Archives for 2015

Family Secrets: How to Overcome their Toxic Legacy 

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Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

Paul Tournier

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost, The Secret Sits

In families where there is addiction, abuse, criminal behavior, or mental illness, there is usually a code of silence that dictates the actions of the whole tribe. This unstated but powerful family trope has the potential for creating an internal shame-based environment that perpetuates a sense of worthlessness and can leave a legacy of self-destructive behaviors and difficult relationships.

What motivates people to keep family secrets? Fear of social rejection, fear of rejection and criticism from the family, fear that articulating these truths will somehow make them more real and demanding of attention (whether by oneself, other family members, or the authorities). Yet, the path to releasing shame, cultivating self-acceptance, and creating a new life paradigm is through speaking one’s truth. By openly acknowledging the challenges of your unique childhood you unlock much of the power those secrets had over you, and can connect with everyone else who facedsimilar issues. Instead of feeling isolated and unfit for human company, you can re-join the human race.

Of course, after years of denial and keeping secrets, it is not easy to start speaking honestly. Thankfully, there are ways to heal from these patterns and their fall-out. 12 Step programs provide support as you navigate unfamiliar emotional seas. Therapy bolsters you as you become your authentic self and learn to speak your truth, while shedding light on family dynamics inculcated at a very impressionable age. Therapy can also help you deal with the parts of you that feel disloyal when choosing a different path from the one you were taught at home. In addition, it can assist you with the emotional, physical, and behavioral reactions that come from unleashing a boat load of family secrets. These consequences can be very hard to handle as they often include outright denial of events, and pushback from people who have known you one way and resist your changing. (A therapist can also help you with the cascade of feelings these reactions might trigger.)

If you grew up in a family with big secrets you were trained to deny your reality. If your childhood included abuse you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress. Luckily, there are a number of incredibly helpful ways to heal through much of that trauma.

The more people refuse to keep family secrets and open the gates to their truth, both past and present, the more likely everyone will realize: we all suffer, we all feel rejected, we all face physical, emotional, and social difficulties. The sooner that happens, the greater the likelihood we can create a compassionate world for ourselves and others.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

Change your words, change your relationships

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“There exists, for everyone, a sentence – a series of words – that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”

Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Words! What power they hold. Once they have rooted in your psyche, it is difficult to escape them. Words can shape the future of a child and destroy the existence of an adult.
Words are powerful. Be careful how you use them because once you have pronounced them, you cannot remove the scar they leave behind.”
Vashti Quiroz-Vega

It’s easy to get into linguistic habits that profoundly effect your relationships. By changing just two simple patterns your interactions will improve immeasurably.

If you find yourself saying: “Yes, but…” actively work to change that to “Yes, and….” This tiny linguistic adjustment will shift people’s unconscious perceptions of you from negative to neutral or even positive. When you say “Yes, but…” the “but” negates what you said before it. If you are trying to win friends and influence people, saying “Yes, and…” gives the impression of inclusivity, and comes across in a more positive way.

Another pattern that hinders relationships is the use of the word “You.” If you are in the habit of starting every sentence with the word “you” be aware this can come across as blaming, judging, assuming, shaming, criticizing, condescending, even accusatory. This negative message gets transmitted to your listener both consciously and unconsciously. Consciously, people may react defensively. Unconsciously, they might avoid you. Neither is conducive to nurturing safe, close relationships.

To get out of the habit of approaching people with the word you, unless it’s “My, you look beautiful,” start your thoughts with the word “I.” For example, instead of saying “You’d better watch out, something as tiny as an extra piece of bread can really pack on the pounds.” You might say, “I find changing just one thing, like skipping that extra piece of bread, really helps me maintain my weight.” The first one sounds condescending, shaming, blaming, judgmental, and critical. The second one sounds a bit more friendly, and informational. Of course, talking about weight is probably not a great idea no matter how semantically diplomatic your delivery.

To make matters even more complicated, the way you speak has profound effects on the way you think, and vice-versa. By saying “Yes, but…” you have already dismissed whatever it was you were supposedly agreeing with. The whole construct is designed to get your opinion out as fast as possible while rejecting the other person’s, albeit in a socially sanctioned way. Ultimately, this linguistic habit gives people the impression you don’t value their input. By saying “you” rather than “I,” you create a wedge between yourself and the other person. It’s subtle, but over time, its effects accrue.

