relationships – Inspiring Change LLC

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.

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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)

Why Do I Keep Asking you to Journal?

Daily I am asking my clients to take therapy skills with them into daily life – the foremost being the ability to think about our thinking. It builds the critical self reflection muscle that is a key to overcoming the distorted thinking of chronic anxiety, depression, chronic pain and problems with body, self and relationship image and assessment.

Here’s helpful list of what handwriting can do for you and your brain, focused on students and learning, applicable to what we are working on when we do psychotherapy.

https://ivypanda.com/blog/handwriting-good-for-your-studying/

Gendered: “girl culture 2”

One of my colleagues was raised by her father. While he was in the military, she experienced many different global cultures, and was raised around men. She mentioned to me that while she understood what I was talking about in my first Gendered post, she wasn’t raised in that way. She was raised by a man and that experience made her emotional and communication patterns different than most American women. More masculine, we could say. Makes complete sense.

What she then said was that her more unique direct and simple speaking style has often brought her the experience of rejection and judgment by women, even close friends, who were socialized to be constantly circumspect, people pleasing and perfectionistic in all relational matters.

She has been called “angry,” “too direct,” and other unpleasant words of judgment by women. She has experienced looks of surprise and body language of distancing and distain while talking in professional meetings, therapy settings and social outings. I have encouraged her to write a personal response to my post so I can add it here.

I, too, have been cautioned against speaking my mind even by my Midwestern-Lutheran-socialized-by-awfully-nice-people-30-years-together spouse. We have even disagreed on something as simple as whether we ought to say our opinion to family members or even more horrifying, friends. Socially, he will almost always choose the grin and bear it or simply ignore it route. Me? I’d rather find a nice enough way to speak my mind. I spend enormous amounts of time in my mind trying to suss out the right way to say what I am thinking so I don’t lose connection to those around me. (I’ve been doing that as I write, edit and re-edit this post.) Even with all that internal sifting, no doubt some have and will call me a bitch behind my back.

But you would never do that, would you gentle woman reader? Become automatically uncomfortable when a colleague, boss, friend or loved one violated those carefully maintained but invisible gender norms. Provide some emotional feedback? Subtly step back in disapproval? Most of the most painful comments and betrayals of trust I experienced as a female pastor throughout the years were from other women in my social and leadership circles.

While most of us are struggling to wake up to our inherited and unearned privilege of race and economic status in contemporary America, may I be among those who bang the gender drum at the same time. Inherited gender roles are reinforced every day, without reflection, and women are the ones who seem to have the most at stake when other women don’t obey the rules.

Let us wake up and act up. We have been controlled and socialized by rigid expectations about our bodies, our biology, our fertility, our parenting and caretaker roles and yet we have been at the head of the line when it comes to enforcing the rules. If we want freedom and opportunity for all, let us mean all. This freedom to be ourselves, no matter our gender identity, is what I believe feminism is about. Call me a feminist. And then ask me to offer my point of view. I’m quite sure I’ll have one I can share.

Do You Have Enough Friends?

Do you have all the friends you need? Chances are that you are among the majority of American adults who recognize that they are struggling with fewer close friendships than they want. As emotional beings, all of us are biologically designed to connect to others in and outside our families of origin. While we may be surrounded by others at work, or sporting events, in our neighborhoods or churches, few of us feel that we have a core group of steady, supportive, mutually caring same gender friendships. We are friend hungry. And we don’t know how to fix it.

This emotional scarcity can come on quite slowly. While we are progressing through school, the constant shifts from playgrounds to classrooms to new schools provide us with an ever-replenishing sea of faces from whom we may find sympathetic chums. But just as quickly as those people move into our lives, they can move out, as new environments and opportunities sweep our time and attention elsewhere. Our friends and we may marry. And right before our eyes, our emotional circle becomes instantly smaller and more fixed.

