Is Your Family Dysfunctional?

“She was nothing to me, baby,” Robert said desperately.

She didn’t look convinced.

“She led me on and wanted me to have a relationship with her,”

She shook her head.

“She said that a good man should be shared.”

Sandra had walked in on her husband of five years to find him in a compromising position with Hellen, a nurse she knew. Sandra and Robert were doctors.

Sandra would have none of it.

Neighbors reported later hearing screaming and cries for mercy and a deep groan like an animal going through a deathly ordeal. When they charged into the Airbnb, they were assaulted by a gory display of blood everywhere.

Sandra sat at the dining table, numb and withdrawn from her surroundings. Her hands were on the table, with her right hand firmly holding a bloody slicing knife, which was missing from a knife set in the kitchen area a short walk away. Sandra was covered in blood. The blood trickled down and formed a meandering path into the corridor.

Face first on the floor was Robert, with multiple stab wounds along the length of his body, and mainly concentrated on his back. An act of rage. He had dragged himself from the bedroom and was unable to go any further from exhaustion, loss of blood, and wounds, and died in the corridor.  

In the bedroom lay Hellen, who had never left the bed. She had two precise fatal stabs to the heart. She had died instantly.

Sandra had exerted her revenge.      

What would have been your initial thoughts had you watched this story on the 7 o’clock news?

With a spike in femicide cases, some may say, ‘Alas! He had it coming.’ Others will double down and say, ‘a scorned woman is dangerous.’

Few realize the tectonic impact of this event. Not just for Sandra and the deceased Martin and Hellen. The couple shared four children, and Hellen had a daughter. This incident would forever change five lives and impact the psyche of many more.  

Sandra’s four children have to contend with a murderer for a mother and a father who died from her hands. Hellen’s teenage daughter also has to contend with her feelings towards a woman who killed her mother. The circle of vengeance continues.

Sandra was a successful doctor and was loved for her drive and business acumen. Many asked why she ‘threw’ that away. Little was known of her family background.

 

The family is the basic unit of society—the atom from which a society is painstakingly built. By observing the history of a family, you can make predictions about a society. Is it on the upward trajectory or tottering on the precipice of disaster?

Sandra’s father abandoned his family to elope with another woman. Sandra hated her father for this and never spoke to him again. Her father had also been abusive and compulsively dishonest. He loved women, and they loved him back. He bequeathed his four daughters with stunning looks and traumas inherited from his parents.  

Sandra’s father came from a fractured polygamous family. Hate, murder, and a deep self-loath are what he passed on. His actions, words, and outlook on life for the twelve years he was in Sandra’s life remained imprinted in her.  Sandra carried the shame and abuse of her brilliant, well-educated mother, who had fallen for the charms of a city boy.

Sandra’s mother, a doctor, passed her intelligence and deep desire for success to her daughters. She was a nurturing and caring person but horrendous at choosing partners. Unintentionally, she taught her daughters how to perceive men and protect themselves from them. Her daughters never once interacted with their father’s family. They lived off their mother's resentment —a topic too painful to revisit.  

“Depend on yourselves and no one else,” she told them. “Be driven and tenacious.”

Sandara’s mother never spoke of her deep desire to have someone love her. The painful loneliness that afflicted her most nights and turned her into a workaholic.

The four daughters were strong, bold, and beautiful. They passed their exams at the top of their class and took up studies in different universities, pursuing Medicine, Engineering, Law, and Architecture.

Away from the prying attention of her mother and at university, Sandra’s life soon spiraled.

Sandra's anger was regulated by an intense drive to succeed. She used this drive as fuel to compete against her male counterparts, rising above them. She stood out like a sore thumb, living a lonely existence. She wanted to belong. Drinking, partying, and sexual indulgences became her way of coping with the mental strain of study.  

But she never understood why she felt unable to control certain emotions. She would feel sad for days, then battle with loneliness, and want a person to hold her and tell her she was worthy. She couldn’t remember a day she was happy.

