Tag: family

We Can’t Choose our Parents

It’s true; we can’t choose our parents.

Whatever skills or deficits they possess as people: their readiness or disinterest at caring for us, their physical and mental health, and their ability to meet basic needs for food, shelter and safety have an immediate and lasting effect on our own development. The human brain is shaped every day by the way we are cared for by those closest to us, and grows fastest during the first two years of life.

If a child is born to a parent who neglects their needs, is addicted, or who is violent, abusive or mentally ill, the effects are devastating. A human mind can be ruined if not helped and supported to develop in a healthier, more stable and flexible way.

It’s also true that in America the first time a failing family may come into contact with an institution that could help it recover is with the justice system or the public schools.

In this wonderful episode of This American Life radio show, stories are told of educational and therapeutic systems that work to re-parent our cultures disordered parent-child relationships.  If you’ve ever wondered how schools cope, or how family and in-home therapy works, take a listen. It’s great.

The American Life : Back To School, Episode 474

Major Mental Illness (MMI) and the Family

For all the research that has been done in the last twenty years attempting to understand the brain, the organ at the top of our spine retains its essential mystery. We know more now than ever how the brain works, how it has developed over the centuries to do the miraculous things it does, and what is happening to it when it gets injured. Doctors, parents, coaches and professional athletes are more alert to the dangers of brain concussion. Neurologists study to become adept at repairing the brain with surgery, cellular transplant, or electrical stimulus. Every one of us has a stake in the health of our minds.
But no one has now, or may ever, understand what to do when a brain loses its essential emotion balance. Major mental illnesses (MMI) like bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and severe personality disorders are currently treated with hospitalization, a variety of medicines, and several kinds of therapies including group, art, music, physical, occupational and individual, couple and family therapy. All of this effort does help a person suffering acute episodes create some safety from self-harm and violence to others. But we currently have no cure for the worse of brain diseases and dysfunction. Those afflicted with the most severe mental illness bear this burden without much hope of recovering their former, pre-illness selves. It’s a terrible, life-changing diagnosis.
Many of those who suffer also try to help themselves with illegal drugs and alcohol. It’s estimated that nearly half of those with MMI also may be drug addicted. It’s quite easy to see that a chronic emotional disorder, topped with occasional medications from a hospital stay, plus a chemical dependency, legal or otherwise, is a simple recipe for chaos. And that’s exactly what can happen. These are the majority of those we call the Homeless: adults whose illness and addiction make any kind of stable life impossible. Whose schools, work places, doctors, community programs, churches, friends and family in an uncoordinated effort tried to help but ran out of options, money, beds, time or energy.
If you have a family member with chronic mental illness, it certainly has affected your life as well. If you are like most of us human beings, the early months or years were a mix of denial, sorrow, anger, and accommodation as you tried to learn how to manage life with someone who couldn’t stay in the lanes of the average emotional highway. You may have had more than your share of blinding rage at promises broken and soaring optimism as your parent or sibling found a new doctor, a new medicine, a new religion, a new apartment. And then the up and down cycles of recovery and illness, of stabilization and hospitalization, continued. It feels insane. And in fact, it is. It’s easy to see how many people give up on the most mentally sick.
In the grand scheme of life, it’s to your emotional and spiritual benefit not to lose touch with your family member who struggles to stay mentally balanced. You may be their only connection to a person who remembers them when they were well, who has the same family features, who reminds them of their place in the human family. You may be the only person they know with a shared childhood memory. As exhausting as it can be to stay in their lives, I urge you to try.
To keep your own life in balance, to have good relationships, keep your job, and sleep well at night, you will need a simple but unyielding strategy when it comes to dealing with your loved one. Here’re my suggestions:
1.     Education: Get informed about your loved one’s diagnosis. Have a basic understanding of the medications they are on. Attend family meetings held by hospital or other care providers. Learn about the long-term physical and mental outlook of the disorder. Speak to an attorney if financial support, inheritance, property, arrest or civil commitment issues arise.
2.    Support: Seek out the understanding, company and expertise of others who struggle with mental illness in the family. Support groups such as NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) and those run by your county or local hospitals or churches are excellent places to find on-going information, support and referrals to local mental health resources. It’s here where you can grieve the person your loved one may never become, and figure out to live with the person as they are.
3.     Clear personal boundaries: You will need to figure out how to care about your family member while leading your own life. Your job, your marriage and your children will all suffer if you can’t say no to requests you can’t fill, to demands on your time that can’t be met, to assumptions about money you can’t meet. You may need professional help (i.e., a good therapist) to help you manage, grieve, and maintain your limits, especially if you are connected to your family member in any helpful way.
MMI is a devastating brain dysfunction that can destroy every good relationship in its wake. One day, we may have more than a bucket load of powerful drugs to help manage and even heal diseases like schizophrenia. But until then, if you have MMI in your family, do everything you can to manage its effects and continue to lead the life you want. You’ll need help to do it; it’s a long journey.   
           
