Family Assignment

Week Four Assignment

My family consists of myself, my brother and our mother and father. The subsystems in my family are marital, parental and siblings. The formal roles in my family consisted of my parents providing finances to support our family, caring for the children and the household. I also had the former role of a caregiver to my younger brother when my parents were not home. As for informal roles, I am my family’s scapegoat and black sheep and the victim to people outside of my immediate family. My brother is seen as the needy and lazy one and my mom is seen as the victim because she is married to an abusive man. My father is the “bad” guy.
My family is Catholic and follows the traditional western culture. Our Catholic religion meant that we celebrated Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Advent and Christmas. For Good Friday, we were not allowed to eat meat and on Easter Sunday we had to attend a church service. My family also had large family gatherings for

We value privacy and secrets are expected to be kept in the family. I am considered the black sheep because I exposed the abuse happening in our family. As kids we were given plenty of play dates with our cousins, but didn’t have much opportunity to socialize with people outside of the family, except for at school. My parents had card nights with extended family, but made no effort to make friends outside of the family. They did not like to show affection or love and believed in traditional family roles, with rigid rules. We were not given much encouragement or praise and were expected to live up to our parents exact expectations. For example, because I did not go to college when I was 18, my family cannot seem to forgive me for it and refuse to tell me they are proud of my achievements now. They made comments like “you should have gone to school years ago” instead of saying they were proud of me when I told them I made the Dean’s Honour