The Two-Sided Mirror: Healing From Deep Family System Wounds and Ongoing Sibling Rivalry.

The following is an e-mail exchange I recently had with a client of mine.

The struggle presented in the exhange is a common one: how to come to terms with the innate and strong wish to have and maintain family relations while enduring the ongoing, long-term results of damning and damaging family secrets and the visceral memory of deeply felt childhood harm, even if only partially remembered or not remembered at all.

I thought it was informative and worth sharing here because of the common-ness of such circumstances between siblings even, and perhaps especially, after the death of both parents. It also asks and reviews many questions that are common to those who struggle with life-long patterns of unresolved and hurtful sibling rivalry:

•           What do I do if I remember hurtful things from the family’s past and      my siblings do not?
•     What if my siblings remember circumstances that involve me and I do not?
•     How can I best cope with sibling behaviors that seem to be a result of occurrences in the distant past, especially if they deny those behaviors or claim they are my fault and a result of my own unwillingness to come to terms with the past?
•     When do I, and can I, let it all go and recognize present behaviors on their own merits and refuse participation in a damaging, hurtful, pattern of behavior? How do I do this?
•      How do I recognize when I am re-entering the pattern of hurtful interactions and see the warning signs so that my innate hope of reconciliation isn’t turned into co-dependency or re-emergence of the patterns that result in the opening of old, deep wounds?
•      If I can’t remember specifics of how I was wounded how can I manage the unsettling and difficult feelings my family members bring up in me? Is estrangement the only answer?

The difficulty underlying all of these questions remains how to manage the competition between the nature of the wish to cultivate and resolve family connection and the equally strong defense mechanism that each of us possesses that wants to keep us safe and loved, worthy, in our world and among our family.

Deep wounds, and perhaps especially the ones that remain stubbornly half in and half out of the box of secrets that we began to fill up and lock when we were very very young, push to be realized and healed. We feel that push even if we do not remember and cannot find the words to describe. Besides, we cannot use language to describe what happens in the more primitive parts of our psyche that have no language, just feeling. We assign guilt and responsibility according to how we translate these occurrences into language, and therefore we often misappropriate wholly or in part.

Perhaps we no longer have the combination, or perhaps we unknowingly gave the key or the combination to others in the family and they have forgotten where it is, what the numbers are, or have other reasons, conscious or not, for with-holding essential information from us. Many of those reasons may have everything to do with their own methods of coping and strategizing their own healing and defense. Unfortunately our manner and skill in actively participating in how that healing can take place co-exists with the desire to bring our degree of safety in the family configuration to the fore and make it work for us and for the others whom we are connected to.

Much happens in the preverbal areas of the human brain. How to trust our ability to interpret the messages we get from those netherlands? So much of how we interpret our world happens in the parts of the brain that also devise and implement ways to protect us from the dynamism that the pre-verbal areas want to subject us to. We must be careful. We must be concrete in how we facilitate the interaction between how we speak about and understand our childhood wounds and how they are presented to us through the Escher-like vagaries of memories, ours and those who share them with us.

Most of all, we must be as kind as we can while we proceed on our way toward fuller integration of our childhood experience as it arises even unbidden and asks us to understand it, as we continue to work to protect ourselves from further harm. We must be kind to the others who share parts of this story, for while it is unnecessary and not worthwhile to place ourselves back in the way of harm. We can realize that they have almost certainly been harmed as well and as deeply. Being a victim and a perpetrator are often, perhaps even usually, both sides of the two-sided mirror. We must be kind to ourselves.

Names in the following exchange have been changed. It is being used with permission.

***

Hi Bob,

Can you tell me about if a child can have something bad done to them and not remember it??  Does that really happen??? I made the horrible, horrible mistake of giving siblings another chance to blow my life apart.  They didn't disappoint.  Problem is I don't know what's real or what's a lie anymore.   It has taken a toll.  Are their ways to find out your own past??  Thank you!

Truly,

Molly

*

Molly;

Yes.

