The Goal of a Healthy Family & 6 Roles We Take On In Dysfunction
Episode Notes
It's hard to lead a family. It's even harder when you didn't experience health in your own family as a child. Today, I'm walking you through what a healthy family looks like and what happens when it gets out of balance. This is a practical, non-shaming guide to identifying what's working in your family and how to course-correct when it's not!
Here's what we cover:
1. The goal of a healthy family (5:19)
2. Signs of dysfunction vs. signs of health (8:07)
3. 6 extreme roles children get pushed into (19:44)
4. 4 simple, research-backed strategies to create harmony within your family (37:28)
Resource
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Music by Andy Luiten
Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript
Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad that we are here. In this new year, this new year of 2024, the new year is just an opportunity to be just a little bit more intentional about how we want to focus the direction of our lives.
And in today's episode, I wanted to address a topic that so many of you have asked me to address. And it's: what is a healthy family? What do healthy families look like?
We spend a lot of time talking about how to recover from childhood wounds, how to heal from painful events in the past. So what does a healthy family look like? Some of you are trying to understand that as you lead your own family. Some of you are just trying to understand it as you consider your past and try to locate your own experience on a spectrum.
Because as we all know, there's no such thing as a perfect family. There are some families that operate in a healthier way than others. And then there are some families that are extremely dysfunctional and most families fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
So whether you're thinking about your past experiences in your family of origin or whether you're thinking about the family that you're trying to lead right now, in this episode we'll walk you through what a healthy family looks like. What are some of the most common pitfalls that show up that lead to varying degrees of dysfunction in families?
And finally, we're going to end with the most important skill to learn as you are trying to lead a healthy family of your own. Lots to cover today. Let's dive in.
So what is a healthy family? Well, there are lots of definitions for a healthy family, but there's one word that I always go to when I'm describing a healthy family system. And that word “system” is important here. All it means is that a system is a collection of different parts and each part of the system is important, but each part is also intricately connected to the other parts and all of the parts working together create the system.
And one of my favorite metaphors to use when you're thinking about a system is to think about a middle school band. Maybe you were a part of one. I was part of one. I played the alto saxophone. I wasn't very good at it, but I have some knowledge of how a middle school band functions. And if you think about that band, there are so many different parts to it.
There's the flutes, there's the clarinets, there's the saxophones, there's the drums in the back, there's the trombones and the trumpets, and each one of those parts plays an incredibly important role in creating the whole of the system.
If any one of those individual parts of that system gets too loud or starts playing off key or loses the beat of the song, the whole thing doesn't sound very good. It's really discordant. There's sort of a cacophony that erupts, but when every individual part plays its role well, you get this beautiful sound. We hear music that is enjoyable, that is pleasant to our ears. The whole system is working together to create a beautiful harmony.
And that's the key word, harmony.
So according to family systems theory and psychology, the goal of a healthy family is this word harmony. And what that means is we're looking for harmonious interactions among and between the different members. It doesn't mean that there's never conflict.
It means that as you look at the family system, and all of the individuals who have comprised the family, every family member has a role that is important in the family. Every family member is valued. Every family member has a chance to thrive.
Every family member has a voice and also every family member needs appropriate boundaries. If you think about that middle school band, every part has to play its role, which means you don't want one part taking over the whole system, but you also don't want one part of the system sidelined, not getting any attention at all.
You want every single individual member of that family to feel valued, heard, seen, known, Like they're contributing within appropriate boundaries. And so this is a lot of work. And if you lead a family of your own, you know what I mean.
And I'm sure you're going, yeah, right. There isn't harmony around my family dinner table. You know, we're not all just speaking pleasantly to each other all the time and making sure that every voice is heard. And I, I want to be clear. That is not what we mean by harmony. The way that we work out the day to day health of a family is incredibly messy.
It's not always that perfect picture. And again, if you think about that middle school band, there's a lot of rehearsal time, a lot of practice time. Every single day, that band is getting together to rehearse and sometimes it sounds terrible. And sometimes the conductor has to take more time with the violins because something's not working there.
And meanwhile, the saxophones are off by themselves, kind of entertaining themselves, right? The goal of all that rehearsal, of all that time in the messiness of trying to figure it out, it's just a moment, one evening of glorious harmony and that moment of glorious harmony makes all the work so worthwhile.
