How to Have Better Family Holidays

As the leaves change and the light grows softer, many of us begin to make plans for the coming winter holidays. While these annual events stir up images of good food, travel, family, and friends, they can also raise anxiety as these very same events dump added stress on old relationships that may have years of unsettled conflicts baked into their patterns and don’t change easily. 

You may be going to see your family weeks after you have announced a new partner, a pregnancy, or an impending move or divorce. What will your parent say when they meet you at the airport, what smart remark do you anticipate from your younger sibling about your body or relationship, what anticipated struggle over food choices or sleeping arrangements make you less than relaxed as your holidays approach? 

Participating in milestone events like holiday visits with our families of origin raises some expected and automatic emotional reactions. We don’t always manage to be our best selves. Anxious and stressed, we may become defensive and reactive, trying to dodge the discomfort that spoken comments or obvious body language raise up. We may begin to mind read, assuming we know what someone thinks; we might withdraw and engage only with the relationships in which we feel safe. It’s then quite easy to blame others for misunderstanding us or nursing a grudge over some long-ago hurt, while finally discussing it directly seems almost impossible. 

If we have a partner, we also may feel pressure to manage their emotions. Our partner may feel isolated, and needs us to support them, even while we feel stressed and unseen by these life-long, important, but imperfect relationships. The pressure on your couplehood may increase as each of you tries to navigate the waters of these familiar family patterns and people. It is no wonder these holiday events can make everyone feel unheard and unseen while being surrounded by people! 

What can we do to make these important extended family events better for ourselves and others? Is there some magic wand we can wave to make everyone more calm and connected? 

Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to feeling more at ease with these intense occasions. Because the truth is, we don’t have control over how others behave. All we have is the capacity to adjust our own thinking and behavior, a difficult enough, life-long task. It’s the challenging, very personal effort of self-awareness, grieving and accepting the truth of what has been, while developing ideas about how we want to grow toward a healthier emotional life. 

What can we do to help ourselves manage these high stress family events with greater peace of mind? Here are a few ideas to help you manage your part of family events. 

  1. Lower your expectations. The build-up to trips or vacations can set all our hopes a bit too high. Remember that a key to managing these kinds of occasions is to expect them to be a real mix of highs and lows. 
  2. Become a family observer. Ask yourself occasionally: How does this group normally function? Who leads, who follows, what role do I play in the family system? Is that something I would like to change? 
  3. Remain as present as possible. When things aren’t perfect, it can be very tempting to check out and just drop your attention into your phone or laptop. What emotions make you want to withdraw? Could you pay attention to what is happening in a way that helps you understand rather than avoid? 
  4. Reflect every day in a journal or with a trusted other. Daily private reflection can make a big difference in our ability to adjust and sustain our emotional connection to family members and to our own behavior. 
  5. Get physical exercise, preferable outdoors. Make sure you have time to be physically active every day to move your body and clear your mind. Eat as well as possible, and limit alcohol. 
  6. Focus on individuals and a bit less on the group. One of the best ways to step out of group behavior is to focus on having individual conversations with family members. It is probably the only real chance people get to be themselves, be heard, and to learn about others in real time. 
  7. Work on creating new memories. While it can be fun to reminisce about the shared past constantly, it’s far more fulfilling to create new memories together. A new board game, a trip to a theme park, even making a new recipe together can pull us into the here and now.   
  8. Bring your sense of humor & humility. You didn’t choose this group of people to be your family, but somehow it’s part of who you were and have become. As they have influenced you, you have done the same for them. You are on a team, and you can have a better time when you are less demanding about yourself and others. 
  9. Have an exit strategy. Even bringing your best intentions and good emotional habits to your family event doesn’t always change how you feel, behave, and respond. Your parent may still be the same deeply arrogant person at 70 that they were at 30. Know when to take a break, seek support, or even leave. It’s better to manage your stress than to never return again. 

