Trying to Put the Fun in Dysfunctional

The past couple of months have been somewhat confusing and admittedly challenging for me. On countless occasions, I have sat in front of my computer with every intention of getting everyone in the world – or at least my small tribe of faithful readers – to think a bit about their lives and to remember to live NOW. And yet, for whatever reason, as I start to write, something always comes up. More accurately, some excuse always presents itself, and I jump at the opportunity to focus my attention elsewhere. “I have to work”, “Tyler needs a Wii buddy”, and “I need to fix that squeaky door” are just a few of the more recent excuses that have prevented me from doing what I really want to do.

The truth of the matter is that over the last few years, there have been two defining experiences in my life that are primarily responsible for my commitment to trying to live now. These events not only changed my life, they also dramatically altered how I see my world around me. It is because of these events that AlwaysLiveNOW.com was created, and it is through these two trying, and enlightening, times in my life that most of my personal growth has occurred. Don’t get me wrong, I will be the first to admit that I have a long way to go, but I know that because of these two events, my life is on a different, better path, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

The first event, which I have already shared, was when Tyler had his health scare. Feeling like there was a very real possibility that I was going to lose my son changed my life. The preciousness of NOW was made abundantly clear to me. As painful as that time was for us, it has been relatively easy to share the experience because 1) Tyler is happy and healthy and his medication has helped control his epilepsy, and 2) the positive impact of this wake-up call has been profound.

I now have a much better awareness and appreciation for my blessed life, and I know that every moment is an opportunity to be embraced and enjoyed.

The second event has been much harder to come to terms with, and this is why I feel like I have reached a writer’s block of sorts. I know that I want and need to tell this story since what I have learned from it with respect to living now has been tremendous, but actually sitting down to write it has been surprisingly difficult. Given that an inordinate amount of my own personal growth has resulted from this experience, I feel it is important to share it, but I would by lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that still longed for the blissful ignorance I had before it happened.

One year ago, the seemingly happy, healthy relationship I had with my parents for 35 years was forever altered in a matter of minutes. To celebrate my 35th birthday, Andrea and I had invited my parents and my sister to our house for the weekend. Everything seemed normal, everyone seemed happy. The whole weekend felt like one of our typical fun family get-togethers. Unfortunately, as is often the case when the straw breaks the camel’s back, a seemingly trivial matter changed everything. In this case, the straw that broke my parents’ back was a possible change in plans for an upcoming weekend visit. We had been talking about getting together at their house in a few weeks when I mentioned that one of the proposed weekends wouldn’t work for us because something had come up that was important for my family – me, Andrea, Tyler and Kailey. Surprisingly, this not only broke the camels back, it effectively broke every bone in the poor camel’s body.

It still seems almost unreal to me when I think about it, but my parents totally lost it. Apparently, in their opinion, it was completely unacceptable for me to prioritize my family over them. It was, and still is, unbelievable to me how much rage they had. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen my parents angry on plenty of occasions, but this time was totally different. My dad kept screaming and yelling and basically challenged me to a fist fight, while my mom kept going on and on about how much Andrea and I, and the rest of the world for that matter, constantly took advantage of her, and how fed up she was with it. The whole thing completely caught me off guard. I honestly didn’t know how to respond. It was both infuriating and heartbreaking at the same time. The hardest part to swallow through it all was the fact that both Andrea and I had constantly bent over backwards to do things for them and to include them in our lives because we loved them, and yet there we were, in our own backyard, being physically and verbally attacked for “constantly taking advantage of them”.

Needless to say, the visit was over within the hour, and I was left to process what had just transpired. It still felt hard to believe. I kept replaying my parents’ reactions and behavior over and over in my head – the anger, the resentment, all of the accusations. Even though they had inappropriately attacked both me and Andrea, I felt like I must have really done something wrong to make them behave that way. I moped around for the better part of a week, part of me waiting for an apology from them, the rest of me blaming myself for everything. At the end of a miserable week, it dawned on me that, while my parents obviously felt a certain way, I didn’t have to blindly subscribe to their story just because they were my parents. Despite their anger and hostility, I honestly didn’t feel as though I had done anything wrong. If anything, I felt like I should be the angry one given the fact that I felt like I had constantly prioritized their feelings and had always worked hard to make sure they felt like they were a part of the family, and the result was their open hostility.

