Coping with Family Suffering: Lessons from the Oz Family

Understanding Ineffective Responses and Finding Ways to Heal

I don't know the Oz family. To be honest, I've read more books by Galia Oz than by Amos Oz, and I've seen the play "Shakshuka and the Great Lemon Tree Robbery" inspired by her books twice. But I know families. We all know Tolstoy's proverb: "All happy families are happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But the truth is that the opposite is true: all unhappy families are unhappy in the same way. And the road to unhappiness goes through the inability to relate to the suffering of others.

The suffering of others overwhelms us from all sides. Recently, within a very short period of time, we were asked to witness the suffering of young girls exposed to the aggression of an older director, the suffering of a daughter exposed to the aggression of her father, and the suffering of children, boys, and women harmed by a role model in their community. What do we do with all this suffering?

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Can It Be Fixed?

It seems to me that there are three common ways in which we try to deal with the suffering of others. The interesting thing for me in the case of Galia and Amos Oz is that the reactions to Oz's book include all three.

The Fix-It Approach

The first way is to try to fix the situation. If Galia Oz feels this way about her writer and leader father, the situation is probably messed up. One of them must be fixed. Some commenters felt that the author was the spoiled one ("What do we do in the face of the knowledge that he used the exact same qualities to lie? And to hide? And to create a false representation? Doesn't this turn everything that felt true in his writing into one big bluff?" Maariv wrote).

Others felt that his daughter was the spoiled one ("Even though he did not recognize himself in her accusations, father tried and hoped until his last day to talk to her and understand her, even about the things that seemed to him and to us to be contrary to reality. Galia's pain is probably real and heartbreaking, but we remember differently. Completely different," wrote Oz's sister).

The fact that suffering makes us want to find the fault is understandable. But I will risk sounding strange and say that this is a mistake because there is no connection between suffering and failure. The fact that someone is suffering does not mean that the situation can be lifted on a lift in the garage of life, diagnosed where the fault is—in the father or in the daughter—and fixed. Things depend on each other, and they look different depending on the point from which you view them. The fact that some people in the family or the circle close to her did not see what the daughter saw does not make the daughter a problem.

Despair

But how do we deal with the realization that we can't fix it? Some despair, and this is the second type of reaction to the suffering of others. Despair can manifest itself in sinking into depression, throwing up one's hands, and giving up trying to alleviate the other's suffering. A close friend of Oz described Oz's desperation to improve his relationship with his daughter, and in a public address to his daughter told how Oz promised him "to stop sharing his pain with his close friends and to no longer talk about the deep sorrow that you and your children cut off all contact with him."

But despair is also a mistake. In the case of the suffering of a son or daughter, it is a double mistake, one in principle and the other specific. The fundamental mistake is that tolerating the suffering of others is part of being human. The specific mistake is that one cannot give up on the pain of a son or daughter, just as one cannot give up on referring to the pain of an organ in the body. This is not even a moral statement, but an almost mechanical statement. Family is one system. If there is pain in one of the organs in the system, it affects the condition of the other organs in the system. Fact.

Indifference

The third type of response to suffering is indifference. In the case of the Oz family, there is no lack of people saying to each other, "I didn't read, I'm not interested." This reaction can be understood, but of course, it is also dangerous to health. When we close the article, change the channel, or change the topic of conversation, we may reduce our suffering at that moment, but of course, this makes us very limited.

When we don't want to be reminded of the pain, vulnerability, and fragility, we withdraw into ourselves, leaving ourselves a very limited space of interaction with the world. We also increase the risk that we will become aggressive towards anyone who tries to bring us reality. And of course, in any case, it is an illusion. Within a family system, the illusion is very clear. Just as I can't say that I don't care about my severe stomachache because my head doesn't hurt. The smaller the system, the more radically and rapidly each organ affects the other organs.

From my point of view as a couple and family therapist, the case of the Oz family is interesting because these three ineffective coping mechanisms with the suffering of a family member are very common. They characterize to one degree or another almost every unhappy family, where one of the family members, especially the children, feels pain from the way one or several of the other family members behaved towards them.

This could be a girl who was sexually abused by a family member and has to deal with parents who say "nothing happened," or it happened a long time ago and she needs to leave the past behind her. This could be a woman who is humiliated by another family member in public situations, and the rest of the family tells her that she shouldn't make an issue of it "because that's the way he is." It can be a child who tries to express his unique personality, political views, or sexual tendencies, and the family members try to regulate him "for his benefit." Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples.

What is common to all these cases, and it is clearly seen in the case of the Oz family, is that there is always a double injury. The first injury is the one between two people: father and daughter, brother and sister, son-in-law and mother-in-law, mother and son. The second injury is the one between the rest of the family and the victim: the family towards the daughter, the sister, the mother-in-law, the son. It is important to understand that many times the second injury is the one that has the potential to radically change the way the first injury will be labeled in the mind of the victim. A family that is willing to listen to suffering, bear it, give it recognition, and try to bring healing can turn pain into an engine of growth. A family that denies suffering by trying to identify what is broken and fix it, by despair or by indifference, usually leads to increased suffering in the victim and, accordingly, in all family members.