The Holidays are fast approaching! Some of you are looking forward to a relaxing family visit, many of you are slightly panicked at the thought of facing a challenging family visit. Greg Liotta, CSR's Program Coordinator, is here to help!
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| Ugh. This again. |
Holiday Primer:
Expanding One’s Spiritual Life at the Family Visit
Greg Liotta, MSW
November 13, 2013
With Thanksgiving a
couple of weeks away, holiday season is bearing down on us, and I'll admit I am
excited. I have family in NYC and Ohio, and am trying to figure out how
to see them all. I wish everyone could be together in one place. I just
can’t wait to get together with them, to see my loving father and laugh with my
siblings, all of whom I’ve come to admire quite a bit, and be delighted by their
children. But, I’ll be honest: it wasn’t always like this. There
was a time I loathed the holidays, particularly the way it forced all of us to
break bread at the same table again. Forced to sit with people I “didn’t
choose”, didn’t feel appreciated by, didn’t appreciate in return, and wouldn’t
select as my friends. Holiday gatherings would invariably end up with bickering
and unbridled resentments flying. The holiday post-mortem always included
a scathing critique of any number of family members, phone calls to dissect the
dramas and fuel the latest family scandal. This went on for a number of
years when my siblings and I were all in our 20’s. I once penned an article
titled “the dreaded family visit” which expressed my feelings about the ordeal.
I never published it for fear of offending too many people.
Indeed, the holidays
are universally acknowledged to be a stressful time for most people, whether in
recovery or not. There’s no need to elaborate on all of the many
compromises to emotional, physical, and spiritual health that are made during
this time of year. We all know about the devastating effects that
overindulgence, disrupted routines, financial pressures, and looming
end-of-the-year deadlines have on people. Stress reaches its apex at
the end of the year for all sorts of reasons. Nothing new there.
The point of this essay is to take a look at the dynamics between family
members, offer a different perspective about them, and provide a doorway for
expanding within them.
Who Am I? Who Am I in Relation to You? What is My
Value? These are the
fundamental questions each of us carries from childhood into adulthood.
We organize our identities around them. From the moment we take
our first breath, our immediate impressions become imprinted into the psyche,
so in a sense, one’s identity is subject to disruption when things around us
change. As such, we tend to keep others “in their place” even when they
move out, grow up, and forge new identities in the world. For many years
I experienced total disorientation at family holiday visits. After moving
about the world in new skin as a man of respect, garnering acknowledgement in
the circles I traveled, once home I experienced myself as an 8-year-old boy all
over again. Some of that had to do with being back in familiar
surroundings that brought to life the 8-year-old boy in me. Some of that
had to do with rigid, entrenched views my parents and siblings had of me, a
view that I was not able to shake despite who I had become in the world.
And some of that had to do with how easy it was for me to slip back into
old patterns of behaving whenever I got around my family…like an 8-year-old.
Picking on my sister, goofing with my brother, rebelling against my
parents. I wanted to be seen as a man, but felt like a child.
And, like a child, I resented them for not seeing me as a man. In some
ways, they couldn’t help it. If you’ve ever had a puppy or kittens,
you’ll know what I am talking about. Even when they are old and grey, you
always see them as a kitten or a puppy. I’d be rich if I had a dime for
every time I've heard mothers say, about their fully grown children, “He’s my
baby”. Um, no lady, he’s not a “baby”. He’s a 35-year-old man.
Family constellations
can be incredibly rigid, having been forged for many generations.
Sometimes the weight of a family pattern is like a boulder rolling
down a hill for 20 generations. Often that force is too powerful for
parents, who pass that down to you like a hot potato. For the one
entering recovery, you might be the first one to stop that boulder from ramming
into the next generation. But for most families, maintaining
these old views and modes of behavior is essential to maintaining a certain
order. Even if it’s out of tune, at least the tune is familiar. The
collective consciousness of a family operates just like the ego: it wraps
things up in a neat package (even if it’s “messy”), makes sense of things,
and puts things in place, regardless of how unhelpful or insane it is. And
it will fight tooth and nail to keep things (i.e. you, your role, expectations,
routines) in their place, regardless of your efforts to break ranks and
(um, become sober?) shift into a new identity.
For many people, it
is essential to their self-identity that they keep you trapped in the vision
they held of you as a child. Their own narrative may be intricately tied
into their narrative of who you are, so once you return, even in a new
incarnation, old interpersonal dynamics will re-emerge. You will be thrust
back into your inner 8-year-old. Relatives often need to see you through
the eyes of who you were because that is the ground upon which they understand
themselves. This can be unnerving to a recovering person, or any
adult seeking to re-frame or even re-script a more empowering personal
narrative.
This syndrome
is not only reserved for family members. It often manifests in the workplace as
well, where the “experts” all have to come from outside the company. A
variation on the old, “if she loves me, there must be something wrong with her”
syndrome. As in, “If she’s a part of this family, she must be
bonkers.” That lack of self-validation
is always reflected in a lack of ability to bless others by seeing them in their
highest light. A self-critical person will invariably focus on your
failings before all else. Self-loathing is usually characterized by an
inability to give or receive authentic praise. As such, shame-based
families can be the toughest to revisit when one is attempting to transcend old
paradigms.