By thinking before you say something, you give yourself the opportunity to abort the idea completely. If that takes too much time, just changing “you” to “I” will shift the emotional quality, valence, and meta-message. Try it for one week and notice the changes in people’s reactions to you and your reactions to them.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

Finding solid ground when you lose your way

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I got lost but look what I found.
Irving Berlin

When you lose your way and forget who you are, your beauty, your kindness, your connection to all that is, come back home. There is a trail of breadcrumbs leading to your true self. A self capable of curiosity, creativity, confidence, courage, unconditional self-acceptance, and peace.

There is a part of you that can be ok in this world with its mind-boggling contradictions, daily challenges, betrayals, and unanswered questions. You can let it all just be. The knowable and unknowable. Give it a cosmic permission slip to soothe, annoy, delight, or dismay in its myriad ways.

Let whatever comes come. It won’t last.

You are here for it all. A vessel for experiences. If you woke up this morning there is still space in you for more. When you’re full, you’ll go. Now, just be.

Take a moment to let life fill you with its wild buffet: hunger/satisfaction, connection/disconnection, sound/silence, meaning/meaninglessness, joy/grief. They all pass.

Be curious.

Be open.

Listen.

Look.

Feel.

Taste.

Touch.

Move.

Pay attention.

You won’t be here forever.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

Adult Children’s Revelations After Divorce

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Oh! What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

Sir Walter Scott

As time moves on from your divorce you can be sure of one thing: There will always be new revelations from your children. At times, they will rock your world and make you question your own memories. Whatever they are, it is important to understand the truth will make you free (if it doesn’t kill you first). Eventually, that new knowledge, however shocking, will help you let go of a past you may have been romanticizing and allow you to more fully release any lingering attachment you felt for someone who was clearly not the person you thought you married.

The worst revelations are of abuse to your children and they will require deep work on everyone’s part. Learning of infidelity, especially if it went on for a long time, is also painful and the collateral damage can have long-lasting effects on your children’s views of marriage and ability to trust. Finding out your ex may have been undermining you for decades, or asking your children to lie to you can feel devastating. Since none of these past behaviors can be undone, the only good option is working to create the best relationship you can have with your adult child.

If your child was seduced into keeping secrets and lying to you, the history of those behaviors will always be there. The messages can quiet down, they can even be eclipsed with years of new thoughts and positive interactions, but they can never be erased. As a result, they will effect your relationship in inexplicable ways. Accepting that, and assuming everything happens for your highest good, is your path to peace.

To complicate matters even more, when children have been manipulated by a parent to keep secrets they usually feel guilty and ashamed. This guilt typically creates resentment for the wronged spouse because, on some level, the adult child knows they colluded with the other parent. When they interact with the parent they lied to their guilt creates cognitive dissonance and all they really want is to get away as fast as possible. These mixed feelings are often felt as resentment. (See chapter on Guilt.) So, now, you not only have to bear the brunt of the toxic behavior you knew nothing about, but your adult child’s possible guilt, shame, and convoluted resentment towards you. Add that to your parental feelings of protection for your child, no matter how old they are, and you get a very complicated situation.

As if that weren’t enough, they are dealing with anger at the toxic parent for manipulating, bullying, cajoling, bribing, and intimidating them. This anger can easily morph into depression, or anger directed within. It can also appear as anxiety related to dealing with either parent over the potential fall-out of choosing to keep secrets or reveal them.

If you felt abandoned or neglected as a child these revelations may feel like a re-wounding, and trigger old issues. If you learned of new betrayals by your former partner this knowledge can easily catalyze bodily reactions that make you feel unsafe. Unsafe physically, emotionally, or with the adult child who shared the information. It is hard to trust after being betrayed. (See chapter on Trust.)

What can you do to heal your inner wounds and your relationship with your child? First, remember, they were young, impressionable, and wanted their other parent’s attention and affection. Both of which may have been given by making your child feel special through sharing secrets, buying things, acting as a best friend, denigrating the other parent’s values, and all sorts of other unsavory behaviors. But, your child did not start this dynamic.

