Family History and Type

[Alice]

Hello everyone! This topic is going to touch on some personal stuff, and some pretty heavy stuff as well. If you don't want to hear about topics like addiction, death, and just general personal details pertaining to my life, you may not want to read any further ahead. This topic is going be touching on my family's history, and is going to contain some speculations I have about the various types of my family members, as well as some comparisons between the themes in their lives. I will also be sharing some aspects of my own life in order to consider how family history affects further generations, and how the themes in our lives may be related through cognitive type or genetics if they aren't just nurture-based traits passed along.
So I'm just going to jump right in by saying that the reason I'm writing and thinking about this is because my cousin passed away last week from an overdose. Addiction and impulsivity is a pretty common thread in my family, from both sides of my family tree, probably extending even beyond at least two of my paternal and maternal grandparental lines. Here is what I know specifically about this theme in my family, chronologically. I will also be peppering in other speculations throughout, and I will go into their possible typologies as I go -
On my Dad's side, my great-grandparents (paternal grandmother's parents) were from Sicily. My paternal grandfather's parents were also from Sicily, but my grandfather died before I was born, so I don't really know much about him. His side of the family is a bit estranged from us. In Sicily and in New York, where they immigrated to, they almost certainly had ties and participated in familial organized crime, probably at a low level. I don't know much about this time in our family history, but my grandma would sometimes let slip small stories of how she suspected that her aunts and uncles were tied up with mafia in New York. My grandmother's family were invariably big drinkers, big smokers, and frequent gamblers. They were work-hard-play-hard people, gruff, but very close-knit. Growing up, I remember my grandma and great uncles and aunts, along with their elderly cousins, carrying on the tradition in the form of late-night poker games with loose change they had around. They had stopped by the time I came along in the mid-90s, but my Dad has stories from when he was growing up that the ceiling above the dining room table was yellow from the constant smoking, and he remembers a kind of cloud hanging above these late night poker games.
It is my suspicion that my Dad's side of the family are mostly of the Beta quadra. My Dad is most likely an FeNi ll--, my uncle is probably an FeNi l-l-, I'm not sure about one of my aunts, but my oldest aunt, the oldest child in the family and the only other to have children, is probably an NiFe. All types besides my father's are pure speculation. I saw a lot of them as a kid, but since my grandma died, the family kind of scattered. She was a definite matriarch and binding force for the various family, and because much of the previous generation is so old (my dad is 56 and the youngest of 4), it's pretty much just my dad and his siblings at this point. This was an exceedingly tight-knit family though. My brothers and his siblings still talk to each other (and gossip about eachother!) on a nearly daily basis.
It also seems to be a conductor heavy family. My extended family is well-known for all being very loud, very argumentative, and very much hand-talkers. They were a classically stereotypical Italian family hahaha, and that may just be cultural, but there are some other hints as well - My Dad's brother is a well-off computer programmer and security analyst who retired early, became a part-time comedian and musician, and now makes all his money on the stock market. My dad's oldest sister, a quiet, simple woman, married a quiet, simple man, and they moved out to the country and started their own farm. They make all their money at various famer's markets and off their own land. My great uncle, her husband, especially has an extremely Pi quality about him. For as long as I can remember, he has been sitting stumpily in a chair dispensing nuggets of wisdom about how people should behave. My dad's aunt and uncle owned a gas station when he was a kid, and they had him and his siblings help out around the shop to save money. That same aunt was notoriously domineering, earning her the nickname "the general," dictating the very minutia of family gatherings from her chair at the dining room table. She went through multiple live-in aids when she lost her ability to live on her own because she was so dominating. My uncle, her husband, was also gruff, but really loved to talk everyone's ear off thru tales of his time in WWII. Lots of stories, and lots of stereotyping and prejudice against Germans until he died. My dad's other uncle's side of the family is a well-established construction family in the Chicagoland area. They probably honestly also had ties to organized crime until maybe the 90s, though this is mostly gossip I picked up at family gatherings. That side of the family, which is the estranged side I mention earlier, is rich - self-made rich. Many of them are also pretty difficult to be around. A lot of the older members of that family branch are overtly racist, sexist, and just generally crass and loud. When Trump got elected in 2016, I immediately thought of a few specific older men on that side of the family. They kind of remind me of bad reality TV - fake tans, spoiled kids, and drama.
