Where does an overwhelmed parent begin?
Mark avoided difficult conversations by disappearing into his basement workshop or staying away from home. His wife, Julie, had to cope with parents who still criticized every little mistake she made. Mark and Julie's teenage daughter was spending time with friends her parents didn't trust. Their sixth-grade son spent his time glued to his video games, slaughtering anything that moved.
Taking responsibility for healing your family can feel lonely and overwhelming.
If you were that overwhelmed parent and I were your best friend, I would remind you that all parenting is difficult—there's nothing easy about it—and I would offer you a hug of comfort. Then I'd take you to a really pleasant place and pamper you while you rested and regained your sense of humor. We would find a place for you to yell as loudly as you needed (yelling by yourself or with a friend can have a very satisfying effect and perhaps make you too hoarse to yell at your family). And I would listen-for as long as you needed me to listen-while you talked out your frustration and brainstormed ways to make the situation better.
Maybe you have a friend who could support you in ways like this. Or perhaps you know a doctor or priest or counselor or someone else you could ask for support. You might need to begin by making a telephone call or writing a letter. Someone will have to create a healing atmosphere at home. If not you, then who?
Suggestions for Change: As an experiment, stop taking part in any family squabbles for a day (or an hour, if a day seems too long for you). Instead, stay calm, keep your sense of humor, and do something distracting like singing or smiling or talking about the weather or your grandmother or the cat.
A joke can sometimes ease the stress:
During the calm, acquire as much new information as you can about soothing your family's tensions. Promise yourself you won't take part in family arguments. Tell another person that you are ending your part in causing family frustration and enlist his or her help, if possible.
Seven excuses and six responses:
Here are seven excuses why we cannot accept responsibility for change in our families, and ways around six of them.
1. Nobody will listen to me. Maybe people have learned to ignore us. Aesop in the boy-crying-wolf fable reminds us to keep our demands honest. If we demand people listen to us, and we have nothing constructive to say, then people will tune us out. Do others expect us to be critical, boring, shaming, unhelpful or otherwise worth tuning out? Do we waste our credibility on nagging or complaining? Do we fail to follow through on the consequences we state will follow? Do we have substantially helpful things to say when our turn rolls around? And are we good listeners, truly working to understand what is said to us?
2. Why does it have to be me? Because there apparently isn’t anybody else. For many of us, beginning a process of true change in our families will leave us feeling isolated, unappreciated, exhausted, and even excluded from the family at first; perhaps for a long while, if the family is entrenched in its old ways. Our road to healing takes us right through this predictable inertia from other family members.
3. I don’t know what to do. We need new ideas. This book is a start. Other books, the counsel of friends, mentors, other parents, extended family members, counselors, religious leaders. It’s entirely OK not to know what to do, so long as we reach out and acquire new ideas and energy.
4. I could never make it work. This could be true, but to assume it is true before we look into new ideas and new resources to strengthen our position is to give into old ghosts telling us their old fibs.
5. I am not strong enough to impact such huge problems. This too may be true. Military recruits are not expected to be ready on arrival to boot camp. Training, conditioning, and discipline all help ready us for strenuous tasks we would not otherwise be able to accomplish. We can strengthen ourselves with confidence-building measures, including systematic trial-and-error study of new ways to approach our problems, and discussions with others who can teach and encourage us. Keep an open mind about what you can accomplish until you have tried. If you need a coach, enlist a friend, become a co-counselor or employ a counselor.
6. Nobody cares anyway. To the degree that this is true in a family, the level of despair will be very high. However, Readers, if we care, then the statement is false. The journey may well be lonely for a time, but so long as one party is determined to see change, change will happen.
7. I can’t stand to confront these problems. If this is true, then we will not be able to impact the problems that face us. If we genuinely cannot tolerate facing the problems in our family, if we are phobic of these problems, or cannot maintain any composure when confronted by them, then we will not become agents of change in our families. We will need to rely on someone else. However, even with extremely traumatized parents, odds are still very high that this statement is false. What we likely mean instead is that we are petrified by the prospect of feeling so horrible as we expect to feel in dealing with these issues, and we don’t know how we can stand to do it. This puts us back to excuses 3, 4 and 5, which allow us at least the options to grow into people who can bring healing to our families.