If the lies, bad-mouthing, and deception have continued into your children’s adulthood your path is even more complicated as expectations of adults are usually quite different from those for children. The good news is all of it can be worked with skillfully, lovingly, and patiently.

Here are some suggestions to help you heal from an adult child’s new revelations:

  1. Take plenty of time to let everything sink in. Do your best to react slowly. Talk with a friend, therapist, clergy member, or relative to work through the myriad effects of this new information.

2. Explore these revelation’s effects in your body. How do they feel physically? Where do you feel them? Patiently work to find words to describe what you feel in your body as this will take the focus off your thoughts, and help re-ground you.

3. What are you feeling towards your child? Reach deeply to find all your feelings, not just the ones that show up immediately. Whatever they are, they will change with time.

4. When the time is right, talk with your adult child about your reactions to this new information and listen to how they feel.

5. What are your thoughts? Can you do some journaling? Try writing a List of 100. This is done by setting a timer for 20 minutes, pre-numbering a page with 100 lines, and writing as fast as you possibly can about your topic. No censorship. That means you write down everything that comes up, even if it is the exact same thing you just wrote on the previous 10 lines. Topics might be: 100 reasons I don’t trust my adult child. 100 things this revelation taught me. 100 reasons I am glad to be divorced from this person. Once completed you can easily group your responses into percentages, see which thoughts and feelings come up most frequently, and work with those first.

6. Does this experience trigger others from the past? If so, what are they and what emotions do they bring up? I am partial to Internal Family Systems therapy as it is a gentle, yet very deep, way of working with difficult issues.

7. Look for the benefits as well as the collateral damage. No matter how earth shattering the news there are always hidden benefits.

8.Emotional pain is almost always soothed with a combination of time and kindness. You can calm your body-mind with yoga, massage, exercise, good food, journaling, talking it out, music, sleep, nature, Bach’s Rescue Remedy, aromatherapy (lavender, citrus, balsam fir needle, cedar, or any essential oils you like), tea (hot drinks without much caffeine have been shown to calm the sympathetic nervous system), an epsom salt and lavender bath, and anything else that reliably works for you.

9.If you like talking to yourself as a way to work through things you might be interested in some new research that shows how using your name, or talking to yourself in the third person (using “you” instead of “I”) can be very beneficial. It’s explained here:http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579543772121720600.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to your truth. Your truth when you lived it in the past doesn’t change because of some new information. It may change your opinion of your ex, but it doesn’t change what you felt at the time. Whatever new information has come to light says nothing about you and everything about him or her. You may think it says things about your children, but they were impressionable and needy. Even if the deception continued through their adulthood it is still not about you. They were indoctrinated, felt special, safe, and avoided conflicts with the manipulating parent, all if which created intense cognitive dissonance. Compassion for them and yourself is the best medicine.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang

How Abandonment Issues Affect Intimate Relationships

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“Finally, I decide I am my own case history, and if I don’t dig in to understand what I am doing, I will be spending the years ahead in a vexing pattern of intimacy and abandonment.”

Dominique Browning in “Slow Love”

Dig in is right. Dig in and root around is even more accurate. Of course, merely looking at the past will not excise it, as insight alone rarely leads to change. The intimacy and abandonment issues Ms. Browning refers to are some of the most deeply felt on earth, which gives them the greatest capacity to create suffering.

When do these issues of intimacy and abandonment get tangled together? In childhood. Everyone has some level of abandonment issues. Even a child brought up in the most loving, secure household still felt abandoned when his parents left the house. Babies have no concept of “I’ll be right back.” So, when Mom or Dad left the room they felt abandoned. Quickly, they learned parents will come back, but that primal experience of being left alone, perhaps eternally, is still part of their experience. If your parents divorced while you were still growing up, even if it was amicable, you will undoubtedly have some abandonment issues. Ditto if you were hospitalized as a child. Even more likely if you were outright neglected or abused. (Recent research into trauma has found that abuse by a family member has the potential to create just as much post-traumatic stress as living through a war.)

Though radically different, the capacity for intimacy also develops from birth. Did the baby get fed, held, changed, soothed, and spoken to? If so, there is an inner template for feeling safe. It is almost impossible to have intimacy without some sense of safety. That safety may be internal or external, but the greatest intimacy usually occurs when both coincide.

