April 2, 2017
by Rod Smith
Mondays – celebrating the first workday of the week:
I love Mondays although I have not always done so. I especially enjoy the first Monday of the month.
Mondays are a reset button. They are an opportunity to set new goals and to reset goals that have lapsed. They are a new beginning, a fresh start and an internal blank slate, a new baseline. Whatever metaphor you employ, I’d suggest we reject the term “blue-Monday” from here on out and switch it for “Magnificent Monday.”
Mondays are an opportunity to love life and to love the lives of those around you and I don’t only mean family and loved ones. Mondays are an opportunity to see the miracle within all people and to affirm human resilience.
Mondays are an opportunity to affirm the spiritual nature of all things, from the most mundane, like getting up and getting ready for the commute to work to the most glorious, like the opportunity to pay debts, thank coworkers, and be part of a vibrant, even conflicted community.
Mondays are a wonderful opportunity to be generous, to be forgiving, and to encourage. They are an opportunity to set the stage for the change you’d like to see in your own life and to measure and assess progress 50-plus times a year.
Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, Responsive people, Trust, Voice |
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March 29, 2017
by Rod Smith
- Lower functioning people require more and more control.
- Higher functioning people want greater levels of freedom for all.
- Lower functioning people place obstacles (hurdles, doubts, misgivings) in the way of those who are higher functioning often without even knowing it.
- Higher functioning people know that self-definition and acts of strong leadership will face resistance in the form of doubts and misgivings from those who are less inclined to grow.
- High functioning people want mercy and justice and equity for all even if it means great personal cost.
- Lower functioning people operate out of a desire for revenge or to “teach them a lesson.”
- High functioning people do not regard themselves as victims while lower functioning people arrange their lives and often their livelihood around victimhood.
- The person who wants a relationship the most (any relationship) shifts the balance of power into the hands of he or she who wants it least.
- Every time a person wants to do something great or adventurous or thrilling someone will try to put a stop to it.
- Grace and forgiveness and generosity are among the most powerful forces of change in any family or community and the one who embraces them immediately increases his or her level of functioning.
Posted in Addictions, Betrayal, Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, High maintenance relationships |
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March 14, 2017
by Rod Smith
I ask a woman how her life is going and she tells me about her children. She’s very forthcoming. I hear about their failures and successes and their disappointments and their accomplishments in sports.
So I ask again how she is enjoying her life and she tells me about her children’s teachers and how dedicated they are and how they go the extra mile for her sons and how much she appreciates it and how happy her sons are at school.
I persist and ask her if she has any close friends and how much time she spends with her peers and she tells me how her sons’ friendships are a little disappointing to her and that sometimes they get left off birthday party lists and how much it hurts her when that happens and how she wishes adults were more sensitive to her children.
I ask the same woman who happens to also be a wife how she is enjoying her husband and she tells me they “work together” as parents and they are almost always on the “same page.”
I press in and ask the woman if she has a life outside of being a mom and she gives me that blank look as if I have no idea what I am talking about.
Posted in Adolescence, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Grace, Grief, Parenting/Children, Single parenting, Step parenting, Stepfather, Stepmother, Teenagers |
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March 12, 2017
by Rod Smith
When it comes to my sons, I remind myself of these things:
- Their lives are larger at their ages than mine was at their ages. Of course, they’re starting late and the world is a very different place. Their platforms are more complex, and more dynamic than mine was and, I admit, I am somewhat limited in my ability to identify with it. This means I should not be taken aback when I am blinded to possibilities and experiences they see and want to embrace. Rejecting an idea or a possibility simply because I couldn’t envision it is a good way to widen a gap than is mine, and not theirs, to bridge.
- While the world is a very different place than it was in my formative years, some things remain unchanged. Good manners, using please and thank you, looking people in the eye, standing up for adults, dealing honestly with money and time, working hard, and displaying empathy in the face of those who are suffering – are values that cannot be discarded just because the world is faster paced than it once was. One of my jobs as a parent is to encourage, even enforce some of these things if necessary.
- I am enough for my sons and the only dad they will ever need.
