family’s world in a way that made you feel misunderstood. I want our struggling ones to be friends with those who see you, rather than people who are coming from a place of sympathy or pity, or have a narrow view of you that is mostly about your limitations. Our friends should not only accept, but embrace all of who we are.
Another topic for Struggling Ones in friendships is when to open up and share their story. You may have felt that within your family it was safe to be struggling, because that’s where your challenges played out, in that private space. With friends and the outside world, it may feel scary to open that box, for fear of being “burdensome” or “too much.” Brené Brown reminds us that people need to earn the right to our story. So there is some amount of discernment that the struggling one needs to bring to friendships around how much can this friendship hold at this stage, and based on who this other person is, how much can they hold.
Because friendship is so deeply chosen for struggling ones, it's important for you to keep an eye on the give-and-take. If there are some things that you aren't as amazing at (for example, initiating plans), that’s okay! Just make sure that there are other ways that you're contributing… and that you are thanking your friend for initiating plans. There are so many ways for you to show up for your friends, even if you have limitations.
In longer term friendships, your story is going to come up. Though it may be painful, that may really give permission to your friends to be vulnerable as well and share what they're struggling with, too. Even if it's not a disability or a mental health condition. Because of your journey, you are likely able to handle more vulnerability than the average bear, so you become a model of authenticity: being real and being honest about what's difficult in life. That can be so permission-giving to a friend, and it can be a real point of connection. You may very well be a non-judgmental, safe space for folks, and that’s something to really take pride in.
Intimate Relationships
In intimate relationships, that idea from Brené Brown about people earning the right to your story also applies, big time. In dating, it can be tricky to know when and how to share your store or let someone know about an ongoing challenge you face. It may be that in this world of dating apps and tech, you’re able to date within a community of people who have similar diagnoses or struggles, but you may also have questions about whether you need to be with somebody who is similar, or if you can date across difference. This is a deeply personal question that kicks up all sorts of stuff around trust, vulnerability, and potentially sexuality depending on if there’s a connection between your struggle and your sex life.
No matter who you’re dating, make sure that whenever you do choose to self-disclose, it's not an apology. Instead, think of it as a kind of an honor for the person you’re getting to know. You’re letting them know that they feel trustworthy enough that you want them to know this about you. Rather than a confession or an apology, it's you offering them deeper access into understanding who you are as a person and what your journey has been about. There may very well have been experiences for you where it has felt like your struggles have pushed potential romantic partners away. Be careful to not put that all on yourself. Them stepping away from you says something about their capacity, their limitations, their prejudices, and their fears.
If a lot of your life has been about dependence and help, you may be working on how to have things feel more equitable and reciprocal in your romantic relationships. And even if there are ways in which you do need help or accommodation, make sure that both of you keep an eye out for the ways that you are the helper and you are the accommodator. Reminder that everyrelationship has dynamics around helping and accommodating. But for you, it may just be more amplified, given your more sensitive history.
If you are a Struggling One partnered with someone of a different role, I want you to think about what helps you not fall into that painful pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. The goal is for you to take responsibility for your self-care so that you are in touch with yourself enough that you can create reasonable expectations for yourself and communicate those to your partner. Another goal is for you to be so anchored in your self-worth and sense of wholeness that you are able to be available to hear about the impact of your challenges on your partner… without getting defensive and without dissolving into a pool of shame. Of course, your partner has a responsibility to bring feedback to you with so much compassion and kindness that you are able to stay open-hearted.
Folks who identify with roles like The Parentified Child (which we haven’t discussed yet in this series) or The Perfect One may be drawn to a Struggling One, because they see someone who needs support (or, in less healthy scenarios, a “project person,” where the partner gets to feel like a helper). So there's a dynamic that kind of works for both of them, like a key in a lock, where the Perfect One is deriving a sense of worth from being helpful. And that may feel really familiar to a Struggling One who is used to being in a dynamic where they are the problem and where they need help. But now we’re slipping into that over-functioning, under-functioning dynamic that may have been so much a part of the Struggling One’s childhood. So, for a couple that's partnering across roles, I want you to be keeping an eye out for ways you can shake up that pattern—where the Struggling One is helping the Parentified Child, where the Struggling One is accommodating the Perfect One. By shaking up that dynamic, each of you gets to work on something that is less familiar / less comfortable… but also liberating.
When two Struggling Ones come together in a romantic relationship, they may bond around a shared history of challenges and victories. I am thinking here about what happens in addiction recovery programs, how there are often rules and restrictions about how and when people can date within the group. It's so easy to feel deeply understood, bonded, and aligned in the struggle, but it puts pressure on the relationship and can be a recipe for codependency.
