Family Systems Theory Biggest Drawback

In Seminary, I learned about Family Systems Theory from the Rev. Dr. Will Spong. He showed us how to make histograms, a sort of family tree thing. But there was one caveat missing from his discussion, he never said "this works only if you know the truth about your family."

You see, I grew up the middle-child only-son. There are a lot of family systems dynamics that are affilliated with these two things. My only problem is that this wasn't true.

For my 30th birthday, I got two older half brothers. My younger sister was moving back to the small town where I was born and where all of this takes root. My father figured the past would no longer be the past so he decided to tell us on his terms rather than have my sister figure it out on her own.

He kept his first family a secret because he figured blended families never worked out, so he wasn't even going to try to get it to work. To us, they never existed. His error in all of this was to believe that keeping his other family from us would make it as if they never existed. This didn't work out and I believe it was an error. Even if it didn't work out, at least the lie was out in the open.

There was a constant undertow of something just beneath the surface, I could sense that I didn't have all of the facts. Sure, I never knew what was going on, but I always knew there was something.

So suddenly I figure out that in my father's eyes I was never middle-child only-son. I was four-of-five youngest-son. These have vastly different dynamics. My mother was kind of caught in the middle of this as she had to deal with step-children whom she would never see, but by my father were intricately connected to her life.

The Family System that I thought existed didn't. Welcome to the drawback to the system, we don't always know the whole truth, even about our families of origin.