Tag: belonging

The Set Up

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“Strong people don’t put others down. They lift them up.” – Michael P. Watson

When I was 19-years-old and attending the University of Washington, my older sister, 23-years-old at the time, moved back to Washington to attend law school. She’d hated me growing up and I was desperate for her approval.

College had seemed to soften my sister. She’d gotten her undergraduate degree in southern California and it seemed to suit her. My sister is incredibly smart and competitive. She played number 1 or number 2 on her college tennis team so she’d been successful both academically and athletically.

But at about age 19, she’d fallen in love with a married guy who was in his 40’s. She didn’t know he was married for a year or so by the time she figured it out, she was in deep. He didn’t play fair either – giving her lavish gifts like a car and not letting her go.

When she was accepted at law school near Seattle, my parents thought it was a great opportunity to get her away from that personal entanglement.

At the time, I was a sorority girl at UW, blithely making my way through classes and frat parties without too much angst. Having my sister nearby AND acting like she liked me was topping on the cake. When she wanted to set me up with the friend of the boyfriend she’d just started dating, it seemed like everything was on track.

The guy was 10 years older than me and lived in Binghampton, NY. He was in Seattle on a contract to build flight simulators for Boeing. He seemed so sophisticated and grown-up to me and I was IN LOVE!

About six weeks after we started dating, my sister told me he was married. She made me swear that I wouldn’t tell him that I knew. The image that I remember running through my head was of all our double dates with my sister and her boyfriend. Whenever the four of us were together, I was the only one that didn’t know that key piece of information, and they all knew I didn’t know or even suspect. I felt so stupid.

I dated him for another couple of months and then broke it off. I did tell him I knew – and the details of how that went are super fuzzy now. But he was pretty decent, relatively speaking since we are talking about a married guy having an affair with a college kid, about letting me walk away.

My sister said very little. I’ve come to believe now that my sister has carried a wound of not feeling like she belonged in our family. The pessimist amongst a group of optimists. The one that won’t go along to get along. The complainer. Whether she had intended to or not, I believe she’d wanted me to experience the same quagmire of dating someone who was married that she had.

Like when she sued my brother, it seems that wound has been driving her for a lifetime. Her anthem, even now in our 50’s, is “the other kids are just as bad as me.”

No doubt about that. We are all flawed characters. But my response, which has gotten louder as I’ve worked to heal my wounds, is “let’s lift others up, not drag them down.” The right kind of set up.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Forgiveness or Letting Go?

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“Forgiveness does not require reconnection.” – unknown

I was recently reading the section of Why Won’t You Apologize by psychologist and therapist Dr. Harriet Lerner where she makes the distinction between forgiveness and letting go. Here’s Dr. Lerner’s description of forgiveness, “I use the word forgiveness sparingly and only when it is earned through a process of open-hearted listening and self-examination.”

She goes on to say, “..the word forgiveness is not a word I use to describe this compassionate or accepting place that I may or may not come to when I feel wronged by someone who can’t get it, who is too defensive to take in what I am saying, and who will never genuinely feel that they have something to apologize for.”  

It made me think of my family. I’ve said often that I work so hard to make sure my kids are friends because I grew up feeling like my sister, who is four years older, hated me. While we’ve had times in our lives where we got along fine, that hasn’t been our primary place.

About 6 years ago, my sister met my daughter for the one and only time. During that short visit (about an hour or two), she offered an apology along the lines of, “I’m sorry I was mean to you growing up. I don’t know why I acted like that.” It was easy to think there wasn’t a lot of self-examination behind that apology and she might have only said that because at the time she wanted something from my mom.

And then about a year after that apology, my sister sued my older brother and it felt like she demanded that we all take sides. When my mom suggested that she should settle, my sister stopped talking to her for about five years. Even when my sister’s anger isn’t directed at me, I find it to be incredibly unsettling because it radiates from her in hot waves.

Fortunately for my very patient mom, my sister finally got back in touch with her. My mom says she’s in a good place. But without any substantive change to my sister’s life philosophy or self-regulating resources, I find myself skeptical.

But throughout all this, I have developed a lot of compassion for my sister. I think that in a family of happy optimists, she felt like an outsider because that isn’t her default. In fact, I think she felt that the emotional space from which the rest of her family operated was a fake, construed lie and her incredibly smart brain catalogued all the differences she noticed. In short, I think she grew up feeling like she didn’t belong.

There’s a passage about belonging in Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, that was a huge a-ha moment for me about my family of origin and my sister in particular.  “Even in the context of suffering – poverty, violence, human rights violations – not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth.”

If I was to go by Dr. Lerner’s description of forgiveness, I haven’t forgiven my sister. My personal usage of forgiveness is a little more expansive. But whatever you call it, whether it be forgiveness or letting it go, I can attest that there’s a lot of peace to be found when we do our own work to try to understand people who are or have been in our lives. I recognize the irony that growing up in a family to which I did feel like I belonged has helped underscore my own feeling of peace and forgiveness, work that I imagine would be much harder for my sister.

