October 22, 2017
by Rod Smith
Of course I cannot do all of the following – but reading them through each day helps set my daily trajectory, especially on a Monday. My ardent hope is that reading this list will do the same for you:
- I will be proud of my behavior when I review it at the end of the day.
- I will take full responsibility for my actions while anticipating that others might not do the same.
- I will pay my way, live within my means, and seek and act on opportunities for generosity.
- I will be kind no matter what.
- I will seek to be as low maintenance as possible.
- I will try to know the difference between what are my responsibilities and what are not, with the understanding that some things are everybody’s responsibility.
- I will give others the benefit of the doubt.
- I will allow people to escape their reputations even if their reputations are well earned.
- I will speak up about what I want or don’t want so that others, even those very close to me, will not have to spend any energy guessing or interpreting my behavior.
- I will remain out of control and unpredictable; I will break my own rules and habits without hurting anyone and without damaging any treasured relationship.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult 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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October 17, 2017
by Rod Smith
I am very aware that people don’t analyze their connections in the manner I’ve described below. We’d have healthier communities and families if we did!
- Will you search with me when I am searching, stand with me when I am standing, and drop to your knees with me in prayer if and when I need it? I will try to do the same for you.
- Will you stand up to me with firmness and kindness when my many blind spots are blocking my thinking? I will try to do the same for you.
- Will you join me and examine our connection (as casual acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, partners, or spouses) so that we remain mutual and equal and respectful no matter the degree or significance of our connection?
- Will you take time to listen to me? I will try to take time to listen to you?
- Will you allow me my quirks and eccentricities and try to regard them as interesting rather than regard them as things you wish were different about me?
- Will you seek my highest good as far as you are able given the knowledge we have about each other? I will try to do the same for you.
- Will you try to be as unafraid of me as I try to be unafraid of you?
Posted in Addictions, Attraction, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, Grief, Leadership, Listening, Love, Manipulation, Marriage, Past relationships, Re-marriage, Reactivity, Recovery, Responsive people, Schnarch, Sex education, Sex matters, Sexual compatibility, Single parenting, Triangles, Voice, Womanhood, Young Love |
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October 5, 2017
by Rod Smith
The world is disturbed by threats of nuclear war. There have been horrific mass shootings, race riots, and re-emergences of violent extremes.
Entire regions of the world have been destroyed by hurricanes and earthquakes. Millions are homeless because of severe weather and millions more live as refugees fleeing oppressive political circumstances.
May we (you and I) deploy our most powerful individual forces. As limited as we each may be, the world needs a few superheroes and we can each in our own way be one:
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Design and commit specific, routine acts of kindness and generosity. Make them pointed, uniquely tailored for someone in need. If possible, make your target an enemy and make your act anonymous. The “routine” will help us form healing habits. The “enemy” element will transform us into fine-tuned agents of grace
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Extend your immediate community by embracing the stranger, the sojourner, the person on the fringe. Resist the urge to create him or her into your own image by expecting your guest to conform to your ways or to convert to your ways. Superhero hospitality accepts people exactly as they are.
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In the spirit of St. Francis, indeed a superhero, may we seek to console and to serve rather than to be consoled and to be served. I know, I know – it wasn’t supposed to be a direct quotation.
Posted in Anxiety, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Grace, Leadership, Listening, Love, Past relationships, Recovery, Responsive people, Therapeutic Process, Voice, Womanhood, YWAM |
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September 24, 2017
by Rod Smith
The Mercury / Monday 9/25/2017 / I have witnessed many fine acts of parenting:
- The mother who sends her adult sons and daughters Mother’s Day cards with handwritten lists of joyous memories about what it has been like to be their mother. She has done this for so long that it was some years before the children (when they were children) even knew they were the ones who were supposed to send her cards.
- The dad who traded in his own car and settled for a used car so he could give his son the sports car his son wanted.
- The parents who each worked two jobs so the two sons did not have to assume significant debt to attend university.
- The single mother who has the wherewithal to leave her daughter’s academic struggles up to her and who encourages her daughter to speak up about what she needs to her teachers.
- The dad who packs his son’s lunch each day for school and who adds an extra pack for his son’s friend who once expressed to the boy that he wished that he too had a dad.
- The dad who taught his son to share without ever saying it but by showing it at every turn.
- The parents who never let drinking distort or shape the way they reared their children.
Posted in Addictions, Adolescence, Anger, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, Leadership, Listening, Love, Manipulation, Parenting/Children, Responsive people, Single parenting, Step parenting, Teenagers, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Voice |
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September 20, 2017
by Rod Smith
My teachers have never left me. They hover in my awareness and continue their work despite the decades that separate me from their classrooms, lecture theaters, labs, fields, gyms, and studies. Almost all were highly motivated and loved their jobs and regarded it as a calling and I can still hear them calling me to adopt high standards for others and for myself.
The few who didn’t love their jobs, those who landed in the classroom somehow against their will or to test the waters of education, also hover. Their obvious boredom, anger, or their cynicism, were in themselves powerful lessons.
I find it incredible that the teacher with the parrot (Mrs. Bradman) who dogged my third or fourth year of school and the psychology professor who was so self-absorbed more than a decade later and my family therapy professors a lifetime later and nations apart and Mr. Morey, Mr. Graham, Mrs. Hornsby, and Miss Chadwick (I could go on) do the cancan in my frontal lobe at the oddest moments.
I know, I know, someone is going to write and tell me there is medication for my condition – but I think not.
I think it’s a testimony to the power afforded men and women who are teachers.
Posted in Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family, Friendship, Leadership, Listening, Responsive people, Trust |
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September 17, 2017
by Rod Smith
The Mercury / Monday
Thank you for reading my work. Really. I appreciate it.
Allow me to let you in a little.
I live in the USA, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to be precise. If you are reading this in a real newspaper you are probably somewhere in KwaZulu-Natal. I was born and reared in Red Hill, Durban.
If you are reading online you could be in any one of the 180-plus nations where people read this column.
Before you are overly impressed, in several of the 180-plus nations my readership totals 2 or 5 or even 8 people.
I am writing this particular column on the Saturday before you will read it on Monday. I am in a busy coffee shop on the very affluent side of our city. I drive here. We don’t live in this neighborhood. But, where we live is hardly poor. By American standards my sons and I are well off.
There are many days I want to be where you are. I miss the beaches, the weather, your naturally hospitable ways. I miss extended family.
I am sure there are times you’d like to be in the USA.
I’ve had this consistent thought since moving to the USA: It’s not where, but how you live that makes the difference.
Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Grace, Leadership, Listening, Responsive people, Voice |
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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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August 15, 2017
by Rod Smith
“I have read your work for a long time and even find myself thinking with some of your terminology. I am ‘trapped’ or ‘triangle-d’ with my adult son and two daughters. Serving one means alienating the others. I have to watch my every step and filter every word. It’s like they are constantly trying to prove that I am more involved with one than the other – but they have very different life circumstances. Please help.”
It sounds like your adult sons and daughters are waiting to hear a strong word from you about who owns your time and your efforts. I’d suggest you take back your power and hold onto your own power rather than place it in their hands.
Thanks for the compliment inherent in the fact that you have read my work for a long time. The terminology to which you refer is not originally mine. I detect that you and many readers are great candidates for several books on Family Systems Theory. This is where my own training lies.
Immerse yourself in “Extraordinary Relationships,” “Extraordinary Leadership,” “The Cornerstone Principle” and “The Eight Core Concepts of Bowen Theory.” All of these titles are by Roberta Gilbert and all are worthy of study.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family Systems Theory |
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