It might be best before you go forward to do some research about memory itself. Maybe Google "Recent Brain science re: Memory"

The jury's out whether it is of much use to "remember" those things that appear to be forgotten. Every individual and every incident of childhood trauma can be so different... one child is forever altered by the death of a dog and another child manages the death of a sibling without a glitch.  It is VERY difficult to "remember" the specific details of otherwise forgotten episodes of one's childhood.... and some trauma is less a specific event and more the sustained behavior of powerful people around him or her....  so that it may not be a specific incident of cruelty, abuse or neglect, but a pattern of dealing or NOT dealing with the needs of the child. IE: a pattern in a family culture that results in making taboo the discussion of traumatic events that happened to everyone can be just as difficult in later years as other more specifically harmful events... because of the pattern one devises to manage those events. Patterns gets ingrained even after it is not useful and even harmful.

Remember: it is very difficult to give up on one's family. So giving them multiple chances to rectify past patterns and harm is NORMAL... perhaps unavoidable (it seems the mind tricks us into doing it even after we have made firm resolutions to never let it happen again!) so go easy on yourself.

Is that helpful?

***

Yes, it is very helpful.  I did Google it and read some articles with differing points of view.  Considering what I've read and...  the sources of my questions, it seemingly confirms that I will never know the truth. 

For the past year, Jim & I knocked ourselves out for by brother Hank and his wife Chris.  All while driving back and forth to the Cancer Treatment Center of America for Jim’s treatment.  We painted, repaired, cleaned, moved, installed....a multitude of physical duties.  We brought him a lift chair, a hospital bed, a standing wheelchair, etc...and a list of other things to help them remain in their home.  The second visit together Hank poured out this seemingly heartfelt apology for all he put Linda, Larry and I through [Larry and Linda are Molly's children from a previous relationship --BV].  I just accepted his need to clear his conscience as this stage in his life and I really enjoyed puttering around with him and fixing things for him and giving him some peace of mind.  His ability to walk is lost, his ability to transfer himself was greatly diminished last I saw him.  Chris seemed o.k. around us.  She seemed to make the effort and we just tried to be respectful and not rock her boat.  But from the beginning, Jerry [a son adopted by Molly and Jim  --BV] seemed to follow her (almost obsessively so) while we were there.  (In retrospect, we should have realized his signs of being on point....Lord knows we've seen him do it before.)  Then one Sunday night while I was still struggling to wrap things up at 9pm and head home, Hank didn't want me driving late, he was worried about my safety, etc.  So I was going to stay and we sat there visiting together and he proceeded to tell me how Chris hated me and it was all an act.  He went on to tell me that she "made a big deal" around the boys, but trashed them to others....etc.  I was stunned.  I was there alone and it was my worst fear being realized.  I began to panic.  She had gone to bed, but I just didn't know what to do.  He just kept going on and proceeded to tell me all the things that were wrong about me.  They were stunning.  He was so cranked up I just tried to keep calm.  By midnight I told him that I decided to just head home.  Then he really went nuts.  I stayed calm, calm and steady, but my head was spinning.  I got my tools and played like everything was o.k.  I left and called Jim and woke him up.  I drove the 5 hours home.  I never went back, but I did stay in touch on the phone and online until we received a photo of our boys that Chris had sent on to Larry's biological Dad and his wife.  I didn't have to pop a vein, Jim did.  We decided what we were going to do about it and I was the one chosen to deliver our decision to Hank.  He went ballistic.  He sent a letter (that I did NOT read).  Jim intercepted it and I honestly did not read it.  Jim handled it with Hank from that point on.  He told him that his family was off limits, that he would not stand for any further harm inflicted on me and never would Larry and Jerry know this kind of behavior in their lives.  He told him to stay away from all of us, including Linda.  All our social media was all closed off to them at that point.  Jim told him if there was another contact, letter, call, harassment of any kind, he would be calling the police.  He told Hank that HE was stopping it.  I am grateful for that, I didn't have it in me anymore.  At the time, Linda's wedding was upon us and it really cast a shadow over a part of it for all of us.  But I kept going.

Problem was that Jim did tell me (in a moment of non-thinking...) a couple comments that Hank had said to him.  It's almost as if the poison continues to seep into my life.  He made accusations of someone abusing me.  (My brother David implied that in a fight with my parents many years ago too.)  Since neither of them knows anything about my personal life, they couldn't know my own thoughts.  I've never spoken them out loud to anyone.  I've thought about it all a great deal in the past few months and especially after reading these articles, I don't know that I believe what they are saying, but I also don't believe there is any reliable way to find out.  