Posted in Adolescence, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Leadership, Parenting/Children, Stepfather, Stepmother, Teenagers, Triangles, Triggers, Voice, Womanhood |
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March 4, 2017
by Rod Smith
The Mercury / Monday (3-6-2017)
Do you love your life – or at least most of it?
I hope so. It must be terrible to wake up every day having to face a job you resist in order to provide for people who find you difficult and in whom you may find repeated displeasure. I feel ill thinking of it. It gives me a heavy feeling that I would hate to have to haul around all and every day.
Perhaps you have no job and that may be the source of at least some of your displeasure.
Perhaps you have no family or zero support from family you do have.
I am very aware of how much family and friends form the scaffolding of my life, making so much difference to me when things are tough.
No matter what your circumstance – and I declare this as loudly and forcefully to myself as I do to you: you are what you’ve got. You are your most powerful asset, and, you’d better make the most of it.
Someone wiser than I – and I’d give full credit if I knew the source – said, “we see the world, not as it is, but as we are.”
I’d suggest we also love others, not as they are, but as we are.
Peace. Have a fabulous, loving, and aware week.
Posted in Addictions, Anger, Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace |
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February 27, 2017
by Rod Smith
Ten signs of the presence of spiritual abuse, manipulation, domination, or intimidation.
Spiritual Abuse (always on a continuum) is occurring when a pastor, leader, or even a friend:
- “Hears” God for you. God apparently “goes through” him/her to speak to you. This requires a sense of superiority – from him or her and is often framed as being “more mature,” and a sense of being “less” from you.
- Alienates (shuns, ignores) you if you do not adhere to his/her guidance, leadership, or authority. This is usually VERY subtle – so it is easy to deny.
- Suggests that rejection of his/her “higher understanding” is done so at your spiritual or even physical peril. You will hear things like, “Be careful. You will move yourself from the covering and protection of God if you don’t listen to me.”
- Rewards your obedience with inclusion, and punishes your questioning or resistance with withdrawal. Compliance gets stroked; resistance gets struck.
- Demands “cathartic” honesty. Unless you spew out every detail of your life you must be hiding or withholding something and that “something” will, of course, impede your spiritual development.
- Lavishes you with praise, acceptance, and understanding when you are “good” and “pushes” you away when you are “bad.”
- Is apparently fixated on the use of titles like reverend, pastor, elder and cannot appear to relax in the company of “ordinary” mortals. The issue is not in the use of legitimate titles (or robes or religious garb) – it is that identity seems impossible without the titles or the trappings.
- Leaves a trail of cut-off relationships. Usually in the trail are those who refuse to bow, to submit, to stand in awe of, to be thoroughly entranced by, the will of the pastor, the leader or the friend. Always regard with suspicion or caution leaders who are cut off or alienated from members of their family, especially their parents.
- Lives from a “for me/or against me,” “black/white,” “all/or nothing” platform of “relationships.”
- Genuinely sees God’s Call so zealously, so fervently that any signs of resistance are seen as the expressions of The Enemy or an enemy – thus, relationships are expedient (disposable) in the light of getting on with God’s work.
The perpetrators of abuse apparently fail to see that reconciliation, and forgiveness, “space,” and room to move, and room to respectfully disagree (boundaries, morality) are all part of the glorious work of the Gospel.
Freedom begins with recognition. Recognition must result in action.
Stand up to those who misuse their positions of leadership. Spiritual abuse serves the welfare or neither the perpetrator nor the victim – quite apart from the disservice it does to the church.
All authentic holiness, spirituality, Godliness, is LOCAL. If it’s not present and respectful in the most immediate one-to-one relationships (spouse, child, secretary, mail-carrier, in the traffic, at the airline check-in, with the dog) it will not be authentic in the one-to-many relationships, no matter how many thousands or tens of thousands make up the many.
Posted in Addictions, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Domination, Family Systems Theory, Grace, High maintenance relationships, Leadership, Manipulation, Recovery, Responsive people, Sexual abuse, Spousal abuse, Therapeutic Process, Victims, Violence |
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February 26, 2017
by Rod Smith
A conversation means we both speak. You speak, I listen; I speak, you listen. We take turns. We build on what each of us has said. We ask questions related to content already shared. It’s really quite simple.
