~ On Being The Identified Patient
From Toxic Families Forum 2007
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. - George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes we are the family skeleton, the black sheep, the shame of the clan. Many times it’s because the clan is completely nuts. A dysfunctional family needs someone to focus on, someone to blame things on, someone to point to when things go wrong. In clinical settings, we call that person the “identified patient” or IP. It means that in a sick family system, the group has subconsciously elected one person to act out all the family sickness in a very overt way while the rest of the family acts it out in a covert way. Even if the IP tries to act “not sick,” the family will send messages to “get back where you belong” and set the IP up for failure. Before you know it, the identified patient is acting out AGAIN and the family is shocked (simply SHOCKED! that the person they set up to be the IP is acting like an IP). The IP does the bidding of insanity for the whole family.
It’s not that the identified patient is any sicker than the rest of the family, in fact they probably aren’t, but they are the one through whom the family channels all of its “stuff.” The family dynamic is to keep things status quo, to keep its eyes Read the rest of this entry »