           

How to Become a Good Stepparent

While most of us who marry intend it to be for a lifetime, about half of all first marriages in the United States end in divorce. Divorce ends not only a couple relationship based at least initially on attraction, trust and commitment; it marks the end of a dreamed future as a family. Despite the pain that most divorces bring, the desire to be happily married doesn’t seem to end, since most of those who divorce will eventually remarry.

Marrying at any age or stage of life is a challenge and a good deal of personal work and adjustment, but choosing to marry for the second (or more) time brings with it some additional complications. The most prominent complexity involves entering into an already existing family system as stepparent to the new spouse’s children.

As a therapist, I have noticed that a strategy for entering into relationship with the new spouses’ children seems to always take a back seat to the excitement, distractions and stresses of a new love, moving into a single household, and planning a wedding. Many adults who blend families believe, with good intention, that settling in as a new family will be easy as pie. After all, most of them already are parents, and have come this far as a new couple. How hard can it really be?

Well, it can be really, really hard.

I don’t believe one can be too deliberate or mindful when joining an already existing family, especially one that has been stressed by divorce or the death of a parent. In my practice, I frequently consult with adults who are planning to remarry, but whose children, especially teenagers, have grown increasingly angry, sad, disrespectful, demanding, or even hostile to their parent’s new partner the longer they are in the family circle. What was once a ride of excitement and anticipation erupts into bitter conflicts about moving homes, changing schools, losing friends, shifting visitation schedules, add step-siblings, and confusion over family roles and responsibilities. It can become so divisive couples may consider calling the whole thing off.

What’s an excited but hopeful new stepparent to do? I’d like to offer some basic strategies that can help your new family system adjust, adapt and thrive through the necessary shifts that come with merging family systems.

  1. Slow down! Perhaps the most important thing any new couple can do as it plans to blend families is to take it as slow as possible. Every family, no matter how fractured or stressed, holds loyalties and patterns of relating and functioning that need time to adapt to new people. I frequently tell my clients that though marriages may begin and end, families are forever. Don’t assume everyone will happily embrace your presence without some time to adjust.
  2. Take an outsider’s position. While all of us know what it’s like to be part of our own families of origin, and the family of choice we created as adults, you have never been part of a family exactly like your new partner’s. Be curious, respectful, and observant. Learn about how this family works. Become a student of the new family you want to join.
  3. Don’t try to become Mom or Dad to your partner’s children. Always remember and respect the role your new partner’s former spouse has with the children. It doesn’t matter whether they are awful parents, in prison, or deceased: children are loyal to their biological parents, and will fight you tooth and nail should you ever forget it. You may one day be called Mom or Dad, but don’t ever begin this way. Strive instead to be a positive, new adult friend in the children’s lives and a respectful, tactful partner in the eye’s of the children’s mom or dad.
  4. Allow the bio-parents to discipline the children. Family rules, expectations, negotiations and limits can create serious, lasting difficulties for children and their new stepparents. Don’t try to discipline the children alone. Allow their parents to enforce the family expectations. Dialogue about the children privately with your new spouse, and in matters of discipline, defer to your partner. If you keep your distance, eventually you’ll be able to set your own limits. Just not at first.
  5. Build relationships with the children one on one. Don’t assume that joining the family at Chucky Cheese every month is going to create a close bond with your new spouse’s five-year-old son, or that attending a few of your new 16 year old stepdaughter’s basketball games is going to make her think of you as a loyal fan. Taking the time to talk regularly with each child privately, reading to them, listening to their stories, going out somewhere easy and fun together is going to help bridge that long divide between stranger and stepparent. Take it easy, let them set the pace, and you will become a new friend instead of an unwelcome outsider.

While these ideas can go a long way in helping you make positive, lasting adjustments to a blended family, don’t suffer alone if things aren’t going well. Family therapists are mental health professionals who can help when family relationships get strained or problematic. Going to therapy as a couple or family regularly for a while can give you the skills and courage to recreate a happier family experience. After all, that’s what getting married and sharing our lives as families is all about.