Appearing to listen while you are really waiting to speak is not listening.
The split-second you decide you know what I am going to say or think you have heard it all before is when you stopped hearing.
When I am talking and your eye contact is with your phone you are not listening. And, no, this is not the new form of multitasking. Listening takes focus and respect.
When I tell you something, respond to what I have said. Following what I’ve said with your bigger, better story, related or unrelated, reduces conversations to competitions.
Unless you are genuinely affirming people we both know I’d suggest we leave all others out of our conversation.
Our routine one-liners and well-worn war stories serve as shields. If we are really going to talk we either have to get them out of the way early on in our dialogue or we have to agree to focus on content neither of us has shared with each other before.
Posted in Boundaries, Difficult Relationships, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, High maintenance relationships, Listening, Responsive people, Triangles, Trust, Voice |
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October 16, 2016
by Rod Smith
“I read about rebound relationships – please explain.”
The term is used to describe a relationship that is in reaction to a breakup or a loss where one or both parties enters a relationship before finding “closure” on the immediate-past relationship:
- Falling in love (or into a relationship) to fill a vacuum rather than because of who the new person is.
- Falling in love (or into a relationship) because the grieving or abandoned person has apparently nowhere else to go.
- Falling in love (or into a relationship) out of anger, revenge, or to prove a point, in the wake of a troubled breakup.
- Falling in love (or into a relationship) out of a sense of novelty rather than because of who the new person is.
- Experimenting with someone and dating as a sense of loss dissipates without being honest about intentions.
- Entering a relationship because being alone is too frightening or shameful to contemplate.
- Falling into a new relationship thoughtlessly and therefore showing little or no respect oneself or for the new person.
- Entering a new relationship when the past relationship has not fully ended.
Posted in Affairs, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family, Family Systems Theory, Friendship, High maintenance relationships, Long distance relationships, Love, Manipulation, Womanhood |
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October 16, 2016
by Rod Smith
Secrets to working relationships:
- See every opportunity or challenge as a potential to learn something new or to grow in new ways. No matter how many years experience you have there’s always room to learn and to grow. Your teachers may often be half your age. Get used to it.
- See every conflict as an opportunity to learn more about grace and forgiveness. This is not some odd subservience or rolling over and playing dead. It’s acknowledging your possible part in any conflict and the willingness to learn from it – even if you didn’t cause it.
- Do what you can to cooperate even with those who are not necessarily in your camp or on your side. Building bridges is usually better than burning bridges.
- When you are wrong or make a miscalculation or a misjudgment or you over react to something admit it and make things as right as you are able. The truth is always better and easier to deal with. Nothing can be solved if you are protecting image over integrity or accuracy.
- Volunteer wildly, but stay within your skills and talents. Things work better in organizations when people do the jobs they are hired to do and resist “bleeding” into other areas they are not necessarily skilled to work in – even as a volunteer.
Posted in Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Education, Family Systems Theory, Grace, Manipulation, Reactivity |
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April 24, 2013
by Rod Smith
A man responds to the column of April 22, 2013 about being a stepfather…..
“You are correct. You will never replace you step children’s father. The children did not ask for the divorce or for you to be in their lives. Their mother will never put you ahead of her children, nor should she.”
I hear often that a mother will never place the new husband (in fact even the children’s father) before the children.
This is often touted as “good mothering.” While no counselor would suggest a parent ought to neglect children, there is a distinct difference between being a parent and a partner. It is a very healthy parent who exercises the difference.
There are conditions under which it is a healthy for parents to allow their primary commitment as a spouse to take priority over their commitments as a parent. Yes, you read correctly!
Just as it is a travesty to neglect a child, it is also a travesty to neglect a spouse, especially in the name of “putting the children first.”
I’ve seen parents hide behind “putting the children first” as a means to avoid the bravery required to be a full and functioning partner.
Sometimes it’s good for children to be in second, even third, or fourth place!
Posted in Blended families, Communication, Differentiation, Education, Family Systems Theory, Parenting/Children, Trust, Voice |
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