The Gilmore Family Analysis

1377 Words6 Pages
Christian Valentin English 200 28 March 2012 Understanding the Gilmore Family With lack of coherence, lack of authority, and chaotic struggle—how can we explain families at this level? These families are known as “level 5” families; according to the award winning Journalist Maggie Scarf, These families are “in pain” and are “severely disturbed”. These Families are in a state of “confusion and turmoil”. She explains these families in “The Beavers Scale of Family Health and Competence”, to show the different types of families that do exist and how they look and how their emotional health is being targeted. One family that is a perfect example is Mikal Gilmores family. Mikal writes about his severely disturbed family in his autobiography…show more content…
In Mikal Gilmore’s personal narrative “My Brother, Gary Gilmore,” he describes his two brothers and father as the “teenage rebellion of the fifties” (1) for the fact that they each looked “for a forbidden life” (2). It was a life where they just did what they wanted to do without anyone stopping them. For example, “They would smoke cigarettes, drink booze and cough syrup, skip and ditch class” and sometimes “take part in gang rumbles” (2). The Gilmore Family has no authority and rules made for them to follow. They live in a life of unstructured hierarchy in the sense that no one in the Gilmore family has total power to control the actions of those committing crimes, which helps us understand why the Gilmore brothers and even the father choose to be living a forbidden life. Mikal’s family truly has no process of exercising authority in the sense that even the father is joining gangs and being part of all the dirty work. This helps us understand that governance in the Gilmore family shall never exist as long as a father figure is committing crimes as well, which sets an example for the…show more content…
Scarf explains in “The Beavers Scale of Family Health and Competence” that “ the family in pain tends to do what it has always done before, without ever seeming to notice that what it does has not been working”(4). In other words Scarf is implying that a household in distress prefers to repeat previous patterns, without ever seeming to grasp that what it achieves has not been useful. The word “notice” in this assertion suggests that the family needs to notice that the way of solving problems or making bad situations go away is only possible if they all change their ways of problem solving. This can also refer to an individual who wants to change in any sort of

More about The Gilmore Family Analysis

Open Document