Skills for the Road

Whether or not your family of origin had issues, here are two lists.  Notice if you are doing the first, be kind to yourself and run as fast as you can to list 2 and change your ways!!

DO NOT:  FORCE, IGNORE, SUPPRESS, TEASE, DISPARAGE the needs and dreams of others.

DO:  LISTEN WELL, COMFORT AND VALIDATE THE UNHAPPY, MEET LEGITIMATE NEEDS (provide a basketball for a kid playing basketball), HELP WHEN APPROPRIATE TO SOLVE A PROBLEM (school bullying needs adult intervention), ENCOURAGE PASSIONATE DESIRES (lessons, coaching with organic chemistry if you want to go to vet school but find the class daunting),  BE REALISTIC, all WITHOUT SHAMING (“You sure are costing me a fortune.”) or PUNISHMENT (“I got you that basketball but now we do not have money for you to go to the movies.”)

We all have our limitations.  We can be honest about that without somehow making the kid feel responsible (this also applies to other relationships with our spouses, or employees or whoever we are in relationship with) or guilty for a legitimate need or big dream.

When our daughter was going to college it was during an economic downturn.  My husband was our sole provider and he was part of his company’s leadership team.  They worked hard to not have to layoff anyone and this meant some pay cuts while the economy rebounded.  Our daughter wanted to study finance.  She considered out-of-state schools.  Her dad explained that we could pay for in-state tuition, but not out-of-state.  She could get loans for the difference but being a person who loved to study finance, and seeing as how we were alum of UVA and they had an excellent business school - she chose UVA.  Sometimes she was disappointed that she didn’t get to go somewhere adventurous and far away.  But as an adult, she understands.  Part of supporting big dreams is ALSO developing the capacity to be realistic.  

If no one ever did this for you, please do not beat yourself up if you have trouble doing it for others.  That’s ok, awareness is key.  If this is a problem for you, find someone who can mentor you so that you can move from the DO NOT list to the DO LIST.  It’s far more satisfying!

Take your ordinary life...

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.

Romans 12:1 The Message

The sacred is made real in the mundane.  I do not have to be a Super Hero of the faith; I do not have to go to some far off land as a missionary or spend all my time at church in order to be a faithful person.  

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you (this is a sacred dance, there is stuff I am to do but it is with the awareness that God is always helping me do it).  Your sleeping, eating (good self-care), going-to-work (not some special kind of work in some mystical quest for spiritual significance whatever the work I am doing is the work I am doing), walk-around life (no compartmentalizing - I am not one person at church, another in the stands at my kids’ ball games).  Place it before God as an offering (just living life is an offering).

You’ll be changed from the inside out. (There will be some internal shifting that may precede my ability to express this in my daily living.  Patience!)

Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (I need to understand how God wants me to be in the world so that I can respond accordingly but most important I need to understand that God is my biggest advocate, my greatest supporter, he’s crazy about me and wants to support my maturation.  He’s in this out of love for me, not in an attempt to get something from me.)

In the next few days we will talk about the ways that healthy families validate, support and nurture one another.  But what helped me the most was first seeing how God went first and did these very things for us long before I was aware of his presence and provision.

Hope for Change

Somewhere in my late 20’s, early 30’s, I was sitting in a classroom and my instructor was talking about the biblical concept of love.  I turned to my friend Sandy and said, “I have never loved like this; I have never been loved like this - and if I am wrong about that it means I cannot recognize love if it smacks me on the head.”

Turns out I was wrong.  I had been loved just like the bible talks about but I had not realized it.  

Up until this time I operated under the assumption that love was conditional and that some relationships are unconditional (some relationships we are just stuck with for one reason or another) - again, wrong on both counts.  There are a million reasons for this but I won’t bore you with the details.

Here’s what emerged out of this existential crisis of faith.  I found a passage of scripture that pretty much gave me hope for the future even as I was dismantling the assumptions and firmly held beliefs of my past.  I am convinced that this biblical framework for seeing how God relates to me began a journey that continues to this day.  This journey is one that helps me become more resilient.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
3 I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.  

