Do you see a therapist about your family or relationships issues? Here are a few ways to measure your progress. 

• You’re gaining the courage you need to define yourself more and more clearly. You’re learning the futility of trying to define others, especially the people to whom you’re closest. Defining yourself means you’re declaring who you are and what you want in the nicest, kindest, most self-assured manner, and anticipating that those to whom you’re closest will do the same, or not.

• You’re urging your ego to opt for being quieter, less defensive, and more curious. This is with the welcome knowledge that you have a lot to learn from how you got into the circumstances you face. You understand that you are the common denominator in all of your relationships. You blame no one for your choices and take full responsibility for your future choices, as loaded and as difficult as they may be.

• You are able, more than ever before, to get a bird’s eye view of your family and your individual life. You are seeing how all things work together for gains in emotional health or, sadly, declines in emotional health. You know that all relationships and connections impact all relationships and connections and therefore you are being more careful with yours.

Please, dismiss the idea of resilience and toughness as a man with a ball scoring an unforgettable try – although indeed he may be both resilient and tough. 

Some of the toughest people I know are slight women who’d confess to embodying zero athleticism. I’ve met 14-year-old girls with apparently more resilience and grit than adult and professional millionaire athletes.

Grit and toughness and courage and resilience include:

• Holding onto yourself when things around you appear to be falling apart. Self care when others appear not to care (about you). It’s getting an “above” view or objective view of what’s going on around you. 

• Speaking up for yourself and others when the trend would prefer or appeal for your silence. It’s also, of course, knowing when not to speak at all. Remember, most people speak too much and listen far too little. Courage invites the necessary flip.

• Waiting for the optimum moment, the opportunity, the gap, when waiting seems counter to the action required to reduce anxiety. This is another form of “holding onto yourself.” It’s realizing that if you miss the moment it probably will return.

• Embracing the “opposition” or problem without it (the issue) knocking you off kilter or allowing it to shape your predetermined well-considered plan.

Facing tough or difficult decisions? Facing conflict with people whom you love? 

• Do what is possible, be kind, be assertive, act within your budget, and then, let the rest take care of itself.
• Do not explain, try to justify yourself or others, excuse, attack or chase others, and then, let the rest take care of itself.
• Be as playful as possible – some circumstances need a little mirth and humor – without being flippant or dismissive and then, let the rest take care of itself. There are circumstances, of course, where playfulness is inappropriate. Know the difference.
• Make no heroes of others, and take no victims, in all that you decide to do, and then, let the rest take care of itself. Healthy people value their own freedom and the freedom of others.
• Avoid unnecessarily provoking so-called “sleeping dogs” like long-past arguments or long-forgotten scores. Some things are best left undisturbed. Some things must be disturbed. Know the difference.
• Remember that how you treat others is always about you and reflects the kind of person you are. If you are a “changed person” then the change will be demonstrated in all of your relationships and not a select few relationships. Real change impacts all our relationships and not only those where we endured or inflicted pain

“Yes, sadly,” I expressed days ago, “we all carry an edge of  inhumanity.”

It was not written to insult but to inspire a deeper look both for you and for me for none of us escapes the common brush of our inhumanity. For most, it is subtle, for  we have highly developed skills to hide the harshness we usually prefer to think is not lurking within. 

Do you experience any of the following? 

Indifference when others, strangers, even neighbors, suffer. Indifference when you read of wars and calamity in far off places.

A cold shoulder turned to the person who’s in trouble by his or her own doing where “but for grace there go I” is forgotten. 

A determined forward stare at a traffic intersection when a hungry child attempts to gain attention. 

An inner sigh of contempt when a friend recounts her abandonment that occurred decades ago. 

The short tempered reaction with what you or I may assume is another’s stupidity with a task or challenge you and I may find offers you and I no challenge at all. 

If you, as I do, recognize any such responses, then you are not unfamiliar with your inhuman edge, an edge that’s waiting to be shaped and make you into a person even more beautiful and kind and patient than you already are.

Wait and watch before you judge, dismiss, turn your back on the human you want to reject for a behavior, a look, an appearance that you don’t understand or appreciate.

You may have something to learn from this person. 

He or she may hold a key for you to love a little deeper than before. He or she may indeed put you in touch with a more of your humanity, and shave off an edge of your remaining inhumanity. 

Yes, sadly, we all carry an edge of inhumanity.

But, to find the key, unleash the love, you’ve got to be willing to admit you may indeed have something to learn and discover from someone you might readily rather reject. Often, at the core of our impulse to reject is the heart of the lesson life is aching to teach us.

Look “below” the behavior. 

Listen  beyond the cry. 

Hear what is not being said. 

Do this and you will find a desire for connection, a longing for meaning, a desire for appropriate human touch, a longing to belong. 

It’s – whatever the behavior you despise – a search for significance. It’s a longing to be embraced, understood, accepted, included. 

