April 21, 2011
by Rod Smith
“My husband says I am obsessed with our children. He says they take up all my time and leave little for him. I tell him that is what it means to be a good mother. We discuss this a lot. Please comment.” (Synthesized from a very long letter)
Mutuality is a challenge
signs: your husband is speaking his mind; you are listening enough to write for my opinion; you are able to have some reasonable dialogue on the topic without either of you closing down to the other.
I am in no position to comment on your particular relationship but I have seen women hide from their husbands in the name of being a good mother. I have seen women bury themselves in the children in order to escape the call of mutual, respectful, and equal relationships with other adults. Likewise, of course, men can also “hide” from wives – they can hide behind children, careers, and sports.
While a woman is enmeshed with her children she will rob herself, her husband, and her children of the beauty and freedom that comes with respecting the space and the distance everyone needs in order to grow.
Even trees cannot reach full height if they are planted too close to each other. Give your children some space and face whatever it is that makes them a useful shield. It will do you all a service.
Posted in Anxiety, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Friendship, Grace, Listening, Love, Manipulation, Marriage, Responsive people, Sexual compatibility, Space, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice, Womanhood |
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April 8, 2011
by Rod Smith
Family meetings!
The following are pointers (two are enough) to suggest you could use therapeutic help with your family, relationships, and your faith:
1. Being part of your family feels mechanical, rigid. You feel locked in – you are an actor in someone’s play and you don’t particularly like your assigned role.
2. No matter how hard you try, things (tensions, roles, anxieties, problems) stay the same. Faces and circumstances modify over the years but the stresses and the issues remain constant.
3. At family holidays (Christmas and Thanksgiving most intensely) you feel pressure about where to be. You are the rope in a tug-of-war.
4. You feel intimidated when speaking with your parents about anything meaningful even though you are an adult. You knees get weak at the thought of engaging your parents about substantial matters.
5. Old arguments often resurface; minor disagreements seem monumental – there’s little sense of proportion and little things are blown up into huge issues.
6. You find it easy to talk about your parents but find it difficult to talk to them. You’re loaded with material about them but feel silenced when it comes to taking with them.
7. Feelings of loyalty and disloyalty can rage within and you feel pressure to compromise your integrity with your family of origin (parents, siblings, grandparents).
8. Your career and family life interfere with each other. It seems as if you can’t have both with any degree of success.
9. New relationships get intense very quickly (becoming sexual, manipulative, or controlling) despite genuine attempts to make things different “this time.”
10. You enthrone (make saints) and dethrone (make sinners) people rather rapidly. Your heroes quickly prove fallible and you are disappointed once again.
Call me / Skype me (RodESmithMSMFT) / Email me – I can probably help you or steer you to someone who can.
Posted in Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, High maintenance relationships, Leadership, Listening, Triangles, Triggers, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice |
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April 7, 2011
by Rod Smith
Openhanded Families are close and healthy. People feel free, unique and have a sense of community. There is enduring approval. Disapproval’s short-lived. The love does not feel overwhelming. Love is not a trap, trade, or deal. Pressures from outside the family, the opinions of others, societal trends do not significantly modify the family’s direction. The family is internally driven. Relationships are self-sustaining. Each person, to differing degrees, dependent upon level of maturity, understands that every person in the family desires, at one and the same time, both community (togetherness, intimacy), and separateness (autonomy, independence).
It is within the movement, wrestling, imbalance, and the struggle that emerges from healthy families, that each person is empowered to be a unique person.
The freedom enjoyed by healthy people, embraces the family member who, for whatever reason, chooses to be less involved with the family.
Ironically, such families can appear to be less healthy or unhealthy because diversity is welcomed and individuals can be “all over the map.”
In an openhanded family a person can look, believe, feel, and speak very differently than everyone else in the family without having to face negative consequences.
(Interested persons are encouraged to read the work of Virginia Satir).
Closedhanded Families are “close” in a different way. They believe and need uniformity and control to keep people together. Togetherness is all-important. There is often disapproval between members of the family, often discernible when someone in the family will not “stay in line,” live in the family “box” or enjoy the closeness. In such families, people are “overly” close. “Closeness” (uniformity, togetherness) is insisted upon, even demanded. People feel cornered through an intricate play of rejection, judgment, and “love.”
Here, rather than relationships being self-sustaining, they are held together by musts and shoulds and hidden rules arising from an obscure idea of what constitutes a relationship and a family. In such families there are frequent tensions often from an unidentifiable source. A person can easily get the feeling that he or she is walking a tight rope of being “in” or “out.”
These families are reactive or legalistic and bonds are not chosen and togetherness is covertly coerced or overtly forced. In these families, fusion is mistaken for love and expressing the natural and God-given desire for autonomy is regarded as betrayal.
