The boss needs an airline ticket. You book him in the middle row, knowing he has little time to make his next connection to a very important meeting.

When making place cards for a birthday celebration, you put two family members who get along in opposite corners because you don’t really like that they are friends.

Your twin’s new spouse has a successful career and speaks her mind. After you met for lunch when you really preferred not to, you talk with your brother and embellish things your sister-in-law said, bypassing the context, of course.

Perhaps you make excuses for why you can’t meet up with a family member or share events customarily spent with others.

What do these behavioral examples have in common? In all of these examples, there’s upset. Anger. Indirect (or not) communication, insecurity, and possibly a dose of self-absorption come into play, too. One thing is for certain: These behaviors come back at you in a myriad of unpleasantness, so it is best to acknowledge and correct them.

Family systems teach us that problematic behaviors likely didn’t start with us but may well have flowed down from past generations, as anxiety tends to do in families. So, if you’re trying to get a handle on your own behavior, look to your parents or even your grandparents’ generation. Anxiety flows down the family system. Not up. Not sideways. A three-generation genogram can help as it relates to behaviors, diagnoses, and who got along with whom and who did not.

We are inherently drawn to explanations. For example, four years ago, many devoured Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D., for its familial insights into her uncle’s problematic........

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