Tag: dysfunctional families

It’s Not All About You

When I was younger, I was sure I was the source of every problem that cropped up in my life. And why wouldn’t I? I had a parent who was devoted to that narrative.

She flatly told me: “I love you but I don’t like you.” I couldn’t disagree with her. I didn’t much like myself.

But it takes a certain insidious brilliance to turn a struggling child’s every misstep into making them believe they have some core defect. Even moreso to blithely disregard the deficiencies and exposure to harm in the child’s upbringing into which that parent placed the child.

I guess I was supposed to take responsibility for that, too.

The dynamic is all too common and well understood in the therapeutic community. A child whose needs are not met and whose pain and needs are ignored will slowly come to the conclusion there is something wrong with them.

They cannot place the blame on their caregivers as their lives literally depend on them. And if they did, what power would they have to change anything? None.

I’ve been considering this lately in light of certain struggles in my life. I have been trying to evaluate where to draw the line between my responsibility and that of the perpetrator. It is not easy to work out when you were raised as I was.

Throw into the mix that I am a woman. Women are often perceived as bossy and mouthy and difficult and “other” when we speak up or out about something we take issue with.

I once read about a woman (maybe you know who it was; I don’t) who said: “I don’t know whether I am a feminist or not. I do know I am labeled a feminist whenever I speak up or take any action that distinguishes me from a doormat.”

I was lately labelled “fiery” by a new neighbor. I have often been called “intimidating.” I never got what that meant exactly. It probably meant I was not completely on board playing the requisite political games to advance my career. I paid the price but have no regrets about speaking up about what bothered me.

I may have extended my life (I hope the Universe doesn’t smite me for making this comment) by giving full voice to my pain and aggravations. I have not often held back my opinion or silenced my voice in the face of present or pending harm as an adult. Corrosive or angry feelings were often given full voice. Not very sophisticated or smart, I know.

All to say, I can relate to those who struggle with finding and using their voice. I am always surprised by the blowback experienced by people who choose to speak up. Like whistleblowers.

If there was ever any doubt about the power of words and expression, you need look no farther than the fate of recent whistleblowers for examples. Perception is reality. When a whistleblower speaks up about something that they feel is wrong, the usual defense tactic is to smear that person’s character and discredit them in the public eye. It usually works.

It strikes me how similar this is to the dynamic of the dysfunctional family. Truth is elusive and can be very subjective. This is in direct opposition to what we are led to believe about “honesty” and “transparency.”

In truth, it is a balancing act we struggle with from cradle to grave. Even a person raised in a perfectly happy and functional family soon has to learn “the rules” of whatever world they get involved in as adults. Some “worlds” are more desirable than others. All depends on whether you choose to make your career on Wall Street or Sesame Street.

Wherever you land, you are making constant judgment calls and tradeoffs between your truth and the shared reality you operate in. Most can suck up the shared reality and its inherent imbalances and hypocrisy for the payoffs in money or good reputation.

Children raised from childhood without consistent support for their emerging voices and inclinations may have more difficulties. They may have much more trouble discerning and acting on discrepancies in problems not clearly and easily attributable to “them” or to “me.”

It is a learned vulnerability. I am discovering that – while infinitely better than it was earlier – the grooves of self-doubt can be hard to surmount. Even knowing that makes it much easier than it was to discern between the “true” ownership of a problem. And its resolution.

You may play a part in your struggles but you are not operating in a vacuum. True, you must take responsibility to resolve problems as they arise. Determining the level of responsibility you must take comes down to a decision about what you can and cannot control.

Know that and sort out whether or if you can do anything about a problematic situation. If you can’t, do yourself a favor.

Walk away.

Good Thinking

My friend Margo Talbot https://margotalbot.com/ is a world-renowned ice climber, author and mental health advocate.

Margo has led expeditions in such far-flung locales as Antarctica and the Arctic. She is a motivational speaker and writes a powerful blog about her insights along the road of life. She promotes women’s personal empowerment through workshops and coaching.

