December 17, 2017
by Rod Smith
“I’m 28. I will marry a wonderful woman in August. My mother brainwashed me with venom about my father for 24 years. He lives nearby. I hardly know him. I think I want him at my wedding. She is threatening to boycott if he is invited or there.”
It’s your wedding. Except for your mother’s friends whom you want included, the invitation list (under these toxic conditions) is none of her business. Allow your mother hostage power now means you can expect her to try to wield similar threatening power over other matters in your married life.
The good news is you have several months to complete important work with both parents.
Contact dad. Invite him into the slow, deliberate process of deeper, appropriate, father-son intimacy. (Use your own words). Suggest a bi-weekly breakfast and tell him there will be no talk whatsoever about your mother. After a few breakfasts include the “wonderful woman.”
Stand up to your mother. Tell her you want her at the wedding but it is an invitation she may always decline. Include her on other plans – the challenge is to not alienate your mother but to clearly define your response to her controlling ways.
Defining yourself to both your parents will do more for your long-term fulfillment than anything else you do.
Posted in Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Domination, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Grace, High maintenance relationships, Marriage, Sabotage, Trust |
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December 6, 2017
by Rod Smith
Enabling is rampant in many families.
It can involve:
- Covering for someone so outsiders do not notice or find out about his or her undesirable behavior (drinking, gambling, addictive habits).
- Relaying lies to a workplace – calling in to say he or she is ill when he or she is unable to work because of the addiction.
- Permitting, turning a blind-eye, cooperating, letting things go unnoticed to keep the peace or because it feel easier.
Enabling behaviors are often subtle way of disguising who it is in a family who is in need of help. The enabler often appears to be the strong or the healthy one. Control is the name of the game – and family life can feel like one.
Empowering is common in healthy families.
It can involve:
- Getting out of each other’s way so people can learn from errors and get credit for their successes.
- Allowing natural consequences to follow choices so people can learn just how powerful really are.
- Trusting and believing in each other even when things do not go to plan or appear to be falling apart.
Empowered people require the company of other empowered people and all require a strong sense of self. Freedom to discover and to learn are the hallmark of the empowered.
Posted in Addictions, Anxiety, Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, High maintenance relationships, Listening, Manipulation, Pornography, Reactivity, Recovery, Responsive people, Sex education, Sex matters, Shame, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice |
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November 26, 2017
by Rod Smith
The Mercury / Tuesday
I’ve seen women and men painstakingly pick up pieces of their lives after a broken marriage.
This is necessary, natural, and understandable. Deep love, when it ends, at least for one party, is scarily disorientating.
Some never recover. A broken heart can really cause a slow (or a quick) death.
Perhaps you are you tripping over evidence of a terminated relationship. Letters, photographs, or books seem to appear from nowhere and evoke fresh pains or salt for the wounds.
A purge may be necessary, but it’s not for all.
The loot may be all you have. It can become a crucial stepping-stone to greater health. Or it can be a debilitating anchor.
I’ve been confused about why some friendships have ended. I examine memories for clues to what, how, and why things went wrong.
There are times this is unnecessary.
My damaging role is painfully clear.
The pain I caused is deep for others and obvious to me. And, my own and deserved pain is utterly near.
What do we do with our pain – deserved or not?
Options are unlimited once confession occurs.
Confession, of course, does not mean mutual forgiveness is inevitable. It’s not.
Options broaden with confession and commitment to learn from the past.
Posted in Addictions, Affairs, Anger, Anxiety, Betrayal, Boundaries, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Domination, Education, Faith, Family Systems Theory, Grace, Grief, Listening, Manipulation, Meditation, Past relationships, Re-marriage, Reactivity, Recovery, Responsive people, Sex matters, Sexual compatibility, Spousal abuse, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice |
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November 16, 2017
by Rod Smith
What is the year teaching you? Please, reflect and let me know. Here are a few things I am learning afresh and re-learning:
- Trust broken is hard to restore. My experience is that forgiveness can restore broken trust but the ability to trust again can take a long time to restore. This is especially so with close friendships and infidelity in marriage.
