'Family' can hurt like Hell, and sooo complicated!

The whole concept of 'family' is very intense for me.  Some families do it so well; while the rest of us struggle.  It seems that how much love one invests into the 'family dynamic' has absolutely no relationship to how big a struggle family can be.


And Pain!  No one can tap into painful emotions like a family member!  No matter how estranged you are, or for how long, the capacity to get hurt by a family member is huge.  And they can have no idea they are hurting you, sometimes even by doing nothing at all!



Perfect Family



This is one of the dynamics I understand the least. How can one family member be so hurt, while the other family member be so oblivious?  And what is it about shared blood that makes the impact so powerful and last so long?  Most of us are pretty adept at placing an ex-friend or ex-lover or ex-worker or ex-acquaintance into a category that doesn't give them the access to our hearts they once had.  But if we share blood with them, even just a little blood, the story totally changes.  The power of family to hurt is immense.

Yet the value of family is just about as hard to understand and just about as intense.  When we are hurting, family is what we look for to help us endure, to carry us through.  So for those of us with estranged family situations, the tension between need and fear may be the most intense feeling we will ever encounter.  We feel this tension about people we have not seen nor heard from in ages, who may be even far away; but we still feel it! What an interesting (albeit annoying) phenomenon!

My personal family situation started off awful!  As I alluded to in my previous post, I do not know how to do 'family'.  It was never modeled for me in my youth, or at best very poorly.  By the time I got close to any sort of meaningful or helpful model, I was way too screwed up to understand or appreciate it.  I come from a broken home, and a highly physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic mother who married like some collect spoons or tea cups.  As I got close to my teen years I was 'transferred' to my other parent.  The style of parenting was so radically different, I don't know how I could have adjusted.  How does a child just approaching their teen years whose only understanding of life is how to try to navigate the treacherous waters of abuse supposed to even understand, nevertheless navigate through a totally different family culture? My trust had been shot to Hell years before, and what I was being exposed to just confused me. I know, life's a bitch!

Well, a lot has transpired between then and now.  When you grow up in a world like the one I just described, areas of your life just have to grow up very very fast.  But any time parts of our lives accelerate in growth like that, other parts are invariably going to be left behind.  And I have a number of areas of my life and maturity which grew at a stunted pace because of how fast I had to grow up in others.  So even now, as I enter the second half of a century of living on this planet, I find myself still struggling to be who and what I need to be in a family.  I struggle with my father, I struggle with my sisters, I struggle being the father my daughters need right now, I struggle with being all I can be for my son, I struggle with my step-children.  I struggle in a process of learning how to be the best I can be for each of them; even while some of them still scare the shit out of me.  Here I am connected with a woman (Judy) that may be the best I have ever met at family, and I feel like I am struggling to get through what I need to learn in the first year of a 9 year doctoral program!  But I have help, Many of those who make up my family are pretty patient with me.  I have situations that cause me deep emotional pain every single day, but I also have people who love me as I am and who pull for my growth and success.  

Maybe I am a lot more fortunate than I realize . . . . .