Eventually, I emailed them what I was feeling. It was a painstaking writing exercise since I wanted to make sure the message conveyed how much I loved them, but also how disappointed I was by what had transpired. I assumed responsibility for the things I could have done better, and I focused on being clear, calm, and constructive, because I wanted to work through the issues so we could begin repairing our relationship. Their responses were unexpected to say the least. Rather than admit to any of their responsibility for all of the mess – or at least acknowledging how wildly inappropriate their behavior was – my dad sent a one line reply that he “couldn’t control my interesting perception” and my mom said that I was wrong, she was right and that she had even more she wanted to say, but that she wasn’t sure I could handle it. Nice. Baffled, and admittedly a little angry, I told her to go ahead and continue sharing. I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, but, without going into all of the details, suffice it to say that it definitely has.

The past twelve months have been an overwhelming, painful, empowering, frustrating, enlightening, often bizarre, sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic journey into the truth of yet another perfectly “normal”, dysfunctional family.

I have had to face some truths about my family that I chose to ignore, or at least deny, for all of my life. Just like every other family in the world, we had our problems. And just like every other person in the world, my parents had their own set of issues.

Unfortunately, in my family, no one ever wanted to talk about them, or even admit that they existed. I had gone so far as to convince myself that I was lucky because my family was perfect, and I think that is the primary reason why all of this has been so eye opening and challenging. The mind is definitely powerful, and ignorance definitely was bliss. The harsh reality is that I spent a lot of my relationship with my parents – for as long as I can remember – feeling like I wasn’t good enough, being afraid of my dad’s temper, working my tail off trying to make them happy, and it never seemed to be enough for them. The weekend blowup was just another example, albeit a more explosive one than normal, of them making me feel like I was responsible for their happiness, and that I had failed.

It has been hard coming to terms with the reality of my true family dynamic, particularly given how long I had believed my “perfect family myth”, but the worst part has been that, to this day, neither of my parents are even willing to acknowledge their part in any of this. My dad has removed himself from the situation completely – I haven’t heard from him in a year – and my mom continues to dismiss and deny any possibility other than her perception that I, like the rest of the world, just constantly takes advantage of her.

Over the course of the year, as I have tried to encourage getting to the bottom of what is really going on, my mom has called me everything from “just an angry little kid” to “a pompous, Dr Oz-a**hole wannabe”

(I think she meant Dr. Phil, at least I hope she meant Dr. Phil) to somebody who “just can’t handle the truth”, to name just a few. I would be lying if I said the personal attacks and passive-aggressive jabs didn’t hurt, but the reality is that my parents’ resistance, denial and anger have actually helped promote healing. Their behavior has forced me to really work on myself, to focus on my own issues, and to let go of trying to fix things that are not my responsibility to fix. With my parents, I now know that, as much as I would love for them to be happy, I am not solely responsible for their happiness. At some point, just like I am trying to do in my own life, they are going to have to process their own emotional baggage. The events of the past year have helped me start to do that, and I feel like I have learned a lot about myself, and have identified some of my behaviors that I really want to work on changing. Some of the more important things I have learned that have really helped me live NOW include the following:

Healthy relationships are built upon open, honest communication
More than anything I have learned throughout this experience, I now firmly believe that happy, healthy relationships – even the relationships we have with ourselves – are built upon openness and honesty. Anything less has the potential to lead to bitterness, anger, and resentment. If we are unable to be honest and productively communicate with our loved ones, how can we possibly expect there to be the necessary level of trust to build a healthy, sustainable relationship? From my own experience, I know that whenever I bottle things up, it only leads to frustration, tension, and ultimately, resentment. In the end, something has to give. It is impossible to carry around resentment forever. And then, when all of the bottled up anger and resentment finally come pouring out, it can be difficult to repair the relationships that have been impacted. Being open and honest as much as possible is really the only way that I have found to keep feelings of resentment from starting.