It becomes harder and harder to stay in regular, meaningful touch with people. Phone calls help but don’t completely replace in-person conversation. Getting together can take enormous scheduling and financial efforts not everyone is able to sustain. When was the last time you hand-wrote a distant friend a letter? Many of us have tried to find less isolation in the connections we make on social media. They soothe us with easy digital connections to people across the globe. But unless those relationships are mutual and sustained, they won’t fill the emotional gap that face-to-face time with people provides.

This scarcity of friendships seems to hit American men even harder than it does women. We have a culture that still assumes men need to be independent, stoic and in competition with one another. Generations of this gender ethic have led to families that raise boys to dismiss healthy emotional dependency and under-value one another, even within the same family. This places men in emotionally vulnerable positions, overly dependent upon their romantic partners for support. Women shoulder this by becoming the emotional centers of their families and becoming adept at managing everyone’s interpersonal relationships. It leaves men empty and women exhausted. While many of us reject these old models, they still shape the way we live. What are we to do?

I don’t think we should give up on being and having good friends. The emotional cost of loneliness is a true mental health crisis for many, and there are no quick and lasting solutions. Over a lifetime, we need many real friends with whom we can share common interests, new experiences, shared struggles and spontaneous laughter.

One of the most helpful resources I have found that helps to describe how we make good, close friendships is the 2016 book, “Frientimacy” by Shasta Nelson. Nelson has created an online community around friendships, speaks around the country to groups and corporations about her research, and was a featured speaker at TEDx in 2017. What she has to teach us about the qualities of good friendships is inspiring to me as a relationship therapist and someone who wants to be and have close friendships throughout my entire lifespan.

The core qualities we must cultivate within ourselves and our key intimate relationships are Positivity, Consistency and Vulnerability. In other words, our key friendships should feel good, be mutually maintained, and let us be our real selves. These are high standards, and they take time, good boundaries and mutual intention to develop. Not every friendship can or will experience all three qualities. There are all kinds of people in our lives who may be able to sustain one aspect, like positivity, but can’t meet other aspects like consistency or real-life sharing. Or we may be more interested in someone as a friend than they are in us, and the relationship never grows. I’ll point you to Nelson’s book for more details about these key aspects, but you get the point. Real friendships take work and commitment to one another. When they work, they make us feel fully human.

No matter who we are, we need good friendships. Perhaps the last good friend you had was someone you knew years ago but with whom you have fallen out of touch. What did that friendship teach you about how to recreate that small, essential, positive human community of two close friends? Perhaps it’s time to discover more about how you can be a friend and welcome new friendship in return.

(Written for/published 5/28/2019 The Savage Pacer)

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

Dividing Family Loyalties When You Marry

There is nothing like bringing home a close friend or partner to shine a spotlight on the unspoken rules by which every family, your family, lived and lives.

Every family that lives with one another for some time develops a set of patterns for emotional engagement that soon feels like the “family rules.” These expectations for behavior may start within a marriage and strengthen their grip as children are brought into the home. Once the children catch on to these patterns, they begin to live by them. Only family members know how that family works, even though no one may have ever spoken these powerful expectations out loud.

Many of these rules are quite helpful, and create a kind of emotional shorthand that members count on. Some rules families frequently live by are: this family lets one another know our whereabouts; this family goes to church/synagogue/mosque; this family values education; this family values friendship, and this family works hard. Others might be less helpful. They might be expressed as: this family avoids conflict; this family never questions mother/father; this family relies on men for money, women for support; this family doesn’t live outside our region; this family keeps secrets, and this family doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.

With these internal rules, members keep the connections of their family relationships, even unhealthy ones, intact. Once we bring another person into close relationship with this family system through marriage, the rules become more obvious; our new partner has no way of knowing or observing these internal rules except by bumping into them. Because they don’t have the years of unconscious training in working within the boundaries of these family expectations, newcomers invariably stir up distress and even conflict by disregarding these rules or even openly disagreeing with them. This is one way newcomers remain permanently on the outside of their partners’ family systems.