And so I want you to think about that when you think about leading your own family. The goal is not perfection every single day or every single meal. The goal is that you're working it out. You're working out the kinks of family harmony every single day, so that every so often you get these glimpses of wholeness. You get these glimpses of what it's like when you're just enjoying the heck out of each other.
Okay. So I want you to keep that goal in mind. Imagine being in a family. And if you think back to your own earliest memories of family, in most dysfunctional families, there is almost never a moment of joy. There's almost never a moment of, oh my gosh, this is just such a delight to be together. It feels so comforting, so safe, so secure to be with my people here in our home, as a family.
In those extreme cases of dysfunction, there's so much chaos. Where there's just no order, you never knew what you could expect or rely on from your family members. Or there's just constant, persistent, unresolved conflict where there's a state of tension and emotional distress constantly.
You never feel that sense of peace in a highly conflicted family. In a highly dysfunctional family, there might be an extreme lack of emotional support. You don't have any memories of feeling really loved or comforted or cared for. Maybe your parents were around, but they really didn't pay attention to you.
You were kind of on your own, and so there weren't those glimmers or those glimpses of, oh, this is what love feels like. This is what it really feels like to feel close to a family member.
In really dysfunctional families, we also see an absence of communication. And again, if you think about that middle school band, part of what makes it work is the different pieces of the band have to communicate with each other. Everybody has to wait their turn and come in at the right time.
And, each part has to listen for the other parts so the different parts aren't playing over each other. In an extremely dysfunctional family, there's no communication at all. Nobody's really asking hey, how was your day? Or, hey, could we connect? I'd love to share with you what's going on with me. I'd love to learn what's going on with you.
Instead, you're just kind of ships passing in the night and no one's really ever stopping to connect. In contrast, in a healthy family, in a family that's moving toward this idea of harmony–again, it's not achieved every single day for sure, but you're moving toward harmony–here are some of the features that you'll see.
And it's the opposite of what we just laid out. You'll see a lot of effort at communication. It doesn't always go perfectly, but a lot of frequent efforts to connect where the parents are frequently checking in with the children. How are you doing? I want to check in with you. What's going on with you? Can we connect?
And the children have a sense of that safety so they respond. Again, these bids for communication don't always go perfectly, but there are frequent attempts to connect through using words to ask questions and to listen to the responses of the other person.
Number two, there's a pathway through conflict. And this is really important. It doesn't mean there's no conflict. In families where there's no conflict, that can actually be a sign of emotional disconnection. It's almost impossible to be close to another human without some form of conflict.
Conflict in and of itself is not the problem. What healthy families have is a path through conflict. This means there's an avenue to name conflict when it happens and address it in a healthy way. And this skill of addressing conflict within a family or within any relationship is such an important skill that so many of us never learned.
I'm going to return to that at the end of this episode, because there's one skill that is critical to resolving conflict in a healthy way. But healthy families have a path through conflict. They don't avoid conflict, nor do they live in a state of high conflict where everybody's always yelling at each other and they're never really connecting.
In healthy families, we see conflict. Man, I think I just hurt your feelings. I'm really sorry about that. Could we talk about what happened? Or wow, that conversation just went sideways. I can see that you're upset. I didn't mean to upset you. Can we talk about it? In healthy families, those conflicts are named and there's a path through them so that you can repair and come out stronger on the other side.
Number three, healthy families also show a high degree of emotional support. So instead of leaving each member of the family to just sort of function on their own and find their own way through life, in a healthy family, there's a lot of emotional support where parents or caregivers are checking in on their kids. Again, it's part of this communication, but it's not just words.
And we talked about this all the way back in episode 16, when we talked about attachment. Emotional support really gets at this idea of presence. It's not always words. It's having a calm enough nervous system that you're really present to what's happening in the people around you.
You're picking up on nonverbal cues. Maybe you're noticing that your teenager has gotten quiet or withdrawn and you might not even be sure exactly what to do or say, but you're aware. You're processing that information, you're present. And as a result of that presence, you can attune to your child and figure out how best to check in with them.
That emotional presence is really important for young children. Again, it's not always verbal, but we have this sense that someone is present to us. They're available to us. And if you think about when you feel seen by somebody, you feel somebody's eyes scanning yours. You feel somebody's arms go around you.