Ironically, in the last communication I received from my mom, she said that through this experience her main epiphany has been that all of this could have been avoided if she would have kept her true feelings to herself, because “I obviously couldn’t handle it”. I feel like she is missing the main point. I think hiding is sometimes the easy thing to do, but I actually think it is probably the least productive thing you can do to foster healthy relationships. I believe that a lot of the heartache of the past year could have been avoided if my parents had been much more honest with themselves, and with the whole family from the beginning. Instead, they have chosen to bottle up their true feelings for the better part of their lives, at least as long as I have known them, and the resulting resentment has been profound.

Everyone has their own issues
For the longest time, I felt like I was the only one who had any issues. I felt like everyone around me always had it together, and that there must be something wrong with me because I felt like a complete mess at times. I grew up convinced that my parents were infallible, and as I got older, anytime any point of contention arose in our relationship, I naturally assumed that I was at fault. Over the course of the past year, my mom has shared with me some of the details of her childhood. She grew up in a situation where she rarely felt loved, and where she always felt like she had to do things for others to get them to value her. No matter what she did, she never felt like it was good enough for her parents. Similarly, she shared that my dad has his own set of emotional issues stemming from a childhood raised in an abusive environment where he was made to feel unwanted and unloved.

Hearing this, hearing that my role models – the people that I thought were perfect and had it all together – had been carrying around their own fears, inadequacies, and insecurities for almost 60 years was incredibly eye-opening. It helped me see that we all have our issues, and it showed my how powerful our issues are at shaping how we perceive the world around us.

In my life, I grew up in an environment where I felt like what I did was never good enough.

Now, I am beginning to see how this has impacted who I am today. Whenever I am in a new situation, I am terribly insecure and I feel like everyone is judging me. And given my history of never feeling good enough, I naturally feel like everyone is judging me negatively, thus confirming in my mind that I am not good enough. It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. I have been conditioned to feel a certain way about myself, just like my parents have been conditioned to feel a certain way about themselves, so we always end up finding exactly what we have been programmed to believe. Every innocuous word, deed or even passing glance becomes a confirmation of our worst fears.

Now that I am finally being open and honest about my own set of fears and insecurities, it has become abundantly clear to me that I am not alone. Everyone I talk to, almost without fail, has shared with me the challenges and issues that they face in their own lives. Whether we choose to admit to them and deal with them is an entirely different issue, but the reality is that we are all carrying around our fair share of emotional baggage. Knowing that I am not alone has allowed me to cut myself some slack, and to realize that I don’t have to be perfect.

I get to choose how I feel
I am not trying to fool myself into believing that I am in total control of my emotions. Far from it. Instead, what I am trying to better understand is that I am ultimately responsible for how I feel about myself. In the past – even the very recent past – I would allow other people to dictate how I felt about myself on an almost daily basis. It’s frustrating, but it’s true. With respect to my parents, for as long as I can remember, I would regularly let their words and actions make me feel guilty, wrong, even selfish to name just a few. Even with a family of my own, I still found myself susceptible to the slightest suggestion that I wasn’t being “the good son”. I never wanted to let them down – I don’t know anyone who wants to disappoint their parents – so I worked even harder trying to include them, and to make sure that they knew how much they were loved. But laboring under a cloud of guilt will take its toll, and there is no denying the fact that I felt like I deserved a medal for my efforts, not more guilt for not having done enough.

Now, I have a better understanding of the distinction between how I really feel, and how I am allowing someone else to make me feel. It is a precarious balance. Through this experience, I have a much better appreciation for how destructive empowering others with how I feel can be. Thankfully, I have grown to a point where I realize that I can take that power back. For me, the key is in figuring out how to be empathetic and supportive to others, while also making sure that I don’t let their issues shape how I feel about myself.

As trying as this experience has been, from a “glass is half full” perspective, it has also been an incredible gift. I feel like I have only scratched the surface with respect to how much I have learned and how much it has positively impacted my ability to live NOW. I want to be true to myself, and to those around me. I want to develop and maintain meaningful, respectful relationships built on honesty. I want to be empathetic to those around me who need it, but to take back ownership of how I feel about myself. The price of these lessons has been high, but I feel like I have been blessed with a unique opportunity to see, and to work on – and hopefully fix! – some of my own potentially destructive behaviors before it is too late.

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