- No one is more important than anyone else. To be intimidated by another is a waste of opportunity and energy. Yes, we all have different roles. We are afforded a variety of degrees of power and responsibility that come with our varying roles, but using that power to lord it over another is the surest indication that the power is in the wrong hands.
- Some individuals are so significantly hurt that the real person has disappeared behind shame, regret, and pretense. The defense has become the identity. The vulnerable person inside died a very long time ago and, sadly, will probably never be known.
- Ignored conflicts and family issues that are unaddressed will remain and usually grow. The issues may change shape, may go into hiding, may remain latent for decades – but they will surface and get necessary attention.
Posted in Anxiety, Attraction, Blended families, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Leadership, Love, Manipulation, Parenting/Children, Past relationships, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Triggers, Trust, Womanhood |
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October 9, 2017
by Rod Smith
Nine things I learned from my father – and some of them not too well:
- “There, but for the Grace of God, go I.” This he said when seeing anyone in a tight spot, self imposed or not.
- “What if it was us, Mavis?” This was his appeal to my mother who tended to want to watch expenses more than he did.
- Radical hospitality. Stories of our father opening our home to strangers were legendary.
- “Make your words soft and sweet in case you have to eat them.” He used this when I was judgmental or harsh.
- “Don’t carry your fish in a violin case.” My father despised all pretension.
- “Build bridges; don’t burn them.” My father feared cut-offs.
- “A man who is going the wrong way down a one-way street already knows it – he needs help turning around.” Forever benevolent, my father championed the underdog.
- “Rather be fooled because you trusted too much than because you trusted too little.” And, sadly, he was frequently duped.
- “If the child needs milk the child needs milk – milk is more important to that child than the money is to me.” He’d open his grocery shop at all hours of the night and give milk to the mother of a hungry baby.
What did you learn from yours. Let me know.
Posted in Blended families, Boundaries, Communication, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Forgiveness, Friendship, Grace, Leadership, Listening, Living together, Love, Responsive people, Therapeutic Process, Trust |
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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 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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July 30, 2017
by Rod Smith
Five (very lofty) goals for the week
Teach, facilitate group so students and staff are empowered to find, enjoy, and use their backbones, most creative brains, and voices, each to maximum of his or her current level of helpful, “growthful” discomfort. (Yes, I occasionally make up my own words).
Facilitate each student’s possibility for growth (to get bigger or smaller) into his or her appropriate size (a) as a distinct individual, (b) as a distinct individual in within a variety of contexts (like current or immediate family, family of origin, a class of students, a sub-culture and a broad culture of national heritage), and (c) finally, as a member of the Church, immediate and universal. This means examining contexts, roles, boundaries, skills, talents, gifts, and resources.
Jesus, Herds, Traingles and a Woman
Teach, model (if it possible) Differentiation of Self by “watching” it in Scripture. We will use three Gospel encounters to illustrate this delicious way of life.
Give practical insights into healthy or unhealthy TRIANGLES, GENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION, HERDING, and other usually INVISIBLE pressures that can undermine or sabotage healthy individual, family, and organizational functioning. We will use two, perhaps three, Gospel encounters in order to illustrate.
Give practical tools to minimize individual and group anxiety, to grow and support healthy invisible individual and group loyalties, and to develop the awareness of necessary sifts from REACTIVITY to RESPONSIVENESS, from STEMMING and EMOTING to THINKING, and from AMPLIFYING or IGNORING to EMBRACING and EMPOWERING.
Further reading: Bowen, Murray; Friedman, Edwin; Schnarch, David; Gilbert, Roberta; Satir, Virginia; Framo, James; Minuchen, Salvador
Posted in Anxiety, Boundaries, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Education, Faith, Family, Family Systems Theory, Friendship, High maintenance relationships, Leadership, Listening, Love, Parenting/Children, Reactivity, Recovery, Responsive people, Schnarch, Therapeutic Process, Triangles, Trust, Voice, Womanhood, YWAM |
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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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