Chronic Illness and the Family


It may be the idealized image of television shows, or perfect, ever-present pictures in advertising in newspapers and magazines, or just the plan hopefulness with which we all start our families. But most of us don’t plan to include chronic, life-long health problems in our family plan.

Our bodies are quite amazing creations, able to fight off disease, recover from injury, grow, age and change every day. We aren’t minds that have bodies attached, but we are instead bodies that think. We must eat, move, think, rest, work and love with our physical selves in mind. And for the most part, this natural rhythm of self-care makes life work.

But life isn’t smooth, and our physical systems aren’t perfect. Some of us will encounter injury, disease or disability that does not respond to time and care. For many of us, that process comes quite late in life, after the children are grown and gone, and our work life blessedly finished. But for others, this physical change comes much earlier, as a child, or teen, a young or middle adult. And suddenly life is different.


Chronic illness. It’s a disease, like diabetes, that robs the body of its natural resources and requires hourly attention to diet, activity and insulin. It’s asthma that can be quiet for days and weeks and suddenly constrict airways. Spina bifida, cerebral palsy, brain disorders, arthritis, paralysis, cancer, and blindness: the list of disorders, diseases or injuries that can change our lives is seemingly endless. None comes with our permission. But once it comes, if we want to keep our families and marriages healthy, happy, and productive, we must figure out how best to cope.

While those who live with chronic illness in themselves or close loved one have to create their own way to manage, there are some common factors when people find themselves faced with permanent life challenges. Perhaps one or more of these resources may fit you and your family now or in the future.

  1. Support. Being suddenly faced with disease or disability can be an enormously isolating experience; we feel overwhelmingly alone in our loss. Reaching out to others who have been there before us is a great relief to many. Local, in-person support groups or electronic on-line discussion groups are a wonderful way to break that isolation, find help, advice, and new friends who can walk the new journey with you.
  2. Education. Many of us have found the Internet and it’s endless resources both wonderful and awful: some of what we find is inaccurate and it’s hard to sort out which information is true or not. Finding the most authoritative sources of information about our condition is important and life giving. Medical libraries on-line, medical professionals, and research foundations may be the best places to start when researching a disease.
  3. Insurance companies. Believe it or not, most health insurance companies want to help you manage your disease so that you maintain or improve your symptoms. Many diseases have been shortened, improved or cured by the research done in clinical trials. Ask your physician if you qualify for research studies, and then be in touch with your insurance provider. You may find, as I have, that your insurance will cover an important, life-giving clinical study.
  4. Mental health care. As a psychotherapist who has been a therapy patient herself, I know how critical mental health care is to living with disease and chronic pain or disability. Reach out for mental and emotional support before you feel overwhelmed, and find a private, confidential healing place to think about your feelings, behaviors, relationships, and changed body. Internet directories like GoodTherapy.org are great places to search for quality therapists in your area.
  5. Spirituality. Nothing is more important to the long-term adjustment to change and disability than working within one’s sense of faith, belief, ritual and higher power. Faith and spirit can help one recreate a sense of purpose, meaning, self-care, self-acceptance, love and forgiveness in the midst of loss and change. When we can feel connected to a Being or community that loves us in the midst of our personal storms, we can experience a safe harbor for our hearts and minds.

Even with some or all of these important resources, living with chronic disease is a difficult and exhausting journey. Be sure you make time and space in your life for love, laughter, and joy, the things that hold families together. Despite the challenges, you may find life really worth living, together.

Personality: Does Birth Order Matter?

For generations, family members have noted the differences that naturally arise in children raised in the same family. How is it that John, the first born and only boy, seems to have such different personality characteristics than his younger brother, raised in the same house by the same parents just two years apart?  Good question!

Theories of personality abound. You may be familiar with some of the more popular models, often used in work or educational settings. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on the four major personality styles described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a favorite. The Enneagram, a model developed in religious communities and often used in spiritual direction, and other forms of personal discovery, is another.  These are models that seek to describe common types of personalities. Other models, such as the Big Five theory, attempt to describe personalities using the idea of common traits shared by human beings across the world, such as extraversion or neuroticism.
    
Whichever way makes more sense to you to describe human beings, by types or common traits, we have a collective curiosity about how people become who they are, and how much we can or should adapt ourselves to others and our environment.

How did I get to be the way I am? When my clients ask me this question, I answer this way:  our personality is constituted like a recipe, with three primary ingredients. The first main ingredient is our individual nature. We are born with a particular style of personality, inherited from our parents and our larger family system. It’s part of our genetic code, and forms the basis of who we become.  Our general sense of the world, our innate optimism or pessimism, our sense of humor; this basic personality is another thing we have inherited.

