Tolstoy and Unhappy Families

Leo Tolstoy: When Life Does Not Imitate Art

or

Unpacking The Opening Lines Of Anna Karenina

“Happy families are all alike;

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

    I’m sure you’ve heard this quote before. 

    It’s the opening line from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, first published in serial form between 1873 and 1877. This quote has been repeated so often that it has actually taken the form of an operational principle: ‘The Anna Karenina Principle’. Briefly, the principle claims that we can articulate several basic reasons why a species or a process may be successful, but it becomes much more complex to articulate why a species or a process may fail. 

    Whether Tolstoy knew it or not, Aristotle stated something similar in the ' Nichomachean Ethics', Book 2:

    "Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way..."

    While this may be intuitively satisfying and may have represented the best wisdom of the times for Aristotle and Pythagoras, it is almost completely not accurate when it comes to the reality of unhappy families.

    What’s more, it’s a red herring. 

    Bear with me. 

    Let's assume that 'family unhappiness' (or as we might say these days, family dysfunction) is distributed much like most characteristics throughout a population - in a normal distribution curve (Illustration 1). At the 50th percentile, 50% of families are unhappier (to the right side of the mean) and 50% are happier (to the left side of the mean). There are worse places on the curve (there are almost always worse places than ours on the curve...). For example, if your family had the misfortune to be at the 90th percentile, only 10% of families in the population would be unhappier than yours.

    With that in mind, it seems pretty clear that the quote from Tolstoy shines a light on the wrong road. It suggests unilaterally that each unhappy family has a unique psychology, unrelated to the general impacts of cultural history, social class, environmental degradation, and neighborhood trauma. I'm not suggesting that a percentage of unhappy families do not suffer from comparatively unique clusters of debilitating vulnerabilities. In terms of family dysfunction or unhappiness, however, they are the outliers, located somewhere to the right of the 90th percentile, plus or minus. These are Tolstoy's comparatively rare Unhappy Families - the ones about whom, theoretically, we are unable to generalize. 

    The point here, however, is that it is possible, and much more important, to generalize about the other 90% of us located on the rest of the curve, below the 90th percentile, who still struggle with varying degrees of distress.

Illustration 1: The hypothetical distribution of family unhappiness throughout a population.

after http://www.learneasy.info/MDME/MEMmods/MEM30012A/statistics.html

    In the social sciences, 'The Anna Karenina Principle' draws our attention to the outliers, the 10%, diverting us from understanding how discriminatory practices inherent in our institutional lives act as catalysts for family despair and dysfunction in the larger body of the curve. We stop studying the effects of pervasive social and economic marginalization and, instead, focus on the sickness of individual families, i.e. commercially profitable evidence based therapies, criminal justice and family services interventions (which often save lives, but, more often, coming as late as the do, create a subset of their own problems), and pharmacological solutions, instead of investing in more comprehensive social policies and levels of community organization. 

    And the principle does not help to illuminate some of the more recent research which informs us more adequately about the epidemiology of dangerous and extremely costly psycho-social pathogens in the deeper structures of our society. 

    One such piece of research, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs), originally published by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, as "The Relationship of Adult Health Status to Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction", in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1998, Volume 14, pages 245–258, examines the impact of 10 specific and widely prevalent adverse childhood events. This study propels us to some stunning conclusions about where our social and health sciences should be taking us (see Illustration 2). These 10 events, which are most toxic before the age of 18, include:

• substance abuse

• mental illness

• criminal behavior

• parental divorce/separation

• battered mother

• psychological abuse

• physical abuse

• sexual abuse

• emotional neglect

• physical neglect

     When we look at research like this, we are empowered as professionals and as a society, if we so choose, to move towards more honest, more relevant, and potentially far more effective change. Summarizing Robert Anda:

    "What all this means, is that we need to prevent adverse childhood experiences and, at the same time, change our systems – educational, criminal justice, healthcare, mental health, public health, workplace – so that we don’t further traumatize someone who’s already traumatized. You can’t do one or the other and hope to make any progress."*1 (Notice the title of the article referenced)

    Put another way, children are undamaged by the monster in the occasional nightmare, but certainly damaged by the monster returning home from the bar every night to assault and otherwise terrify the household. The resulting sustained stress response has real, physiological  impacts on a child's developmental trajectory, impacts which epigenetic research is only beginning to elucidate (epigenetics is a golden link in this chain of research).*2

    Research like that of Anda and Felitti and others, and the resulting interventions, should be: 

            - fundamental to the development of social and economic policy,

            - critical to program development in criminal justice 

            - at the heart of efforts to improve public education,

            - primary to the mission of public health agencies.

    Tolstoy, and those who mistake literary device for wisdom in the sciences, give us primarily self serving and irrelevant political rhetoric (reinforcing the privilege at the root of alienation for substantial populations), the further victimization of those already victimized by institutionalized injustices, superficial and self defeating education reform, costly and unending 'therapeutic' interventions of little, if any value, and, what is perhaps most distressing, bad science.

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    *1 from http://acestoohigh.com/2012/10/03/the-adverse-childhood-experiences-study-the-largest-most-important-public-health-study-you-never-heard-of-began-in-an-obesity-clinic/

    *2 For those of you who may not be familiar with this, epigenetics is the study of the way in which the expression of inherited traits are modified by environmental influences without a change to the DNA sequence.