Anyway, back to the topic of impulsivity and addiction, much of my dad's family displays these traits, even those who married in. My family has a deep relationship with habitual substance use. My dad and all his siblings have been regularly smoking weed since the 70s, which isn't necessarily an addiction, but there is certainly a dependence factor there. At this point it's more of a family tradition at family gatherings, and they've been sneaking off to the backs and garages of houses at every family gathering that I can remember since I was a kid. I honestly think it's deeply comforting and meaningful for them to have this communal sharing of a state of mind they've imbibed in since they were kids, but it is still an altered state of mind, and I'm going to include it in my list of dependent behaviors as I would with alcoholism. My oldest aunt's children, my cousins, are all also habitual cannabis smokers, and many are also pretty intense alcoholics. The cousin I mentioned earlier who recently passed was my oldest aunt's granddaughter. She died of an overdose last week, and had struggled with addiction since she was a teenager. She was 30 years old when she passed. At the time, she was living with her aunt (my cousin), who I suspect also suffered from some hard substance abuse in her life, though it isn't talked about much. I know all these family relationships are probably very confusing, and I apologize about that.
I don't say any of this to shame my family members. I have experienced addiction myself in my own life, which I will touch on later, and I understand how these kinds of things can happen. The reason I'm writing about this is because this theme of casual abuse of substances in my family is incredibly common and at this point fairly blasé, and almost totally normalized on my dad's side.
Moving on to my mom's side, her family has also had some similar themes, but in a bit of a different way. Culturally, her side is mixed between my Mexican grandmother and my Hungarian grandfather. My grandfather on her side also died before I was born though, so the Hungarian bit was sort of lost culturally. In fact, most of any ethnic cultural practice ended with my grandparents on my mom's side, most likely because my grandmother was concerned about her children feeling included in America in the 60s and 70s when they were all growing up in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. Another factor may have been that my mom's parents were incredibly religious. My mom's father was a pastor, and my mom's childhood environment has many of the hallmarks of the kind of charismatic Christian semi-cult movement that was prevalent in the LA area where she grew up as a kid.
This is where I draw a similarity between the substance abuse of my dad's side with the hyper-religiosity of my mom's side. My mom has described the religious practice of her mother (my Nana) as almost a drug addiction. She would spend hours and hours a day praying alone in her room, sometimes days away at church retreats with the semi-cult I mentioned earlier. My mom is an oldest, and she pretty much raised her four younger siblings since her dad died when she was about 16. I admittedly don't know much about my mom's childhood, because she doesn't talk about it much, but what I have heard her talk about has been through the lens of her own redemptive journey as she recovered from her own addictions a few years ago.
Touching on my mom's side's history, my Nana's sister was an alcoholic, and was actually detained in a kind of asylum for a portion of her life. My mom once mentioned that she may have suffered from manic-depressive episodes, and some paranoid delusions. I know virtually nothing about my Nana's parents, other than that my great-grandfather was probably a pedophile. This fact offers some clues about the history of mental illness my aforementioned great aunt suffered from, and the hyper-religiosity of my maternal grandmother, my Nana. My mom was an alcoholic, and had a very colorful late-adolescence in the 80s punk scene in California before running away with her best friend all the way to Chicago. They apparently drove for three days in her old Volkswagen bus without any plan on what to do when they got there. My mom married my dad when she was 19, and had my older brother when she was 21, kind of dealing with her religious upbringing by sort of ping-ponging between being very religious and non-religious until she settled back into religiosity. My brother and I grew up going to a super-chruch in Illinois that kind of teetered on the edge of hyper-Capitalism and certainly went over the edge of evangelism. When I was a kid I was very much encouraged to covert my peers and bring them to church with me, and my brother experienced the same pressure. My mom encouraged this too, and I think it was probably all kind of a watered-down throwback to the kind of charismatic Christian speaking-in-tongues fundementalist upbringing she had. I've you've ever seen the movie "Saved!" you have a pretty good idea of what was going on.
That was a bit of a ramble, but again, I don't shame anyone in my family for their beliefs of practices. I do call into question the indoctrination and shaming of children though, and the general atmosphere of guilt and fear that came with it. There were a lot of unspoken-but-implied purity rules in my household growing up. Certain channels and shows to not watch, certain ideas to not be talked about. I was a very scientifically minded kid, and a very curious and imaginative one, and this was routinely discouraged. My mom flirted with creationism for most of my childhood. My family has since grown and healed from this, and my mom has grown and apologized since, but this all speaks again to the general theme of dependence again in my family, but strangely from the opposite angle of illicit drug use. This time it was a dependence on the structure and communal pressure of a very strict and dogmatic religion. Most of my mom's side has very much struggled with their relationship to religion and community throughout their lives.