Her book All That Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression, is a story of healing and redemption; a story about losing oneself, and then finding one’s way back home. https://margotalbot.com/book/

Margo writes about family dysfunction and healing from it and regaining/preserving mental health. She once gave a powerful TED talk on this very subject. https://youtu.be/kayj6oew9_M

In her youth, Margo got into trouble with drugs. She was eventually arrested for drug dealing. She has spent most of her adult life figuring out how she got there. She helps others to get out or stay out of similar places.

I met Margo Talbot as the group leader of an Outward Bound survival course I took in Ontario, Canada over a decade ago.

Margo taught us how to live survive in the woods. We chopped a lot of wood that week. We made a lot of fires out of forest detritus. We took a lot of swims in a cold and uninviting (but admittedly invigorating) lake.

Margo organized a solo camping trip for each participant on the final night. That was the “big finish” to the course.

Mid-afternoon on the next to last day, each of us were taken by canoe to separate remote campsites. We were left alone to spend the night with a tarp, some rope, a box of matches, snacks and a barebones breakfast. My nerves were pretty steady until nightfall neared.

I went wandering once I landed onshore. I came upon a derelict and uninhabitable shack in the woods with a two-hole outhouse beside it.

On the side of the shack hung a sign. In huge letters, it proclaimed: “Bear Country.”

I can’t even pretend I slept well that night. But I did survive. Bonus.

Margo once shared this wisdom below in a post and it has stayed with me.

I share her perspective.

Make lemonade.

“Things you don’t see coming in life: your sister trying to legally prevent you from seeing your dying father.

Your brother taking your father’s hearing aids from the nursing home to prevent you from having conversations with him.

Your mother defending both of your siblings and their actions.

Your extended family standing by doing nothing to prevent these emotional crimes.

The upside is, I don’t know ANYBODY who gets handed such PRICELESS stories to fill their books with!“

– Margo Talbot

Broken Birds

It is commonly believed – somewhere – that a fertile young woman inclined to get herself in the family way will seek out the strongest, healthiest mate she can find as a father to her children.

The reasons are two-fold. A strong healthy male might be expected to produce the strongest and healthiest babies. A strong healthy male might also be expected to be a good provider.

I’m the first to admit that these are wildly, out-of-fashion assumptions, and options in the baby-making realm these days are just as wildly variant. Many young women plan to not only have but raise and take care of their babies all by themselves, thank you very much.

But abused children as adults do not necessarily seek out what is good for them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I saw this manifest in my mother operating as an adult from her own abusive background (though she would rather eat nails than admit that it was.)

My mother was repeatedly drawn to the birds with broken wings. She invariably sought out others as abused and oblivious to its impact upon them as she had been. Our childhood was filled with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells and problem drinkers and people “not quite right” whom she could and would take under her wing.

She aspired and identified with the local “intelligentsia,” who willingly came to her countless parties and drank copious quantities of free booze. The professors. The lawyers and judges. Occasionally doctors, but her conversational boundaries with them were reached pretty quickly. Doctors were usually much too starchy and grounded in reality for her liking. She much preferred philosophers.

Mom married a bird with very broken wings indeed. His childhood of physical and emotional abuse showed up in adulthood as sex and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and an inferiority complex the size of Greenland.

In retrospect, she would say about her attraction to him, “I was going to love him so much he would heal and get better.” And of course, he never did. Not with her. What she didn’t say is that water seeks its own level.

People change themselves if they are going to change at all. They may be motivated by someone else but the work of “changing” is theirs and theirs alone. And the “savior complex” my mother had was never completely altruistic.

There was something reminiscent of trying to remove a splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Mom came to see – after years of enduring my father’s abuse and her unceasing pain – that her assumptions about her marriage were painfully naive.

But she never really fully let it go and moved on. She liked having been married to a lawyer. It meant a lot to a small-town country-raised girl. I used to say that their divorce was only on paper.

