Archive for ‘Boundaries’

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April 25, 2011

Children and happiness

by Rod Smith

“I see my first responsibility, as a parent, is to make my children have a happy childhood so they can have a happy life. Please comment.”

Good luck. While it is a nice ideal you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

Your children’s happiness is ultimately their responsibility and not yours. The sooner they assume it the better.

If you, the parent, work hard at your own life and make the very best of your skills and talents it is more likely that you will have children who will do the same.

If you focus all of your attention on your children and on trying to make them happy it is likely you will create insatiable, demanding, and entitled men and women who are more than a challenge to all who know them.

Of course I am not suggesting parents ought to intentionally create tough lives in order to amplify challenge – this would be ridiculous.

I’d suggest you focus on providing a loving and challenging platform for your children to achieve well in all areas of their lives and get out of their way as much as possible.

Success, and reaching for success, is what results in fulfillment. I’d take “fulfillment” or “useful” or “purposeful” over the illusive state called “happiness” anytime.

Posted in Adolescence, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Friendship, Grace, Leadership, Parenting/Children, Single parenting, Step parenting, Stepfather, Stepmother, Teenagers, Voice | 1 Comment »

April 23, 2011

I was unfaithful and now he wants out

by Rod Smith

“I have been an unfaithful wife and my husband is tired of it. He has given me a fresh start on three or four occasions but this time he refuses. He says his trust well is empty and that he has to move on with his life. How do I convince him that one more chance is all I need? Please help.”

Attraction is only enduringly poss

Take responsibility for your actions

Your husband appears to be taking an option necessary for his well being. I’d suggest you move full force into recovery from serial infidelity.

Unfaithfulness can hardly leave you with good feelings about yourself and I’d suggest you get professional help to delve into its origins in your life.

While his actions are painful for you, I’d suggest he has not had a painless journey.

If your husband were consulting me I’d attempt to solicit from him the level of his desire to remain married. Given any suggestion that he’d prefer to stay married, I’d encourage him to embark on an extended separation to allow you to get your troubled house in order.

Unfaithfulness is an individual pursuit. There’s nothing anyone can do to make you unfaithful. It’s not your spouse or any of your multiple cohorts. It is you who needs the help – get it. Allow him, in the mean time, to do whatever it is he needs to do.

Posted in Affairs, Anger, Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Difficult Relationships, Forgiveness, High maintenance relationships, Manipulation, Marriage, Past relationships, Reactivity, Recovery, Sex matters, Space, Spousal abuse, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice | 1 Comment »

April 21, 2011

My husband says I am obsessed with my children….

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)

Attraction is only enduringly poss

Mutuality is a challenge

I see several good 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 | Leave a Comment »

April 19, 2011

Go ahead and surprise yourself…..

by Rod Smith

Attraction is only enduringly poss

Reach for your inner strength

You are probably stronger and more resilient than you feel and think you are. I am often amazed at the latent power I have seen come to the salvation of men and women who are under great stress or experiencing great pain.

You are probably more creative, tenacious, and determined, than you have conditioned yourself to believing you are. It’s been a joy to watch men and women dig themselves out of a tight spot once they’ve allowed themselves to escape the prisons of their own thinking.

You are probably better able to negotiate tough situations and speak up for yourself than you consider yourself to be. I’ve seen clients transformed from the proverbial wallflower to a force to be reckoned with, simply because they’d had enough of some people regarding them with less than absolute respect.

You are probably wiser than you give yourself credit. When push comes to shove it’s amazing what wisdom will emerge.

You are probably funnier than you think you are. When the chips are down, it’s refreshing to see how funny people can be. To cap it all, the humor of the wise, the humor of the resilient, requires no victims.

Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Family, Family Systems Theory, Friendship, Grace, High maintenance relationships, Leadership | Leave a Comment »

April 16, 2011

Don’t chase anyone, ever

by Rod Smith

“I’m a single mother of a one month beautiful boy. His father loved me before I was pregnant. He wanted a baby with so much and I did not. I was busy trying to build a life. I fell pregnant and I love my son. His father was unavailable through out the pregnancy. He wanted to give our son his last name but my family refused because we are not married. I want him back. He says begging him is unattractive and that he will come back when he wants to. It’s hard because my son hasn’t had a chance to have a family. He’s walked into an emotionally broken mother.” (Edited)

Chasing is a waste of energy

Don’t chase anyone – ever. The energy required to woo the father back into your life, even if you are successful, will be insignificant next to the energy it will take to keep him.

Your son may well have “walked into an emotionally broken mother” but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Resume your pre-pregnancy quest to build your life.

Living a full, satisfying life yourself will be the greatest act of mothering you will ever offer your son – go for it. Live the kind of life you hope he will live one day and he will have something to emulate.

Posted in Betrayal, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Family Systems Theory, High maintenance relationships, Triangles, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice, Womanhood | 1 Comment »

April 14, 2011

Great weekends are made of this…..

by Rod Smith

How to have a great weekend in 7 easy steps

Clean up (apologize, clarify, tie lose ends, write thank you cards) before you leave your workplace.

Call ahead before you leave work. Inform your family that you are expecting to play your part in creating a fabulous weekend.

