‘I came out of a challenging home’: Richard Hogan on family dysfunction

Psychotherapist and Irish Examiner columnist Richard Hogan’s new book will give you the tools to recognise negative patterns from childhood – and avoid them when it comes to your own family. In this extract he writes about the trauma he experienced – and how he overcame it

Richard Hogan and his family.

I am the clinical director of Therapy Institute, and the author of Parenting the Screenager, a book that outlined very easy-to-follow tips for parents of the modern tech-savvy child. 

For the last six years, I have been writing a weekly column called Learning Points for the Irish Examiner. 

I am the founder of a charity, Embrace Badjao, which has built a school in the Badjao community in the Philippines to provide educational opportunities for children of the tribe, who are marginalised and have education denied to them.

I am a regular contributor on television and radio promoting better mental health. 

In my new book, Home Is Where The Start Is, I offer insights into how to thrive in life. 

In the following extract, I talk about where my desire to become a family therapist came from. 

As I was writing, my own story kept coming up, and rather than ignore it, I began to embed it into the narrative, which is all about how family is crucial in our formation as a person. 

The book explains how we can rebuild ourselves and live healthier and happier lives.

I hope by telling my story and how I overcame adversity in my personal life, it will empower you and give you insights and inspiration to overcome challenges in your own life.

Richard Hogan and his book, Home is Where the Start Is

UTTERLY ALONE

I was no more than 16 years old when I decided I wanted to become a family therapist. 

My parents agreed it would be good for me to see a psychiatrist because I had been in trouble in school and my mood was low. 

The idea of seeing a psychiatrist wasn’t exactly unwelcome. 

On the contrary, I was quite happy to go because no one had ever asked what life was like for me. 

I had acted out throughout my educational career — a suspension here, a detention there — but my behaviour was simply punished, never understood. 

The idea of talking to a trained professional, with penetrating insights into what was going on in my life, intrigued me greatly. 

I had the notion that I’d be sprawled on a couch, pensively reflecting and recalling my early childhood traumas while an aged, tweed-clad expert jotted down my poignant ramblings. 

There’d be a lot of ‘Fascinating!’ and ‘Wonderful!’ as I elucidated all the difficulties I’d had to endure as a child.

Well, that’s what I imagined.

As I was sitting in the waiting room, trying to guess what the priest with the monobrow had wrong with him, my mother leaned into me and whispered, “Don’t tell him about Dad, because he knows him.” 

In that moment, as the door was opened to usher me into the room, ‘Richard Hogan, Family Therapist’ was born. 

I’ve never forgotten that feeling. I felt empty, utterly alone. 

In that one sentence, the responsibility for all the issues in my life was firmly located within me. 

It had nothing to do with the difficult environment I was navigating, nothing to do with the ecology I came from. 

Nothing to do with the fact my father was an abusive alcoholic. Just me. 

The meeting was nothing like I’d imagined. The psychiatrist was quick to inform me what a wonderful writer my father was and then proceeded to ask very rudimentary questions about my family. 

He seemed to know the answers before I even responded. Not that I was my garrulous self, I was monosyllabic. His verdict, depression. His answer, Prozac.

Richard Hogan and wife Erica.

AN INSECURE ENVIRONMENT

My depression would deepen over the next few years as I discovered the true extent of my father’s betrayals. 

Living with him meant living in a constantly changing, unpredictable environment. 

One moment everything functioned normally, the next he was falling in the door aggressively drunk and looking for a fight. 

It was a very insecure environment to grow up in. At times, I struggled to make sense of it. 

Yet I never felt as hopeless and powerless as I did that day, as a teenager, sitting in front of that psychiatrist. 

His prescribing of Prozac still troubles me to this day. 

Medication wasn’t going to change my reality. Well, maybe it would. 

It might have numbed my interactions with my environment, but my environment wasn’t going to change. 

Medication wasn’t going to change the fact that my father was an abusive alcoholic. 

That reality would still be there, waiting for me, even with medical intervention. 

That whole encounter planted the seed of my future self: I was determined to become a psychotherapist and help others. 

As I look back on that time now, I know it was a lot to go through for a young boy. 

But it didn’t really feel like I was living with abuse. It was my reality. And it made me strong. Resilient. 

I felt I could face difficult people and not bend to their will. 

Richard Hogan and his daughters.

STANDING UP

I had been bullied by my father, but I had never shown him I was scared. 

I was, of course, but I stood up to him, and he wouldn’t have thought I was scared. 

He would probably have said I was a tough kid. 

But I was very soft, too — I never wanted to hurt anyone in my life. 

Living in dysfunction changes the way you think and how you see the world. 

It changes how you talk to yourself. It took me a considerable amount of time to work out a lot of my own experiences as a child.

And that child is always with me, speaking to me when I’m talking with a teenager who is going through a turbulent time. 

That moment, waiting to see the psychiatrist, has replayed on a loop in my mind many times throughout my life. 

It has become one of those transformative moments we sometimes have.  My road to Damascus. 

And the genesis of this book. I remember reading the psychotherapy textbooks, as a student, and seeing the theory behind ‘the identified patient’. 

The literature suggested that often the presenting patient manifests the pathology of the entire family. 

That was certainly me. I have worked with so many families over the years who have brought a child to the clinic, but in reality, the child is bringing the family for help. I had the same thought sitting in the psychiatrist’s office that morning. 

Maybe this will be the help we all need? But I felt utterly helpless at the end of that encounter. If a trained professional was blinded by the veneer of my father’s status, I felt we were all doomed. 

Stuck, endlessly repeating the same patterns. That was a profoundly hopeless feeling to experience at such a young age. 

The reason I am sharing this very personal story about my own life in such a public manner is because, too often, ‘experts’ present themselves as perfect. 

I am not perfect. I did not come out of a perfect home. I came out of a challenging home. A loving home in many ways, with a mother who was loving, caring and did her best, a father who was talented, angry and an addict, a grandmother who loved us and was great fun, and siblings who supported and tormented each other in equal measure. 

It was messy. Families are messy. People are very messy. There is no such thing as ‘perfect’. 

That’s why this book will offer you real examples, from real people, dealing with real-life situations. It is rooted in my own family experiences and in the experiences of hundreds of families and individuals who have sat with me and talked about their lives. 

It’s all real.

• ‘Home Is Where The Start Is’ by Richard Hogan is published by Penguin Sandycove on June 8