Family systems are interesting.
Family systems self-organize multiple times. Self-organization is the process of two (or more) actors/things interacting towards a mutual goal — systems have a goal. Out of that self-organization emerges “family.” The emergence of family happens at marriage, at the arrival of offspring, or through other acts where that type of bond exists between actors — certainly some friends may regard themselves as family.
The system persists through feedback loops.
Balancing feedback loops may keep the actors in line and focused on a mutual goal, reinforcing loops may allow the system to continue to
Communicating with one another is a form of reinforcement feedback loop. The act of actors communicating with each other through text, calls, visits, or family norms may reinforce those bonds and allow the system to persist.
The system contains resources such as patience, tolerance, or love. The stock of patience may rise or fall within a family system. The stock of love may rise or fall —there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a thing. Time may be a stock — a non-renewable stock at that. Actors, or members, of a family may be a stock. The more that enter the family, the higher the stock of people in the family system.
Resources are added to or removed from the system via flows. There may not be enough patience, love, tolerance, money, or other critical resource to maintain the stock of people in a family. Perhaps a family system became too big and splintered off to sub systems? What if one member of a family committed an act so egregious or deviant that the stock of patience or tolerance for that family member became depleted; the deviant is removed from the system. Maybe factions form.
If you remove the system, it’s easy to look at actors in a family and judge them. I do and have done that. You do and have done that. It makes perfect sense for a person to judge (on any gradient of harsh) the members of their family. However, if you add the concept of the system over the top, you see a different story.
You see people playing their part, as boundedly rational actors, in the game that is their system. They' are attempting to do their best. They don’t realize that the system may collapse or persist, and they may not be fully aware of how to persist it. They may only measure thru-put, how much of a thing happened, and they may not measure the stocks within the system. They may have their own goals and their goals may be different from other members of the system — creating a push and pull effect. They may all feed from the same well and use up the resources so that not one has any more resources.
Nothing natural lasts forever.
Families come, go, re-form, and collapse … like everything else in life. It’s natural, it’s okay, and it’s best not to judge. Simply accept and love the best you can.