Do you have any thoughts on "Soul Retrieval"?  

I won't lie to you.  I have scared myself a few times in the past couple months.  Then a good friend of mine took his own life.  It made me realize I better get my shit together.  But it seems that who I thought I was and who I really am may be miles apart.  I know that my siblings words created that doubt and there are some "coincidences" that seem too close to be ignored.  

Anyway.  Enough of my babbling, I know you already know my family dysfunction.  I've probably put you solidly to sleep....snoring in fact.  LOL! Just trying to find my way through all this.  

   

*

This sounds so familiar. I am sorry for you but also admire your continuing efforts to try to make your brother's life more live able.

I think it's important to remember that just because you may not remember specifics of any abuse you may have suffered does not mean it never happened. SOMETHING happened. You live with that legacy... and in some ways so do your brothers, whether they were victims or perpetrators or both. Sibling rivalry in families with toxic secrets is fierce and life long. In my business we would be fools if we refused to treat people for symptoms of PTSD just because there is no substantiated history. The symptoms are and should be enough. Of course, most victims of such secrets are stuck with the de-legitimizing forces that are extremely strong and alive (even if the perpetrators aren't)... the feeling that there must be proof is undeniable and sometimes crushing. Can you let go of that part and focus on taking care of yourself while you continue the fine work you are doing to stop and change the legacy?  Most of these things are multigenerational.

Great that Jim has been so strong for you... sounds like he really came through. Very very cool.

... the problem arises when one's words are significantly divergent from one's actions... if the space between the two is too wide, pathology is born both on an individual and collective level.   This is the space of the birthplace of neuroses that can grow into insanity. It is the seedbed of propaganda and tyranny... not to mention good old-fashioned lies.  Add charisma to the picture, the ability to convince others and one's own conviction that the wide space between one's words and deeds is non-existent, and what do you get? Manipulative anti-social dystopia or serious personality disorder…. a collective ruled by the insane.

Your Own Permanent Revolution

Radical Revolution: Step Eleven

Make a pig a cow.

Turn water into stories and orchids.

Bring the children to the mountain

and make them sing.

Believe what cannot be built.

Forever is longer than you have.

Count your feelings to the moon.

Leave the last hummingbird in the thistle.

Deport the calendars of the empty rich.

All the moss will be your bed.

America will turn into snow

and you will not be able to see your street

from your window.

Eat something you have saved.

Save something you can eat.

Make sure the seeds are as protected

as the gold. Break the banks

with bread. Imagine all the lines and blueprints

disorganized and lost to their centers

and their expected order.

Tell someone you are lost too;

do it over and over until, like last night,

the shining crescent cups

a billion flights: you are here and you

are there. Believe you can believe

and kick the pirates out

until they have nothing but their hearts

on the plate of hunger and of love.

Make a forest a clean winnowing harvest

as it is, doing nothing to disturb

the minutes of its wind and the turn

of its breath to the moon. Ah

the moon again.

Take a minute, in the snow,

to locate that light. The revolution

has never been gone.

You are standing on it.

It turns in you, under a wheel of dreams

through the tumble in the rivers of vacuums,

galaxies and the first nebula

of the primary star.

Your mother is there

and your twin. Carry the signs

of revolution as if it never stops

because it never does.

From Life and Death Motivation to Joy: Changing Diet, Changing Life

I recently recieved the following letter from a reader. I wanted to share her letter and my response because it relates to my own life as well as the reasons I've been unable to post on this blog for some time.

Hi Bob Vance,

I was reading your blog today and wonder you could give me an opinion on a diet/fitness app I'm making right now?

For me, I think the problem with being healthy is motivation. It's an abstract, overwhelming goal. I think the best way to counter this is to have concrete, winnable games and small victories.

So, this app will makes living healthy, and fitness into a RPG game, where users earn points, and "level up' as they achieve their goals. Every time they eat something healthy like vegetables, they earn points. Every time they complete a workout, they earn points. Each level will present different challenges.

