DailyOM: Why are family relationships so often challenging and emotionally painful?
Eric Maisel: Families can be difficult in all sorts of ways. One of your parents may be alcoholic, abusive, and unreliable. Your mate may be absent, distant, and "barely there" for you. Your teenage child may be having school difficulties. Your older sister or brother may be scathing and cruel. Sometimes the difficulties are subtle and hard to grasp: you don't really feel good or safe inside your family, but you cannot quite put your finger on what's feeling dangerous or off. Virtually all families are difficult in one way or another, and that might almost be the definition of a family: a difficult place to be.
Any grouping of human beings produces difficulties, because each person in that group has his or her own personality, opinions, secret agendas, defensive style, mood swings, selfishness, and habitual ways of being indifferent to and careless about the needs of others. All of this is intensified in a family, where you are supposed to rely on family members who may not be reliable, care for family members for whom you don't really care, and deal with family members who may be hard (or even impossible) to deal with. In this course, I will describe eight keys to your survival. These are efforts that you can make right now: you do not have to wait for someone in your family to change, improve, or be different in any way. Other family members may perhaps be influenced by the work that you do on yourself and for yourself, and that may prove a blessing, but you can't control that. All you can do is take charge of yourself.
DailyOM: What are two strategies that you teach to help students cope with their difficult family?
EM: One is to be present. You find yourself in a difficult family situation. In order to effectively deal with it, you need to be here now. You need to be present so that you can muster your strength, your courage, your clarity, and your smarts. If you're only half here, you are unlikely to find the motivation, the serenity, or the inner resources to cope. What makes a difficult family situation all the more difficult is how hard it is to actually be present. Most people are not here now: they are elsewhere, pestered by the past and defensively distracted by the busy work and the busy thoughts that they themselves create.
A second is being strong. Living in a family requires a lot of fortitude, stamina, and strength. Being criticized over and over again is more wearing and more tiring than a long march. Feeling abandoned, misunderstood, or rejected is harder on the system than climbing a mountain. We need great strength to say what we mean, if saying what we mean feels threatening and comes with a history of retaliation. We need great strength to stay present through our teenager's tantrums and rebellions. We need great strength to deal with a mate who envies our success, a parent who snickers at our life choices, or a child who requires our constant attention. Family life is nothing if not demanding. This is not a strength that we can acquire in the gym (though being healthy and fit is a good thing!). This is an internal fortitude that we must muster and manifest. This is our instantly disputing self-talk like "I can't do that" with a firm "Yes, I can!"
DailyOM: What if someone wants to find healing with a family member but that person isn't ready or willing to work with him/her?
EM: You bravely try to reconnect with that person while at the same time maintaining your own safety. You want to be brave but you also want to be safe. This is an enduring conflict in human life, to stand up to a danger or to opt for discretion over valor. The bravery that we need to manifest with respect to our family life may not necessarily take the form of physical courage. Instead, it may take the form of saying something that scares us to say, making a hard decision that terrifies us to contemplate, or penetrating our defenses and looking courageously at something that frightens us to see. This is the courage that we are obliged to manifest, including when it comes to trying to reconnect with someone who isn't ready or willing to meet us halfway.
DailyOM: In this course you teach eight skills, tell us about one of them.
EM: The eight skills are: being smart, being strong, being calm, being clear, being attentive, being brave, being present, and being resilient. Let's take "being clear" as an example. Family communication is often murky, negative, and hurtful. Much remains unsaid or half-said, and when things are said, they are likely to be delivered with a critical edge. Surprisingly often, when someone in a family speaks, someone else in the family gets hurt. You can't change this dynamic single-handedly but you can become an instrument for change. Waiting for someone else in your family to begin communicating well will not work. If you wait for your child to speak and reveal what's really on her mind, she is likely to continue keeping her fears, frustrations, and problems a secret. If you wait for your mate to start the communication ball rolling, you'll have another long wait coming. While it's true that every family member has a duty to communicate well, still someone has to start: let that person be you.
It is important that you say things directly, in short, simple, clear sentences. When you say things indirectly or at great length, that often means that you feel that you don't have a leg to stand on, that you are ambivalent about your message, or that you hope the family member you're talking to won't discover your hidden agenda. It is better to be clear before you speak, know what you want to say, trust that you have the right to communicate, and then deliver your message simply and directly. That's the sort of learning you'll get in this course.
DailyOM: What do you hope students will achieve by the end of this course?
EM: I hope they will learn and make use of the skills that I present. For instance, I hope that they learn how to increase their resilience. Resilience is the willingness and the ability to bounce back. It is as much the willingness as the ability. It is altogether common for people to make a decision, somewhere just outside of conscious awareness, that they really don't want to bounce back, because they feel they have been treated unfairly by life and therefore they will stubbornly stay in some dark, angry, injured place. Rather than deciding to bounce back with renewed energy and renewed hope, rather than opting to surrender to some less-than-ideal changed circumstances, they pull up the drawbridge and adopt a siege mentality. Being adamant when that adamancy amounts to self-harm is not a sign of strength, and being resilient, even if that resilience involves some humbling surrender, is not a sign of weakness. I hope that students will begin to understand this idea: that resilience is an ability, but it is also a willingness.
Likewise, I hope students will learn how to pay better attention to what is going on in their family. Family difficulties tend to continue to grow if no one is paying attention to their existence or to their growth. It is one thing, and relatively easy, to remove an unwanted sapling from your garden. It is another thing, and much harder and more expensive, to remove an unwanted full-grown tree. In order for that sapling to be removed while it is still a sapling, someone has to both notice its existence and realize that it will grow into a tree that may threaten the house's foundation. There is a noticing component and also a predicting component to attentiveness: being attentive means both spotting something and also predicting its importance. These are the sorts of ideas I'll be presenting and the sorts of skills that I hope students will acquire.
If you have a desire to mend a family relationship, learn how to better deal with your family, or be more resilient in difficult family situations, this is the perfect course for you. Eric always brings a high level of experience and wisdom to his work and courses. Until next time.
Be well,
DailyOM
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