November 6, 2017
by Rod Smith
Every extended family (usually) has the need for a leader or leaders. He or she may vary as needs and issues change. The role may be offered through covert means – a sort of passive pressure – or readily announced and openly assumed.
That person may be required to:
- Initiate meetings and facilitate conversations where there has been a falling out.
- Empower family members to take a hard and loving stand against cruel or harsh treatment at the hands of another member of the family or even someone outside of it.
- Go first – and be the first person in the family to travel or to go to university or to branch off into an area of interest or study that no one in the family has done before.
- Go back, and visit childhood places and long-lost relatives and to hear the family stories that may have never be heard.
- Demonstrate grace, generosity, and forgiveness in a family that may have for many years traded in selfishness, resentment, and judgment.
- Speak well and kindly of those family members who for whatever reason have been rejected by some members of the same family and be willing to reach out to them in order to draw them back into the fold.
If it is you, may you have the courage and the wisdom to exercise your calling.
Posted in Addictions, Anger, Attraction, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, High maintenance relationships |
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October 18, 2017
by Rod Smith
Your day will run much like your mind runs – positively or negatively
Versions of the following have occurred this week with clients:
Jane unexpectedly sees a friend, Sally, at a distance. Sally appears to ignore Jane. Jane ruminates deeply about this.
- Jane feels rejected and wonders for hours, or even days, what she did to offend Sally. Jane can’t let it go.
- Jane assumes Sally simply did not see her, or, if she did, Sally was too busy to talk.
Francis hears about close friends who had lunch together without her.
- Francis is immediately debilitated. She feels betrayed. Francis knows they were talking about her and she is sure she was the reason they met.
- Francis tells herself her friends are as free to meet and exclude her, as they are free to meet and to include her.
- Francis assumes her friends are planning a wonderful surprise party for her.
I’d suggest that hidden within each of us is a healthy self. It’s a self that can be pushed and pulled to run with the negative or to run with what’s healthy and positive. It’s the often-miniscule inner choices that make all the difference to the shape of your day (week, month, and year).
Posted in Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships |
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September 9, 2017
by Rod Smith
People who are more defined, more separate, and who can live without each other are more likely to stay together in a long-lasting committed relationship than those who are very close and can’t live without each other. Even trees need space. So do people.
When a relationship is faltering people want to analyze it, work on it, talk about it and fix it; when relief and healing my indeed come from benignly ignoring the relationship as each participant commits to working on him or herself. Declaring personal goals and dreams that may have zero to do with the faltering relationship can go a long way toward its healing.
Childhoods are important (of course) and a happy one is what any reasonable parent strives to give a child, but, not every relationship malady or personal failing can be placed at the foot of flawed parenting or childhood trauma.
Understanding and talking about matters is not always helpful and is not always the golden key to possible solutions. Sometimes people have to simply change unhelpful habits, get off the couch and work harder and stop rehashing excuses for their behavior or searching for its source in a troubled childhood.
Posted in Addictions, Affairs, Attraction, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace |
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September 5, 2017
by Rod Smith
Therapy works:
- When clients are highly motivated to grow
- When clients are willing to take risks and do new things
- When clients are willing to be vulnerable with the people with whom they share life
- When clients are willing to face, rather than deny, necessary and inevitable loss
- When clients establish a realistic view of what therapy can and cannot achieve and have realistic expectations of the therapist and the process.
Therapy will be an exercise in treading water and wasted expense:
- When clients go through the motions of getting help without wanting either growth or change
- When clients attempt to outsmart the therapist and therefore treat the process as a game
- When clients have a distorted view of the power therapist have and an unrealistic view of what the process may deliver
- When clients withhold pertinent information
- When the therapist “pushes” or “pulls” clients against their will and in conflict with their abiding loyalties.
Posted in Anxiety, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family, Family Systems Theory, Leadership, Listening, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust |
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July 24, 2017
by Rod Smith
When relating to a family – be it to one or many members of a family – ignoring or discounting blood-ties or invisible loyalties is done at peril, even if it is at the family’s invitation and if the family is experiencing considerable turmoil.
If a relationship is professional (helper, counselor, coach, teacher, head of school, pastor, or health-care worker), or if it involves befriending or dating a member of a family, blood is and almost always will be thicker that non-blood, and any insertion by an outsider into the family that violates the invisible loyalties (even when invited) will not occur without retaliation.
Ignoring, discounting, or dismissing invisible loyalties is the emotional equivalent of swinging from live power-lines.
While invisible loyalties often defy logic and can be thoroughly irrational, while they can appear to switch without notice and can be denied even while their enforcement may be glaringly obvious to an outsider, messing with blood loyalties will be rewarded in ways the intruder will regret.
The wise “outsider” – a paid professional, an educator, or a person who is invited into the family as an intimate, the wise outsider respects the blood, the pre-existing bonds, even if they appear to be unhelpful or destructive binds.
[This phenomenon is tough to identify but it explains something of how and why some people really never become “part of the family”, why step-parenting is so very difficult for many families, and why family business is so hard to do well.]
