I enjoyed yesterday's Personal and Professional Development session a lot - an exercise for us to share positive aspects of our own genograms (a clinical term for family trees). I was amazed at how cross cultural family relationships and experiences could be! An unplanned common thread among us was about our fathers.
My father grew up in a big family, the fourth of five sons. When he was a child, he was often the first person to be blamed and physically punished by my paternal grandfather whenever something went wrong in the family. According to my father, most of the time he was not responsible for the mischiefs or the occurences! I believe this childhood experience had such huge impact on my father that when he himself became a father, he was determined to be totally different from his own father. The clinical term I could relate this to would be what John Byng-Hall labelled as a corrective family script, i.e. a guide to actions taken in family relationships that is the total opposite of what was done in the previous generation.
Througout my childhood my father never used corporal punishment on any of his children. There was only once he lost his temper with me. That was a morning when I was in primary one when I felt really lazy and not wanting to get out of bed. I told him I did not feel like going to school. He was so furious that he took my school uniform and threw it onto the floor. I was so shocked to see him angry with me that I went to school that day. I never played truant throughout my school days (well of course not counting my college days:). That was the one and only time in my childhood when I experienced my father losing temper. It was not even projected at me but directed at my school uniform! I could still remember this incident after so long, imagine how traumatic it would have been for my father when he was a child or for children who experienced much worse, such as witnessing or experiencing domestic violence.
In a way, I feel priviledged that I was spared from the negative childhood experience my father went through. It probably took lots of conscious and efforts at his end as a parent to refrain from adopting my grandfather's parenting style. I personally do not think that my lack of traumatic childhood hinder my clinical practice. On the contrary, it provides me the strength and curiosity to explore such themes with clinical families without unnecessarily triggering any personal scars or memories that may cloud my clinical neutrality or judgement.