Ironically, these families can appear healthy to outsiders because of the appearance of togetherness, while some of the people within the family might be “dying” from the pressure to conform.
In a Closed-handed family a person can only look, feel, believe and speak differently than everyone else in the family according to the guidelines. Anything else might result in overt expulsion, a subtle shunning, or covert distancing.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Education, Family, Family Systems Theory |
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March 31, 2011
by Rod Smith
Edwin Friedman – a pioneer in family therapy, writer, teacher, and rabbi and who was trained by Murray Bowen who is considered the “father” of family therapy and “Bowen Theory” – wrote about helping couples to separate, establish space, maintain individuality and secure room to breathe and room to move in order to help the couple avoid radical separation (divorce) in their future. Friedman suggested sometimes couples were “too close” meaning that everything done one or both persons seemed to unsettle or rock the world of the other or both.
Identifying couples who are “fused” or who are too close:
1. Every thought, move, glance, blink of the eye, every gesture is interpreted to mean something by the other person and the meaning is usually negative.
2. Mind reading is at its most intense. What is damaging is that what is “read” or interpreted is believed as fact. “I know exactly what you are thinking when you look at me like that.”
3. There’s no room for change or growth because there’s no emotional “wiggle room.” If one person is convinced that he or she knows exactly what the other person will do and will think there is no room for anything new to occur.
I have named these writers to facilitate reading beyond this column.
Posted in Affairs, Anxiety, Attraction, Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family, Family Systems Theory, Grace, High maintenance relationships, Leadership, Listening, Love, Marriage, Schnarch, Space, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Victims, Voice |
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March 21, 2011
by Rod Smith
Two families met in my office with the young girl (12) who was at the center of their conflict. Dad and his new wife, mom and her new husband, with both biological parents insisting they wanted primary custody of the child. In earlier meetings dad and mom had shared (without the other parent or the daughter present) how the other parent was irresponsible, uncaring, and unfit for anything more than visits.
Getting everyone in the same room (new spouses and child included) was no walk in the park but I insisted and the families ultimately agreed.
Having established that neither parent was the demon the other portrayed and that both step parents were invested in the wellbeing of the daughter whom all were now co-parenting, I risked asking the child to stand in the center of the room.
I requested mom and step-dad pull the child by the right arm while dad and stepmother pulled her left so we could see who could pull harder and “win” the daughter in the tug-of war.
“You are a cruel man,” said the dad, as the daughter cried and the illustration hit home.
“Not really,” I replied, “I’m simply showing you what you both do to her every weekend of her life.”
Posted in Blended families, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Family, Family Systems Theory |
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March 11, 2011
by Rod Smith
Pain is an inevitable result of almost all divorce and hardly anyone in a family escapes it. The enduring stress, the separation period preceding the divorce, the event itself, and the process of adjustment, all impact family members.
When divorce is regarded as a process, and not an event, the impact is likely to be somewhat eased.
Out of the ruins of a broken marriage people do not easily embrace such principles. These are goals to work toward. Doing so is likely to ease the impact of divorce upon the children.
It is worthwhile noting that remaining (unhappily) married is often easier than becoming (happily) divorced.
Assuming no violence has occurred, the following attitudes expressed by the adults will allow for the best outcome when two adults divorce :
1. We will discuss the divorce with you, together, on a regular basis.
2. We are divorced but remain your parents.
3. It is our divorce, not yours. The implications affect everybody, but it remains our divorce.
4. We were once happy as husband and wife and you were born out of our love. We found parenting to be rich and rewarding. (Ignore if not true).
5. We will always help and protect you and cooperate with each other concerning you.
6. You have done nothing to cause our divorce and nothing you do will restore our marriage.
7. We will not destroy each other (verbally or in any manner) but will rather choose to honor and respect each other.
8. We will not use you as a go-between your parents, or as the rope in a tug-of-war, or as a commodity for child-support.
9. When you face inevitable choices, we will clearly communicate with you about your options. When this is impossible, we will tell you why it is impossible.
10. When choices cannot be made easier we will do all we can to make them clearer. We will honor and hear your voice in all choices pertaining to you and when and if it impossible to do so, we will let you know why. Hearing you (and each other) does not mean agreeing or giving you what you want. Divorce makes some things beyond the control of even the most loving and reasonable and powerful people.
11. We will support each others’ values and rules and will try to establish a similar atmosphere in each home.
12. We both want you to do well in life. Our failure at marriage does not mean you will fail at life.
13. We cannot predict the future, but we will both talk about it with you as we see it developing. You will have as much information as possible about your family and about yourself.
14. You will have as much power over your life as is age appropriate. Sometimes the divorce will feel more powerful than each of us alone and all of us together.