Posted in Addictions, Affairs, Anger, Attraction, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness |
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July 1, 2017
by Rod Smith
- Attraction is only possible between people who are functioning at the same level or emotional health (or the lack of it). If you think you are way ahead of him in any manner and are helping him along, and yet you are attracted to him, you are in strong denial.
- Attraction is far more complex than being simply about looks or dress or a pleasant and attractive demeanor. There are multitudes of people who dress well and who are very good-looking and very pleasant whom you will hardly notice. Deep calls to deep, needs call out to needs, and (un)health attracts (un)health.
- When attraction occurs between highly functional individuals the development of a meaningful relationship may seem to elude them both for a while – simply because healthy people are not driven to find a relationship. People on the other end of the continuum will seem to fall in love in an instant with about anyone who reaches out and the new couple will feel as if they’ve known each other for years even after they have just met.
- Healthy attractions allow for the new couple to include others; unhealthy attractions lead the new couple into isolation.
Posted in Addictions, Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships |
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June 16, 2017
by Rod Smith
The greatest gifts we can offer each other as spouses, intimates, friends, and as colleagues:
- The truth as we perceive it: knowing that events, feelings, circumstances, history, and responses to everything are in the heart and the eye of the beholder. Everyone has his or her own set of lenses, lenses colored and distorted by a myriad of variables, immediate and historical, which are shaped by rational and irrational life-experiences. Even though we may not agree on the truth and its precise shape, offering another truth, as he or she knows it, is a gift of love.
- The time to be heard: knowing that being heard and understood do not necessarily mean agreement. Hearing, too, is in the heart of the hearer. Everyone’s ears are filtered through a myriad of variables and experiences, some immediate and some ages old, but the gift of love we each can offer is the willingness to put aside differences and listen.
- The freedom and space to be distinct: knowing that there exists a strong pull toward sameness in thinking, feeling, and interpreting, and a strong pull toward togetherness. It’s a gift of immense value when we open our hearts to those in our spheres of influence and encourage the love of freedom divinely imparted to every person.
Posted in Addictions, Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships |
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June 6, 2017
by Rod Smith
Shame has pernicious intent for our lives. It lurks; it’s imbedded in our language as in, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” says the parent or teacher, and it casts its debilitating shadow and cuffs itself to the shamed hearer.
Here are some means it uses to set up house and does its work of life-long restraining:
Abandonment: “See, if you were good enough (prettier, cleverer, slimmer, taller, shorter) he or she would have stayed. It’s your own fault you are alone.”
Trauma: “You deserved it. If you’d been more alert (agile, aware, fatter, thinner, taller, shorter) then you’d not have been selected as a victim. What happened doesn’t happen to all children or adults so it’s your fault.”
Guilt: “What you have done is not only bad you are bad for having done it or even for thinking about doing it (no matter what “it” is). You are forever defiled and you will carry this around forever. People can see it on you.”
Shame-based living is tough and wearisome.
Shame is lessened, even expelled, through the exposure that authentic vulnerability brings.
Shame drives people into further acts of shameful behaviors.
Vulnerability in a community loosens its grip and ushers in well-deserved freedom.
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Posted in Addictions, Anger, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Difficult Relationships, Domination, Family Systems Theory, Pornography, Shame |
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April 24, 2017
by Rod Smith
Is it possible to enjoy a long-term and committed relationship with an adult child of an alcoholic? Is it possible to have a committed and long-term intimate relationship if you are an adult child of an alcoholic?
Of course it is possible. Being the son or the daughter of an alcoholic is not a life-sentence of some variety although at some points in a person’s life it may seem like it.
Here are keys to such a relationship and they may be helpful to all relationships:
- Conflicts are not the end or even the beginning of the end or a sign that things will end.
- Regard conflict as healthy and a necessary component of love.
- Healthy people work things out, talk things through, find resolutions to issues, they don’t move on in the face of conflict.
- Healthy people move towards conflict and not away from it.
- It’s possible to accommodate (change, adjust) without losing.
- It is possible for both parties to grow through learning to accommodate.
- Being loving is more important than being right.
- Fragile people in fragile circumstances say things to partners who may be equally fragile that are hard to undo – caution and love and patience are essential with people who have grown up in families that endured regular conflict.
Posted in Addictions, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships |
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April 24, 2017
by Rod Smith
- They (we) tend to mistrust relationships – from casual to intimate.
- Relationships are about winning or losing, about using or being used.
- Mistrust trust – they (we) are suspicious of you if you trust them and suspicious of you if you don’t.
- They (we) are experts in the “double bind” meaning that no matter which option you choose, it is the “wrong” option.
- They (we) are constantly on duty and have little or no conception of what it means to let go, to relax, and to live with some abandon.
- They (we) assume there’s always a hidden agenda.
- They (we) misread authentic innocence and regard it as a cover designed to pull them in.
To succeed in a casual or intimate relationship with an adult child of an alcoholic persistence and patience are essential. They are likely to test the validity of the relationship time and time again. They are going to put roadblocks in the way and will sabotage any meaningful connection to test if it is real.
In the extreme adult children of alcoholics replicate the chaos of their childhoods in order to replicate the discomfort and the mistrust that was their normal.
Please use this column wisely – it is not intended as a means of judging or hurting anyone.
Posted in Addictions, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce |
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