The ability to open to true intimacy with another is fraught with anxiety, while abandonment scares the wits out of most people. Yet, people seek intimacy even though it carries the specter of potential abandonment. The possibility to truly connect with another is wildly alluring to most humans. Who wouldn’t crave that sense of closeness, safety, and connection?

Trouble appears when your sense of relationship safety is jeopardized. It could be something minor, like your partner saying the wrong thing, forgetting your birthday, or simply misunderstanding you. It could also be something more threatening like finding out your mate is having an affair, emptied out your joint bank account, or really doesn’t want to retire early and spend 24/7 with you. For anyone with abandonment issues small or large events like these can trigger fears of being abandoned again. In relationships, these fears play out in an inability to commit to someone, a pattern of approach-avoidance behaviors, a penchant for starting fights to re-establish space, and any number of creative strategies that dance between the poles of engulfment and abandonment. To someone with these long-standing issues, neither feels safe. One again, the deepest sense of security can be found within.

When you know you can find refuge in yourself your “need” for someone else to be with you and pledge their undying troth is reduced. Of course, people couple up for many other reasons, and being in a relationship can be one of the greatest experiences on earth, as well as a conduit to self growth. However, if it is a hedge against existential anxiety it will probably be a Pyrrhic victory.

The potential for re-traumatization and more deeply embedding abandonment issues increases with each relationship in which you pin all your hopes and dreams on the other person, instead of yourself. Of course, the Disneyfication of society only exacerbates this dynamic, as it historically reinforced the notion that: ” One day my prince/princess will come,” implying that once that happens you will live happily ever after. What a damaging view, as it puts the controls for your emotional health in someone else’s hands.

Developing a compassionate, caring, patient, nurturing, inquisitive relationship with yourself is the holy grail of inner peace. While it is wonderful to have friends and family to depend on, you will always be with yourself. Every minute of every day. Wouldn’t it be incredible to feel safe with yourself?

No one feels 100% safe and sound. It’s impossible. Yet, if you regularly practice some of the following suggestions you will begin to notice a greater sense of inner peace and self-acceptance, as well as an increased tolerance for life’s challenges.

Everyone has different aspects of themselves. There may be a part of you that wishes everyone well, and another part that feels jealous of a friend’s success. You may notice a part that feels curious, and a part that judges or criticizes. Befriending all your parts and approaching them with curiosity and compassion is key to integrating them.

(If this idea interests you, you may want to learn about IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard Schwartz. Here is an animated video to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsJOVs_e1v4. If you want a more detailed explanation check out this video with Richard Schwartz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99HuL_Bk-SU.)

Get therapy if you have been struggling with these issues and not making any headway.

Develop a sense of inner safety by responding to internal alarms of feeling threatened, anxious, angry, depressed, etc. with self-compassion. Kristin Neff’s short video explains them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11U0h0DPu7k.

Watch the ebb and flow of your emotions. Notice how no emotion lasts forever.

Keep current with your inner and outer life through journaling. This allows you to more slowly process thoughts, feelings, and events. It is also a wonderful way of watching yourself grow and change.

Understand your triggers. Triggers to what? To past trauma that has the capacity to flood you with unpleasant emotions. Once you know your triggers you can more easily avoid people and situations that press your buttons.

Listen to lectures on Buddhism. You can start with podcasts by Tara Brach and Jonathan Foust. Pema Chodron’s books and CDs are also marvelous.

Set healthy boundaries with people for what you will and won’t allow, even if it means cutting the toxic ones out of your life.

Create safe practices that help you feel empowered physically, mentally, and emotionally. When you feel stable and grounded in yourself you are less likely to continue any relationship that keeps you swinging between intimacy and abandonment. Some supportive behaviors include: yoga, meditation, journaling to acquaint you with your internal dialogue and repetitive thoughts, relaxing, getting enough sleep, eating well, spending time with the natural world (even if it’s simply looking at the clouds or smelling a flower), giving yourself what you want when you want it (within reason, of course), taking time for friends and family, creating a home that feels welcoming and safe, and consciously balancing work, family, solitude, exercise, and rest.

Copyright Nicole S. Urdang