People

with families and family enterprises

Every relationship is an exchange. This is not a cynical thing to say; it is the ordinary condition of being bound to other people. We give something and we are given something, and the terms are mostly unspoken and mostly workable, and they shift over a lifetime without announcement. Families run on these exchanges. They are how love actually moves.

What complicates a family is when something enters the room that is larger than any of the people in it.

Often it is the business. It can also be money on its own, or a name that everyone in the city knows, or a faith, or something that happened once and has never been spoken about since. Whatever it is, it takes a seat at the table. Everyone now serves it. Everyone's relationship to everyone else begins to run through it. And because it is not a person, it cannot be argued with. It simply stands there, being right.

The trap this sets is not one that anyone builds on purpose. The purpose is always survival, protection, success. Parents want their children to succeed, and so they fund their ventures. They make provision so that the children will be safe whatever happens. All of it is meant as love. But a life is largely made by what it has had to confront, and a family that has done well can end up preventing its children from engaging with the ordinary world its parents once sprang from. And so a comparison enters the family that nobody can win. What was made in one generation by having nothing cannot be handed to the next, and cannot be asked of them either. It is not there to be met. Some children stop trying, and are held to be soft. Some spend their lives over-proving, and find that it does not count either, because it was not done from nothing. Both are measured against a founding they were born too late to enter, and their own founding has escaped them.

Severity does the same thing by the opposite route. The parent who gives little, who withholds praise on principle, who is afraid that softness will ruin what hardship built, is trying to hand on the one thing that cannot be handed on. And the child grows up meeting an ordinary world with an extraordinary judge already installed inside them, so that nothing they do out there can ever quite be reported back. Indulgence and severity are not opposites. They are two ways of trying to give a child a founding, and neither of them works.

It looks, from the outside, as though the next generation holds nothing. In fact they hold everything the money cannot reach: their presence, their willingness, the grandchildren, the good name. But holding it is not the same as being able to use it, and few think of this as power. What it feels like is that there is no legitimate way to speak up. You have been given a great deal, so you are not entitled to be unhappy. Anything you decline looks like ingratitude, anything you fail at looks like proof, and anything you succeed in is catch-up. So the objection goes underground and comes out sideways — as the venture that never quite starts, the life that will not settle, the distance kept. These get read as problems with the person, and sometimes that is all they are. Often enough they are the only thing left to say, said in the only way that remains.

If you are the one who sees this, you already know it. That is usually the situation. Someone in a family — often the person who built the business, sometimes a daughter, sometimes the one who married in and can see the whole thing from the doorway — knows exactly what is happening and has nobody to say it to. Not the spouse, who is inside it. Not the children, who are the subject of it. Not the lawyer or the banker, who will hear it as a structuring problem and return with an instrument. The knowing has no room to go into. That, and not the trouble itself, is often what makes it unbearable.

The customary remedy is to get everyone into a room. The family retreat, the facilitated conversation on the family constitution or the relationship dynamics, the weekend at which people are finally going to be open with one another. For some families this works. For a great many it does not. To speak plainly to the people who you feel let down by, and to still be heard by them, is a skill. It has to be learned, but it cannot be learned in the presence of the very people it must eventually be used on. A family with thirty or seventy years of unspoken history in the room is not going to acquire it over a weekend.

There is another way, and it begins by admitting what is true: that some things can be said to a third person long before they can be said to a family member. Our profession discourages triangulation — carrying words between people. But what I have found is that there is an honest form of it. Words are worked through with each person separately, put into a form the other can actually receive, and carried across — not to keep the two apart, and not to make the go-between necessary, but to get true things moving between people who cannot yet face each other, so that one day they can. Done carelessly, this becomes collusion. Done with discipline, it is sometimes the first thing that has worked in twenty years.

I do not think there is such a thing as a good family, or a state of harmony that a family should be trying to reach. Every picture of the perfect family turns out to be an idealized picture of some particular class, or culture. What I look for is plainer.

Can the people in this family still grow — can each of them become someone, choose something, live a life that is recognizably their own? And can the family itself still grow, or has it hardened into a set of positions that everyone is now serving? Where the answer to both is yes, a family can carry a great deal of turbulence, even pain, and be quite all right. Where the answer is no, no amount of provision will help.

All of it comes down to speech. Saying a true thing to someone you are bound to, and being heard. But that is the second half. The first is saying it to yourself: without excusing them, without excusing yourself. Whether the others come to the table is not in your hands. This is.