Healing your family starts with healing yourself.
The biggest mistake I see parents make is to model the very problems they want to eliminate from their children's behaviors. An old Vermont farmer was asked how to get to the elevated freeway that passed by his farm. His answer: "You can't get there from here." You can't force your children to cooperate and it won't work to yell at your kids to stop yelling. They learn from what you do. You know the saying, "Your behavior speaks so loudly I can't hear a word you are saying." It's true.
Suggestions for change. Tape record yourself directing your children the way you usually do. Put it away for several days, then listen to it. How do you sound? Does the tone of what you said fit with the results you wanted? Would you really like someone else to speak to you with the tone and words you said to your children? Was there love and humor in what you said? Did you children feel better about themselves after doing as you asked?
Accepting your personal part in the family chaos means experimenting systematically with different ways of relating until you discover what reduces family tensions. Out-dated responses frustrate good parenting. When something happens today and we respond instead to something that happened days, weeks or even years ago, we make our problems worse.
A time of crisis is no time for avenging old wounds or settling old debts. Later when we sort through our feelings and injuries, we can decide how to resolve the past and really leave it behind. Our long-term goal will be to accept the past that cannot be changed, and maybe even forgive key players responsible for our suffering. Psychotherapy folklore defines forgiveness as giving up all hope of a better past. Forgiveness is a deep form of acceptance and emotional maturity, which requires we see the people who injured us as real people too and recognize the humanity in their ineptness and injuriousness at the same time we refuse to condone it or perpetuate it.
As we fully understand that
1) parenting is difficult
2) unseen mental illness undermines healing
3) unacknowledged family trauma repeats itself
4) one determined parent can start a healing process
we improve our ablity to model caring and respectful family interactions. In doing so we lead our families into the Family Recovery Zone and a time for celebration! Personal change gets a bad rap, because it is predictably painful and it requires hard work.
At its best, personal change generates new vitality that helps us feel light on our feet, as if we just put down heavy load. Too much of what many of us spend our energies doing is wasted or actually increases the emotional demands we face.