It's almost an intangible thing to describe, but you know it when you feel it, that the other person is orienting their whole being toward you. And it creates this supportive container that is deeply settling to our nervous systems and deeply critical to achieving harmony within a family.
So again, if we zoom out to that metaphor of the middle school band, if I'm the conductor of that band, I only have so much energy to go around. I can't be present to every single part of that band simultaneously. So it's not being omnipresent as God is, right? We're not God as we parent our families and our parents weren't God either. It’s about seeking moments where you're really zooming into each member to give them that quality of your presence.
Healthy families also have clear boundaries. There's no rule confusion. In fact, it's one of the crucibles in which healthy boundaries are for. So if you struggle with boundaries in your current life, it may be because you didn't experience healthy boundaries in your family of origin.
Healthy boundaries mean that there's a clear distinction between the parent and the child, and if you look back on the way that you were raised, you may have experienced something that we call parentification, where there was a role reversal. Where you were expected to parent your parent.
In healthy families, those boundaries are clear, where the caregivers are the caregivers, the adults are the adults, and the children get to be the children. And this can be communicated in a lot of ways. It can be communicated through actions, but it can also be communicated very specifically where a parent says to you, listen, I see that you care. And I see that you want to solve this conflict between your dad and me.
It's not your problem. This is for your dad and I to figure out. You get to be a kid. And what matters is that we love you and that we're here for you. And yes. We're in a little bit of conflict right now. We'll figure it out. It's not yours to solve.
Because kids pick up on the conflict between adults and their families. It doesn't mean that as adults, you can never have conflict. It does mean that you're clear about your role and it is never a child's role to take on the job of being a conflict mediator between two adults.
Now, role confusion can also show up among siblings of a family. Oftentimes in unhealthy families, we see the children getting pigeonholed into rigid roles, and this isn't healthy either. Healthy families create a flexible enough family environment where every child feels valued, feels like they can play a different role, but they're also not pigeonholed into an unhealthy extreme.
And I want to spend a little time here because this is a big place where a lot of you listening will relate to one of these unhealthy roles that you might've gotten pigeonholed into.
There are six roles that sometimes get extreme in families. It can be convenient to let a child play a certain role that becomes unhealthy. It's unhealthy for the child, but it's also unhealthy for the entire family. Again, in healthy families, everybody's playing a role that leads to the individuals’ benefit and to the overall health of the family.
We've got to have families that are flexible enough to include the gifts and talents and different voices of all the family members, even as each individual family member is willing to set some things aside for the good of the whole family. This is how we learn this beautiful dance of autonomy and connectedness that we all need to bring into our adult relationships.
It's not all about me, but it's also not never about me. And some of you have had that experience where it was never about you in your family of origin. And so it's really hard for you to figure out how to take up space in your adult relationships.
Other folks have the opposite of that, where maybe it was all about them in their family of origin, and so they don't know how to share space in their adult relationships. I want to walk you through six of these most common roles that children get pigeonholed into in unhealthy families.
Now, again, if you're leading a family of your own right now, if you're parenting kids, you will notice trends. You will be like, I think one of my kids fits more into that role. And another kid fits more into that role.
The fact that you can name that with humility means you're already well on the path toward health, because if you can name it, you can then begin to ensure you're not shoving your kid into a role that's not healthy for them.
Think about your family of origin, the family you were raised in. And notice if you may have been pushed into any one of these six extreme roles.
The first one is the golden child. This is the child who can do no wrong, no matter what they do. The parents just think they're amazing. If you watched the sitcom Friends, with Monica and Ross Geller, brother and sister, it’s a comedic take on this, but Ross is the golden child. He can do no wrong, no matter what he does.
The parents think he's amazing. Even if he does something really stupid, he's just always thought of as amazing. Now, if you were the golden child, there are ways in which that can feel really good, but there are also problems with it.
If you grow up and you never really learned how to receive constructive feedback from a parent, or you never really learned how to tolerate the reality of disappointing someone else, it can have a negative impact on the way you relate to your peers or your adult relationships.
You might struggle with getting your value and your worth from people outside of you and not know what to do with it if someone just doesn't like you, or someone differs with you, or someone is disappointed by you.