Take a while, perhaps even a very long while, the person upon whom you’d rather turn your back may be the very prophet you’ve been searching for all of your life.

Alcohol abuse stings, stings deeply.

And, it does so for generations.

It poisons. 

It sets children on edge often for a life-time of living on edge.

I know too well.

The memories may be distant but my emotions still react and I often still feel the pain even though it’s been well over 55 years since I was exposed to the incessant drinking of close relatives.

Remembering the energy I spent as a boy trying to maintain order in the family and reliving my futile efforts to steer adults away from drinking and the twisting and turning in bed when people raged with drunkenness refreshes the emotional exhaustion that is ever ready to awaken in my body, despite the years.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you are a parent who indulges in alcohol and it shifts your moods and messes with your driving and threatens your employment and demands spending money you cannot afford and makes you want to pick on those whom you say you love and it is destroying all semblance of trust people may have in you, please seek help.

Humble yourself.

Get the help you need.

You, and all whom you love, will be better off for it.

Generations to come will thank you.

The “old” way of “love” 

• Love as a bargain or trade- favors returned or unreturned determine the level of “love” and commitment.  
• Love as a weapon or to establish and maintain power – inclusion if well-behaved, exclusion if not. 
• Love as a face or image – a show of love offered in public contrasting greatly with what is privately experienced. 
• Love as a teaching tool – it’s all about learning, shaping, seldom for enjoyment.
• Love as punishment through withholding – a “I’ll show you who is in charge” distortion of love.  

The “new” way of love 

• Love as service – the giver enhances the lives of others through chosen humility and service.
• Love as a means to learning – the giver seeks to grow, therefore watches, listens with patience and care.
• Love as an expression of spirit and soul expressed to all – the giver has made a decision to grow in love and has therefore recognized that none are on the “outside,” all are insiders.
• Love as belonging – the giver desires to belong, not lead or organize or capitalize.
• Love as an expression of mercy, forgiveness, deserved or not – the giver has acknowledged his or her failings (gross or benign) and has turned his or her back on harmful, selfish ways, while offering to all the grace he or she so badly also needed.

Bring your brokenness and your regrets and your heartbreak and fall apart with rage and anger stocking the fire and I will listen.

I will try not to even attempt to quell your storm, extinguish the fire, quieten your rage and you will not fall apart or burn up or drown in the process. 

You will be on your way to falling together. You will be on your way to finding and making greater sense of who you are and “why” you are. You will be heading towards the center of your soul where you will discover, perhaps afresh, just how beautiful you are.

Then, not immediately but at some time, will you do the same for others? 

Perhaps even for me.

Will you form a wall of acceptance and empathy and challenge with your presence and your listening skills and your experience for others and perhaps even for me?

As “together” as I may appear, truth is I am perched upon my own volcano, climbing my own mountain of regrets, uncovering my own rage and anger and remorse and it is all, all of it, is toward myself and my selfish actions and my lack of foresight or insight and care for the impact of my actions upon others let alone myself.

There are overwhelming emotions – feelings, mind traps – most will face, to one degree or another, especially as we advance in age, hopefully grow in awareness, and have moved beyond the innocent, but necessary belief in our individual invincibility.

A sense of being disqualified – the lurking thought that the past denies a person access to possibilities. Being too bad, too reckless, he or she feels undeserving. The shame of being disqualified can become integral to a person’s personality and often confused with humility.  

A sense of living in exile  – the lurking belief that a person’s history, reputation, class, a lack of status puts him or her on the outside of groups to which he or she longs to belong. Habitual trepidation, fear of rejection, can become a skittishness so embedded it is assumed he or she is simply “the nervous type.”  

A sense of being forever unforgiven – the lurking belief that nothing a person can do will erase the mark deserved as a result of his or her own doing. This powerful shame can drive a person into silence and into literal isolation.

Listen, watch. Be a source of love and acceptance others so desperately need. You have it in you. No one needs to exist in these states of silence and desperation.

When you don’t know what to do, or you think you don’t, you probably do. Dig a little deeper. However new a circumstance may feel, it’s probably not. You, or someone you know, have been through this or something very similar before.

When you don’t know where to go you probably do. Seek old and trusted paths. Summons the courage. You’ve achieved the almost-impossible before. Get thinking. Plan. Inertia will get you nowhere, fast.

When you don’t know what to say it’s better to be quiet. There’s a lot of value in the axiom “least said soonest mended.” Speaking can seem a lot like committing. Hold onto yourself. 

When you don’t know what to think it’s time to step aside and look for the big picture. The big picture usually leads to healthier options.

When you’ve heard something you’d prefer not to have heard, or seen something you’d prefer not to have seen, it’s time to take a walk and allow yourself to think through all the consequences of what you will or will not do, and how you will or will not respond.

When you’ve said something you wish you hadn’t said, it’s time to apologize. No excuses. No qualifiers. No explanations. And, no waiting for the right opportunity. It’s now.