Robert was her knight in shining armor. He gave her attention, took her out, and dotted over her like no man had ever before (Many had been afraid to approach her).

Robert was living the script given to him by his uncles. He had lost his parents young. He came from a polygamous family. As long as he could take care of a woman, he contemplated he would give her children. Sandra and Robert were married, and two twins were born soon after.

Sandra had known of Robert’s philandering as they dated. There were signs everywhere, but she loved him. He completed her, taking the loneliness away.

But when he started to go away for days on end, and the loneliness came back, a darker voice also appeared with the anger, resentment, and hate she had bottled for years. She fumed for months until that fateful night.

 After she had done the act, she considered taking her own life, but a voice, gentle and calming, told her to wait. She saw her father’s face laughing in the darkness of her mind. She then calmly decided to face the reverberation of her actions.

 

We like to believe bad things are happening around us beyond our cognition and actions.

‘The economy is bad because so and so is stealing.’

‘The sun is so hot because so and so is cutting trees.’

‘The youth today are so morally degraded.’

We have narratives that absolve us of responsibility for what happens around us. We fail to see the invisible link that connects us all. Our actions and inaction fuel this connective system.

The bribe to a traffic policeman to ignore your minor misdemeanor, repeated a thousand times, grinds to a halt the police and justice system. The bribe to a revenue authority official to allow tax evasion, repeated a million times, cripples all systems depending on those taxes to run a government.

We elect leaders who bribe us with short-term promises because we love Ponzi schemes: rhetoric and tribe trump progress and values.

We have never taken a moment to process our past, values, purpose, and where we want to go. And this is why we have failed at the atomic, individual, and family levels.     

A government that understands the power of family can manipulate it for its own gain.

Nazi Germany used propaganda and enacted laws to propel Germany into a genocidal war machine. Women were central to Adolf Hitler’s ‘racially pure Aryan race.’ They were the pure race's generators, so they were encouraged to have many children. Men were encouraged to have four children in and out of wedlock.

The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored "child-rich" families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion.

Women, by law, were not to marry non-Aryans, those with handicaps, and those with certain diseases. The Jews and Gypsy were seen as inferior and exterminated. Many families looked the other way and supported this extermination.

 

Today, we do this often, not as efficiently and as extensively.

 

Corruption is our propaganda tool, and bribery is our weapon of choice. We bribe our way past trouble to get ‘premium’ services and to oil our way through services that have ground to a halt in many failing or failed countries.

 We are blind to our actions and delusional about our deeds.  

We bribe to get our kids to the right schools or to get our way because our retort is, ‘There is so much corruption in this country.’

 There was a time when the community was more important than the individual. There was honor and sacrifice for family, community, and nation. Fewer were instances where leaders would sacrifice their people for riches and glory.

But every time we committed atrocities against each other, people recoiled.

Hate grew and was then carried over great distances to counter the communal bonds and peace that we had.

The enslavement of people was rife with the Arabs of East Africa, they inspired a system where slave runners went to great distances to hunt and enslave human beings and herd them like cattle to slave markets. The wars between tribes also brought hate and discord—greed, power, and desire for control strain the social fabric.

Then came the World Wars that came to our shores. Taita Taveta was the scene of World War I, significantly affecting the Taita people. They were displaced, used as forced labor, expelled from their land, and faced a shortage of food and casualties.

This affected their social fabric, brought economic hardship, and planted traumas passed down through generations. Could there be an invisible connection to how alcohol and bhang use became a generational way of coping with past traumas?

We can extend this narrative to the British colonial pursuits across Kenya, mainly in the rich highlands. They subjugated and exploited. Doubtless, they had better technologies and optimized land for global commerce.

But they did this without regard for those they uprooted, treated as second-class citizens, and rounded up and placed in concentration camps.

