Doom & Gloom and the convolutedness of forgetting to communicate

So we have been learning about the family as a system. The idea that you can't just effect and individual part without some reaction from the rest of it. We do this with the rules, roles and boundaries we make in our families. They don't always work, but we will keep them because we are too scared to try something new.  The rules of a family are those things which have repetitively been done and proven the same reaction. Thus the rule don't ask for anything is implicitly made but never spoken about. The roles of a family can be what keeps people from changing. The "problem child" might be their because they are serving a purpose within the family or they could be showing the symptoms of a dysfunctional family. The boundaries of the family are how open they are to the out side world. Some boundaries are ridged (like a cinder block wall), others diffused or unclear (like a fences that only has posts) or clear ( like a picket fences).  The best is a clear boundary where people know where the family is at and they let new ideas in and out of their boundaries. It was Salvador Minuchin (click on name to see a little video of him) who began to look at these relationships and draw maps of the family. One of the things which he is famous for is his manipulation of physical space in order to help the family system of a new experiences in a safer environment. My Teacher is actually a family therapist who uses these methods and spoke of how you can see a dynamic by how they first sit in the office. I thought about my family, which in and of itself is complicated. I have 3 biological siblings, 3 adoptive siblings, 4 biological step siblings and 2 adopted step siblings. Only the only the 7 youngest live at home now, but before I got married I lived their for about a year-ish. When we went to watch a movie we were always segregated. This is the first thought that sends me on the doom and gloom path. Second is the rules, Eliason's (my main family) never beat Lasley's (step family) and some other things which cause inequality between the two families. Then we started talking about how blended families often fail. And then I found out that two of my siblings are moving out for the summer or longer while my dad works two weeks on two weeks off in North Dakota.  And I am just thinking about how I am in a dysfunctional family and that it is never going to last and why did I feel so good about it in the beginning and dooming and glooming. It didn't help that I texted my little sister (the oldest child at home right now) about what the family rules are she expressed that their still was inequality between team Lasley and team Eliason. She is just tired of being at home and being a good responsible  young adult and still treated like she isn't. Shes is going to be heading out to college as soon as she can after her graduation. Me thinking of how families function I ask her basically if she things that it will fall into chaos when she leaves. She explains that Dad is worried about her mostly because she is the only one not getting along with mom. And that mom actually grounded my second oldest step brother at home for a day (this may sound like a short time to you, but he ALWAYS gets what he wants and is never punished so this is amazing) and the oldest step brother who doesn't really care about anything and goes the lazies route possible (partly because he is a teenage boy) she talked to about when it was important to go to church and mutual (an discussion she would have skipped before). I texted her back and just thanked her for letting me  know that something good is coming from this marriage. That the kids aren't just getting screwed up and the parents heart broken. I told her just to send me what good stuff is going on, in a text or email or phone call or face book message, I didn't care. It's just so easy to tell people what is going wrong and it can become so big that we miss the little baby steps that people are talking that after a time become leaps and bounds. The imagination is wonderful at times, but it also can take and twist things into a scarier picture than it really is. Lesson I have learned: It takes time for change so keep track of it all the way so you aren't shocked by the crisis and understand how things are really going.
PS: This is like how the news sensationalizes the new trends in sciences. Like how we were going into an ice age which would freeze the world and then global warming that would  melt all the polar caps and flood the world and now we are just dealing with the climate change and protecting the environment.