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Expert Q&A

	By John C. Friel, Ph.D. Psychologists

My 2-year-old daughter used to be a good sleeper. She would sleep through the night fine, up until we started to have problems with her uncle. She used to love spending time with him but now he has become aggressive and abusive towards us and is no longer part of our lives. The only time she sees him is when he is at our door abusing us and now my daughter will only sleep if she goes to bed with us or can see me while she is in bed. Noises through the night scare her and she says it is her uncle. She is especially jumpy the night after she has seen him. I am not sure how to handle this situation. Is there any way I can make her relax and know that she is safe so she can return to her sleeping routine?

This sounds like a very painful situation for all of you. Serious rifts in the fabric of a family typically cause systemwide fallout. How much of an impact will depend on how clear the parents' internal and external boundaries are.

An internal boundary is one inside of ourselves. For example, people who have a clear internal boundary around their emotions are able to contain their more explosive emotions rather than acting them out on the freeway or their child's soccer field. An external boundary is one that we set around the outside of ourselves, like keeping our door shut and locked when there is a dangerous person in the neighborhood.

Before I could help you gradually develop a strategy to handle this problem, I would want to ask you several more questions because it sounds as if this situation has gotten out of control. If this uncle is truly no longer a part of your lives, then why is he at the door, abusing you? Do you need to file a complaint with the police and get a restraining order to keep him from doing this?

When it comes to family, totally severing a relationship is usually ill-advised, and rarely works in the long run, anyway. Have you and this uncle and any of the other adults in this situation sought help from a family systems therapist? When this uncle is not around, do the adults in the household go about their business calmly and matter-of-factly, or is there a lot of emotionality flying around the house about this issue, with the adults talking about it often, within earshot of the children?

You ask if there is any way you can make her relax and know that she is safe so she can return to her sleeping routine. If this uncle shows up at the door when he is not invited, and you or your spouse answer the door and engage in emotional interactions with him, then she isn't safe from him, because you aren't. The message you are sending is this: "There is a person we don't want in our lives right now, but we haven't yet been able to keep him out of our lives."

From a systems perspective, we would look at your daughter's sleep problem as a symptom of the boundary problems in the system as a whole. When you are able to keep this uncle from coming to your house, and if you no longer make this issue a focus of conversations amongst yourselves (assuming that you are now making them a focus), then I would expect the problem to gradually go away.

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