My mom's side isn't nearly as tight or monolithic as my dad's, but I suspect that generally they are Alpha and Delta types. My mother herself is most likely an NeFi l-l- or TeSi of the same development. My Nana is proooobably a TiNe l-l-, but I can't be sure because I haven't seen her for a while, and I never knew her when she wasn't elderly. From oldest to youngest, here are my guesses for my mom's siblings - My aunt is absolutely an FiNe, with very little margin of error. My oldest uncle is almost definitely a TiSe or something similar, and he carried on the fundementalist Christian tradition in the family. He moved him, his wife, and his six kids off the grid to live a wholesome and isolated lifestyle near Chico, California. They are a delightful family though, and I hold no judgement for them. My middle uncle is probably also an FiNe, and has been kind of drifting around most of his life, never really settling down and taking odd jobs here and there. And my youngest uncle is probably an NeFi, though I'm not too sure about him. He's been a concept and general visual artist most of his life (now he works for Marvel!)
Interestingly, to contrast my dad's heavy conductor side of the family, my mom's side is almost totally revisers. They are almost opposite my dad's old school Italian side - they are a bunch of spiritual west-coasters who's main focus is wholesomeness and general innocent living. They almost never speak to eachother, sometimes going years before any of them reach out, but there are never hard feelings when they do. When they do talk or get together, it's like they all slip back into childhood with eachother, it's really pure and cute.
So that brings us to my immediate nuclear family, my mom, dad, brother, and me. My dad is probably an FeNi, my mom is probably an NeFi, my brother is pretty positively an SeFi, and I am an FiSe. I don't know much about my brother's experiences with substances, but he's been a general ruffian and hooligan since we were kids hahaha. He's been getting in trouble as long as I can remember for impulsive decisions, and he's always been a classic Se anti-authority person. He got involved with the local punk scene when he was probably 16 or so, moved out when he was 18, and has been living on his own ever since. He has and continues to recreationally use all sorts of stuff, but he seems strangely impervious to addiction, somehow always able to have a good time with whatever he's doing and not chase the feeling too far. He has pretty much dedicated his life to playing the drums, which I think is probably been his main focus in life since he was about 11. It sounds silly, but he is genuinely happiest when he is playing, and he's been in like 20 different bands throughout the years just so he can keep going. He is very good, and he knows it.
I myself have dealt with addiction since I was pretty young. I started smoking and drinking when I was 16, started hanging around some older kids and even started hanging with my brother's older punk circle around that same time. Around 17, I started stealing and abusing my parent's old Vicodin prescriptions, mostly my step-dad's because he's a bit of a packrat and likes to keep things around forever. I would just smoke weed alone in the backyard, pop a couple hydrocodone, and play videogames for days and days and days alone in my room. Looooots of weed in highschool, always so much I couldn't really make sense of reality around me. My friend-group was pretty much the same way. Lots of drinking with them, lots of drinking alone at home too. A few times, I experimented with robotripping off cough syrup, Benadryl, and a couple times I even synthesized my own LSA from both morning glory and hawaiian baby woodrose seeds. I won't get into this as much, but as I got older, I started to get more into sexual relationships that were probably a little too advanced for my in my late adolescence. Eventually in my early 20s, it became a couple of years of just hookups and nights out, augmented by an Adderall prescription I would abuse to keep this cycle of hookups and dates going for days. At my peak, I think I slept with three separate people over three days. There were also some trysts with a married couple that involved a looooot of alcohol, and a summer with my partner where we were both dating probably... 4 people each and hooking up consistently with some combination of eachother's flings. So a lot of those familial themes of dependence have run in my life too.
I've now become aware of all of this at this point, and I wanted to kind of write this all out as a sort of unprofessional case study of how family history might tie into personality later down the line. I've done a lot of growing and healing and learning over the last couple of years, and so have a lot of the friends I grew up with. They have similar family histories too. I hope this has been informative, and I hope it all made sense! I apologize if it got too heavy, and I really thank you for reading this far.
Have any of you noticed any general trends in your families, and do you think they've been related to type?

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