And when good self management doesn’t work well, this is where good therapy can help. When we bring these repeated and unhelpful experiences into our private conversations with a skilled family counselor, we can better develop a capacity to observe our beliefs, our emotions, and our behaviors. Observing our own patterns gives us the distance and ability to imagine how we might behave differently. We begin to see that we have some choice in how we function, even during intense, important, or occasional family events. 

Growing ourselves up into the people we want to be may not solve your familiar family fights over who manages the kitchen, or the alcohol, or the children. But it will give you increased resilience for the times when it is important to connect, to speak up when conflicts arise, and the capacity to accept, and perhaps even to forgive, those imperfect souls with whom you are intricately linked. 

(Written originally for Lineage Counseling blog, New Hope, MN)

Gendered: “girl culture”

One of the recurring themes in my therapy room for my female clients has been the reluctance and even fear of emotional conflict.

We are raised in contemporary social norms to maintain pleasant relationships. Taught as children to “get along” rather than assert ourselves physically or verbally when encountering trouble (as most boys are), we become evermore sensitive to emotional energy in the people around us. While this can become what I call a female superpower, it is an emotional preference with a great shadow side: we are often paralyzed by bullying in our families, at the neighborhood bus stop, on the playground, at sleepovers, anywhere someone with an urgent need to assert their dominance lurks. We easily become victims of other people’s inappropriate power.

Does this feel familiar? it is completely familiar to me. By the time we are deep into dating or full time jobs as young adult women, we have reinforced this emotional bias so many times we can struggle to know what appropriate personal power looks like. A large majority of women never fully heal from this expectation and gendered socialization: they become adept at sending their anger inward at themselves, sideways to those who don’t deserve it, and passively with those who do.

Bad romantic partners, bad family members, bad neighbors and bad bosses all cause enormous stress to those of us raised to not kick up a fuss when we are slighted, injured or even abused. At the far edge of this impulse to be forever pleasing is the extreme automatic adult responses of freeze and dissociation when threatened, enduring trauma or physical or emotional assaults. We have simply never given our bodies and minds the chance to push or fight back when threatened.

To become whole, happier, less anxious and perfectionistic people, we need to grow our toleration of social awkwardness, conflict, distain and stand up for ourselves when we need to do so. The need to be the people who are forever soothing others comes at such an enormous cost to us and to our relationships. No wonder women have such high rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, body image issues, food addictions and eating disorders, emotional dysregulation and suicide attempts.

Any kind of emotional conflict is the kyrptonite of people pleasers and perfectionists. Time to see that superpower as an incomplete strategy, turn it into wonderful intuition that is BALANCED by the strength of your strong voice, confidence and skills at problem solving. But we must first become unafraid of wading into those turbulent waters. I promise you already know how to ride out that rip tide: speak up, hold on and ride it out.

Gender Control & Body Shame: The Purity Movement

Nothing makes me sadder than the way a part of the Christian family, the conservative evangelical community, has shamed women for their gender, leadership and sexuality. In the 1990’s, a bizarre, controlling movement spread in churches to have young women be told that sexual purity was their responsibility alone;  that young men were so weak that they couldn’t control their sex drive. Girls were trained to pledge their “purity” until marriage at the cost of their integrity and sense of self. Girls were indoctrinated to such a degree that their sexual expression was wrapped in shame, guilt and fear to traumatic degree.

I hope that any woman for whom this story is a personal one will seek care with a good, skilled mental health therapist who has religious training and deep background. I work with such women.

Want to learn more about the way women have been shamed and controlled by this movement? Listen to this recent Fresh Air broadcast in which Teri Gross interviews the author of the new book, “Pure.” https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/09/18/649070416?showDate=2018-09-18

 

Video You Should NOT Be Watching

Smart cellphones are everywhere, and ever since the advent of very high definition small lenses and amazing software, so are self-made video clips. Everything from stupid pet tricks to police high speed chases are there on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram and any number of other social and media platforms.

But just because they are watch-able, doesn’t mean you should be watching them.