Family and tradition were the one thing that kept the Jews strong even during pogroms and mass evictions.

For native Kenyans, we developed the Stockholm Syndrome; we fell in love with the British's skin color, language, culture, way of life, technology, and conquest.   

Our shame caused us to subtly reject our culture and think of it as old and archaic. To preserve our dignity, we developed a classism on who was more British. Subconsciously, if you speak better English, know their ways more, and understand their way of exploiting others and land to gain wealth, you are more respected.

 

In one generation, we went from honoring age-old traditions to our traditions being treated as inferior and unwanted.

The hate they cultivated in us? No! It didn’t go away. It was just not directed at them. They replaced our language, culture, education, way of life, and beliefs. How could we hate them? They educated and took care of us!

We used hate against ourselves first, our families second, and then our extended families, clans, and tribes, and then we went outward.  

The insidious effect on the family was instant.

Men were uprooted from their homes, either working for the white man or fighting against them. Those who chose to fight faced death, discrimination, and abject poverty. Their women were raped and saw violence.

Families were fractured, and traumas were planted. These traumas would continue to affect generations after independence, untreated and quietly forgotten, simmering below the surface.

The evidence is reckless and self-destructive behavior, aggressive outbursts, and anger witnessed in communities that were the epicenter of the Mau Mau and other uprisings that were decisively suppressed.

Their will was broken, and they were treated as subhuman, and then when the time came, the white man left unceremoniously, amid our celebrating that we had gained our independence. But was it a win or a pyrrhic victory? The trauma came to haunt us soon after.

Men became drunk to cope with the traumas of war, and women stepped up to take care of a fragile home, wondering what had happened to their men. The next generation was asked to obey and respect their fathers. Absent fathers were a poor example and were removed from traditional moors of honor, dignity, and respect.

In many ways, the white man came and ensured that he replaced our cultures with education, English, and order. An education system that turned the majority into servile and obedient, unable to think critically for themselves.

We were told to study, and one day, we might reach the level of the ‘superior’ white man.

But not too soon, our great-grandparents learned only how to read, write, and do arithmetic, which qualified them to do basic clerical jobs. After independence, we were left with a castle in the air to occupy, making us more subservient to their ways and demeaning our old moors that would have saved family and society.

We maladapted and started changing our culture to suit our busy lives. We were now more ‘intelligent’ and more learned, and so we fell into an abyss where subsequent generations ascribe to the white man’s way of life, choosing to forget conveniently what turned us tame.

Forgetting the very behavior and environment that shaped our genes (epigenetics), making us what we are today. Full of negative thoughts, fearful, angry, numb, and detached.

 

We are inauthentic, unhappy, and unsure of who we are in the 21st century. We do not know we are living past traumas, choked by an invisible hand unwilling to let us go until we resolve the past and better understand ourselves.

Instead of doing so, we in the 80s and 90s were smitten by what we saw on television. We wanted an identity here and now, not the vague and dark identity from our past.

Our children learned from us and embraced a global culture, which Netflix and others propagated. We had never solved the issue, but we had done everything to forget it in our busy lives, avoiding boredom and loneliness.

Unwilling to take time to process what we feel and even go back and talk to our aunts, uncles, grandparents, and those who can still tell us who we are and what we need to untangle from our past. And find healing.

Interestingly, the tectonic plates are shifting under us. The education systems that brought us this far are becoming irrelevant. Now is a good time to question everything.  

It is a time that requires us to look inward to find our creative streak and purpose. But it is also the right time to face our traumas: the rejection, hate, low self-esteem, and abuse that we have carried for generations and is normal and acceptable to a great majority of the 21st century.

 

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Thank you for taking the time to read this blog! I'm Edwin Moindi, a Life and Habit Coach dedicated to helping people understand their habits, navigate their emotions, and cultivate emotional intelligence for a happier, more balanced life. I'd love to hear your thoughts—feel free to reach out and share your insights or questions!