Nobody thanks the doormat

I was out to dinner with my friend Lucy the other night. We were catching up and she was sharing about her feelings of being unsupported at home. She said that she had a wake-up call the other night when the family was playing a game and one of the questions was ‘what one word would you use to describe your mom?’. Her 13 year old daughter, Marissa, answered ‘maid’. She was hit by the realization that this is what her daughter really thinks of what she does for her. She said she was starting to feel resentful and angry and doesn’t want to just try to make her daughter appreciate her, but really wants to make a change. She gets that she somehow did this, but has no idea how or how to change it now.

The good news for my friend is that she gets that she is responsible for her daughter’s view of her. She has worked so hard to be a good mother that she created an environment where all of Marissa’s needs were met timely and competently that Marissa wasn’t required to meet many of them herself. This was ok when she was little, but Marissa is now an adolescent and has come to believe that her world is a world of low responsibility and high care. She is required to take care of her basic hygiene and schoolwork but Lucy admits to struggles with trying to make Marissa meet time schedules and needing to cue her to do simple things like brush her teeth. Marissa doesn’t have any other responsibilities as Lucy felt that she should concentrate on her schoolwork. She also said that things just went faster when she did them herself.

The fact is that we teach people how to treat us. This means everyone from our bosses to our children. What we bring to those encounters on a moment to moment basis teaches others about what we will and will not accept. It shows them how we feel about ourselves, our self-respect, our self value, our integrity, our yes’ and our no’s. We don’t even have to say much to communicate all of this, we carry it in our body language and in our presence.

In my friend’s case, what she hoped to teach her daughter through all of her care, attention and good-mothering, was that she is loved, and that she is capable of doing well in school and in life if she attends to things in the way she taught her to, i.e. meeting deadlines, finishing tasks, doing quality work, doing her best at everything, and being willing to go the extra mile. What she actually taught her was if you are loveable, and maybe a little helpless, those who love you will do for you and everything will be fine. Because Lucy was just as committed to feeling like a good mother and winning everyone’s love and respect as to being a good mother, her need for mirroring kept her from expecting more involvement by Marissa in her own care and work as her development progressed. She has never had to do chores, doesn’t have any responsibilities except to feed the cat, and most of the time forgets that.

Here are some tips I gave my friend to turn her train to martyrdom around:

1. Have a meeting with her family and come clean as the angry doormat that she has become. Show them the list of all the jobs involved with keeping the house and family running, and which ones she is doing. Let them know her feelings about them not stepping in during summer vacation, or while her husband hasn’t been working, etc. Be honest and openhearted about her desire for a more balanced family system that keeps things running but is shared more equally. Then allow the other family members to come forward with suggestions, ideas and discuss which things they would like to take on and set up a plan. Investment by all members is a key. She needs to step out of the Directors seat and allow for more input and less control on her part.

2. Seek support for her feelings along the way through groups, classes, etc.. Lucy needs to build tolerance to feeling frustrated and scared when she isn’t sure if Marissa is going to complete her tasks at home or school the way she would, or the way she thinks Marissa should. She will need to learn to find the right place in this developmental piece with her adolescent, so that Marissa can begin to learn self-discipline, self-manage and experience the joy of her own successes, as well as learn from her failures. There are many support groups available that can be very helpful in making changes in how we deal with the people in our life.

3. Marissa and her dad will need to form a different alliance as family members with voting rights, but also with responsibilities. At this point their biggest felt responsibility is to keep mom happy. That isn’t a skill set even if it is used by millions of people. Pleasing isn’t loving and it is never experienced as authentic. It is based in fear and manipulation and never in love and respect.

4. It would be very good if the family could do a few sessions of family therapy to learn better communication skills, team building and to help rebalance the power structure that is there right now. A family that wants to make a change like this often benefits from outside help. It is very hard to do it on their own with patterns that have become entrenched like these. More times than not the family just falls back into conditioned behaviors and ends up where they started.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Have set family meetings and try and make sure that there are regular family dinners. My friend has the tendency to let her daughter occupy the conversation during dinners, and rarely talks about herself or her day. It isn’t up to others to draw us out into conversation. That is more about our own early history in our families. When we are treated like our feelings don’t matter, or are unwelcome, we learn to try and get them out through cuing. We might use body language, or silence, or looks that cue others to ask after our feelings. It is manipulative and based in fear and shouldn’t be a part of healthy communication.

Hearts are meant to be broken

Your pain

is the breaking of the shell

that encloses your understanding. ~K. Gibran

When I came out of my house the other day, my neighbor and his two little girls approached me. Dad was carrying a bird’s nest and I commented on it. Julia, who is 4 and precocious, piped right up “We are going to have a funeral.” Dad filled in that they had been watching a nesting Mourning Dove pair for a few weeks and were anxiously awaiting the baby birds. “It fell and the eggs got squished!” announced Julia’s older sister Tamara. “Oh no!” I said and immediately my mind went to who knocked it down, who do we need to talk to about, it etc. Julia brought me back though. “Yeah, we are going to go later and scoop the eggs up. They are all bloody.” At that she winced, and then teared up a little, “it’s sad” she said. Her older sister had moved away and dad was ready to talk about the ‘whodunits’ with me, but thank goodness for Julia. Her little heart was broken for these little squished eggs and brought the two adults back to theirs. “I think it is sad too.” I said. Dad adds, “we are going to have a little ceremony later on.” I nod looking at this beautiful open-hearted girl work through her grief at lightening speed. “Maybe we can bury them in our back yard so that we can visit them and they won’t miss their mommy and daddy.” She was sad, feeling the loss of the little birds that she was waiting for and now would never see, making sense of the bloody eggs and what they meant, and sorting out how to deal with the separation that loss brings by burying them close to her. “Maybe we can leave a note for their mommy and daddy birds so they know where to find them?” With that dad and the girls moved into the house talking about why birds can’t read.