That may feel incredibly uncomfortable because you never learned to tolerate that within your family of origin. And again, if you think back to healthy families and this idea of harmony, part of being part of a healthy system is giving and receiving feedback. It's learning to be able to hear from someone, hey, this disappointed me and learning to tolerate that.
You can work through that with a family member and come out the other side even stronger and even more connected for having had that hard conversation. So while being a golden child might feel good in the moment, it can lead to problems in adulthood.
Secondly, we have the comedians. And in fact, a lot of actual comedians in real life talk about how one of the ways they coped in families with high conflict was to become the funny one, was to alleviate tension, tell a joke, do something funny, make everybody laugh. It would calm everybody in the family down.
And made them feel good. And that became this role that they learned how to play. One of your own children may have this skill. It can be a gift. It's not a bad thing, but if that was the only role you were really validated for playing in your family of origin growing up, it can lead to issues in your adult relationships.
You may not know how to process your own painful feelings. It may be hard for you to be vulnerable. You're so busy trying to make everybody else feel better or laugh, that you don't know how to say, man, this is hard for me. I'm the one who's hurting. This is painful for me. You may not know how to express vulnerability.
In a healthy family, it's not that we don't have these tendencies, but that child tends to be the one to alleviate pressure by telling a joke or making people laugh. We want to honor that gift while also ensuring that that child doesn't feel like that is their job. We want to help create balance where that child can also come to the table and say, hey, this doesn't feel very good to me. I don't like it when everybody's fighting.
The third role is the scapegoat, and this is the person who becomes the outlier, the one who is different from everybody else. They're often the focus of the family's problems. They're sort of identified as the problem child.
It's the opposite of the golden child. So if you were a golden child, you might've had a sibling who was the “problem child”. The family norms work in such a way that this one person is sort of left outside of those norms.
Oftentimes those family members really are just creative. They're different. They might have unique needs. They might have unique challenges. Maybe they're acting out for a specific reason. And so it does take some work to figure it out. I'm not trying to say this is simple. Your present day family may have a child who sometimes it's easy to scapegoat and think, oh man, they're the problem.
But when you find yourself doing that, you wanna pull that back in and ask yourself, what does my child need? Because if you were scapegoated, it's really painful and if the family doubles down on the exclusive norms that the child doesn't fit into, that child is gonna polarize against the family even further.
I've worked with families over the years where this has happened. The family will come to me with a sort of identified scapegoat. Can you fix this kid? If we could fix this kid, our family would be okay. Now, again, I don't want to minimize the reality that sometimes there is one person or one child in a family that is really difficult. Maybe they're addicted to a substance. Maybe they're really acting out. Maybe they're really going their own way and you need to set healthy boundaries.
I do not want to minimize that. I'm talking about something a little bit different. It's where the family norms aren't flexible enough to allow for a child that just doesn't quite fit in. It might be a child who's really creative and thinks outside the box and doesn't really love the family rules or wants to do things a little bit their own way.
It's not that they want to go do bad or immoral things. They just want to do things a little bit differently. It might be a child who's really honest and speaks up and says it like they see it. They're not afraid to call a spade a spade, and it's kind of off putting to the rest of the family members.
If you were one of these children, maybe you were the kid who was just kind of saying, this is dumb. I don't know why we do this. I ended up getting in trouble for that, when you really were just being yourself, you were just trying to be honest, and then you end up feeling like an outsider to the rest of the family.
And it can be really painful when you get scapegoated, when you're simply trying to be honest. You're trying to be true to your God given self. If you were a child who was scapegoated, as you enter into your adult relationships, you might notice that you tend to feel misunderstood, that you tend to feel ostracized, that you tend to feel like an outlier in your adult relationships or in adult groups.
You may even seek out other scapegoats, right? Other folks who didn't feel like they fit in because you feel more at home with those folks. And so it's something to be mindful of as you think about your family of origin. In a healthy family where we're trying to move toward harmony, we'd slow the system down and take the time needed to get to know the unique needs of this child.
I get that this takes a lot of work and that we do not do it perfectly. I've worked with enough moms and enough families to know this is not easy. But it's reframing what's happening in your mind. Okay. I don't always get this child. I don't always understand what they need. Sometimes this child even triggers me and that's okay. Sometimes some children trigger you more than other children.
