Family systems

Seven Stages by Which Protection Becomes Distortion

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  8 min read

Nobody sets out to build a wall around another person.

It gets built the way most damaging things get built inside families: one reasonable decision at a time, each of them defensible on its own, each of them made out of love. What follows is the sequence I see most often — seven stages, arranged roughly in the order they arrive. They spell NINEVEH, after the city that was warned once and heard it, and warned again a hundred and fifty years later and did not.

Most families are somewhere in the first three. That is not an accusation. It is a reason to keep reading.

1. Normalization — “that’s just how they are”

The first stage is not dramatic. It is the opposite of dramatic. It is the slow process by which something that should have been alarming becomes ordinary, then invisible, then simply the family’s definition of normal.

A woman came to see me because her marriage was in trouble; her husband, a gentle man, had told her he could not keep living with someone who flinched when he raised his voice. She had described her childhood as fine. Her father had never hit anyone. He yelled, and threw things, and once put his fist through a door, and there were long silent evenings when he was in one of his moods.

“That’s just how Dad was,” she said, with real surprise that I had asked. “Everybody’s dad was like something.”

She had carried that weather into her marriage the way a person carries an accent — without ever hearing it. The people who grew up in the same house are the only ones who cannot.

2. Insulation — someone always steps between you and reality

Insulation is the first active move. Someone begins standing between a person and the natural consequence of what that person did.

It usually starts young and small. A seven-year-old breaks a neighbor’s window and hides under the bed; his mother goes to the door, apologizes, pays for the glass, explains that her son is very sensitive, and then goes upstairs and tells him it is all taken care of. Nothing about that afternoon is wrong. Repeat it for thirty-four years and you have a forty-one-year-old whose mother is now liquidating her retirement, and who has never once had the chance to find out whether he could have handled it.

That is the question I ask parents who tell me their child would fall apart. Has he ever had the chance to find out whether that is true?

3. Narrative protection — the stories we tell so nothing has to change

By the third stage the family needs an account. Not a lie, exactly — the stories are usually true, which is what makes them work. They are simply selected, and what they are selected for is the preservation of an identity that the evidence would otherwise threaten.

The pressure he is under is real. The people who left were difficult. The critics have their own history. Each explanation may be accurate. Together they perform one function: making sure that nothing has to change.

4. Enmeshment — one person’s distress becomes everybody’s assignment

In an enmeshed family, when one person is in pain, the whole system reorganizes around it.

A young man came home after a breakup and a job loss in the same month, meaning to regroup. Seven months later he still could not leave, and it was not the breakup that had done it. The moment he came through the door in distress, everyone’s life had rearranged itself around his. When I asked his mother what her life would look like if he were fully well and living on his own, she opened her mouth, closed it, and finally said she had never thought about it.

In a family where one person’s distress becomes everyone’s assignment, that person learns something very fast: the way to stay connected is to stay in distress.

5. Validation becomes vindication — my feelings matter, but they are not the judge

Validation is good practice. It says: your feeling is real, and it makes sense that you feel it. That is true and worth saying.

Vindication is a different claim. It says: because I felt it, I was right. The feeling stops being information about the person having it and starts being a verdict on everyone else. Once a family accepts that move, no account of an event can ever compete with the strength of someone’s reaction to it — and the person with the largest feelings becomes the family’s supreme court.

6. Externalization — explaining is not excusing

Here the cause of the behavior moves outside the person doing it. The trauma took over. The trigger was pulled. She knows what sets him off and she did it anyway.

An explanation of why someone did a thing is genuinely valuable; it is most of what therapy is for. It becomes externalization at one specific point — when it is offered in place of responsibility rather than alongside it. So I ask the plain version of the question: did your trauma grab her arm, or did you?

7. Hyperprotection — the person everyone protects

The final stage is institutional. The protection is no longer one mother at a door; it is a system, and it has decided in advance which conclusion is unavailable.

A mother reports concerning messages between a youth pastor and her teenager. She is thanked for her concern. Two weeks later she is told the matter has been explained and resolved. When she says it is not resolved, she is told she may be reacting from her own history. When she asks whether other parents will be informed, she is told that would be gossip. Within four months three families have stopped speaking to her, her daughter has been quietly dropped from the worship team, and she has begun to wonder whether she is the problem.

She was not the problem. But the system needed her to be, because the only other available answer was one it had ruled out before she ever walked in.

What the stages have in common

Every stage is a form of love, or began as one. Normalization is loyalty. Insulation is mercy. Narrative is charity. Enmeshment is devotion. Vindication is empathy. Externalization is compassion. Hyperprotection is the instinct to shelter what is precious.

And every stage moves the cost of a person’s behavior off that person and onto someone else. That is the axiom underneath all seven:

Consequence never disappears. It just finds someone else to stay with.

The wall does not remove the bill. It only decides who is handed it — and the person handed it is almost never the one who ran it up.