Romans 12:1-3 The Message

What do you notice in these words?  I’ll unpack my perspective tomorrow.

Listening and Being Heard

There are some particular ways that children can become stuck in patterns of thinking, feeling and acting as a result of growing up in an unhealthy family system.  This is predictable.  

#1. NEEDS AND DREAMS are for someone else.  I have two grandchildren at the moment and my intention is to listen to their needs and dreams, not constantly correct how they communicate them.  I am loving this job of Meme!!  There is a fine line between training a child to not be obnoxious and teaching a child that their needs are not a problem.  When an adult is insecure they want control and this often means caring more about what others are thinking about their child’s behavior than they are studying what their children need at each developmental stage.  The terrible two’s, in my opinion, are only terrible if a parent wants a baby that acts more like a doll than a son or daughter.  Sure, the loudly voiced “NO’S!!!” and frustrations that come from not being able to communicate what their little brains are already capable of processing is tough - but it is developmentally appropriate.  

In unhealthy families, parents are stressed out about other things.  They often are inattentive, do not have time to to do the hard and patient work of listening and providing.  This creates an early memory of feeling unheard.

One of my brothers tells a story of wanting to play football when he was a kid; instead, he was allowed to sign up for basketball because he could walk to the sign up station.  The coaches provided him with a practice basketball because my mom sent him with a kickball or some such non-regulation ball.  My mother probably didn’t know the difference.  

She meant no harm; but my brother has vivid memories about this story, including his gratitude for a coach who was kind.  I think it is no mistake that my brother is the guy who shows up for all his kids events; he supports their dreams.  But that is also not a particularly predictable response.  He is one of those wonderful men who learned from the past without getting stuck in the spin cycle of his memories.

My niece Kaitlin, my birthday twin, was a preschooler when she announced she wanted to be a Veterinarian.  My brother made her a vet clinic.  Last spring he pulled that 20 plus year plywood clinic out, repainted it and used it as a photo booth - AT HER GRADUATION FROM VET SCHOOL!!!

So here’s the deal - we can learn from the mistakes of others, even the unintentional ones.  But this requires us to “get unstuck”!!  For the next few days I’m going to take a timeout from talking about getting unstuck and provide some biblical context.  Stay tuned!

On Being Stuck

Today I had lunch with a woman who asked the most heartbreaking, utterly sincere question:  “Why am I stuck?”

I probed, asking what she meant by “stuck” and she pretty much meant what it sounds like.  In spite of years and years of earnestly seeking answers and possessing the uncanny ability to criticize herself mercilessly, she continues to make choices that her intellect disagrees with on a regular basis.

I can relate.  How about you?

Lunch with her was like eating with a tape recorder stuck on “play fast”.  She reeled off stories and incidents and insults and abuses from her past that sounded like well-rehearsed lines rather than a vulnerable conversation.

Eventually I had to ask her to just sit in stillness for a minute.  She couldn’t do it.  I asked her a question.  She couldn’t answer it. The best she could manage was to pause for a second, grab a deep breath and continue with her story.  

I can relate.  How about you?

We were not connecting.  She was not present.  Her eyes were not tracking with mine.  It was like she was reading out of a well-worn book that she never enjoyed.  She is stuck in the story she has been telling herself for ages. 

How about you?  Do you have any stories that you tell and retell about things that you did, were done to you, past offenses and so on?  If these stories do not change, or if the details just get exacerbated in the retelling, this might be contributing to your sense of stuck.

Finally, I interrupted AGAIN and asked a ANOTHER question:  how long has it been since these stories have provided you with insights that helped you change your own thinking, feeling and doing?

She was flummoxed.   But she is also a woman who grew up in a very sick family and she is stuck in a very familiar, particular way.  We’re going to explore this particularity for a while - see if you recognize yourself in any of the descriptions.