When you name that with humility, you can take brave steps to gain understanding, to gain the skills that you need to parent that unique child so that they feel like a part of the family system. And again, if you think about that middle school band metaphor, you might think of a really cool instrument that isn't necessarily that common that comes in and plays an amazing solo. That wouldn't be possible without that unique gift.
If you were scapegoated as a child, if that's how you were treated, please hear me say you have tremendous value to the group. You may not be the person just sort of seamlessly cruising along with the rest of the system, with the rest of the people, but you may be the one who comes in at key times and shows up and changes the whole thing for the better. Your role matters. It matters for you and it matters for the good of the group.
Next, we get to the invisible one. If you were an invisible one, you'll know it to your bones. You were the child who was just trying to survive. You stayed out of the way, out of the fray. Off the grid.
You didn't get the positive attention. Maybe your parents were preoccupied. Maybe they weren't present to you and you surely did not want the negative attention. So you flew under the radar. Unseen and unnoticed. And if you were the invisible child, it can be hard for you as an adult to feel worthy of being seen, to feel worthy of love, to feel worthy of making your presence known in your adult relationships.
If you were one of those invisible children, your job as you heal is to learn how to insert your voice. Now again, for those of you parenting and and thinking about your own kids who might be quieter or might be tempted to stay under the radar, your job is to stay connected to them, is to try to gently keep them active, keep them involved, keep them engaged in the system.
The last role I want to cover is the caretaker. And I'm guessing a lot of you will relate to this one. A lot of what we talk about on this podcast is learning how to not take responsibility for everybody else in our lives. And in many ways, a lot of that starts in childhood, where as a child, you were the one who took responsibility for supporting everyone in your family. You might've tried to cover up the unhealthy behavior of another family member.
And this is a role that I see so frequently in women, especially. These are the children who take responsibility for everybody else. If you were somebody who took on a caregiver role, you might've taken responsibility for a parent where you became the parent for your parent–maybe they had an addiction issue or a mental health issue. Or maybe they were just emotionally immature and you tried to care for them as a child.
That became a role that you took on. Maybe you were caring for siblings because your parents or caregivers weren't taking leadership, weren't taking on that responsibility and you saw a need. And so you stepped into that vacuum of leadership and started taking care of your siblings.
And these are beautiful qualities. If no one ever came alongside you as a child and reminded you that at the end of the day, you are not an adult, you are not the parent, you are a child, and those responsibilities were never meant to be yours, it can be really challenging to learn the boundaries of those caretaking skills.
As an adult, you can slip into codependency where instead of focusing on identifying and meeting your own needs, you over-focus on meeting the needs of everyone around you. It can be really hard for you as an adult to learn where the healthy boundary lines fall between being a good person, a kind person, an empathetic person, and also not taking on other people's problems in a way that isn't healthy.
That can be really challenging if you were in that caregiver role as a child. For those of you, again, who are parenting and you have a child that kind of fits that description, that can be very empathetic, and that can tend to sense the needs of his or her siblings, it's really tempting to rely on that child, right? This happens in the best of families, where we just sense these different areas of giftedness, and we might over-rely on them instead of helping our children have healthy boundaries.
If you notice that in one of your children, it's so important to name that and have those conversations and be saying to that child, listen, I love that quality in you. That is such a beautiful quality, that empathetic spirit, that kind heart. And also it is not your job to take care of all of us. It is just not your job. And I want you to excuse yourself from that responsibility today.
You start to teach your child. Number one, that you see it, that you name it, and that you are going to help them learn to identify when they're overextending that part of themselves.
These are some of these extreme roles. When a family system gets out of balance for any reason, when the adults, the caretakers who are tasked with the job of maintaining a harmonious system, when for whatever reason that job gets abdicated, children get pushed into these extreme roles and the family gets out of balance.
Again, it's not only detrimental for each child who is part of the family. It's also detrimental for the whole family because the whole family isn't functioning in its healthiest way, where each family member is showing up as a whole person who has feelings, who has thoughts, who has needs, who can express their needs, can express their thoughts, and also meet the needs of others who can express opinions, who can also be disagreed with.
