Family Matters

Parenting kids is a challenge for most people. There are many things that make parenting such a challenge, but one of the big ones is that a couple of parents is made up of two different individuals, each with their own upbringing, values, beliefs and preferences.

If life was just smooth sailing, this would not be such a big problem, except life is bumpy sometimes and when tensions are high, things can get silly and weaken the parents’ position of authority.

Even when things are pretty quiet, the ever-so-sensitive kids can detect notes of disagreement between their parents and immediately try to use them to their advantage (little buggers). Parents who are too preoccupied to notice end up facing the “But Mom/Dad said” and looking pretty stupid being caught unprepared.

Every relationship, with your partner, your parents or your kids, requires effort. No matter how compatible you are with the other person, each of you has a different background and continues to go through a different life. Each of you may be completely blind to the other’s experiences and feelings.

So typically, relationships involve a lot of guesswork. When we know the other person well, guesswork does an OK job in most cases, particularly when everyone is in a good mood and has enough energy to share.

Things get a bit messier when one person feels down and needs support and real storms can erupt when both people have gone through something unpleasant and both need an emotional hand.

In longer relationships, like a marriage over 10 years, a teenager or with your own parents, I would not be surprised if you have had a few storms already. Moreover, the same storm may have happened again and again, reaching full blast more quickly and increasing in intensity every time.

Let’s start with some big words. According to Wikipedia, “Intimacy generally refers to the feeling of being in a close personal association and belonging together. Genuine intimacy in human relationships requires dialogue, transparency, vulnerability and reciprocity”.

When I mention intimacy to people, many of them immediately think of romance and physical closeness, but this is only a borrowed meaning. In fact, many sexual relationships have little or no intimacy in them, while other relationships are based on deep spiritual bonding without any physical contact whatsoever.

In a family, some relationships are chosen for us (parents, siblings and extended family), while we get to choose the others (spouse and kids). Either way, the degree of intimacy in a relationship determines its quality and importance for us, not the kind of relationship. In a sense, when we rate a relationship as “good”, it is because there is enough intimacy in it for us.

Last week, I wrote about the relationship breakdown between parents and kids as a result of watching too much TV. Today, I cover the influence of TV on couples’ relationships, on the divorce rate and on the breakdown of the family structure.

This week, I lost it. I finished a session and came crying to Gal. I think I am surrounded with crazy women. It usually takes me a lot longer to say things like this about people, especially when I do not know them, but this week’s emotions accumulated to the point where I must vent.

On my life coaching journey, I meet many angry people. Angry, disappointed and frustrated that most of the time, those feeling are reflect by their relationships, their health and their level of success in life. One major rule in teaching happiness is that the space inside is limited to one of them only and you have the power to choose.

You may have noticed this about yourself or the people around you, but being happy can be a bit of a challenge. Sure, there are moments of joy and elation, but they do not seem to last very long and then we go back into, well, “normal” life.

Why is this? Better yet, once we know why this is, how can we benefit from this knowledge to become happier?

I bet that if you compare the amount of love you feel for someone, it will correlate well with the amount of hurt you get from them sometimes and possibly with the number of things they do, which trigger a strong emotional response from you.

If you have been in a long term relationship long enough (and since you are reading a parenting blog, it is likely you have been), you can probably come up with quite a few examples of things “the other person” says to you on a regular basis, which you find infuriating. In fact, saying them is just like pressing some invisible button in your mind and triggering anger and resentment.

Love, as you probably know, is one of the most wonderful feelings. Some people claim there are only two feelings – love and fear – and every good thing in life is a form of love and all the bad things are forms of fear. A stronger version of this only recognizes one feeling – love – and all the rest is lack of love.