Viewing oneself
through the eyes of others is almost always an invitation to dive into the
quicksand of shame. Whenever I am reflecting on some earlier mistake
I made, or some situation I handled without skill, I project how I think others
judge me. I do violence to my own psyche by telling myself stories about
what a jerk so-and-so thinks I am, and how right they are. The more
I reflect on that, the more it expands, until I am thinking of a whole crowd of
people who think I’m a jerk, so therefore…I must be a jerk. When in
reality, sometimes I just don’t have the skills to handle particular
situations. Shame can’t see behavior as skill-based. Shame wants to
judge behavior as character, so “lack of skills” becomes “she thinks I’m a jackass”
which becomes “I am a jackass”. This condition can hang around a
good 10, 20, even 30 years past the actual event. Invariably, I
invite my own suffering by giving energy to what I think others think of me
when I was not my best. And when I do that, it is impossible for me
to realize the seed of magnificence I was destined to be.
However, this
is not even the biggest problem. The real challenge comes when you ALSO
see yourself through the eyes of your own less mature self.
This is where the trouble really gets traction. When you hold onto
a vision of yourself from the perspective of a less mature, less whole, and
more insecure aspect of yourself, this can threaten your attempt to reinvent
yourself. You know that you are still seeing yourself through those eyes
when your inner 8-year-old is triggered around others who cannot see the person
you have become. The family holiday visit becomes the “dreaded family
visit” only when these old paradigms rise up and disrupt your emerging new
self. This is your clue that the shift has not yet completed its cycle.
Until a few years
ago, I had not yet made that shift. I had many accomplishments already in
the “adult” world, but when I returned home I still longed for that
acknowledgement from my family. And when it didn’t come, I was
disappointed and then resentful, and carried out that grudge by refusing to
acknowledge my siblings for the powerful people they had become. Those
were difficult years. Thankfully, that acknowledgment never really did come,
because, like most siblings, our dynamic was established to compete for
parental acknowledgment, not fraternal support. And that withholding
became a gift, because I was forced to let go of that longing. I was
forced to come to peace with who I was for the sake of who I was. I had
to answer the questions “Who am I?”, “Who am I in relation to you?” and “what
is my value?” without being given the answers. It forced me to come to
terms with the 8-year-old in me who was still making noise, demanding to be acknowledged
despite not really feeling adequate or worthy. The 8-year-old in me who
couldn’t let go of an 8-year-old’s world, even while living inside a grown man
surrounded by grown siblings. And here is the elixir: I had to start
feeding that child by feeding others. When that happened I was able to
start noticing - and acknowledging - the amazing and powerful people my
siblings were. I was able to acknowledge the human beings that my parents
were and stop holding them hostage to ideals that no human could fulfill.
The holidays - and
the family visit in particular - are opportunities to expand one’s spiritual
life, for “conscious contact with god” is nothing less than acknowledging the
reality of life as it is right now, in this very moment, without
the big dramatic story around it. I cannot say whether or not it is a
conscious decision or a gradual, organic unfolding, but at a certain point one
is asked to stretch and become the person one aspires to be. It
is independent of family acknowledgement (or non-acknowledgement). It is
to render moot the middle question: “who am I in relation to you”, and
turn it into “how can I best love you for who you have become in this world?”
The reframing of that middle question informs/ transforms the other two questions.
"Who am I” becomes “love”, and “what is my value?” becomes
“invaluable”. So long as I am trying to “get” something from my family,
showing up with my eyes big and hungry, my hands stretched out like a
beggar on the street, I am incapable of giving life to the man I aspire to be.
When I show up hungry like that, there’s no way I can give anything.
Showing up like that sets up the old dynamic. "Expectations are
resentments under construction.”
Ultimately, it is
irrelevant if any member of my family accepts me or my life choices and
decisions. Here’s where the chains loosen. Everybody likes approval, but
it’s not a prerequisite for happiness. It would certainly be easier if
everybody embraced me in my recovery and my big bag of unresolved issues. It
would be awesome if everybody applauded me for all my gains and
accomplishments, and gave me an award for…ANYthing. But the paradox is
this: one does not become a man/a woman until one is able to step into that
space on one’s own. So long as there is a need for validation, there will
always be a clinging, a security blanket, an umbilical cord. Maturity
might be best defined as coming to the realization that I alone am responsible
for validating who I am. I am responsible for my own peace and happiness.
One expands beyond the borders of a less mature self when you are able to
look beyond self, and see how you can love the people in your family. It
may be true, that we don’t “choose” our families. But if that is so,
there must be some reason we are thrust by the universe together with them.
Perhaps one reason might be so that we let go of concerns about “me” and “what
they think of me”, and focus on “what can I give them?” and “How can I
love them - where they need to be loved - without having to make them fit
my image of perfect?” That includes the
graceful yet effective skill of setting boundaries: “how can I love
myself in the presence of this person’s ignorance and destructiveness?”;
“How can I set limits in such a way that honors my boundaries yet preserves
our relationship?”; “How can I say ‘no’ to that behavior and still say
‘yes’ to who he/she is?”. Ultimately,
the experience of the family holiday becomes a
wonderful experience when one agrees to let go of old, out-moded
perspectives. It is a growing up, and growing up requires one to give up
reaching, grabbing, and trying to accumulate. It requires letting go of
the desire to shine, and instead shining the light of acknowledgement on the
people that show up, especially family members. Instead of seeing them through
the eyes of my history (as told by an 8-year-old), I can practice seeing them
through the eyes of love: exactly as they ARE.
“When I was a
child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but
when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a
mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know
just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Cor 13
Greg Liotta, MSW
Program Coordinator
Center for Students
in Recovery
UT Austin
November 13, 2013
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