This is where the partner, whose family of origin is the one getting stirred up, has to bring his or her best self to the party or he/she will end up offending and damaging the new family and partner. If the rule is “no one can challenge the way Mom behaves,” Mom can run roughshod over the new wife of her son and her son gets caught between his loyalties toward his family of origin and that toward his partner. Because the loyalty to one’s family of origin is older and deeper, chances are that is the one that most easily wins.

In families where emotional connection has never been particularly intense or expected, this kind of division of emotional importance happens automatically. Parents have children, raise them, and expect that once their children marry, the old family changes. The new has come, and everyone has to adjust. In more emotionally intense, enmeshed, or distressed family systems, blending a new spouse and/or grandchildren into the mix may require an our-way-or-the-highway kind of behavior from the newcomer that can make for chronic distress for everyone.

I counsel couples who find themselves in conflict over family rules to think about loyalty as an emotional quality of relationships that can and must be shared unequally. One can be loyal to both one’s family of origin as well as to a new spouse, but the most successful marriages have partners who transfer their primary loyalties to their new partner. Mom or Dad may still be core relationships, but if there is any important conflict, decision, schedule, or issue to decide, the default must move to the spouse and couple.

If you and your partner seem to be in constant conflict over your visits back to visit your parents, your time spent with siblings, or the ever-present sense that you care more about pleasing your parents than you do your spouse, check in with yourself regarding that unequal balance of loyalty. If you feel miserably caught in the middle, it’s time to shift your focus. Unplug some of that urgency from your family of origin and give it to your new partner and children. And, of course, if it’s just not as easy as that for you, consulting with a local marriage and family therapist will help you more easily make that emotional transition.

(Originally written as a post for GoodTherapy.org, April 2013)

Loneliness Increases with Digital Workforce

Before the advent of the Internet, people worked mostly in the presence of others.

Whether they were in the fields of a farm, the sea of typists in an office, the floor of a factory or behind the counter of a retail store, other people and relationships with them were the stuff of every day life. Millions of stay-at-home mothers, who may have been alone with their babies most of the day, nonetheless had that child to hold and other mothers at home to seek out.

Men, who in western culture frequently have trouble keeping friendships beyond classroom educations, made and sustained important relationships with others on a daily basis. These work friendships may have been more temporary than lifelong, but nonetheless gave men the social interactions we humans, who are wired for connection, need as much as air, water and food. And while marriages or dating relationships have kept men emotionally connected, they can’t carry all the emotional connection needs men have.

I have noticed that increasing numbers of my clients are working alone at home. Technology is allowing all kinds of people to put in their work hours without long, gas-guzzling commutes, endless team meetings and even much face to face interactions. While the quality of their work may even improve with less interruptions and increased personal satisfaction with flexible scheduling, their emotional isolation can be an unrecognized drain on their emotional well-being and mental health.

Many of these workers are lonelier than ever, and can’t quite figure out why. Friendship making is getting harder and harder with less workplace interactions, fewer people connecting to churches, fraternal, political, sport and social groups, and neighborhood relationships. No wonder so many people, particularly men, sit alone at their computers and post anonymous angry comments on every article, tweet, post or meme they can find. It’s a very quick way to be reminded there are people in the world when you irritate, enrage or frighten others with your words.

Friendships have always been an important part of our personal worlds. With fewer and fewer places to interact with one another, they are becoming increasingly important and rare. Loneliness is a critical mental health concern for our culture, and especially for men. We may be able to save a lot of suffering if we can help our children and teens learn to make, be and keep good friends.

Netflix’s “The Crown” & Joy in Marriage

Netflix’s major release of the second season of “The Crown,” a lavish and brilliantly acted biography of England’s Queen Elizabeth II in her very first years of her reign, is worth every moment of your time. Writer Peter Morgan is creating a masterpiece of historical drama.

