divorce

Many years ago a man named Jim married and had three sons. Jim’s father had a bad temper and Jim inherited that trait. He was nice enough most of the time but when something set him off he would go into a rage and after a time he would settle down and things would return to normal. When Jim was growing up he witnessed this behavior in his father and came to believe that this was the way the world operated. This is the story of what we call today a dysfunctional family. As an adult Jim found himself acting like his father and he just assumed that this was his lot in life, that there was nothing he could do about it and besides this gave him a good reason to excuse his behavior. Since our children are influenced by our behavior it was not surprising that Jim’s three boys became fathers like him. Recent studies have shown that people can change inherited personality traits but not many people are willing to put forth the effort needed to make such changes. Since these fathers were unwilling to make the changes necessary they were doomed to pass on the behavior. One day one of Jim’s grandsons married and had a son. His wife, however, understood that children watch their parents and she refused to live under such circumstances and became estranged from her husband. They lived together but there were no more temper tantrums and their son never witnessed the spontaneous rage. When he grew up he married and had some children but the inherited rage had been decoupled and was no longer passed on. There are times like this, when the father is unwilling to make the needed changes, the mother must step in and force this issue. The mother had to weigh the downside to have a cool relationship between her and her husband against the disruptive influence of temper outburst and she made her decision. Like most things in this life we will never know the long term results but something had to change. I suspect if someone could have talked with the father and explained how his daughters will marry men like him and his sons would treat their wives like him, he might have been willing to do the work needed to change but no one ever pointed this out to him. Then again, even if it had been explained to him, he still may not have changed.