The second main ingredient of our personality is formed by the way we are cared for by our parents; it’s the nurture part of the recipe. Was our mother well nourished, healthy, and ready to become pregnant? Were our parents free from addiction, major illness or injury? Was our birth relatively normal? Were we welcomed into the world with joy and cared for with love? The way our parents meet our vulnerability, suffering and growing sense of self makes up the great majority of our personality relationship style.

If our parents or primary caregivers have enough sense of self that they can sacrifice and respond to our needs consistently, we learn to trust that others will meet our needs, and that others are trustworthy. We offer ourselves to them, and get care and love in return. In the research done on this concept of emotional attachment, about half of us get just what we need to feel secure. The rest of us learn some combination of security, anxiety and withdrawal to cope with inconsistent parenting.

The third part of our personality is made up of all the unique, individual experience we have in life and what we do with it. It’s the fall you took in second grade from school jungle gym, the trip to the hospital, and the cast that you had to wear through the summer. How did that fall affect you? How did it shape the way you think, feel and respond to the world? What happens, and how you chose to respond, makes up a large part of your personality.

What about birth order? I think it fits in this third “what happens to us” category of personality development. While research is still battling it out whether first born children actually are more independent than their second born siblings, therapists and other social scientists have found a common pattern in family position that seems to fit many families, at least in Western cultures. In general, first born and only children are commonly more self determined and disciplined, having been born into an adult system and most closely associated to adults, even as infants. The second born child is less connected to the adults in the family, and if followed by a third child, may feel a bit lost in their parents’ strong relationship to the first born and emotional focus on the baby of the family. The farther away from the parent system, the more independent and even rebellious that child may become (Sulloway, 1997). Additionally, the more older siblings a child has, the more accustomed they often become to letting other people lead, and can more easily go “with the flow” than those born first.

Family therapists differ in the amount of importance they place in this theory of birth order, but most will inquire about how a client’s family is constituted, and where in the family their client “fits.” Why it matters at all is that it may help people better understand some of their unconscious preferences for friendships, marriage partners, relationship styles, and even how they may connect to or discipline their own children. It’s all just part of our individual personality recipes.

Sulloway, F. J. (1997) Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York:
Vintage.

Family Travels

The weather’s slowly warming across the country, and along with snow melt and longer days comes that familiar family travel time known as Spring Vacation. And though they may not be, as Charles Dickens’s wrote, “the best of times, the worst of times” in your family’s lives, travels together as a group can be some of the happiest as well as most stressful times you have together as a family.

Time away from our regular routines is essential for good mental health. We do tend to thrive with a healthy balance of the familiar and the different, and vacations are one way many of us create difference in our lives. We can put away the same responsibilities, schedules, foods, sights, people, and weather for something different, a change that can make for a sense of escape as well as renewal upon our return. When we travel with our families, we get a chance to make shared memories and then recall them again and again in the future. Many of us remember the time spent in the back seat of our family station wagons going somewhere together as hallmarks of our childhood.

But like everything else with our families, traveling together as companions is a mixed blessing. While we can anticipate one another’s reactions and find pleasure in those shared experiences and understandings, we also make instantaneous assumptions, judgments and responses to each other that can zap the joy out of the newness of travel. In other words, it can be great and awful at the same time! (Recall the Clark Griswold’s of the 1983 movie, “Vacation,” and you’ll instantly know what I mean).

So, before you come unglued in your rush to close the house and get on that plane for that long-awaited winter escape, consider a few things that may make for a more relaxed, pleasant and renewing family trip. If you have some more ideas to share, be sure to add your comment at the bottom of this post.

1. Stay Within the Budget
Nothing can kill the joy of a family trip than spending more than you can afford. No one wants to be paying off credit card travel expenses 11 months after that dream visit to Disneyworld. Do all you can to stay inside your planned budget, making room for the spontaneous and unexpected, and you will have a much less stressful time while vacationing, and particularly, upon return.

2. Prepare to Travel
Don’t wait until the night before you leave to know if you have enough cash, if you have or need your passport, if your favorite shorts still fit, if the car needs an oil change, or if you have renewed your daily prescriptions at the pharmacy. None of us needs the emotional turmoil of last-minute, rushed packing. It can take all the pleasure out of the first part of your vacation, and can really stall your trip through airport security!

3. Lower your Expectations
No destination is going to be as great as the travel brochure, the website, or your dreams set you up to expect. Even Hawaii has problems. Lower your expectations of your perfect honeymoon or family trip, and instead, ready yourself to be pleasantly surprised and flexible. More fun will be had by all!

