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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April 3, 2011
by Rod Smith
Richard McChurch was very aware that God’s a communicating God. The still small voice or the thunderous call, and anything in between, (whichever God might choose to use at a given time) was not something to which he often laid claim. When Richard felt God had spoken to him, he was always particular about inserting the words “I believe God spoke to me.” This not only gave him room to be wrong but also the appearance of humility.
One day he had a very unsettling experience. It was as if everything he had ever believed about the way God treats humans was turned upside down.
“What do you really want, Richard?” he believed God asked when he was earnestly praying about a few major decisions.
The question was posed long and hard. It lodged somewhere deep in Richard. There were no voices, no unusual feelings or anything at all weird about the moment. This was a “matter-of-fact God” meeting him, face-to-face and there was no mistaking who it was as far as Richard was concerned.
“Go on, figure it out Richard. What do you really want?” he felt God say.
It was as if God was playfully saying, “Stop asking me what I want for you. I know what I want for you. I am God. I am not at all confused about what I want for you. What I require is that you demonstrate the courage and willingness to determine what you want for you. Do this, Richard, and we can do business.”
He became very nervous. In his silent negotiations, random and scary thoughts began darting across his mind. It was very disconcerting.
“What if I want to break up my family, hurt someone or steal something?” he questioned God.
“Is that what you really want? You want to go around hurting people? Do you really want to take what is not yours? Do you think damaging others is what you were cut out for?”
“No Lord.”
“Then what kind of game are you trying to play?” he felt God’s persistent voice welling up inside him. “I am asking you to evaluate, for yourself, how you would most like to use the talents I have given you. Take stock of the time you have left, the opportunities that come your way. You keep saying I will grant you the desires of your heart, Richard. But you know what? You wouldn’t recognize them if they jumped out at you from behind a bush. I am asking you to take the responsibility for your life. Develop a blueprint of what would inspire you. Discover and know yourself, Richard. Present me with a plan instead of continually asking me for my plan for you. Find my plan buried like treasure, in your strongest desires and longings. Grow up, in other words!”
Richard was shocked to hear God speak in this manner. He had always been taught that God had a plan for his life and for many years he had waited “in faith” for that plan to unfold. Now it sounded as if God expected him to do something!
“That’s the problem!” God interrupted his confusion; “you want to give me the responsibility for your life when I want you to be responsible for your own life. You think my will is something deep and mysterious when it is not. In fact my will for you is that you discover and do what you really want! It’s about passion Richard, passion. Just make sure it is what you really want.”
Richard thought long and hard and realized to his horror that he really did not like his career, chosen purely for the financial and status benefits. He realized that even his sports interests were built around promoting his career. He sat in stunned silence and realized that if he honestly answered the question he was in trouble.
“What I really want to do God, is so far from what I am doing with my life at present that it will take a miracle from you to turn it around,” he said in near desperation.
“No,” said God, “it will take one from you.”
Posted in Differentiation, Faith, Family, Grace |
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April 3, 2011
by Rod Smith
How can you be a Christian AND promote the idea of growing your SELF?
Christians often have little idea of what it means to deny self or to die to self. There is apparently less understanding of what it means to love self and love others. The “mixed” message of “deny self” (a condition of discipleship / Mark 8:34, see also Luke 9:25 NIV) and “love self” (Jesus commanded “love others like you love yourself” in Mark 12:31), I agree, can be confusing.
Jesus did not mean we were to deny we have a self! He meant we were to deny serving the self we know, love, develop, and enjoy.
Conversion to Christianity does not mean your self disappears or that your self is something to be ignored. Conversion TRAINS and DEVELOPS the self to love and serve God.
At conversion the self gets a new perspective. It gets a new focus. At the Cross the SELF gets and a new reason to live. Conversion is the beginning of self-renewal. The self is offered to God as a gift for restoration, renewal, and service.
Rather than serving self, obeying self, and being self-centered and being self-indulgent, at CONVERSION the self decides to serve God and others. At conversion the self submits itself to God’s will, becomes focused on Who God is and What God wants.
Denial of self (as ordered by Jesus) is a person’s decision to refuse self-indulgence and to turn the self toward full service of God.
It takes a developing, growing, and healthy self to love and serve a healthy God.
A non-self, an ignored self, a self whose very existence is denied, cannot love anyone or anything, let alone love and serve a perfect God.
I believe Jesus meant we were to discover who we are, understand who we are, love who we are – while offering all of who we are unequivocally to God as an act of worship, service and sacrifice.
We are to offer ourselves to God as a living, growing sacrifice (Romans 12).
There is a huge difference between identifying and developing a self to serve God and living in the denial that we have a self at all.
Jesus was a SELF to be reckoned with – yet He was not selfish at all — be the same.
Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Faith, Grace |
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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 30, 2011
by Rod Smith
Good morning/evening, Rod
If you do find time to respond to this message I would be most grateful. If not, I understand. You must be inundated daily.
Your comment ‘Suicide is perhaps the strongest and most powerful form of prayer I have ever encountered’ is profound. It is a belief I share and I would welcome information as to its origin. Is it a personal philosophy or is there reading that would embellish?
It is a very brave thing to do ….juxtapose suicide and prayer and declare them compatible in pursuit of relief. I have been directly and intimately involved with the death of two 15-year-old boys … one my son and the other the son of a close friend who also hung himself five months later. The latter action I cannot for the life of me fathom, but in my search for understanding with my own child, I came to one conclusion that it was an act of bravery in pursuit of that which life could not offer. I do understand that viewed from another vantage point it could equally be regarded as an act of folly ie that something that ‘seems impossible’ need not necessarily be so.
Any available reading you could direct me to in this regard would be sincerely appreciated.