I mean, this is a healthy family. It's noisy. There's a lot going on in a healthy family. There are a lot of skills there. The ability to assert your voice. And also the ability to take feedback, the ability to help other family members, and also the ability to tolerate when we disappoint other family members.
The family is a crucible for learning these critical skills that we need when we move into our adult relationships. I want to pause here for a moment for a few words from our incredible sponsors. These sponsors allow me to bring you this content for free. And so I'm grateful if you take a few moments to listen to these words from them, and then we'll come back and talk about practical steps you can take to create harmony in your family.
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Here are the four most important things you can do to begin to create harmony in your family. Now, if you have kids, this could apply to the family you are leading. If you don't have kids, this could apply to any relationship, really, where you're living life together, where you're working through the kinks of life. Any relationship you have is a crucible for healing past wounds and learning new skills.
You can take steps in any of these four categories in any relationship, and you will be taking a step toward health and wholeness through these actions.
Number one, it sounds cliche, but it's open communication. In harmonious systems, each member of that system is encouraged to both give and receive communication. There's a time to share what's on your heart, to state a need, to state a preference, to ask for help. There's also a time to receive communication, to listen to the people around you.
It sounds so simple, but we don't always do this very well. A great strategy to get started just with leveling the playing field where everybody is invited to come to the table. The two minute check in. You just set aside time. It could be at the beginning of dinner, around the dinner table, it could be in the car, if you all drive somewhere together, where you do these quick two minute check-ins where each family member in two minutes gets to share whatever they want to share.
They just have to share an update. What's going on, something they're proud of, something they're worried about, something they're thinking about, something that happened, something they're excited about, something they really want, and just let each family member have two minutes to share.
Everybody else just listens. Nobody gets to cut in. Nobody gets to judge. Nobody gets to criticize. Everybody just gets to share their two minutes, whatever they want. And everybody else listens and sees what you learn about each other.
It’s a way to level the playing field. You know, if you've got a kid who doesn't talk a lot, or if you've got a kid that tends to take over, it sets a norm where we've got a timer, you got two minutes, go. And the kid who doesn't want to talk a lot has to fill that time. And the kid who wants to talk too much has to stop after two minutes. You're normalizing that idea that everybody's got a voice. Everybody's got a role.
Number two, the other research-backed activity that I really like is called clock contingent attention. And all that means is that if you're a member of a family, you're leading a family, you give clock contingent attention to each family member. What do we mean by that? Clock contingent means it's based on the clock.
It could be once a week that you spend clock-contingent time with each of your children. It could be once a day, depending on your schedule, depending on how many kids you have, this clock contingent attention could happen every day. It could happen once a week, but what it means is you're setting aside time regularly to give to each one of your children.
And during that time, you're going to do something together that you both enjoy. It's not based on how you're feeling toward that particular child. It's not based on how they've been behaving. It's not based on whether they've earned it. It's not based on whether you're in a good mood. It's just what you do.
If your kids are younger, it might be that every single night you read them a story before bed. That's your clock-contingent attention. It doesn't matter how the day went. You're going to end the day at 9 p.m. with 20 minutes of quality time where you are present to each one of your children.
You might take a weekly date night with each of your kids, where during that time, they get your full attention, they know what it feels like in their body to have the fullness of your presence.
As your kids get older, it might be that once a week you check-in with each other. Every Thursday night, we're going to spend 30 minutes together. And you do something that your kids like to do during that time. It's their time and you're just present to them.
This idea of clock-contingent attention reinforces that you are there for each member of your family based on the fact that you just love them. It's not something that they have to earn.
Now that doesn't mean there aren't going to be other times where you need to have hard conversations with your kids or negotiate boundaries or set limits, but that clock contingent attention is always going to be there as a time for you to reconnect and just be present.
The third strategy I call the no shame zone. We want to foster an environment where there's no shame. We can talk about what's hard. We can talk about things that are vulnerable. We can talk about things that we did wrong without shame.
And there are a couple of ways that you can foster an environment like that. The strategy that I like best to foster a no shame zone is what I like to call “two things can be true”. Anytime you're approaching a difficult topic or a challenging conversation, maybe you need to talk about the fact that the house is a mess and you need it to get picked up.