15. You will be able to visit both extended families. Your extended family will be as helpful to you about our divorce as we are. They are also committed to speaking only well of each of your parents. (Ignore if untrue. Let this be a goal).
16. You have permission to embrace any person each parent might include in his or her life. Accepting and loving a stepparent will not be regarded as disloyalty. You might even choose to call that person mother or father without our resistance.
17. All the adults (step and biological parents) will regularly meet to discuss matters relating to you.
18. We will try to lessen the amount of travel between homes so that you might be as settled as possible.
19. Failure at any venture on your part is not because of the divorce. Many people have had divorced parents and have made successes of their lives.
(One person commented: “If I we could have done all that we’d still be married.” I repeat, these are goals, broad ideas for which to strive to make into a reality.)
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Difficult Relationships, Divorce |
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January 30, 2011
by Rod Smith
Who shows the most health and freedom?
interest in the Science of Family Therapy. Here are a few key words to guide any reading to stimulate further interest in at least one of many approaches:
Murray Bowen – is considered one of the pioneers;
Genogram – a diagram of a family usually starting with immediate family or “family of origin”;
Space – the distance between and among people;
Under- and over-functioning – playing more than your own role or doing less than your role deserves or requires; Anxiety and chronic anxiety;
The human need for autonomy;
The human need for intimacy;
Differentiation of self;
Cut-offs, fusion;
Mutuality; respect;
Invisible loyalties – the often irrational and rational loyalty among family members;
Low- and high-functioning individuals; low- and high-functioning families.
Keys to change in a family (if change is indeed possible):
Change in a family often comes from first identifying the most self-differentiated person in the family. This person is challenged by the therapist to move his/her life toward greater levels of health and integrity, despite the cost and the sabotage that will naturally result. Family resistance to change is to be expected. When some seek greater health there will be “push back” from those who benefit from the status quo.
Posted in Anxiety, Blended families, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Family, Leadership, Schnarch, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Voice |
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January 26, 2011
by Rod Smith
“My daughter is living with her fiancé. He has a nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. The girl has no respect for my daughter. My daughter and her fiancé argue about caring for his child. Now his daughter wants to live with her dad because her mom who does not work yells at her all the time. She is already living with them 3-4 nights a week. My daughter and her fiancé have a 1 year old and another ‘on the way.’ He expects my daughter to take his daughter to and from school and to all of her activities while also taking care of two babies. She cannot do this. He has told my daughter that he will always put his daughter first over her. Is my daughter legally responsible for doing this?”
This must be faced.....
owe all of the children (including the one “on the way”) an honest discussion about marriage, child-care, the involvement of the former wife in the life of her daughter, and much else. I’d suggest you do not rescue your daughter or the children by functioning over and above the call of any sane, loving mother and grandmother. Attempts to “save” your daughter will prolong the couple’s avoidance of issues that ultimately must be faced.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Difficult Relationships, Triangles, Voice |
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January 23, 2011
by Rod Smith
“I am also a step-mom to teenage boys ages 13 and 15. When I’m parenting my husband’s sons who live with us most of the time, I make sure their father is informed about everything. We usually have our ‘couple time’ at the end of the day when we talk about just about anything under the sun with parenting his sons included. His attitude is that this is our house and the boys have to abide with whatever rules I have made. I think I make sensible rules as my appreciation to him for giving me a free hand at parenting. These rules are usually about maintaining a clean and tidy house, good moral conduct, and maintaining a moral high ground. A positive attitude towards the stepchildren can go a long way to a blissful existence. It is futile to ‘fight’ the children whom I knew were part of the package when I married their father.”
Thank you for your gracious insights. Your capacity to communicate as a couple, your husband’s confidence in himself, in you, and in his children, and your combined ability to be consistent, has made a joy for you what is a nightmare for some.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Family, Stepmother |
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January 16, 2011
by Rod Smith
“I was divorced 4 years ago and have daughter (7) who lives with her mother. I have been living with my girlfriend for 4 years and we have a son (2). I knew my girlfriend before I got divorced and she had a good relationship with my daughter. After we moved in together she started disliking my daughter. Now that I have gained more access to my daughter my girlfriend does not like it. She says she is too young to accept all of this but it’s been already four years. She knew I had a child before we started dating. I will not choose my girlfriend over my child again. What do I do?”
Look at YOUR choices
This is not your girlfriend’s problem. It is yours.
What it is about you that you would leave a marriage and immediately move in with another woman, giving yourself no time to assess your first failed marriage? What is it about you that you’d bring yet another child into another unstable context with a woman with whom you’d not discussed joys and challenges of co-parenting your daughter?
Addressing these questions might begin to “man-you-up” (get you some backbone) so that you might begin to take more responsibility for yourself and for ALL your relationships.
Posted in Affairs, Attraction, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Difficult Relationships, Step parenting, Stepmother, Womanhood |
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