Tony
Durban
Dear Tony:
While it is true that I am inundated with mail I cannot move on without answering you directly. Your letter moved me. I was making my bed when the “ping” came through and I sat on the same bed and wondered at the pain you must endure in the light of your losses.
My own children are downstairs “fighting” over the remote for the TV and your letter made me so very grateful for their boyish squabbles.
I have been in the midst of several suicides and encountered it as a professional, a minister, a school counselor, and as a neighbor (I am – have been – all of the above).
I am sad and distressed when suicide is framed as a sin, a way out, or a cop out — this is not my understanding from many one-on-one encounters with desperate people. As for reading, I can offer none. Some of the bravest men and women I have ever known have been days from taking their own lives.
Your son and the other child to whom you refer, would have been embraced by me (a stranger to each) were they to have arrived at my door asking for absolutely anything. I would have given them each a home with full rights to the house and my life in every way – this I did already with my two children (adopted from birth).
If I, a sinful, lousy, struggling man could do this — how much more would a loving God not do the same.
Your boys are safe and happy and I believe they’d want you to miss them but to also be comforted.
Please let me know you got this – even if it is not what you expected. Keep in touch. I am not “brave” as you say. I am just sick of the BS people spew in the light of the pain others encounter when they, themselves, have only watched it all from a distance.
Keep in touch.
Rod
Posted in Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship |
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March 29, 2011
by Rod Smith
“I struggle with what I told the little one’s in my family of the death of their young and vibrant ‘Aunt L.’ She had been really sick and took her own life in the end. I just could not tell these little one’s that she committed suicide – how would they understand, ranging in age from 9 to 2 years old. I just told them she got sick and she died – her body and her spirit were tired. I am so afraid of them finding out the truth one day. We all have continued to grieve our loss. All of the children attended the funeral and memorial services and we all take an active role in remembering her life. But how do you explain suicide of a very close loved one to a child?”
Your chidren will understand
Of course what you faced was difficult and, once the children are old enough to know the truth, I believe they will understand the reasons you have said what you have said. Suicide is perhaps the strongest and most powerful form of prayer I have ever encountered – giving ultimate relief in dying, what seemed impossible while living. “Aunt L”, I believe, has found in death what she could not find in life.
Posted in Adolescence, Anxiety, Betrayal, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Grace, Grief, Meditation, Parenting/Children, Reactivity, Recovery, Responsive people, Space, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice |
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March 23, 2011
by Rod Smith
1. Enriched is the woman who does not lose herself to her marriage or motherhood. She has a strong spirit of independence while being a loving wife and mother.
2. Enriched is the woman who does not accommodate poor manners (being taken for granted or being victimized) from anyone (not husband, children, in-laws, siblings, or her parents).
3. Enriched is the woman who lives above manipulation, domination, and intimidation. Her relationships are pure and open; her boundaries are defined, secure, and strong.
4. Enriched is the woman who does not participate in unwanted sexual activity. She honors her body as her private temple and shares it, even in marriage, only by her own deliberate choice.
5. Enriched is the woman who has developed a strong, clear, identity. She regularly articulates who she is, what she wants, and what she will and will not do. She is unafraid of defining herself.
6. Enriched is the woman who knows that pursuing her dreams to be educated, to work, to accomplish much, to expect much from her life, are profound acts of partnership in marriage and profound acts of mothering. She knows that the woman who “takes up her life” does more for herself, her husband, and her children than the one who surrenders it.
Posted in Adolescence, Anxiety, Boundaries, Children, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Leadership, Listening, Living together, Love, Parenting/Children, Re-marriage, Responsive people, Sex matters, Sexual compatibility, Single parenting, Therapeutic Process, Victims, Violence, Voice, Womanhood |
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March 22, 2011
by Rod Smith
“My sister and her husband constantly belittle our lives. We, my husband and I, are not as wealthy, we are not as successful in our careers, but at least we are 100% honest. While they are not blatantly dishonest they do make their living in questionable ways that and it pays them very well. The point is that my husband is now disinclined to spend time with my extended family. Do I speak up or just suffer in silence? Do I insist my husband joins me at family events or do I go alone and make an excuse for him?”
Suffer in silence? Never. Speak up? Of course you speak up. I’d suggest you gently tell both your sister and her husband (together) your truth. Tell them whether they are able to hear you or not. Since their “questionable” pursuits are none of your business, I’d suggest they are not worth mentioning.
Attend any family event you want whether your husband wants to go or not. Don’t push him. Don’t determine his level of involvement with your family or allow him to determine yours. If anyone wants to know where he is or why he is not with you suggest that person ask your husband his or her questions directly.
Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Family, Family Systems Theory, High maintenance relationships, In-laws, Triangles, Voice, Womanhood |
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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 15, 2011
by Rod Smith
Should I leave? Should I stay? Should I tell her? Should I this? Should I that?
These questions flood my email, often hidden in letters loaded with painstaking details of hard, devastated lives depicting complex, entangled, situations.
They are the cries for a formula from desperate readers who want to know what is the right thing to do; men and women aching for some degree of happiness and fulfillment – often aching to do the right thing, especially for the children.
Often there are no right or wrong answers but more helpful or less helpful ways to respond to difficult situations.
How trumps what. It’s not whether a person should stay or go – it is HOW staying or going is done that will determine if the choice was a good choice or not.
Staying or going, respectful behavior, kindness, honoring others, even in the toughest circumstances will prove the decision to be helpful or unhelpful.
When going is the decision, everything, even divorce, child custody issues, financial settlements, can be expedited respectfully, kindly, and honorably.
How do I know? I’ve seen people handle these very issues with firmness, grace, and kindness – even in the midst of the pain accompanying all loss or change.
Posted in Boundaries, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce |
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