Have you ever wondered why a gathering if supportive mothers, or the church committee you are on, or your annual family gathering can become so intense and complicated – and become a minefield of human conflict and emotion?

Every person is a unique, deep well of thought, feelings, conflicts, memories, ambitions, and motives. Many well-meaning persons, like the people on that team with you, have hidden scores to settle (sometimes even hidden from themselves).

When people get together, bringing equally unique, deep and complex issues together, things can begin to be intense. This is especially true when people “unite” for a cause.

It is these very complications, these undercurrents that can offer insight into the emotional processes of any group or community for the person looking to be helpful.

Developing an eye (an ear, a feel) for emotional process among people, and allowing what you see to help you grow and behave in an adult manner will help you negotiate the best possible outcome for everyone, especially when things become messy.

Listen for what is unsaid in groups, look for the push and the pull, listen to the “meetings before the meeting,” to identify something of the group’s emotional process.

Listening, watching, will help you garner useful keys to helping groups and individuals make wiser and more helpful choices than simply (only) reacting to the reactivity within self and others.

May you become fully human knowing that the natural human urge toward inhumanity helps no one.

May you live fully and completely given that most people don’t.

May you have all the beauty life offers with minimal experience of life’s unavoidable brutality.

May you be rich enough to eat a little everyday and be able to give away something everyday.

May you be poor enough to have to work and discover the holiness of hard work.

May you love and be loved and therefore find your place and significance in a community.

May you learn the fine art of “give and take” and that your giving would far exceed your taking.

May you understand that anger, resentment, failure to forgive, are uniquely individual pursuits.

May you understand that blaming others for anything never helped anyone to become something worth becoming.

An emotionally healthy person allows himself to honor his deepest inclinations for AUTONOMY and INTIMACY both in himself and others. I call them DUELING DESIRES…..

AUTONOMY: The powerful instinctual longing to be self-directed and separate from others. It is the “you” who wants to be free of all ties, all responsibilities. It is the “you” that fears absorption by others; the “you” who wants to let your hair blow in the wind, feel the sun on your back and live a carefree life without things that tie you down. This is the spirit of the Wild in you, the lone-ranger, and pioneer. This desire, I believe, is God-breathed, God-inspired, and a necessary part of your survival and growth.

INTIMACY: The powerful instinctual longing to be close with others. It is the “you” that wants to belong, be known and be part of a family, a team. It is the “you” that fears abandonment and desertion; the you who longs for a unified journey with others, the you that wakes up at night and wonders with horror, what it would be like to be totally alone. This is the nest-making part of you, the part who longs for the sounds, symbols and reality of a shared life. This desire, I believe, is God-breathed, God-inspired and a necessary part of your survival and growth.

“I really need some space in my relationship. We’ve been together for about two months now and it has been a whirlwind of a romance. I am missing my family and my friends. She, on the other had, can’t even begin to think of her life before we met. She wants to merge bank accounts, phone accounts, and doesn’t want to have a single meal without me. As I said, I, on the other hand, really need some room to move. I am having a lot of fun and I do love her, I just need a little time alone now and again. How do I break this to her?”

Gently. Firmly. Immediately. Admit your role in failing to declare your need for “space” at the outset. Apologize. Suggest a plan. Before you meet, decide how much breathing space you need (two evenings a week, all of every Sunday, alternate weekends?) and be fully prepared, at least in the immediate future, to stick to it. It is likely you will face some backlash – but I’d suggest you face it now rather than later.

Once one person begins feeling trapped, unless there is a radical willingness to shift things from both parties, things usually go downhill once the sentiment is expressed.

“I was involved with a 60 year-old man that I gave my heart to. We were in a relationship for months. He even got me through my pregnancy. He so loved for me. And this last month he just made me feel like I wasn’t of any importance to him. He came up with all these ridiculous excuses as to why he changed towards me. I had found him on this stupid chat line on numerous occasions when he said he was sleeping. I did everything for him. I never denied him of anything. I built him up telling him how much I loved him and that he was amazing and did everything a girl could do for her man and all of a sudden he breaks up with me. I honestly feel there is someone else or an old lady his age.”