Today on the Minneapolis StarTribune website was posted a caught-on-tape — from one lane over — a high speed rear-end collision of a heavy dump truck hitting a line of cars stopped at a light in my neck of the cities. Now: I am, like many adults, the victim of a violent car crash, caused by a drunk driver. It was, in fact, the central trauma of my young life and while I have found significant healing from its effects, that event reshaped my life in profound ways. I have never expected driving to be perfectly safe. I worry about car accidents while trying each day to be a relaxed driver. I have to mentally work to trust that my family can make it home safely from the roads every day.

I saw that video come up on the site today. And though a part of me was curious, along with over half a million other viewers of the video were, I knew that another part of me would be re-traumatized seeing that clip. (And I bet you expected me to post a link to that very video: Nope, I’m not going to.) A great deal of traumatic experience is processed through our eyes and into our bodies in an instant. To run that clip was to reinforce a part of my brain I have worked so hard to heal. It is not worth days of increased anxiety, hyper-vigilance, or plain worry just as our young adult daughter starts her new job she has to drive to in St. Paul. So I didn’t watch. That was a choice of good self care.

I know that today, 9/11, there are those that are remembering by watching those twin towers fall again and again. Or recalling the heroes aboard the flight that crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania instead of Washington, DC. You don’t need to re-watch the video of that awful day to be a proud American.

Are there experiences in your life that have caused serious harm to you or loved ones that arise in videos, TV series or films? Pay attention. You may not need to participate in those visual experiences, even though they are many steps removed from you. Your emotional system has a life-long memory, and awakening the dragons of our past isn’t always the best medicine. As the old bible camp song goes, “Be careful little eyes what you see….”

 

I’m Not That Kind of Christian

I’m frequently asked by prospective clients for my counseling practice if I am a Christian counselor. I’m sad to say that it’s not always easy to answer this simple question anymore. Not because my faith has changed, but because American culture has changed. Very often those who ask are looking for a very particular kind of Christian to be their therapist. And so, to answer their question, I often need to figure out just what kind of Christian therapy they think they want.

In the last generation or so, the conservative evangelical portion of the American Christianity has so frequently attached the term Christian to their political causes that for many outside the church, to be Christian is to be a conservative, rigid, regressive social thinker. I want nothing to do with any so-called Christian perspective that is anti-science, anti-woman, anti-education and anti-neighbor. I see nothing in that perspective that points me to Jesus.

When I read and think about Jesus, I see a young, brown-skinned Jewish rabbi who turned his world upside down. He didn’t seek the rich and powerful to be his disciples; he chose fishermen and tax collectors. He spent his time seeking the company of the least powerful in his culture: women, children, outsiders, the diseased and the poor. He preached a gospel of forgiveness, love and service. He healed the sick and raised the dead, pointing to a God already in the world in a new kind of kingdom. He knew his scriptures, he understood the power structures of Judaism, and pushing at those powers is what led to his crucifixion.

When I consider how Jesus has been chronically mis-characterized throughout the generations, I really shouldn’t be surprised that we still face this problem two centuries later. My own religious tradition is based on a struggle to reform Christianity. The German priest Martin Luther, whose name later became synonymous with the 16th century European Protestant Reformation, was a serious scholar of the Bible and critic of the church. His sermons, lectures and religious tracts helped to lift Christianity out of centuries of crushing political enmeshment in which kings and princes appointed the local bishops and priests, the people never heard the scriptures in their own language and were taught to obey every law of the church in order to please God. Luther’s movement broke that world into pieces.

With such a fragmented, decentralized and diverse Christian church around the world, it seems impossible to hope for a new wave of reformation to sweep across our continent. The rigid conservative edge of the Christian community has the ear and wallet of the current political establishment, more and more of our young people are rejecting institutional commitments like congregations and seeking spiritual support elsewhere. Churches are closing, seminaries downsizing and church publishing houses are collapsing.

