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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

The myth of the perfect family

Pro wrestler Chris Benoit's longtime driver described the Benoit family as "the happiest people."

Friend after friend who responded to an online board on Fort Thomas resident Robert McCafferty described his family as "the perfect family."

The words have an eerie ring to them now that police say that Chris Benoit strangled his wife and smothered his young son before hanging himself Monday, and are holding Cheryl McCafferty for her husband's murder.

Such tragedies make us wonder how much we really know about even our close friends and family members, how much pain goes on in homes and people's heads that we've never imagined.

Perhaps the "happiest" and "perfect" images are ultimately part of the problem.

Advertising, entertainment and even the social "competitions" that go on within neighborhoods, companies, schools and families push us to hide our weaknesses, deny our problems, project our most successful image to the world. We try to trump one another with the size of our homes, the scope of our travels, the breadth of our social circle, the length of our resume, the college-acceptance list of our offspring.

In the end, being a perfect family isn't nearly as important as being a healthy one -- where people can admit their shortcomings, acknowledge their dependency and seek help with their problems.


5 Comments:

at 4:49 PM, June 26, 2007 Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mankind are humans. Humans are imperfect and commit egregious errors.

You mental health care proponents assume that their healing rate exceeds the rate of failure that Mental Health "Experts" provide for mental patients.

Not everyone is fixable. Often Mental Health Care creates more problems than they cure. Psychologists like to create lifelong care programs for their test subjects. Psychologists often receive formal therapy from other Psychologists.

Psychology is not a guaranteed fix for ALL human irrational thought and behavior.

 
at 8:45 AM, June 27, 2007 Anonymous Anonymous said...

Of course not Anon, but the first step in addressing any problem is being able to admit there is a problem - Krista nails it, again.
Sometimes it isn't about "fixing" anything but gaining the skills or confidence to adapt to the problem and just survive it.

 
at 3:18 PM, June 27, 2007 Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anon...Psychology is a guessing game. Too often the mental doctors are unwilling to acknowledge what they don't know.

 
at 5:31 PM, June 28, 2007 Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very well said, Krista. Sometimes we try too hard to be "perfect" and hope our problems just go away. It takes courage to admit you have a problem and it takes even more courage to do something about it. We are all 'walking wounded' with our own set of issues that we are dealing with.

 
at 1:50 PM, July 02, 2007 Anonymous Anonymous said...

Spousal abuse is a mind game of terrifying proportions. There are outward signs of an unhealthy relationship that can be spotted if one knows what to look for. Perhaps we need to educate ourselves to that, and realize the intensity of the danger when an abused one tries to escape. Often it is unreported because the abused one truly fears for their life (and rightly so).

The signs of abusive trouble are evident in the reported stories of the McCafferty tragedy; I can see them, but I'm also a survivor of abuse. The real question we as a society need to address is, what can we do in the future to save lives and help people escape unhealthy relationships? Ignoring it and pretending it isn't happening always ends up with someone's life lost, so if we value life as we say we do, we need to take abuse very seriously and stop passing it off as someone else's problem. We need to step in and get involved.

 
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