The challenges will follow a certain structure. First will come changing your environment such as getting rid of junk food. Then, reducing stress, as stress leads to eating comfort food. Then concrete goals like keeping track of everything you eat, or taking the stairs for a week. Small, concrete goals rather than abstract ones like “be healthy” or “exercise more”.

The whole point is to create a holistic framework/game so people will rely less on willpower, and more on fun, achievement, and changing our environment

What's your opinion on this idea? Would you want to know when I'm done with it? If this sounds too silly, or absurd, just ignore what I just said, hehe =)

Best, Christine

***

Christine;

I appreciate your thinking of me for feedback on this project. It is interesting to be approached about this at this time in my life. In the past six months I have lost over 25 pounds. It has not seemed that difficult to do, even though I have worked on keeping my weight down for years, actually since I quit smoking over 27 years ago. Your query got me thinking about why it has seemed so much easier to change my relationship to food now than it has in the past.

I’ve never been horribly over weight and I have exercised regularly and vigorously for almost forty years. I carried my extra pounds quite well, but have known for many years that my family carries a kind of genetic cardiovascular predisposition for early illness and death. Both of my grandfathers died before they were 60. My mother died at 68. So I thought, rightly, that I had to try to get ahead of this issue while I had time. So far so good… until this past spring, when two days after my 57^th birthday, while I was swimming my 1.5 mile lap routine, I developed an unusual pain in my chest and back that later that day sent me to the hospital.

Without going into a time consuming and overly detailed account of my heart attack (the result of a clot in my “widow maker” artery that was held back from a deadly course by two peaks of arterial plaque, but still blocked blood flow while I was exercising), I think, for me, your idea that the main obstacle toward developing better health and diet patterns is motivation is right on. That I survived a potentially fatal heart attack (and did so, according to my cardiologists, because I exercised and worked on diet) is, it occurs to me, the only motivation I’ve needed to fine tune my diet, lose the extra weight and improve my overall cardiovascular health as I go into my older age. The motivation I feel is a matter of believing, viscerally, that I MUST improve my diet, that I have no real choices if I want to stay alive. This has worked, so far for me (and really, with no real 100% assurances) because it is everything I can do.

Duplicating this kind of motivation for others who are not confronted so concretely with their mortality seems to me to be the kind of question you are dealing with. You are working on a formula that maneuvers people into flicking the switch of a kind of motivation that takes advantage of their knowledge of the importance of their diet and exercise in very deep and essential ways.

Beyond haranguing people who really do not have a concrete perspective concerning the nature of their own mortality… and haranguing people about the benefits of diet and the negatives of overeating I think usually only creates more motivation to continue to over eat… how can you engage their intellectual understanding of the need for weight loss and over all good health habits in a way that it creates a deeper sensory based motivation toward better diet, weight loss and health?

I think your idea about creating a system of small steps and rewards is a good one. And I think focusing on making it fun, in one way or another, is a good inclination. That being said, I also think you should consider enlarging the scope of what that means to the wide variety of people to whom you want to offer your program.

If you have a good understanding of the nature of individuation, you must also understand that each of your clients will need to be involved in the invention of their own system of steps and rewards, as well as, and perhaps most importantly, in the uncovering of their own particular keys to the kind of motivation that is necessary to make the changes that they have to make. How uncover each client’s will to change? How to help each client understand that their urge to be healthier is indeed a life or death process?

So my next question would be: How can you help your clients uncover their, very serious, will to lose weight and be healthier all while integrating their individual program with the also very serious but more ‘fun’ reasons they want to stay alive? What do they love about life that makes this such a serious “mission”? Each person’s answers may be different, but without integrating that passion for living into the reasons for wanting to be healthier in whatever way shape or form it occurs in each individual life, I doubt that it will be possible to find and add the weight of the motivation needed to make the changes that they want to make. And they really must be ready to find those reasons, make that change and do the work themselves.

Also: For me food is a one of those joys of living. I don’t doubt that I am in rather good and crowded company. Eating is fun and gratifying. It is a social adhesive and a daily reward for the trials of each hour of living. It adds spice to love and succor to sadness. Without recognizing that and including it in a diet and health plan I doubt that I, personally, would get anywhere. How can we integrate someone’s love of food into his or her motivation for needing to have less of it? When does wanting food change from a simple daily joy into an addiction? Is there a concretely defined line between joy and addiction, and if so how do we help clients find it for themselves? If there are only shades of grey, how do we help our clients find their own place of comfort and health in that fog?