And after the parents’ divorce, Mom continued attracting broken birds to her circle. The “recovering” alcoholics. The “between real jobs” handymen. The sketchy English professor who was “down on his financial luck.” She was inordinately proud of helping them. If they could be helped.

To me, they seemed like a rogue’s gallery of lesser men of even less fortune who were happy to prey upon my mother’s vanities and vulnerabilities. Children often see things differently than their parents.

So, in kind, I picked a broken bird. Our shared history of parental alcoholism was a bonding issue. But dysfunctional backstories do not set a firm foundation for a lasting marriage. My own views were so crippled and skewed that on our wedding day – carrying our first child – I blithely mused: “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

Life and the children I would bring into this world drove the message of my own naivete home in waves of dull pain for all of the following years to date. I still have to carefully bridge conversations where my daughter bemoans the “fine line” she has had to walk her whole life between her father’s world and mine. “Mom screwed up,” is all I can muster by way of comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. But in choosing a father for my children, I did what I had been taught to do. “Pick a broken bird and make him better.” Poppycock, of course. I can only say that my children were the catalyst for my own embarkation on a healing path.

As my children wrestle with their own issues emergent from a dysfunctional background, I hope that owning up to my own mistakes will give them better emotional grounding and source material than I had to work with.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about life is that hope springs eternal. Indeed it is often said of “second marriages” that they are a triumph of hope over experience.

With the all too human “compulsion to repeat” from those of us who emerged from dysfunctional families, it is one of those quiet blessings for which I often express thanks and gratitude.

Proviso

I write about overcoming a difficult childhood and healing from it. I credit many self-help books I encountered along the way. They often had the right message for me at the right time.

I have also written that I write – I believe – from a place of privilege. Healing is a luxury not everyone can afford.

Let me explain. Most who are drawn to the healing path have come to it because life, as they are living it, has become unbearable. Most important, they believe there is a better way of doing things. That there is a better way out there for them to be.

I don’t shy away from the source of my perspective on healing and dysfunctional families. I was raised in a classic. And like most dysfunctional families, they didn’t get that they were doing anything “wrong.” In fact, they would have been horrified to learn that they had.

That awareness kept me plugged into a family I should have walked away from with love much, much earlier. They meant well.

So in the backdrop of people’s lives are a host of agendas and subtexts. Their belief in the vows of marriage keeps them in an abusive or unsatisfying marriage. Many continue to preen and seek approval from parents who are not worthy of the label, regardless of their biological role in your birth. We are also loaded with a host of other beliefs and constraints that are loaded on us from birth onward.

“Daddy doesn’t mean to hurt me.” “My husband really loves me but he has an anger problem. It’s not his fault.” “I’ll become a doctor even though I want to be a pilot to keep the parents and extended family happy.”

Self-negation is insidious like that. Whenever we deny what really matters to us to “go along” “fit in” or “be loved,” a microscopic portion of us erodes. Sometimes whole chunks fly out of our being. Some people live their whole lives like this. Bland and colorless and safe.

As a result, they never get a clear picture of who they are or what matters to them. They roll along in life – neither satisfied nor dissatisfied – until their lives are over.

So-called seekers know better and want better. It is the wife who – in spite of her low self-esteem – knows she shouldn’t be beaten and called down. It is the adult child who painfully realizes that though Daddy might not have meant to hurt them, his continued toxic behavior is doing just that. If he will not acknowledge this behavior and take steps to change, you must walk away to protect yourself.

The lucky ones who seek a healing path do not have an easier life. In fact, pursuing the healing path can lead to a whole host of upheavals and painful estrangements, and changes you didn’t expect.

And a commitment to healing and self-growth can only come about in an environment of safety where basic needs are met. In spite of the stereotypes about the writers and artists living in poverty while cranking out great works of fiction and philosophy, at minimum, they must have shelter, clothing, and enough food to keep them reasonably healthy.

