ABSTRACT
The recovery movement for children from dysfunctional families requires that survivors get in touch with those early traumatic experiences and the feelings which accompanied these traumas. Defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, psychic numbing, and disassociation protect the child at the time, but they represent survival techniques. To clarify the connection between dysfunctional families and dysfunctional grief, a description of dysfunctional families follows. A model has been proposed which allows us to understand that dysfunctional families occur for many reasons and not merely because of drug addiction. The model is referred to as an iceberg model because frozen core feelings and issues depicted below the water line are common to all children from dysfunctional families. The education and intervention which results when there is a Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) death must continue. Initially one-fourth of the parents in this study thought their baby died of SIDS because they were familiar with the syndrome.
