As a therapist, I often see highly complex, knotty, and dysfunctional family relationships burst into flame during the holidays after smoldering all year long. We humans aspire to unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, flexibility, and cooperation, but we sometimes fall short, and the consequence is suffering. We long to kiss and make up, to let bygones be bygones, and find reconciliation, but find ourselves blocked by our own painful memories/resentments/grudges and those of other family members. We get stuck and stay stuck as the hourglass of time keeps running down year after year. Eventually, some people just give up trying because no matter what they do, nothing changes.
When dysfunctional families engage in chronic hostility or icy avoidance, there is little point pursuing healing. I work with families who mount well-meaning attempts at sorting things out, finding consensual accounts of what went wrong, how, when, and why. When working with these families, however, I typically encounter heads knocking together with only the most glacially incremental, marginal progress, at best. This is no fun for anyone in your family. Everyone involved knows it sucks. I have not found any specific, infallible way to bridge these gaps. There is no perfect technique, no magic bullet. However, based on experience, I genuinely believe there is a process which can restart the stalled engine of family disconnection that became frozen in time.
First step is to recognize that everyone in the family is hurting and no one person caused it. Second, each family member must make a heartfelt commitment to choose love over negative emotions like fear, anger, hate or the desire to punish. They must commit to stop living like this because it helps nobody while bringing nothing but separation, pain, and grief. Third, they must explore the chronic dysfunction within the family without judgment, fault-finding, blaming or shaming. Here it is essential for each family member to recognize and accept his/her part in creating and perpetuating the schisms. Fourth, the family members need to seek new ways to come together, practice them, see what does and doesn’t work, and fine-tune the strategies and behaviors until being together actually feels good. Perhaps there never was a paradise lost which can be regained. Perhaps things went off the rails before or when the kids were born. And yet something that is good, worthwhile, and wholesome, can be created for the very first time when all family members are adults who have become sick of feuding and want something better.