4. Manage your Job
Most successful employers know that we are better at our jobs when we can leave them for awhile. While it’s tempting to stay connected via email, texts, photos or even phone calls to work, unplug from the people at work and turn toward the people you’re with. After all, it’s your family that will stick around long after that job is over. And if you are self-employed like I am, make a plan to limit the contact you need to have with your business and stick to your plan.

5. We Bring Ourselves with Us
Your son isn’t automatically going to be well behaved just because he’s visiting grandma, and your spouse isn’t miraculously going to be easy going, generous and relaxed just because you’re in a different place. Remember that while your family is pretty much the same wherever they go, so are you. Cut everyone a little slack.

6. Staying with Extended Family
Nothing says “emotional overload” like traveling with your family and staying with even more. Be sure to treat the family you visit with respect, do your share of the extra work you create, and make time to get out from under their feet, and you will probably be invited back!

7. Returning
Some of us appreciate more time at home before the rush back to the normal begins. I know I need time to get some of the laundry done, to make sure there’s enough milk in the refrigerator, and to sort the mail before I go back to work. Others don’t need much re-entry time, eking out as much vacation time as possible. Know your preferences and honor them. That way coming home will be as pleasant as possible.

And in all journeying, safe travels!

You Can Go Home Again

For better or worse, we first learn about making and keeping relationships in our families. During our formative years, our parents establish patterns with us; patterns of connection and separation, of independence and dependence, of give and take, that literally shape our developing brains and how they work for the rest of our lives.
The problem, of course, is that this is a very imperfect process. Our parents have inherited their own patterns from their own parents, families and culture and combined them into their own style. Very few of these emotional patterns are conscious; we rarely notice or examine them.  This automatic process is why family emotional patterns are so often repeated generation to generation. When they work for us, they help us develop into caring, connected, loving human beings. When they don’t work well, we can be shaped by anxiety, demands, rigid roles and expectations, and inflexible rules for behavior. Of course, most of us have a unique, messy combination of both.
One of the most emotionally charged family experiences we share are the subtle and not so subtle family expectations that swirl around “The Holidays.” Whether the holiday is Christmas, Passover or the cultural New Year, many families have traditions that involve returning “home,” visiting parents or relatives, eating, and sharing worship or rituals together year after year. For adults who have left their parental home and established an independent life, these expectations can arouse surprisingly high anxiety and worry. We can be caught off-guard by overwhelming feelings of obligation, excitement, frustration, pleasure, anger or any combination of feelings about the family traditions we know but now have a small measure of distance from. And if we add into the mix the distance and cost of travel, or the demands of college, work or a new spouse or child, it can feel like a chaotic world inside our heads.
Most of us solve this internal family stress in just a few ways.
We may promise to return home, but find a conflict at the last minute. We may go, but
bring along a friend, spouse or child, and use them as an emotional buffer. We may go and find the old emotional patterns so arousing we eat, drink, sleep, or spend too much while there. We retreat to the computer, the new novel we brought, or constantly check our smart phones for communication from the outside world. And still others of us find the whole returning to our family so stressful we end up in huge, raging family fights just when we want to be relaxed and connected.
It is hard to return home to our families. We want to behave well, but find our own reactions surprising and troubling. How can we stay connected in a more healthy way to the people and traditions we had growing up, without completely throwing them out? How can we be calmer under the stress of bad communication, or alcoholism, marital conflict, unspoken rivalries, disappointments or fear?
Family systems theory understands the family as both the source of this emotional stress as well as the soil in which new, more flexible personal patterns of connection need to grow. How can we change our point of view of family and behave in slightly more helpful, relaxed ways?
The answer is two fold.
Firstly, we must recognize that we are part of that same family that makes us so confused. We need to return to our families over time, in small amounts, and become a witness or observer of our family’s emotional process. We can enter into our family process as both participant and student. What do we notice? How do this family work? How do I participate in these patterns? What if I were to do something slightly different than before?
And secondly, we make a steady effort to talk with, deal with, and know each member of our family one to one. When we can have real, face to face relationships with the people in our extended emotional system, we stop behaving with them in old, rigid, familiar ways, and have to deal with them as people in the here and now. And not surprisingly, they have the same experience with us.
These basic emotional changes are the building blocks to creating a more flexible self when dealing with our families from a distance. We don’t have to cut our families out of our lives, and we don’t have to simply accept their unique problems and bear our burdens silently. Observe your family system, and focus on your relationships with people individually. You can go home again, with a shift in purpose and perspective, and find yourself better connected and less anxious.