So yes: go on with your program of short term goals and rewards, but I would ask that your process include giving most of the responsibility for inventing those goals, steps, rewards and the nature of their motivation toward change to your client. Have a menu, so to speak, of choices plus give them plenty of space and facilitation to discover their own choices. Have your framework ready (it already sounds like you have a good start on that) and facilitate your clients’ exploration of it and help them fill in the details of the tasks that lie ahead.

I hope this helps. You might do some research and reading in the area of Motivational Interviewing, a technique for facilitating behavioral change pioneered by Professor William R Miller, Ph.D. and Professor Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D.. There’s a lot of information on the Internet, and training modules and courses available. It’s a non-intrusive, non-confrontational method of interviewing and counseling that gives responsibility for change to the client through exploring their roadblocks and stagnating ambivalences. You might find it a good companion to your work.

When the Norm becomes Sin

I am perplexed by the cultural habit of making something a sizeable proportion of the population does into sin. What part of who we are as individuals and as a culture demands that we continually pillory the very same people we set up to be our heroes and models and those who speak for us? Why are we so obsessed with behaviors that are common, a product of a wide range of personal preferences and, if done between consenting adults, harmless? Why are we less upset, even entertained, by footage of the bombing of cities than we are of some guy’s home movies of his underwear?

The Internet is full of video clips and picture-sharing opportunities. That we would expect people NOT to share sexually related information, tastes and titillations, with each other at least as much as they share the latest popular song, the inane circumstances and happenings in family and social relations, political agreements, arguments and passions, pictures of hopelessly cute children and pets, and too many people singing badly to count, is befuddling. Beyond some confused and conflicted, self-hating, shame about our own desires.

Sexual chat and sexual variety, real and virtual (can they be reasonably expected to be distinguished from one another? at least in terms of how the internet is a reflection of our concerns and what we think about?) are a normal and generally motivating part of life. As long as it does not interfere drastically with one's day-to-day survival and the respect for others that is a given in civil society(and often sex enhances survival in whatever form it is expressed) sex SHOULD in fact be sought after. The pathology is with and in those who are constantly working to repress and disappear their own and others' urges for sexual connection... because it doesn't usually work very well, and, as we have ample evidence, it is generally dishonest.

The ugliest part of these overly examined celebrity sex-bashing news cycles is in the nature of the mob mentality with which they are pursued, regardless of how intellectual some of the stone throwers may hope to sound. They are still throwing stones, and if the statistics and Internet content represent any truer picture of what we think about, lust after, and wish to do if only in our fantasy life, the houses they throw from are glass.

The cultural predilection for demonizing normal behavior is self-defeating, but worse it also assures that the collective "we" will always be able to be led over any cliff of public attention or lack of it that is handy when other, more heinous, collective behaviors, deserve our attention and our action. Can we really care that much about a fella's wiener in his tighty-whiteys? I mean, I am more concerned about those who are pre-occupied with puritanical and unmaintainable standards of pathological morality than those who display their goods to someone who asked to see them.

And as far as the lies are concerned: if the thought of being forced to be tied to the burn pile of public attention isn't enough to force such untruths, then the internalized shame such a pathological cultural approach to expressions of sexuality would be entirely expected. More Stones. More glass houses.

In the end, who cares? In the end, the sex other people have or don’t have is as inane as wedding pictures, or the ten-year-old’s first tap dance, at least to those who did not attend and/or have no personal connection to them.

In the end, how can we expect to find people who can authentically represent us and our hopes and dreams for this nation if we constantly tar and feather them for the acts we ourselves have indulged, fantasized, and frightened ourselves with? What is the force behind the velocity and anger with which we aim the stones that we throw? Do we really wish to turn our representative bodies and the lives of our cultural heroes into sterile, passionless and abnormally sexually single-focused Stepford droids?

Just as vehement gay-haters are often most likely to struggle with their deeply felt and deeply unresolved tenderness toward those of the same sex, so must our angst and rage at those who would post pictures of their parts and talk about their titillations be invested with our own shame and denial about our desires and repressions.