Postscript: One last note that I gleaned from Dr. Lerner’s book as it applies to my family, “In my professional work I am struck by how often sibling relationships fall apart around the life-cycle stage of caring for elderly parents, and dealing with a parent’s death and its aftermath.”

While the groundwork was laid throughout our lives, many of the most explosive events that happened between my siblings happened in the years right after my father’s sudden death. There’s no way to know if my dad could have prevented some of the rupture of our family or if the grieving itself caused some of our recent struggles. But I’m sure it didn’t help.

Healing the Divide

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“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

There’s a divide that runs right down the middle of my family of origin – I call it tree people and forest people as inspired by the phrase “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” The tree people are so good at details that they are the ones you want to invite if you need help painting a room or weeding a patch of garden. The forest people are generally better at navigating the ups and downs of life and are the ones you want to invite when you need advice or help troubleshooting a systemic problem. Even with different perspectives, we managed okay until a tree person sued a forest person. Now it’s hard to see that we all stem from the same ground.

So I’ve thought a lot about the root cause (pun intended) about the pain in my family. And when I read the following passage about belonging in Brene Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, it resonated as the real reason that my family is divided.  

“Even in the context of suffering – poverty, violence, human rights violations – not belong in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I’ve borne witness to in my life and in my work:

1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing it and/or inflicting it on others;

2. You deny your pain, and your denial ensures that you pass it on to those around you and down to your children; or

3. You find the courage to own the pain and develop a level of empathy and compassion for yourself and others that allows you to spot hurt in the world in a unique way.

Brene Brown

My dad was a Presbyterian pastor and so the church defined our lives growing up. Amidst all the wonderful things that came with the church community – friendship, values, service and faith, came an unfortunate side effect of an expectation of conformity to an image of a good Christian kid. As the youngest kid, I think the inferred expectation of having to be a living example was much lower or it just didn’t phase me but I imagine that it was harder for my siblings. As such the feeling of not belonging because they didn’t fit the precise mold began early.

I think about this a lot with my kids. As a side effect of being at home together in this year of pandemic, although sometimes feeling cramped, we have enjoyed the luxury of more time building the base of belonging. Now with schools opening up and more activities available, I am both relieved to see my kids start to branch out and concerned with keeping that feeling of deep connection going. I saw some great advice posted by Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity and Resilience in Your Child: “If you are a parent of a baby or toddler, then I have two big tips for you: 1) Delight in your child. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but find time every day to truly delight in them. 2) Take care of yourself. You matter, too.” It’s great advice because when I delight in my kids, I’m present and celebrating who they are and it not only works for my toddler by also my 5-year-old.

I don’t yet know whether my kids are forest people or tree people. Seeing my family’s experience has taught me that I’m willing to work hard to ensure that my kids know that whichever they are, that we inhabit the same ground, stem from the same Earth and are fed from the same soil. We might not see things from the same perspective but I’m betting that if we know we belong together, we will be willing to share our experience, our lives and our delight. Here’s my hope – if I start with my kids then the goodness of healing will ripple out maybe to my family of origin and then beyond.

Vulnerability and Courage

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“I believe that you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage.” – Brene Brown

My friend sent me an email the other day that made me feel like the wind was knocked out of me. It said in essence that she was hosting Thanksgiving at her house but we weren’t invited. There are so many ways to explain this away – she didn’t mean it to be hurtful, the pandemic has made gatherings risky so to protect our older generation this is wise and so on. But the fact of middle age is that we very rarely wound each other. Our lives and patterns of communication have solidified so that no one needs to either extend themselves very far nor risk being hurt. It was such a surprise for me to feel so pierced that it threw me and my productivity off kilter for the rest of the afternoon.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts about vulnerability. it started with University of Houston research professor Brene Brown but now I’m finding that thread in so much of what I’m reading and listening to. That vulnerability means that we are daring to live out in the open, to try things and to fail, that if marks whether we are doing something meaningful. And by meaningful, I mean meaningful as in measured by personal growth.

So I’ve been consuming all this content about vulnerability, I know it’s one of my weaknesses and then my friend sends that email that hurts me. My first reaction was to hide, to pull back into my shell and just nurse the wound. I’m a pretty affable person and I can shake things off as unintended. But one of the reasons the email wounded me is that it feels like my friend often makes unilateral decisions without consulting me. And the second reason is because I secretly fear that I value her friendship more than she values mine. And the third is because I’ve never told her the previous two reasons.

Instead of hiding, I waited a few hours and sent an email back saying that I was wounded. I’ll be honest here – it felt yucky. Her response was lovely and though we probably won’t still get our families together for Thanksgiving as we have for every year for the past ten, it won’t stick like a turkey bone caught in my throat blocking my ability to breathe or be grateful. I continue to feel a little tender but within that tenderness is a kernel of additional belonging that I didn’t have before. I can speak my truth and still be accepted. My right to be here isn’t conditional on me behaving affably. I feel a little more wise about how to coach my kids about friendship. I crossed that chasm between learning about something and doing something and it makes me feel brave!