Family Estrangements - How to Mend Them and Why You Should
With Thanksgiving less than three weeks away, our thoughts turn to family and friends. The Norman Rockwell ideal of the loving family gathered around the dinner table with heads bowed may not be possible for all of us. As you scan the scrapbook magazines and see photo after photo of smiling faces, you might wonder if your family is the only group in America that won't be beaming at each other this holiday season. Perhaps in your family there are those who will refuse to see each other, those who are not speaking to each other, and those who can't be in the same room without creating hard feelings. Well, you are NOT alone. It's happened in my family, so I know the pain a rift can cause. Fortunately, we're all "getting along" right now, but when I saw the book Family Estrangements: How They Begin; How to Mend Them; How to Cope with Them, I snatched it from the library shelf.
Author Barbara LeBey started researching her book when she and her son suffered a painful estrangement. LeBey begins Chapter 2 with the one phrase we all need, "Not all rifts can be mended, but most of them can be." The rest of the book goes through a variety of situations with suggestions for avoiding rifts and patching them up.
Here are a few of her most useful suggestions:
- Don't ever close the door. Even if the other person is unresponsive, send cards, gifts, e-mails whatever.
- "One person has to have enough courage and love to initiate contact," says LeBey. Being that person is incredibly difficult, but you can do it! (I know. I was that person in my family.)
- Once you begin communicating again, resist the impulse to rehash every detail of the situation that precipitated the estrangement. (This runs counter to what you might think, but trust me, she's absolutely right on this. Often there are so many currents that contribute to a break that the parties involved can't honestly say, "This was it." Why go over the broken ground and add more fuel to a fire that's died out. Move on.)
- Realize that "the aim cannot be to restore the relationship to that place where it was before, because the breach has changed it permanently."
- You must a premium on staying in touch with family members. When a break occurs, you lose a sense of who you are. The pain of estrangement cannot be underestimated. As LeBey says, "Not to be in contact with your parents or with your children is a profound loss because our families are so deeply bound to the sense of who we are in this enormous, chaotic world."
As the survivor of a family estrangement, let me add my two cents worth: We must as a society come to an understanding that just because we don't like a family member's personality, we can't protect ourselves from discomfort by estrangement. So your uncle is a horse's butt. Big deal. So your aunt is always correcting your grammar. She needs to get a life. Go visit, stay in a hotel, and treat yourself to a nice bubble bath afterwards, reveling in the thought that you did the right thing. (My best tips: Meet at a restaurant so you don't have bad vibes in your home. Get together RARELY, but send cards. Limit your contact, but do make contact. Assume when they call that they want to talk to your spouse and hand the phone over quickly.)
Don't over-react to the family jerks. Everyone else knows Uncle Frank is a pain in the tushie. They've just learned to roll their eyes and walk away from his stupid comments. It's not personal. He's an idiot to everyone! And don't avoid the family kooks. They prove to your kids that they are REALLY lucky to have you as a parent. (As my son gets older, his B.S. detector gets better and better! Thank the Lord!)
Teaching our children that families have ups and downs, and goods and bads, is one of the vital ways we encouragement our children to act with tolerance towards all people. We are each of us imperfect beings, but we are always and forever members of a family.
(NOTE: I am NOT suggesting you allow yourself or your children to be abused. I'm talking about garden-variety personality differences, hurt feelings and small slights. )
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