Unplug until Monday. Turn off all technology (cell phones, SMS ability, Internet, computers, television, and electronic games) and encourage all in your household to do the same.

Focus on the people with whom you are face-to-face. Give them your full attention. This means listening (without waiting to speak, looking into each others eyes, not multi-tasking while talking). It means loving the person, the moment, and the immediate conversation.

Avoid negative talk especially about the economy, the political atmosphere, work, your boss, and people with whom you have conflict.

Stay at home – eat at home, invite neighbors to a meal having informed them that you are have a tech-free weekend.

If you are a parent ban all talk, for the entire weekend, about children. If you cannot do this, it is a fine indication that you might be in need of a shift of focus for your own sake and especially for the sake of your children.

Posted in Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships | Leave a Comment »

April 12, 2011

Pre-school to the presidency – if you are a leader……

by Rod Smith

If you are a leader of anything – Pre-school to Presidency….

Leadership is often lonely

1. The process, understanding and identifying the underlying pressures within your organization, trumps the content, detail, and the day-to-day minutia. You can have all the details in place and be sabotaged because you failed to see, or you ignore, the hidden tensions that exist in every organization.

2. The people and an appreciation of the inestimable value of others, trumps programs, or the implementation of plans and procedures. You can have perfect plans and procedures to implement your perfect programs, only to fail because you failed to appreciate the people around you.

3. Relationships, knowing the people with whom you share life, trumps hierarchy of who is more important than whom. The “lower” down the hierarchy a leader forms authentic relationships – the more credible will be his or her leadership.

4. Openness and transparency, allowing oneself to be known and allowing oneself to get to know others, trumps covert or undisclosed agendas inhabiting all complex organizations. What’s hidden will bring greater damage to your leadership than what is revealed.

5. Negotiation and dialogue, the willingness to enter into discussion and engage in debate, trumps a dictatorial, top-down style of leadership. Top-down styles bring some heartless, temporary obedience – authentic dialogue fosters creative, long-term, relationships.

Posted in Anxiety, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family Systems Theory, Leadership, Listening, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Voice | 1 Comment »

April 8, 2011

Do you need therapy? Here’s a quick list to guide you……

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 | 1 Comment »

April 7, 2011

Open your hand

by Rod Smith

Open your hand using all your strength. Stretch your fingers. Allow the lines on your palm to feel as though they might tear apart. Study the contours, colors, ridges and valleys, joints, dents and spaces. Push, pull, and rub. Move your fingers through their paces: together, apart, back, forward, curved, strained and relaxed, cooperative yet unique. Feel the texture and every curve. Touch the crevices. Spread your hand further, turn it at the wrist, examine and compare patterns from every angle. Here are pieces of yourself you might never have studied.

Your hands are your constant companions. They have met the needs of others, pioneered romantic moments and worn rings of commitment. They are the way your heart leaves fingerprints, the eyes at the end of your arms. Hands reflect a person’s being and are the front line agents of your life. If eyes are said to be the windows of a soul, hands express the soul.

Hold other people with your hand thoroughly open. Allow them to know the warmth and welcome of your hand, investigate its curves and benefit from its scars. Invite others to follow the lines into the fabric of your life and see the risks you have taken and the adventures that are yours. Allow them to wrestle and rest, search, see and speak. Let them stay; let them go, but let them find your hand always open.

The Open Hand of friendship, at its widest span, is most rewarding, most challenging and most painful, for it enduringly acknowledges the freedom others have while choosing not to close upon, turn on, coerce, or manipulate others. In such friendships, expectations and disappointments become minimal and the reward is freedom. As others determine a unique pace within your open hand, they will see freedom and possibly embrace their own with excitement and pleasure.

Openhanded people do not attempt to “fix” others, change, or control others even for their own good. Rather, each person is given freedom to learn about life in his own way. Openhanded people, instead, express kindly and truthfully what they think and feel, when asked, knowing even in the asking, others might not be interested or willing to learn.

The Open Hand is not naive. It is willing to trust, while understanding and accepting that no person is all good or all bad, and that all behavior has meaning. The Open Hand is convinced it cannot change others; it cannot see or think or feel or believe or love or see for others, but trusts people to know what is good themselves. It will not strong-arm, pursue or even attempt to convince others because it has little investment in being right, winning or competing. Here is offered a core-freedom of the deepest and most profound nature: allowing others to live without guilt, shame and expectation.

Further, the Open Hand offers oneself freedom that extends to one’s memories, ambitions, failures and successes. This allows for growth of enduring intimacy, greater personal responsibility, authentic autonomy, and the possibility of meaningful relationships with others.

In the discovery of a closed hand, even at the end of your own arm, do not try to pry it open. Be gentle. Allow it to test the risky waters of freedom. As it is accustomed to being closed and fist-like, it will not be easily or forcefully opened. So let the closed-handed do their own releasing and trusting, little by little, and in their own time and manner.

When openhanded people meet, lives connect in trust, freedom and communion. Community is set in motion. Creativity is encouraged. Mutual support is freely given. Risks are shared. Lives are wrapped in the safety of shared adventure and individual endeavor all at the same time.

Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness | Leave a Comment »

April 7, 2011

Is your family “open” or “closed” handed?

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 | 3 Comments »

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