BETWEEN PARENT AND TEENAGER

One of the joys of life is the opportunity to learn from others.

Since I wrote "Lose, Love, Live" I have had numerous opportunities to do workshops on grief and loss.  One workshop resulted in an insight that had never occurred to me.

Mark, a youth minister who was in the group listened to me talk about how people respond when they experience a loss. I talked of how people often feel scared when they are losing something that really matters. Anger is generally present in those times.  Anger is normal because anger is a physical response to threat. When we feel threatened the body dispenses adrenaline in our system to give us energy to fight what threatens us, flee from it, or freeze so that the threat might not notice us.  When we lose something that helps us know who we are, we are threatened and get angry.

After the workshop Mark came up to me and said, "This explains the conflict that I deal with all the time when I work with youth and their parents.  At the same time teenagers are reaching for their independence, they are also losing the security and safety of dependence.  Parents, while encouraging independence, are losing the relationship they had with children who were more under their control. That is why there is so much anger."

Mark's observation is important.  Parents and teenagers alike are losing life the way they knew it.  As changes happen, no one is totally confident on how life will turn out. While there is much to celebrate in the new place that both the parent and the teenager occupy, there is much to fear.  That fear results in feeling threatened and thus in feeling anger.

Since this is one of the dynamics between parents and teenagers, knowing that each is dealing with loss can help. Each can listen to the other and help the other explore what is so frightening about these changes. Each can explore what they are afraid they will lose and try to determine if there are grounds for that fear. Some losses may not occur. For example, the normal distancing that happens as a young person becomes independent does not necessarily mean that the relationship will disappear.

When you feel anger rising in your relationships, ask yourself, "What am I afraid I am going to lose?"  It might help you understand and navigate the turbulent waters of parenting. 

CONFUSING EMOTIONS

I have spent much of the past 15 years of my life exploring the impact of change and loss on human life.  I have read the insights of many and explored my own experience.  Some of my discoveries are in a little book I published entitled, "Lose, Love, Live: The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change."

But, since I first wrote that book I have encountered other epiphanies that contribute to my understanding of this subject.  I have long known that significant loss can make one feel totally out of control.  The emotions that people feel fluctuate so quickly that one feels like one is on an emotional roller-coaster.  Some people feel as if they are going crazy.  These emotional shifts are so frequent and disconcerting that panic sets in.

To grieve loss well, it is important to feel the range of emotions and to be able to speak about them.  Speaking about our emotions help us get some insights into our own actions and also gain some strength to carry those emotions.  But, many have difficulty speaking about their feelings.

I recently read a book (Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides ) which contributed to  my thinking about why it might be difficult to speak about those emotions. The narrator writes about the conflicting emotions of his grandmother when she thought her husband had died.  She not only was overcome with a sudden sense of panic and sadness, but also, almost at the same moment, a sense of happiness that the secret of their life would not be revealed. He then says, "Emotions in my experience are not covered by single words." He then proceeds to search for complex words that would express the complexity of simultaneous, conflicting feelings.

He goes on to postulate that the belief that we can name emotions in single words "may be the best proof that the language is patriarchal in that it over simplifies feeling."  The implication is that men are more inclined to shrink feelings to words that they can comprehend and control than are women.  

Now, I am not inclined to generalize. But, grieving loss requires experiencing the feelings that we feel. Being able to name them helps. And whether your are a man or woman, the ability to simplify feelings is compromised when you suffer the trauma of significant loss. If you know that one who is grieving can’t simplify feelings, you can be patient with them (whether it is you who are grieving or someone about whom you care.)  When the crisis of loss occurs, our disorientation is made worse because of the complexity of our feelings. It takes time to name those feelings.

When you are in a situation like this, allow yourself or another person to name their feelings over and over because they are so complex.  Be patient with yourself or others.  Create opportunities for those feelings to be spoken.  When that occurs, we gain strength to navigate the pain that overwhelms us. 

YOU MATTER

I am a parent of three children.  Adults now. It has been a long time since I had young children at home but I suspect that children still can be both delightful and demonic.  They can bring joy and chaos. And and that may be one of the gifts of their presence. They tap the deep diversity of the human spirit and thus, enrich our lives.

I read something today that I thought might speak to an important part of parenting.  Yesterday I watched the Indianapolis Colts come from 28 points down to beat the Kansas City Chiefs 45-44.  Sports writers couldn't say enough about it. People commenting from Indianapolis and Kansas City were initially speechless.