And yet, those of us who remain, who joyfully call ourselves Jesus followers, are called to continue to be a light to the world. To know down in our bones the kind of gracious, liberating God we follow. When I despair that one person can’t be of much effect, I find great inspiration in the witness of Pope Francis, who walks the streets, visits the poor, speaks several languages, opens his treasury for audit, holds his priests accountable for crimes, believes science to be the way we can understand our world, and advocates for the distressed with every president, prime minister or dictator who would meet with him.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of another reformation, when the old is collapsing and the new is coming. May we not lose heart, for the world still cries out for light and hope and peace. I am a Christian, but not like you may have come to expect reading the headlines from Washington D.C. I follow a Prince of Peace, a savior to the nations, a healer of the wounded, and one who welcomed the stranger. He calls us to bear witness to the light. His name is Jesus.

 

(Originally published Saturday, February 17, 2018,  Savage Pacer ) 

What is Structural Family Therapy?

I’m grateful to Sal Minuchin for helping us as family therapists understand, conceptualize and maneuver within the dynamic structures of families: the way that the emotional and legal connections of parents to their children over generations create fluid as well as fixed patterns of hierarchies, loyalties, rules, subsystems, coalitions and boundaries. While we may know these experiences instinctively, his theory gives us a vocabulary, structure and system of talking and thinking about these automatic family features.

I’m particularly glad for the way his ideas give us a way to talk about family power. How are marriages formed? How do parents use their power over children? What does it mean to be a grandparent, a sibling, a twin, a youngest or oldest child? Who creates the family rules? Who breaks them? Of critical importance is the way that this theory helps me to conceptualize children’s emotional dysfunction. I don’t have to think simply in individualistic, intrapersonal terms. I’m free to think, speak and intervene with children’s pain interpersonally by helping their parents better manage their own functioning, power, and relational well-being.

Every time I draw a new genogram, and hear about a conflicted marriage, a stressed child, or cut-off grandparents, and think about rules, power and family structure, I draw upon the core ideas of Minuchin and generations of clinicians after him who have helped us all become students of family structure.

1/2021: Here’s a great detailed look at Structural Family Therapy from a new counseling resource, Choosing Therapy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/structural-family-therapy/

Sometimes it IS About You

As a family therapist and systems thinker, I view the conflicts and discussions in my therapy office as shared events and problems. We are all connected; what I do effects my spouse, my children and other close relationships, just as what they do effects me.

But there are times when one person’s habits, behaviors, attitudes, or choices are the source of a system’s pain. A problem frequently has a source. And it just might be you.

One of the most pained expressions I hear after couples therapy is the complaint that “therapy is always about me” and never focused on their partner. I hear it most frequently from my male clients. This reflects, I believe, the fact that men don’t often start conflict conversations in their relationships, leaving their women partners to do all that heavy emotional lifting. If their troubled patterns have been going on long enough, and the woman, despite how often she requests help or change, is always doing the complaining, the man is inevitably backed into his corner. Of course he feels that therapy is always about him. Because he has to travel so many emotional miles to catch up to where his partner has been.

In other situations, it may be that addiction is stealing away all the relationship and family stability. Or infidelity and secrets have damaged the sense of safety and closeness. Or one partner’s failure to care for their health, or work life, or family of origin problems weighs the entire family down. While all of these issues have system impacts, it just might be true that therapy, at least as we begin to unwind the issues, may truly feel like it’s All About You.

Healing Traumatic Memory

If only life was one long, beautiful, inspirational journey. But it’s not. Some of us know that life can include experiences of such fear, helplessness and pain that we wonder how we survived. Over time, and with support, most of us get back to what we would call our normal. Yet others of us discover no matter what, we just can’t.

We call these experiences psychological trauma, the kind of experiences that steal our mental equilibrium. Many traumas have their origin in childhood; our bodies and minds are dependent, small, developing and vulnerable. The younger we are when they occur, the more impact they may have on the way we learn to relate, think, feel and trust the world around us.

Traumatic memories happen within the brain when we survive a life-threatening event and experience overwhelming shock, loss, fear, horror and helplessness. The words we have for what we experienced are just not enough to explain it to others. Motor vehicle accidents, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, parental neglect and addiction, domestic violence, plane crashes, witnessing homicide, military combat, escaping house fires: these are among the experiences that can overwhelm our emotions and capacity to bear what we have seen and known. The memory of the experience is stored in a kind of jumble in the brain, never blending into what we would call our normal sense of self, our everyday explicit memory.

