Family stories
about disability.
In our family, you don’t make a fuss.
How family scripts, invisible loyalties and beliefs about disability pass between generations, and how families can choose what to keep.
What this is: a guide to multigenerational family stories about disability.
Why it matters: a story that helped one generation survive can hold back the next.
The sharpest reframe: you can be loyal to someone and still do things differently.
One thing to take away: honour what the story once did.
The short version
Families carry stories about disability across generations: “we don’t make a fuss”, “we manage”, “it was a tragedy”, “he overcame it”, “we don’t talk about that side of the family”. Systemic thinkers have described these in different ways. John Byng-Hall wrote about family scripts: patterns so predictable that family members seem to follow a script. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy wrote about invisible loyalties: obligations and fairness carried between generations. Rolland’s work attends to family beliefs about illness and disability. A disability-informed approach honours what a family story once did, often helping people survive without support, and lets the current generation choose what to keep.
You might recognise this
Illustrative statementsDrawn together from common experiences. They are not quotes from individual people.
Scripts, loyalties and beliefs
Established theoryFamily scripts
Byng-Hall described family routines that become so predictable that members seem to enter on cue. Scripts can be rewritten when people find ways to improvise new ways of relating.
Invisible loyalties
In Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark’s contextual approach, families keep an unspoken account of what is owed between generations. Breaking with a family pattern can feel like disloyalty.
Belief systems
Rolland’s model gives a central place to family beliefs about illness and disability, including where those beliefs came from and how they shape responses.
Bláthnaid is 55. Her father Jarlath had polio as a child, walked with a calliper all his life, and was known for never complaining. “We don’t make a fuss” was the family motto. Her son Ruadhán, 22, has progressive hearing loss and refuses hearing aids. He misses things at work and is becoming isolated. Bláthnaid is frustrated with him, then realises she is hearing her father in herself.
Bláthnaid, Jarlath and Ruadhán are fictional teaching examples, not real people.
What the story once did
Our frameworkOther explanations first
Before settling on the family story, the therapist asks about other reasons Ruadhán might not want hearing aids: physical discomfort, cost, previous experiences, stigma at work, whether aids would actually suit his kind of hearing loss, how he sees himself, and whether he is sure they would help. It turns out several apply. He tried aids at 17; they whistled, made his ears sore, and a classmate mocked him. He isn’t sure modern aids would be different, and he has been reading about Deaf culture and isn’t sure he wants to “fix” his hearing at all.
The family story may still be one strand among several. It shouldn’t be the first explanation, or the only one.
If the family story is part of it, its history matters. “We don’t make a fuss” probably helped Jarlath survive. As a disabled child in the 1950s, with little support and real stigma, not complaining may have kept him in school, in work and accepted. It made sense then. In Ruadhán’s life, the same story may be adding weight to a decision that is already complicated.
The work isn’t to declare the family story wrong. It is to understand what it did, what it costs now, and what each person wants to keep. Ruadhán might keep his grandfather’s stubbornness and humour and leave behind the idea that needing support is a failure.
Questions for family stories
Practice- “What did your family say about disability when you were growing up? What did they not say?”
- “Who in the family has been disabled, ill or different? How were they talked about?”
- “What do you actually know about how your grandfather felt? And what do you imagine he would have wanted for you?” (Both can matter; only one is evidence.)
- “Which parts of the family story do you want to keep, and which would you like to leave?”
- “If Ruadhán wrote the family story for the next generation, how might it go?”
A genogram can carry these stories across generations. See Genograms, Ecomaps and Relationship Maps. For the stories a person tells about themselves, see the Narrative Therapy branch.
What it might sound like
Ruadhán, when you think about wearing hearing aids, whose voice do you hear?
Grandad’s. Or what I think he’d say. ‘Don’t make a fuss.’
He never said that to you. He said it to me.
So the family carried it to you without anyone saying it. What do you think your grandfather wanted, underneath the motto?
For us to have a normal life. Not to be pitied.
And would hearing aids help you have that, or get in the way?
Help, probably. I’m missing half of what goes on.
What changes: Bláthnaid tells Ruadhán stories about Jarlath she has never told: that he hated the calliper, that he once threw it in a river. These are things she knows; what Jarlath would have wanted for Ruadhán stays something they can only imagine. Ruadhán books a hearing assessment to find out what his options actually are, asks his employer about live captioning in meetings, and goes to a Deaf social evening. Whether he chooses aids, a different device, or neither is still open. The therapist doesn’t treat accepting a device as the measure of success; an informed choice is. Bláthnaid says it is the first time disability has been talked about openly in three generations.
What needs attention here?
A family motto shapes how disability is handled
Possible focus: what it once did, and what it costs now
Watch for: declaring the story wrong
Breaking with the story feels disloyal
Possible focus: what the earlier generation really wanted
Watch for: dismissing the loyalty
Disability has never been named in the family
Possible focus: gentle opening of the subject, at the family’s pace
Watch for: forcing disclosure
The family story is one of tragedy
Possible focus: other stories that sit alongside it
Watch for: replacing it with a story of overcoming
Possible starting points, agreed with the person, not rules.
How you’d know it helped
- The family can talk about where its stories came from.
- The current generation chooses what to keep.
- Needing support, or choosing not to use a particular kind, no longer feels like betraying someone.
- Decisions are informed choices, not reactions to the family story.
Words you can use
For clientsQuestions worth carrying, as a therapist
Therapist Reflection- What does this family believe about disability, and where did it come from?
- Am I honouring what a family story once did?
- Am I replacing one story with another of my own choosing?
Evidence & sources
Sources checked in October 2026, using targeted searches rather than a systematic review. “We have not located” means our searches did not find it.
Family scripts: Byng-Hall, J., Rewriting Family Scripts: Improvisation and Systems Change (Guilford, 1995).
Invisible loyalties and the intergenerational ledger: Boszormenyi-Nagy, I. & Spark, G. M., Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy (1973).
Family belief systems about illness and disability: Rolland, J. S., Helping Couples and Families Navigate Illness and Disability (Guilford, 2018), chapters 6 and 8.
The application to family stories about disability, and the reading of the case, are this site’s synthesis.
Bláthnaid, Jarlath, Ruadhán and the dialogue are constructed for learning. They are not real people.
We have not located research on how multigenerational family stories about disability affect younger disabled family members.
Last reviewed: October 2026.
How to cite this page: Donaghey, C. (2026). Family Stories About Disability. Disability in Psychotherapy. Available at: https://disabilityinpsychotherapy.online/what-is-psychotherapy/systemic-therapy/family-stories-about-disability/ (Accessed: [date]).