The Family NDA

Sometimes a family keeps an NDA, an informal Non Disclosure Agreement. Something bad happens to one person, or one branch of the family, Maybe when a bad thing happened, it was poor timing: Parts of the family under stress with jobs, with kids or declining parents, or already strained relations. for one reason or another, “I don’t want to talk about it” becomes the family rule. That’s one possible. Maybe, the family has a habit, good in a lot of settings, to not talk about bad things. An unwritten rule “I can take it, I can fix it”

There can be a million reasons. Every family is unique. Maybe a bad thing happened, and no one saw anything bad, or the ‘bad’ was an internal feeling, and everything and everyone else was ‘normal’. Countless folks look back, on childhood years, on difficult different eras, and think : Childhood is normal, normal for me. After all, ”Home is Where We start From”.

A norm in a childhood past feels normal. Who knows? Maybe it actually wasn’t important. Or, maybe it isn’t important now. Maybe its the kind of thing that happens to everybody’s lives: a death, a sudden illness, a move. Or even: ‘there’s crazy stuff going on now, so once again, not a good time to bring up things’ from a while ago. Even: ‘I am the stable one, the caregiver. I never ask for help. Not gonna start now. They need me, and they need me strong. ‘

Or: What goes on behind closed doors is nobody else’s business.

Family that was close at one time can be ‘estranged’ and angry with each other, or estranged by circumstance. A different world. A different time. A different family. None of the folks back then are around now, so what’s the point?

Still millions of very good reasons. Valid reasons. Even ‘best practices’ reasons. In fact, if someone’s got a lot of instability going on right now, maybe focus on here and now issues first. Here and now is the important part. A functional and good here and now

But the bad things still register. They still have impact.

The thing is, if you put it off years ago when it happened, and you put it off again, every season, every year, it becomes a reflex. It becomes habit. it can become a boogeyman. Because you spend so mch time avoiding it, it takes on a character that is catastrophic. Putting it off for a decade can give it explosive qualities that maybe it does not deserve.

The reflex, to look away, to distract, can become a habit. It can infect other situations, other settings now, in the here and now.