My proviso is that. Attempting to heal while you are in the middle of something can be futile. You may have to accept that whatever you are doing today just to survive is the best you can do. In fact, it is mandatory.

With luck and time and the right environment, you may wake up one day in a place where you can commit to living life to its fullest. As with most things, it is a process. One day you may finally feel the urge to jot down and share the learning you picked up along the path of your healing journey.

Basically, you get to unpack and settle in. Speaking personally, it is an outcome that almost makes all of the pain and struggle worth it. Almost.

Live and Let Live

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. After my father died, the book that sort of saved my life was Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that experience, I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enables you to live, to do something. And sometimes, human beings need story and narrative more than they need nourishment and food.”— Emma Thompson in @oprah’s O Magazine.

I have a whole book I want to write about this phenomenon. Books and messages show up when you most need them. It is a real thing.

I want to write a book that is an homage to the many self-help geniuses who emerged in the middle of my life as I was facing different challenges. I was a single parent of two babies. Their father turned out to be financially and emotionally inadequate. My family had utterly let me down and abandoned me.

But my book coaches tell me I am not yet well-enough known to succeed at that type of “healing anthology.” Success in their view, understandably, means how many books will fly off the shelf. More sales, more profit. Duh.

I am really glad I am out from behind the paywall. I get to write whatever I want within the realms of good taste and what I hope is, readability. I don’t much give a care about that really. I mean, it is impossible to know what will strike other people’s fancy. I am mostly here to develop my own writing voice and to find out what I really think and feel about things.

So I have had the exact same relationship with books that Emma Thompson refers to. At the very moment guidance is needed, a book popped up in my life to comfort me or provide insight or help me find a resolution. For a girl that felt pretty odd and alone for much of her life, those books were nothing short of lifesavers.

I remember with fondness and some amusement the book The Dance of Anger by Dr. Harriet Lerner. Her book nailed and accurately described problem-solving in troubled families. Instead of tackling and working on issues to resolve them together, raising issues in many families just causes resistance and more turmoil.

The book jacket blurb puts it this way: “Anger is a signal and one worth listening to,” writes Dr. Harriet Lerner. While anger deserves our attention and respect, women still learn to silence their anger, deny it entirely, or vent it in a way that leaves them feeling helpless and powerless. In this engaging and eminently wise book, Dr. Lerner teaches both women and men to identify the true sources of anger and to use it as a powerful vehicle for creating lasting change.”

Did that ever speak to me. People bring up a difficult topic. Feelings get hurt. People hurl insults and blame at each other. The conversation you wanted to have escalates and before you know it, slam. Someone has headed out the door in a swath of anger. The issue – whatever it was – gets left on the floor abandoned and is ignored yet again. Nothing changes. The issue continues to fester.

When I first read Lerner’s book, I fairly danced with excitement. She gets it! Here is a way out of this horrible pattern! This will bring us all closer to each other! I rushed out to the local bookstore and immediately bought three more copies. One for my mother and one for each of my sisters.

Gathered around my kitchen table that evening, I gave my elevator pitch on the book. Why it was helpful to me. How it could help us.”If we all read it,” I reasoned, naively, “We could work at making our relationships better.”

My youngest sister picked up her copy. Glancing at the back cover, she curled her lip in disdain and threw the book down on the table: “You and your psychobabble.”

Yes, well, okay. That did not work. No one will likely be surprised that I have been estranged from her for decades and the relationship is unlikely to right itself in this lifetime.

Author Jeff Brown (https://www.jeffbrown.co) recently posted about a likely reality we need to accept if we have chosen a healing path. Not everyone feels the need to heal. Not everyone has the capacity to face up to their pain and demons. There is wisdom in the German saying made famous in the movie, Cabaret. “Leben und leben lassen.” “Live and let live.”

The choice to stay where you are and not grow is a choice everyone can make. What we don’t have to do is stay there with them or engage with them any longer. That single decision has made my life a much more peaceful and pleasant place to live. Considerably less drama and accumulated emotional clutter.