The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

by Harriet Lerner

Many of us think we know our family background. Certainly we all have stories we tell about our family to other people. Such stories may elicit their admiration (“Your mother sounds like an incredible person!”) or their anger (“How horrible that your father treated you that way!”) or their pity (“What a terrible childhood you’ve had!”). We may tell these stories over and over during our lifetime, constructing explanations for things that we seek to understand. (“My mother always put me down; that is why I have such a bad self-concept.”) However, these stories, including the psychological interpretations that we learn to apply to ourselves and others, are not substitutes for knowing our family in the sense of asking questions of our parents, grandparents, and other relatives and inviting them to share their experience. Most of us react to other family members, but we do not know them.