This is an imperfect summary of the Greek words for love, something everyone seems to search for and what can lead to so much healing and heartbreak:

• Philia is affectionate regard, friendship, it’s among equals, it’s the loyalty, it’s brotherly love, team-love. It requires honesty, equality, and grows with familiarity.
• Éros is the love of sexual attraction and passion. In the hands of the mature it builds and supports a family and a nation. In the hands of the immature it can be a most destructive and driving force.  
• Agápe is divine, unconditional love, the love God has for humanity and for individuals. Spiritually mature people may know and offer this love in brief, divine spurts.   
• Storge is tenderness, affection, family love, the love a parent has a child. It’s natural empathy.
• Pragma is the love that two people may enjoy and show during a lengthy marriage.
• Philautia is self-love, the ability to appreciate and value oneself.

I am convinced that we love others, not because of who or what they are, but because of who or what we are. Please, join me on the journey of growing up (nothing to do with age) and becoming, by the grace of God, the most loving, generous, and kind person you have ever met.

There is natural, necessary reactivity within each of us. It’s part of a primal protection mechanism. Over reacting (over-protecting) usually leads to trouble. 

The higher our anxiety and the greater the threat (real or perceived), the higher are our levels of reactivity. 

Thinking people, as opposed to reactive people, can think their way into a determined, cool, controlled response when faced with threat. This is usually short lived. We’ve all met “Mr. Cool-Calm” who can also quickly become “Mr. Explosive.” 

Anxiety will get you in the end. 

A better antidote to symptom-producing anxiety (symptoms might include irrational fear, fury, rage, some forms of depression, acts of isolation, acts defying long-held values) is to go to the source. 

Anxiety breeds in unresolved family of origin issues. It lurks within immediate significant relationships, especially where unhelpful compromise and denial of Self have occurred. 

So you thought you simply lost your cool or were pushed over the edge? No, you were probably howling at your forefathers or expressing some deep lack of fulfillment. You were probably trying to shed yourself of generational baggage you never agreed to carry. 

All this said, as adults, we remain 100% responsible for our reactivity (rage, fury, outbursts) 100% of the time – no matter where it comes from or ominous its origin.

“My husband said this morning that it looks like our house was my priority over our relationship. We discussed it in my lift club of women and it would appear that women do put their houses as a priority, wanting it to look neat and beautiful without clutter. Is it a crime?”

It appears your husband’s wife-house-relationship monitoring is his priority, which makes me ponder how much effort he gives to both the house and your marriage or, does he consider both to be women’s work?

Perhaps you could both (together) decide to have your husband take full care of the house so you may offer greater attention to your relationship.

You’re in a classic double bind: neglect the house and you’re going to hear about it. Care for the house and you’re regarding it as a priority over your marriage. Either way you lose.

I’m interested: which requires greater effort and maintenance, husband, house, or marriage?

While it’s all on you you’re married to an under functioning man. While you cooperate with him as if it’s all on you, you are over functioning and headed for burnout.

You’ll know your husbands (lift club women) have grown up when they focus on their houses and their marriages and offer their wives full and endless freedom to love and explore their heartfelt passions, interests, and friendships.

Over the years I have had pleasure of being in your newspaper I have collected hundreds of emails. Thus, I have gathered themes about: broken hearts, troubled families, angry people in workplaces, schools and churches that disappoint, and men and women who have a propensity to control and monitor others (in the name of love, of course).

I know my responses sound simple, even trite. I am also aware of how hard some of the things I suggest are to implement.

But, wellness doesn’t come easy.

Things will improve (no matter how emotionally well or unwell you may be) if you:

• Get your focus off what others and monitor your own behavior. This is called minding your own business.
• Evict the victim you have become from your head and from your heart and assess where and how you have cooperated in where your life has landed. Begin to do something about it.
• Forgive others as deeply as you know how even if they don’t deserve it. It’s good for you.
• Connect or reconnect with your blood family in appropriate ways. The disconnection (except in rare circumstances) will continue to erode your wellness.
• Stay out of control – remember, love and control cannot co-exist in the same relationship.

William Butler Yeats, the pilot-poet, used the term “lonely impulse of delight” to express the thrill he knew when flying. I’d suggest you (we) can join the pilot while having your feet firmly on terra firma.

You’re imbedded with powerful impulses of delight. There’s a set of really strong enduring and strapping desires that come downloaded with your humanity. They are aching to be expressed from within your beautiful heart to all the world around you.

With backbone, commitment, and practice – and the willingness to learn and to make mistakes – finding and acting on your imbedded impulses can become elemental to your thinking and to your behavior and rid you of all your inhumanity. In concert, these impulses can become daily habits and shape the way you see yourself and the way others see and treat you, and given practice and grace, you will live a joyful existence and be a delight to know.

The impulses of generosity, forgiveness, the impulse to spread goodness and kindness, to offer and to desire respect, and the impulse to discover, explore, and take adventurous risks are living within you.

As you exercise each, even in the smallest, most tentative ways, your heart will be right up there with the Yeats and your feet will be ever more firmly on the ground.

The Mercury

Dear Reader Dad:

Your laser focus upon your child will ultimately “sizzle” him (and you).