Neurologists, psychologists and other researchers have made wonderful strides in the last 30 years in understanding how trauma effects the brain. And as the science of trauma becomes clearer, so has the clinical work of seeking effective treatments: treatments for the post-trauma effects that are expressed in our bodies in the form of chronic pain, sudden panic attacks, visual and auditory flashbacks, depression, anxiety, relationship and work problems, addictions and patterns of emotional dissociation.

First generation psychological care for traumatic memory was talk therapy; some relief was attained by patients helped to fully describe their experience in a private, compassionate therapeutic environment. Second generation care added strong prescription medications to calm the nervous system, limit emotional affectivity or target psychotic symptoms. What the most recent research has shown is that both methods are insufficient; talking uses the cognitive portions of the brain without adequately engaging the emotional and survival systems, systems that were in charge during a trauma, and dulling trauma memories or disengaging them temporarily with psychotropic drugs won’t heal the damaged and chronically misfiring memory patterns.

What does work is helping the sufferer to carefully, artfully, and in a controlled and focused way to re-experience the memories, feel the experience again in the body while expressing the energy, body movements, sounds, sights and postures that were suppressed at the moments of helplessness, dissociation and physical restriction. To think the thoughts that seem too terrible to think, and to help the mind link up the original memory to the fuller, day to day explicit or narrative memory that we live and work in every day.

This is what the work of Francine Shapiro’s EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE), Albert Pesso’s Psychomotor Therapy and Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Approach all seek in their similar models: to have the sufferer become integrated with their physical bodies, those same bodies that have experienced the trauma, to feel, tolerate, express, observe and rewrite their story in the present sense of the self.

All this is to say: there has never been a time in human history where more can be done to help the trauma sufferer than now. If you are besieged by physical and mental echoes of a terrible event in your past, please seek out care from a psychotherapist trained in the newer trauma resolution techniques. Many of us have found peace where there was no peace, and wish the same health and healing for you.



Suggested Reading:

Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine

Getting Past Your Past, Francine Shapiro

Waking: A Memoir, Matthew Sandford

Yoga for Trauma: Mary NurrieStearns

Core Long-Term Marriage Skills

One of my couple clients asked me to create a summary of our work together. I know these skills apply to nearly every long-term marriage, so I share them here.

1. Assume positive intent from your spouse. Trust him/her. Build positive interactions. Look for the good. Notice it, appreciate it. Stop trying to control the outcome of every interaction so that you feel less vulnerable. Protect yourself less, be open to one another more.

2. Self-focus: always pay more attention to how you are managing your own emotions/behaviors/words/tones than you are to your partner’s. Think: what can I do to improve our relationship? Journaling, prayer, ritual, reading about emotions/relationships/family of origin patterns.

3. Make every effort to improve your conflict conversations.
Don’t ignore important pain. If you find you are doing a lot of internalizing, mind reading, and stuffing emotions, it’s time to talk.  Bring up pain as complaints (about the issue – “I feel”) not criticism (about the other person – “You are”).

Start a conversation gently, “low and slow.”

Expect your partner to initially defend. Wait until that strong reaction passes before you respond. Ask your partner to lower their defense so they can listen, if necessary.

Listen for one another’s point of view. Appreciate whatever truth you can in your partner’s POV. Repeat it to them so they know they have been heard. Share your POV. Check to see if your partner gets what you are trying to say.

If conflict begins to hurt, STOP. Don’t escalate. Take some time out to calm down and return again to the conversation.

4. Cultivate your marital friendship. Remember, however well you think you know your partner, don’t assume you can no longer be surprised. Make asking questions of your partner’s day, experiences, dreams, hopes, memories, plans and pains a regular habit. Do some new things together. Allow one another the emotional room to do things independently. Too much intensity can be just as hard on a marriage as too much distance.

5. Flexible people are more satisfied in their marriages. Recognize and reflect on the fact that the that details of our lives we take for granted as we become adults – our bodies, minds, work, relationships with children, hobbies, friendships, emotions, goals – are changing all the time. Especially make peace with the ongoing aging of your body.