At it’s core are the conflicts that face a young woman whose father dies relatively young and has the British monarchy thrust upon her at 25. We’re witness to the parallel sacrifices of her husband, nuclear family members, and all those who serve the royal family. As her husband Prince Philip chafes under the demands of his marriage to the Crown, his roguish behavior brings increasing pain and anguish to Elizabeth. Despite the developing pressures, Elizabeth suggests a small party to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. And it is at this dinner party that Philip makes a brief speech that describes the core of marriage’s worK:

(laughter …) “Ten years has taught me,
The secret of a successful marriage is actually to have different interests.
Well, different interests, not entirely different interests. It’s a funny business.
One sees the whole of the other person. You see even that part of them that they don’t see themselves.
And presumably, they see that hidden part of you.
One ends up knowing more about one’s partner than they know about themselves.
And it can be pretty tough to keep quiet about it.
So you have to come to an accommodation, an arrangement, a deal if you like.
To take the rough with the smooth.
But the extraordinary thing is down there in the rough, in the long reeds of difficulty and pain,
that is where you find the treasure.
So I would like to propose a toast in the name of love, in the name of our beloved country, in the name of steadfastness, in the name of another ten marvelous years.
I give you mon petit chou, Lilibet, Elizabeth, The Queen.”

(The Crown, S2E4, “Beryl”; starting 19m.00s)

What brilliant insight – spoken in Philip’s voice – of the hard but joyous human work of living closely with another person, and knowing more about them than they do about themselves; and vice versa. And rather than using that knowledge as a weapon, the happiest marriages reach an accommodation, an emotional arrangement, to take both the best and worse of their partner and accept this as the wonder of what it means to be loved well by another human being. “It’s there were you find the treasure,” says Philip. Yes, indeed. This is what it really means to love another person. To know all about them, accept them, and be accepted and cherished, despite this deep knowledge, in return.

Thank you for saying it so well, Mr. Morgan. May it be so for all of us.

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/

When Severe Mental Illness Strikes a Loved One

Book Review: “I Am Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help” by Xavier Amador, PhD. (Vida Press, 2012)

For the last 20 or so years, brain research has helped doctors and therapists understand that the serious mental illnesses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are diseases of brain function. During the century before the “Decade of the Brain (the 1990’s)”, these rare and frightening mental diseases were blamed on bad or inadequate mothering (the “schizophrenogenic mother”), thanks to the early theories of Freud and subsequent generations of psychology, puzzling over the cause and treatments of such life-altering and permanent mental illnesses.

In his wonderfully personal and helpful book “I Am Not Sick,” Dr. Amador explains that the primary feature of these severe mental illnesses is the core belief that the sufferer is “not sick.” In medical terms, this disbelief in their illness is called “anosognosia” (ã-nõ’sog-nõ’sê-ã). Sufferers may be homeless, talking to voices in their head, unable to sleep or put together a clear sentence, believing that aliens have made inroads to their cells, but to these ill brains, the beliefs and thoughts are as real as sunlight and gravity.

If you have ever been in a relationship with a loved one who has become mentally ill and whose illness has this feature of anosognosia, you know that trying to convince them to get to the hospital for treatment or to take their medication is a futile, frustrating, and relationship damaging exercise. But this is how almost everyone attempts to get their loved one’s the help they need to be safe and recover.

In his best-selling book, Amador explains the model of engagement that he has developed over 30 years of living with his older brother, who was a schizophrenic, and working as a professional forensic psychologist and therapist. He walks the reader through this counter-intuitive but effective model that listens, understands and collaborates with the sufferer, who, in the end, must participate in their care in order to get better.

He calls this program “LEAP,” which stands for Listen, Empathize, Agree and Partner. Utilizing the tools familiar to therapists of Client-Centered/Active Listening, Cognitive-Behavioral, and Motivational Interviewing models, Dr. Amador provides tools, examples, and scripts as examples of learning to use this strategy with loved ones who need help.

I read this book as a way to help one of my clients, whose loved one is beginning to demonstrate marked personality changes, delusions and strange behaviors. As we talked about how to be helpful short of calling 911, this book has become a welcome addition to my library and therapeutic models. If you have someone in your life you are seriously worried about and wonder how to help. I urge you to get this book or log onto his website, LeapInstitute.org.