Or maybe you need to talk about something you've noticed, maybe you need to talk about a poor attitude that you've noticed in one of your children. Or maybe you need to talk about some secrecy or some sneaking around and you need to raise a hard conversation.
The premise of two things can be true is that you can both honor something good that you see and name what's hard. Here are some examples. No one did anything wrong and we need to talk about the mess. When you say something like that, you're saying, listen, I don't know whose fault this is. I'm not laying blame. Something happened here and we need to fix it.
Right there, you're neutralizing the shame of what's wrong with you guys? Why would you do this? How could you make this huge mess? You're neutralizing all the defensiveness, and you're just saying, listen, nobody did anything wrong. I am not laying blame here. And we've got an issue that we all need to help solve.
Another example, you might say to a child who's kind of showing some attitude or not necessarily wanting to pull their weight. I see that something's going on with you. I don't understand exactly what's happening and this attitude isn't going to cut it. We've got to have a conversation.
When you set those two things down side by side, you neutralize defensiveness and you give yourself a fighting chance of actually connecting with your child. You're honoring that there's a reason that they're behaving the way they're behaving. Something's going on. I get it. I don't know what it is.
I do know that this thing that you're doing isn't okay. And so we need to together figure out how to come up with a better way. The idea of a no shame zone isn't that we all communicate perfectly all the time. We don't, but when you use those “two things can be true” statements, you're reflecting reality, which is, listen, we are all doing our best. This is hard. And also, this isn't going to cut it.
We've got to figure out how to navigate that middle ground. I'm going to go back to that middle school band–if you imagine yourself as the conductor going to the violins going, I get that you are doing your best. You are playing your heart out. And also it's a little out of tune. It doesn't sound quite right. Can we try something else?
I get that the drummers are just giving it your all. And also we've got an issue here. This isn't quite working. We need to bring it in a little bit. And when you take that two things can be true, you assume the best of the other person while simultaneously pointing out the thing that needs to be corrected, that needs to come into alignment.
You create this no shame zone and it allows the pieces to all come together. Every family member learns that they are important, that they are valued, that they're trying their best, and also sometimes they're going to mess up.
They're not going to be quite in alignment. They're going to miss some cues and it's your job to point that out so that we're working toward this end goal of harmony.
Finally, to close, I want to share with you what I think is one of the most important skills that you can have in any family, really in any relationship.Here's the thing, there is going to be conflict in your family. There's going to be conflict in your relationship. They're going to be ruptures. You're going to hurt other people. Other people are going to hurt you, especially in our families.
It just happens. We trip over each other's triggers. Sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes it's unintentional. We just do it. We are human. We're going to trip over each other's triggers from time to time. So therefore what we have to be able to do really, really well is repair.
Now there's a really good TED talk that Dr. Becky Kennedy gave on this very topic. She believes the number one most important strategy for any parent to understand is the art of repair. And she does a fantastic job of describing it in her TED talk. You can check that out. We'll have a link to it in the show notes.
Repair is modeling the art of empathy. It's modeling the art of going to a child and naming what happened. Here's what happened. I can imagine how hard this was for you. Here's what I want you to know. I was having a bad day. I didn't treat you right. I didn't say what I wished I would say.
It takes a lot of humility to go and say, I was not having a good moment there. You know, that thing that you saw me do, it wasn't right. And it wasn't your fault. You didn't cause me to do that. I was having a bad moment and this is such a healing act. And the reason I know it is so important is because I want each one of you listening to think about some of the heavy weights that you carry and imagine if your caregivers, if the people who cared for you came to you and said, you know what, I did that thing. It was not my best moment and it was never your fault.
I am so sorry that happened. I love you and I wish I could have done a better job, we all need to hear that from the people that we love, and we all need to extend that to others. When we are able to humble ourselves and say to our children, I own it. At that moment, I was out of line and you did nothing to cause that. That was on me and I take responsibility.
When we do that, nervous systems calm and we open up to the goodness and the kindness and the grace of God, who doesn't expect us to be perfect. In those moments of surrender where we say, oh my gosh, that one is on me. I am so sorry. That is not your weight to bear. God shows up in powerful ways. He releases those burdens and everybody feels just a little bit lighter.
In those moments of repair, the harmony of our family, of this symphony we are creating together, becomes something beautiful for the benefit of everyone.