One person is an alcoholic.
Another is a gambler.
Another is abusive.
Or, it could be as simple as someone raising their kids in a way you completely disagree with.
Whatever it is, you hate it. You hate to see it. You hate to be exposed to it.
And so you’ve told that to your partner.
You’ve told your partner, “I want minimal contact!” – and your partner doesn’t listen.
“But I love my family!” your partner has told you. “I accept them for who they are. I have no power to influence them, anyway.”
Or, “I know what they do. They’ve even abused me, too, in the past. But I have to Honor My Parents!”
So there’s a stalemate: You hate being with them and your partner can’t do without it.
Why Is This Happening?
When growing up in an abusive or chaotic or in some way dysfunctional home, it’s plain scary for a child.
The child has very little choice and no control. The lack of control – or that feeling of being in control – is the worst. It is for that reason that therapists will hear molested children say they liked it or wanted it.
To feel as if they had control.
Sometimes we call that “siding with the aggressor.” It’s also what made up the Stockholm Syndrome. (That’s the story of the bank robbers taking hostages who then married one or two of the robbers later on.) That’s also the Patty Hearst story; you can google it.
To do this, the child – and the adult that child became – has to not “see” what’s bad in the bad. You can tell them and they will most likely agree with you.
But that agreement isn’t even skin deep. It’s an intellectual nod, cut off from the real emotions of being connected to the family they want to pretend their family was.
The urge to be connected is part of what makes us human. Generations ago, babies died in orphanages in which they were physically cared for but never picked up and held.
And the desire to connect specifically to our roots is very powerful. This is the source of national pride and organizational affiliations. We want to be part of something bigger than we are because that gives us strength that we wouldn’t have on our own.
All this is part of the quest for safety and security.
Even when it’s false. Even when there is no safety there, or security. It’s a myth we tell ourselves as children and then we cling to – especially when life gets tough.
So What Do We Do To Get On The Same Page?
Here’s where IFS (Internal Family Systems) is right on the ball: According to its founder, Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, a person operating with Self leadership possesses many qualities that help them get through the tough stuff of life.
Some of those qualities are summarized in the “8 C’s” of connection, clarity, creativity, calm, courage, confidence, curiosity, and – drumroll, here, please – compassion.
Compassion cannot exist without another crucial quality of Self, perspective. Perspective means we get the Big Picture. We see how, when we drop something, it will surely fall. We can see how, as young people, we didn’t know too well what we were doing and what life would bring us.
So we made choices based on our ignorance. And perspective helps us recognize that when we did that, we did the best we could.
From that, compassion means we can feel for the younger Selves that we were and how blind we were as we faced life.
Perspective helps us see; compassion helps us feel.
Then we can also feel for our partners and the other people we must deal with. Dr. Schwartz made the statement that since all our protective parts only meant the best forus and did the best they could with the little information and experience we had as kids, then there must not be any “bad” parts of us.
In fact, that is the title of his book, “No Bad Parts.”
As we come to accept ourselves and our real Self is able to exert a little loving discipline on those protectors that insist on popping up to protect us, it becomes easier and easier to feel that compassion for ourselves and the choices we made.
People occassionally ask me, “How do you manage to work with so many difficult, maybe even abusive people?”
And my answer comes from this exact place.
I tell them that those people’s protectors have mis-guided them to behave as they did and I feel compassion for what they went through that required such protectors.
But I always believe in the person’s true Self, anyway. My job is to help that true Self shine and take leadership over the protectors.
So, to circle back to the original question, to get on the same page as your partner, your job would be to understand the challenges those family members faced and the protectors that were forced to sprout up to protect those people in their own childhoods.
That level of deep understanding leads to getting their Big Picture, which is perspective. And if you can feel compassion for yourself and all that you faced in your life, then hopefully your perspective on the extended family members will lead to compassion for them.
And here’s a very important point: Compassion is not condoning.
When Dr. Schwartz met and worked with prison inmates, he said he began to appreciate all their protectors; he felt compassion. That doesn’t mean that they are relieved of responsibility for their crimes.
Actually, if you think about it, Self energy does just the opposite: It instills responsibility in a person.
Once the Self emerges and feels separate from the protectors that may have dominated all that person’s life, the Self has that distance, that perspective, to recognize the difference between the protectors’ behaviors and the Self’s own qualities of wisdom, love, and open-heartedness (in addition to the 8 C’s).
The Self can easily take responsibility for mistaken actions because they were done by protective parts before that person realized they had a Self that could do better.
Compassion is not easy. When you’ve been aggravated by people who, themselves, aren’t compassionate, it takes a lot of Self energy to work up compassion for them.
But the rewards are huge.
First of all, with compassion comes distance. You aren’t part of and affected by their behavior. You are a separate person, not caught up in and not affected by their “stuff.”
Second, with compassion comes freedom. You are you and you’re super clear on that. You’re free to be who you want to be, including compassionate. It’s a very liberating feeling.
Third, of course, with compassion comes caring. You do care for the person’s well-being and all of a sudden, the resentment you used to feel is gone, replaced by that care. It’s also a good feeling.
Caring doesn’t mean that you have gotten tied up in their stuff again; that distance remains. But with caring your feeling of connection goes to another level – that of possibly helping even if just by being there and listening.