In analyzing the game, some Colts players were talking about how poorly they played the first half, digging themselves a 28 point hole to get out of. One of the players said, "We weren't trusting each other.  We had to depend on everyone to do their job."

Just as a good football team needs to trust each other to do his job, family life is more dependable when "everyone does his/her job".  I remember as a child that we each had "chores."  Many of my memories of family conflicts were around our not doing our chores or not doing them well enough.  I am sure one of my parents thought more than once, "It would be  easier to do it myself."

And as a child, I didn't like having responsibility.  But, now I understand that those jobs or chores were ways in which my parents taught me that I mattered.  I mattered to the family system  I was important to the social fabric of my family life. I made a contribution to the lives of others. Things go better when each of us does his/her job.

This is not a bad thing to know.  We matter.  It matters to the family team that each does his/her job. We know we matter when what we do contributes to the well-being of the whole.  For a child to know this is a wonderful gift.

HABITS

When we talk about "habits", we generally think of patterns, customs or practices.  Good or bad habits are the things we do over and over, often without thinking about them.

Sometimes we decide to change our bad habits. We think we will quite one thing and do another thing. We have a lot of confidence in our ability to act on what we decide.

But, anyone who has tried to break a bad habit knows that self-consciousness about it doesn't always result in the ability to stop doing it.  I remember as a child I chewed my finger-nails.  I tried everything to stop it: clear nail polish, slapping my hand, etc. Being conscious about it was not enough.

Because you see, a habit is not simply what we do. It is place we live.  The root of the word habit means "to dwell in" or to "dress".  In other words it is not simply something we do but it enfolds us, it is where we live or what we clothe ourselves with.

And this helps us see that habits are not simply about an individual decision at a particular moment in time, but they surround us and hold us.  The patterns we develop are not only places of comfort for us as individuals, but they are built into the social systems that hold us and the relationships we inhabit.

Alcoholics Anonymous understands this.  When a person tries to deal with alcoholism, they are encouraged to change their social habitat. They avoid places where people are doing that which they are trying to overcome. They find social groups to inhabit who propagate other values that they embrace.

It seems to me that one of the keys to making changes in our lives is to look at our habitat and see what changes we might want to make to the social systems that hold us.  If we change what we surround ourselves with, we might find it easier to develop new patterns of behavior.

TOO SIMPLE

As I watch popular pundits explore New Year's resolutions I am struck by how simple they make change look. It only takes 5 minutes a day to develop your abs, you can lose weight simply by drinking a certain concoction, you can live more simply by getting rid of clutter.  Our culture thrives on 2 minute segments and happy posters. We are seduced by simplicity.

And as such, we make decisions to change, work at it for a while and often find that we revert to older patterns of behavior. Most resolutions assume that if we just have more will-power and work harder we will be able to make fundamental changes in our lives.

And I do think commitment and will-power matters.  Nothing much happens unless someone is committed to doing it.

But, my experience causes me to question the sufficiency of will-power.  And that is because we are all part of communities of influence.  We are part of families, social groups, churches, neighborhoods, etc.  And as participants in those social communities, we are not only recipients of their graces, but we are also influenced by their needs and desires.  So, to make changes in ourselves results in changes in the social system.  And that is where the rub comes.

For example, when I had young children at home my daily routine included a great deal of time spent in planning and facilitating life for more than me.  If I decided that I was going to change my routine so that I could exercise more, my ability to keep up the practice was influenced by my family adapting to that.  Now social systems are powerful forces in our lives.  They are designed to maintain patterns of behavior that perpetuate the sustainability of the system.  They are not readily amenable to individuals in the system just deciding to change the way they are doing things. So resolving to exercise more wasn't that simple. 

Now, I am not suggesting that we can't change.  I am not cynical about change.  I am suspicious of any change that people think is simple.  And I don't debunk New Year  resolutions.  But, if we keep making them and think that it will be simple to just muster enough will-power to make them happen without taking into account all the other people in our social systems, we set ourselves up for failure.  And when we fail over and over again, it gets discouraging.

So, as you think of a change or two you might want to make this year, think carefully about what impact that change might have on others and the way you contribute to others social system.  Invite those who are impacted into conversations about your goals.  See if they are willing to give up some of what you were offering for the sake of your desire to improve you own life.  After all, when you are healthy and taking responsibility for your own life, they will have a greater chance to keep you around in their system longer.