Not only that, it will probably sever (sizzle) the connection you so desperately desire with him.

The parenting you offer, so focused, so loud, so intentional, so present, I’d suggest, will backfire.

The closer you look at your son, his school, at every aspect of his life, and the more powerful your magnifying glass, the more you will fuel your own anxieties.

You may, as you say, have had a dad who was distant. I’d like to suggest that being too present has its own set of problems.

Back off. Please, back off, even if it is just a little. Try it. You may both like it.

No one can accommodate so much attention, and, when he is able, unless he is supremely unusual, he is very likely to be crushed at the thought of facing life on his own – or angry with you for trying to intercept his every opportunity for growth and discovery.

Sadly (and this is where my heart aches for you) he is unlikely to thank you for your efforts. If you are very lucky, very lucky, he’ll be filled with compassion for you.

Loving your son, and this is something I struggle with as well, is not the same as being constantly alert, anxious, and on guard. He won’t “get life” if you keep getting it for him. Part of loving him will require that you let him go, that you get out of his way, that you allow him to experiment and even to fail.

Your love is not proved in your ability to make his world safe, and sure, and filled with certainty. It is demonstrated as you prepare him for one that is none of those things.

Sincerely,

Rod

The Mercury – Tuesday / when we spend time together:

Appropriate for all relationships, casual to intimate….

Next time we are together for coffee or lunch or a walk on the beach …

• I will leave my phone at home or in the car or turned off so I can spend uninterrupted the time with you and give you my full attention.

• I will talk about whatever you want to talk about without turning the conversation to be about me, my children, my aches, my losses, my boss, or my past relationships.

• I will listen to you without waiting to speak, without following your story with something bigger, better, or more dramatic. I will actually listen. I won’t use every moment of silence as an on-ramp for my bigger, bolder, or braver story. Even when I ask questions, my questions will be an attempt to identify more closely with you rather than seek to steer you in the direction of what I really want to talk about.

• I will honor the confidentiality our conversation deserves and expect the same from you. A confidence is what you tell me about yourself and what I tell you about myself – I understand that all the rest is gossip no matter how well intentioned we may sound.

• While we are together I will not speak about other people in a negative manner no matter who they are and no matter how much we both might want to. Talking negatively about others when we are together is an indication that we have unresolved issues or conflicts between us. Let’s take care of what we are avoiding so we can leave other people alone.

[Cut, paste, copy, mail – please, use as needed]

There is always an option to be kind whatever the circumstance.

Being kind does not mean you cannot be assertive, that you must accommodate poor service or poor manners, or that you have to be a pushover. Such conclusions are nonsense.

Kindness begins and has its life within you already.

Or, it doesn’t.

Kindness is a character issue. It is not contingent on what’s going on around you. It’s an expression of what is going on in you.

If you or I believe our negative responses like unkindness or irritability or rudeness are subject to what’s going on around us we will continue to live as victims – and make others into our victims. While this is our mindset we will be played by circumstance and become as unpredictable as circumstance. People who trust and depend on us will become edgy as they perceive tides change around us.

When you and I take responsibility for ourselves and plan our inner-day and make kindness toward self and others a high priority, we become storm calmers, peacemakers, and the trust quotient afforded to us by others, especially those who are nearest and dearest, will enjoy and safe and steady incline.

The family break, the schism between brother and brother, daughter and mother, can be resolved. That loss of a long-held friendship, that business or church breakup, can be healed.

While being right is more important than being loving the schism will grow and the pain and the hardness will multiply and bitterness will become a way of life.

Oh, you may say there is no more pain, no hardness, but this is just one source of your anger.

That flare of hot anger you feel in totally unrelated circumstances? This is where it started. That capacity you have to ignore the needy, treat the outcast with contempt? This is one of the places that inhuman “ability” got a jump-start within.

You may indeed have been right, but you are yet alienated from each other just as if you’d been wrong. Now your anger is your unaddressed grief turned to hardness, sarcasm, and contempt, and it is playing its let-me-out-of-here game.

Come to the table embracing Humility and you will find full reconciliation. Bow your heart, be the first to do it, even if you are the one more offended.

Forgiveness and reconciliation will not do their beautiful work while pride, entitlement, victimhood, and contempt are doing theirs.

The center of gravity in my family has changed.

When the new year sauntered in each of son sent me a text. The one sent three lowercase letters that I was instantly able to decode as “happy new year.” The other spelled it each word. One was 5 minutes away at a party with all his basketball teammates, the other was an hour away with lifelong friends.

That both messages arrived on the nail of midnight meant a lot to me. It meant they were both thinking about me and, that they were thinking about me and both beat me to the keyboard to send greetings, gave me quite a lift.

But, I was far from down.

I could have been with either boy. I could have had us all together at New Year just as we did for at least most of their lives.

But, the center of gravity began to shift a few years ago and I was not going to get in its way.

I prefer a quiet new year.

Each boy has his own tight circle of peers.

The “we” of us is important but it the “we” in their respective peer groups is more so.

This “we” has served its purpose.

That “we” is doing its job.

Thanks be to God.