6. Keep emotion primary in your experience of life and one another since emotion is the way our bodies and minds give us moment by moment information. Continue to grow in your ability to notice, name, manage and understand your emotional life. Remember that your spouse is doing the very same thing. Think emotion before you attempt to use logic in hard conversations.

7. Know that the past never leaves us, but we can find creative ways to manage how it informs our present. Holding resentments or secrets is poison to healthy long-term relationships. When someone injures another, the healthiest couples use their spiritual resources of remorse, repentance, renewal and forgiveness to experience the hurt, commit to the healing of the injury and press on.

8. Build a positive appreciation for touch, smiles, eye contact, and physical proximity as expressions of affection and sexuality. Use your creativity to express sexual energy and desire in ways that work for both of you. Be sure to talk to one another during sexual activity so that you are clearer about what works and what doesn’t. If there is a difference in levels of drive and desire, work to blend masturbation and some kind of mutual sexual activity.

9. Share the leadership of your family/couple. Appreciate one another’s unique skills and allow for growth and change. Make decisions together, and think of your marriage as a team, a unit, even as you are always individuals.

10. Remember that life is short, and grows even shorter as we age. Set a daily intention to do the best you can as a person and a partner. Cultivate your spirituality and your sense of humor. Stop threatening divorce; take the word out of your imagination and vocabulary. Re-commit to your shared future; appreciate and marvel at all that you have already endured and experienced together.

Have some advice you’d like to share with long-married couples? Comment below!

Direct vs. Indirect Communication

Nearly every time I meet with a new couple, one or both of the partners will tell me they think that their main problem is “communication.” When I ask them to tell me more about what they mean, they will often talk about repeated and escalating conflicts, days of avoiding contact, in-house separation, lack of eye contact and physical touch, and constant critical vocal tones. And more. What I hear in that sad list of problems is a relationship that has suffered for awhile from emotional hurt and mental frustration, with communication being just the most obvious, surface-level issue they face.

As we begin to work on the multiple layers of pain they present, I often find that both have developed the mental habit of communicating very indirectly, all the time. Instead of asking their partner for what they need, or answering a question specifically, or commenting on something that is happening in the moment, they weave and dodge with their words. Now, we all know that to get along with other human beings, whether a friend, boss, neighbor or parent, we often side-step direct speech in favor of a softer, side-ways answer meant to smooth the emotional waters. “So, do you like this new (hideous) carpet we just laid down all throughout our house (for thousands of dollars…),” asks your mother-in-law? Oh, it’s terrific, we may say, simply to go along with the obvious drift of the conversation. What do we care if our spouse’s parents have new lime green shag carpeting under their feet? It’s not an important opinion, and we go along to get along.

While an important adult social skill, in the context of marriage, it can be applied too often. If we always avoid conflict, skirt an important issue, never give our critique or opinion, our partner never really knows what we think, and we are left alone with our hidden thoughts. Do this repeatedly, and with both partners, each will inevitably feel chronically misunderstood, unappreciated, hurt and angry. What’s left? Each partner secretly expects the partner to read their (true) mind, figure it out from their vocal tone, body language, hand gesture or facial expression what the truth is. And around and around we go, with no one feeling free or safe to say what they mean, express a real need or ask for help. No wonder the marriage feels lost and hopeless. I ask if it feels like the opposite of the early days of the relationship when partners were just getting to know one another, and their talk was free and personal and detailed. Invariably, both partners say Yes.

Getting a marriage back to a safer emotional position, in which both partners feel more able to express themselves as they truly are, ask for what they need from their partner and stop constantly mind reading and avoiding is long-term work and takes both partners working at it at the same time. This is where good couples therapy comes in. If what I have written here reminds you too much about your daily experience in marriage, I encourage you to call and set up an appointment. Come and see how a skilled counselor can help you untangle the habits of mind that keep you stuck, and get you back to a more direct, collaborative and warmer emotional style of talking with your spouse.