What I was reminded of from all of this is that hearts are meant to be broken. Put another way, hearts are never meant to become unbreakable. We are supposed to feel the ordinary losses of our day to day lives and have it deepen our compassion for ourselves and for others. The goal has never been to live unscathed by our pain, even though you would never guess that by what we see all around us these days. It seems like every where we look, especially in the media, we see messages telling us all the ways we can move away from discomfort - physical, emotional and spiritual. We have been conditioned to believe that pain is unnatural, sadness is a problem and that we are supposed to be happy all the time. Not only is that impossible, it would be horrible for our culture if it were possible. The Narcissist would reign, and empathy and mercy would leave our world. It is through our experience of our own pain that we find our way to our humanity, and to letting go of our delusion of perfection.

We all start out like little Julia, openhearted children, vulnerable to our feelings, impacted by the world around us. Then we meet the world of the adults that have gone before us. We are taught, through word or deed, the consequences of having an open heart. Sometimes it is a positive thing, but most of the time it isn’t. We learn to protect our hearts from the world and the other people in it, believing that if we don’t it would not survive the pain of it all. We cover it with layer upon layer of protective batting, or we find a safe place to keep it, away from the world of others hearts. A lot of the time we just find ways to numb our selves to our feelings, period, removing the risk of vulnerability to them. We learn to shift from heart-centered to head-centered and think our way through our relationships and our lives.

There is really no such place as safe when it comes to our hearts, there is only alone. The distance we maintain from our pain translates into our distance from those we love. By risking a broken-heart, or an unprotected one, we allow our hearts to cover the distance to each other that our minds have created trying to keep us safe from feeling. As Stephen Levine said, “The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.”

Letting Go of Personalizing and Reclaiming Your Self

“Don’t take it personally!” We have all heard it. We have all said it. But what on earth does it mean? How can it not be personal when it feels so personal?

Personalizing is one way we use to try and make sense of our experience. Most of us learned it at home when the adults were struggling with their own lives and creating confusion in ours. One of a child’s most useful survival mechanisms is to make it about them. It helps them make sense of the confusion and creates a false sense of control for them by letting them believe that it is about them and therefore they can do something about it. Much easier to sleep when dad’s anger can be calmed by good grades and helpfulness, or when mom’s sadness can be lifted by taking care of younger siblings and letting her sleep. We did it then because it worked. We do it now because we don’t know anything else.

The truth of our childhoods is that we were the children, they were the adults and in charge. As adults our parents were responsible and accountable for their choices. The fact that it impacted you is also on them, but, time isn’t negotiable and here you are now. You can’t change how you learned to personalize other’s stuff, but you can change it.

Childhood tools aren’t going to be very effective in our adult worlds. They may be useful in the same way they were in our childhoods, i.e. give us a good false sense of control, but they won’t contribute to our growth or our happiness. They also derail adult communication and leave us wondering what we did wrong or why the other person is such a jerk or both. The truth is that communication is only as adult as the people involved. You can assume that there is an emotional adult on the other end of the relationship string, but that doesn’t mean there is.

Some things to remember about personalizing that may help you steer clear of it:

1. When we personalize our experience we are not in our adult selves. We are in our vulnerable child selves and possessed by our unmet need to be valued and have our feelings matter. Not that those aren’t fine things, but, the adult version is more tolerant of disappointment and can allow for other people and their lives, their unavailability and their issues. Our child selves just get confused and hurt.

2. Feelings don’t determine behavior. I know that is hard to accept. We all want to believe that if someone loves us that they will make good choices when it comes to things that may impact us. That doesn’t mean feelings for us don’t factor in, they do, but they don’t always stop a bad idea.

3. People are people, good, kind, selfish, self-centered and chronically disappointing. They usually mean well but they mess up all the time. It is not a good idea to project an idealized parent on one of them as an adult. You are going to be very unhappy if you do.

If you find yourself in an ‘it’s about me’ moment, try the ‘Pause, Look and Listen” approach:

Pause. Just take a beat before you react. Don’t pick up the phone and call a friend, don’t collapse into to your hurt feelings. Pause, breathe and then,

Look. Most likely you know the people involved with this situation if it is getting to you. Look closely at what they did, why, who you know them to be, not to be, their history with you, their trustworthiness, etc. This is where you want ‘just the facts ma’am’ and no assumptions or projections. People are who they are and not who we need or want them to be, and they have usually been that way all along. Then,

Listen. Listen to your feelings, even the yucky, vulnerable ones. No one likes to feel disappointed but it is part of life and happens to each of us daily. All we really know when something doesn’t go our way, or the way we hoped, expected or thought it would, is that it didn’t and that we have feelings about it. Good! Feel them, get to know them, and learn from them. They are part of your internal feed-back system that keeps you on your own path, not just a follower of some one else’s.