Since age is an issue for you (you refer to “an old lady his age”) and you are clearly much younger than he is, I can only assume things will be better for you if you take his change toward you as an option to end the relationship. Rather than focus one what he needs and wants (or doesn’t want) you might want to think of your baby needs.

I get many letters about missing family members who have moved overseas. Here’s an extract from one that I found deeply encouraging:

“I was diagnosed last month with breast cancer and have been through seven weeks of sheer hell with surgery and drug treatments. Luckily for me it was arrested by the surgery and I effectively have a cure. However, I could never have gone through this ordeal without the deep love and support of my husband from whom I previously believed I had grown apart. He cried with me, drove me around to doctors’ appointments, kept the housekeeping going when I felt rotten. In short I have rediscovered the man I married all those years ago. This diagnosis has brought us closer together than ever before and I now don’t ‘sweat the small stuff’. In fact I wake up every morning grateful to be alive and on the road to a full recovery. I have found pleasure in the little things in life and have come to accept my son and grandkids living overseas. Tell anyone in our position to hang in there it certainly does get better!”

1. His or her solvency (credit score) is more important than if he sends you flowers or she showers you with gifts and compliments.
2. The state of his or her relationship with his or her parents is more important than how he or she dresses or what he or she drives.
3. How he or she treats and respects a former spouse (and children) will tell you exactly how he or she will one day treat you.
4. How he or she handles truth and matters of integrity are unlikely to change. If he or she lies or develops a “cover up” to be with you, the day will come when he or she is “ducking and diving” to get away from you.
5. How he or she behaves in heavy traffic, in a restaurant with poor service, how he or she handles credit, alcohol, and illegal substances, are windows that give glimpses into the “real” person.

“My wife bickers at me all the time. It’s like it’s going on under her breath from early in the morning until late at night. We have been married for 40 years and our children all live overseas and it’s like she blames me that she is not near her children and her grandchildren. We are now both very recently retired and you’d think we’d be glad we reached this stage in life. We are too much together. She says it. I did not feel it until she said it. She is on email all day looking for letters from the children and the grandchildren and sometimes she won’t even go out if she is expecting them to phone. What can I do? Please help.”

This is a fine, yet somewhat exaggerated, example of how careers and children can keep a man and a woman sufficiently apart AND where the apartness facilitates and fosters tolerance of one another.

Take away the careers (and children) and people have to look at each other again and they do not always like what they see. Retirement is new for you both. Stick it out.

Volunteer your services somewhere. Really, it will get better.

Is tough if you are not desperate enough. But once a person is able to see the necessity for change, he or she will ultimately move in it’s direction.

Such change is not necessarily geographic and nor does it necessarily require some momentous relational move- it can be internal and unapparent to others for years.

“I was born into a family that has experienced conflict that has affected us for three generations. Not even the education has been able to prevent the inevitable downward spiral or find ways to resolve differences and remain on speaking terms. A sibling and I did attempt to resolve issues and things hobbled along for awhile, but after the last crisis, which involved the passing of a parent, I realised that the members of my family, including in-laws, are too different in outlook and philosophies to ever get along. Some friends have exhorted us to try to make peace, simply because we are ‘family’. This sort of encouragement doesn’t occur when the feuding parties are not related, then people seem to expect one not to be able to effect reconciliations. Is it really so bad that families feud to the extent that they no longer speak? What if they really are happier going separate ways? We often expect far too high a standard from our relatives, simply because they are blood. We have different and apparently irreconcilable standards.” (Edited)

Getting along is not compulsory because of biological ties. Openness to (even) limited dialogue will serve the invisible emotional loyalties. Family cut-offs exacerbate individual issues. Reasonable, even guarded dialogue, is likely to ease some individual anxiety, even if at first it serves to spike it.