So much connection is possible when you both have felt otherized or misunderstood or lonely that it can feel like you found your other half, somebody who really gets it, and there's so much potential in that. But the thing to just be careful of or keep an eye out for is: are we allowed to be different? What happens when there are ebbs and flows of our symptoms, or when one person is struggling more than the other one? Be mindful that even though there are a lot of parallels in your stories, the dynamic might feel shaken up if one of you is struggling a bit more in a particular season.
If you are the partner or friend of a Struggling Ones, what do you need to keep in mind? How can you be an ally in the Struggling One’s recovery from their limiting beliefs?
Remember that they are an expert in their own well-being. Be careful not to give advice or direct because your Struggling One understands all of this likely better than you ever can. When in doubt, defer.
It may feel really good for you to be helpful to the Struggling One, but when you pride yourself on giving assistance before the Struggling One even knows they need it, you might be unknowingly reinforcing an old, painful pattern from their past. Perhaps in their family growing up, the people were just helping so much that the struggling one didn't get a chance to feel their own agency and power. Our hope is for the struggling one to be able to reclaim that agency in their adult relationships. So for partners, a simple check-in before you jump into helping mode can be transformative. Ask if they need help rather than assuming they always do.
Look for opportunities for your Struggling One to help you. In the Easy One article we talked about “the helper high.” Give them that corrective emotional experience. That chance to explore a different role in relationships.
Practice self-care. When your Struggling One is struggling, make sure you are stepping away and filling your bucket. If you are giving and giving and sympathizing and accommodating, you’re going to get resentful. And resentment does neither of you any favors. It will erode intimacy in your relationship. Resource yourself so you don’t get burned out– other friends, exercise, distraction, etc.
Treatment
Let’s talk about the Struggling One’s healing. When we talk about people with a challenge of some kind, I think there's sort of two predominant cultural narratives: the “helpless victim narrative” and the “you're so special" narrative. Neither of those narratives really honors the full complexity of your experience. Rather, the sort of twin aspects of heartbreak and heroism, both those things are true. Your work is to write both the struggle and the ascendence into your story. Both belong there.
I also want to talk about something called Spoon Theory, which originated from a 2003 essay by the writer Christine Miserandino, when she wrote about explaining her experience with chronic illness to a friend of hers. The idea is that folks who live with chronic pain or another kind of limitation must plan things in advance to conserve energy. Imagine that when you wake up in the morning, you have a set number of spoons, say, 12 spoons, and you have to decide how to use them on that given day. It's a framework for creating reasonable expectations for yourself. If you know that work is eight spoons for you, even though it may be only four spoons for somebody else, it means you have to build the rest of your day to accommodate the fact that most of your energy will be used up by work. All of us have limited amounts of energy in reserve, but for somebody who's a Struggling One, it's probably that much more important to be mindful of limited capacity, whether that’s in a physical sense or a social sense, so that you don't end up overpromising and underdelivering. Setting reasonable expectations for yourself and the people around you is the kindest thing you can do for yourself and your relationships.
As you reflect on your journey with this challenge, make sure that you're focusing not just on what's been made harder for you, but also what are the ways that you have grown or you have unique and valuable insights that are shaped by this experience. In the 1990s, two psychologists, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun started talking about Post-Traumatic Growth, which is all about how the shit we didn’t want, the shit we wouldn’t wish on anyone else, has the power to grow us nonetheless. Post-Traumatic Growth is nothing you can will yourself into, and it’s nothing that anybody else can impose on you. But it might be something that is present within you as a result of how you’ve dealt with the challenge you’ve faced. There are five domains of Post-Traumatic Growth. As I list them, see which land for you:
More meaningful personal relationships / ability to connect with others
New possibilities for personal/professional life
Increased emotional strength and resilience
Spiritual connection / oneness
Gratitude and appreciation toward life
Ok, Struggling Ones, before we do our mantras and wrap up, I want to share a poem by Ashley Solomon that I read on Galit Atlas’ instagram page which is @galiacollaborative. It is a poem by a parent to a child, and it landed for me in terms of your journey as a Struggling One.
Mantras: I hope you can remind yourself of these phrases when you’re feeling stuck, frustrated, or ashamed, either individually or within a relational context. Maybe even write them down in your journal:
I am not my struggle.
I am both someone who needs help and someone who is a helper.
I don't need to be sick to be loved.
I self-advocate without apology.
I work within my limitations without apology.
It's okay for me to take up space.
I'm a bodacious blend of strengths and growing edges.
As a reminder, if you’d like to take the roles quiz, you can find that link here. Next time we’ll explore the role of the Peacemaker. And at the end of this series, we’ll be sharing a worksheet with tailored journaling prompts and practices for all of the roles, so if you’d like to receive that later this winter, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, which you can find a link for in the show notes. Or, visit dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to get added to the list. Thanks for joining me, and until next time, be well.