Family Matters

For a while, I have been thinking about this. What a shame! Do you know how many times I hear these stories that say to myself, “I wish everyone could hear it”? Sometimes, I hear shocking things and I think, “I’m fortunate, because people go through much tougher things than me in their life”. I have enough material for thousands of stories, and I mean real life stories, although some clients’ stories are so unreal they sound like fiction.

This week, it hit me big time. Some of the stories I heard from my clients made me cry – one made me cry of sadness and the other made me cry of joy. So I made up my mind to share with you some of those stories. I will write more about the joy and happiness and less about the sadness and I will keep my clients’ privacy, so the names, professions and even gender will not be their real ones, but the essence of the stories will remain powerful.

The first story is about how one of my clients helped her son pass his written driving test after 6 failures.

Briana was a young woman in her late twenties. She came to life coaching to find purpose and reason. My discussions with her revealed a very mature young woman. She reminded me so much of my own daughter. Life smiled at her – she got along with everyone and you could not pick a fight with her even if you wanted to. Yet, she was so smart that every job became boring a couple of months after she started it and she felt lots of confusion about her career choices, because she did everything very well, but without passion.

Here is a self-test for purpose. Let’s say you have all the money in the world, you can do anything you want, you do not have to work for a living, you are in perfect health and until the day you die, you can live anywhere you like, any way you like and have any lifestyle you like. What will you do with your time?

If you have no answer for this question, start searching for it right now. You see, Briana failed the purpose test over and over again, because every time I asked her about it, she looked at me with an embarrassed smile and said, “I don’t know”.

I have decided to write this post and share with you not Briana’s success at finding purpose, but the process she had to go through, because I think there are many people who think and feel exactly like Briana did and that blocks them from finding their purpose. That leaves them feeling like something is wrong with them, when in fact, no one has ever taught them how to find their purpose.

Over many years of work, I have seen many kids whose parents claimed they had ADD (Attention Deficit disorder) and/or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) and wanted to know what I thought about giving them Ritalin.

Luckily, I am not a doctor and I do not need to prescribe medication to kids, but when parents want my opinion, I usually say, “Try as many other things as you can before you consider Ritalin”.

In fact, this happened to me again recently.

Luke is a 6-year-old boy who came to see me because he was diagnosed with (are you sitting down?) ADD, ADHD, autism, Asperger Syndrome, ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). The doctor was pushing the parents hard to put him on Ritalin, but his mom did not like the idea. She changed his diet and said there was a significant improvement at first, but felt that after 6 months of a strict diet, the effects had worn off and he was becoming more agitated and getting into trouble at school again.

Kids’ mind is a puzzle. Working with kids for so many years (and with grownups who used to be kids), I am amazed by what demons they carry with them and how they use naive conclusions to navigate their life. The more I see clients, the more I am convinced there is never a way to predict how kids will interpret their young life and what they will make of it later in life. The kid’s mind puzzle becomes an adult’s mind puzzle that is even harder to solve. Trish’s story is a wonderful way to get some insight into how this happens.

Trish came to my life coaching deck with her partner. Ben, her partner and the father of their child, had said she needed help but he had no idea how to get it. Trish had not contacted me, had not completed the session preparations and had not even talked to me before coming, so this was an unusual session.

Trish was a beautiful young woman. Her hair was tied back and she looked tired, as if she had spent weeks crying. She was 27 years old and was preparing for her wedding. She had a one-year-old boy, a great job and … a demon.

“Hi, Trish. Thank you for coming. What brings you here?” I asked.

She looked at Ben and started crying. I gave her the tissue box and waited. She tried very hard to stop. Every time she started saying something, tears started again and she choked. Ben held her hand and whispered, “You can do it”. She looked at him and looked at me for a while before she finally started telling me her story.

After her son was born, memories of a childhood trauma had come to life. In-between sobs, she said, “At first, I thought it was a dream, but then I realized I see the same scene over and over again even when I’m awake”.

“Can you please tell me what you see?” I asked.

“It is very vague… I think it had something to do with my dad… I can see myself at the age of 6 or 7 playing with another girl… She was my neighbor and we played a lot together. I think someone did something to both of us… I can see my dad screaming and having a fight with her dad… I think my dad raped both of us”, she managed to say.

When I was about 15 years old, I learned the hard way that sometimes you want things and only when you get them, you realize they were not what you wanted. Addiction is like this too – you want something and shortly after you get what you want, you realize it was not what you wanted.

As a life coach, I talk a lot about wanting. I believe wanting is essential in life. It is the driving force of our existence. But today, I want to tell you about a session on my life coaching deck that reminded me again why the question “Why?” is as important as the question “What?” Chris, one of my wonderful clients, taught me a wonderful lesson about what happens when you do not know why.

All I knew about Chris was that he was a businessman in his early fifties, married, with no kids and a lack of motivation who was looking for a life coach. Nothing special. We all have those periods in our life when we just find it hard to get up in the morning.

This is what I told myself when I prepared for his session. The first time he came, when I opened the door, I saw from the corner of my eyes a classy Mercedes Benz parked outside. Well, the first thing I could think of was “Oh my god, what a beautiful car”. I have to say it made me more curious about the reason he came. I thought that car was the result of lots of motivation.

“Why are you here, Chris? What do you want?” I asked him.

He looked confused. “I really don’t know. I think something’s wrong with me”.

Gail asked for a relationship coaching session, but said she would come by herself. “My husband won’t come”, she said. No matter what I asked her, her answer was related to the fact her husband was depressed and was unwilling to help himself. He had lost his job years before and that had sucked the life out of him. For 5 years, he had been sucking the life out of Gail and her two wonderful boys.

Having a depressed family member is not easy to handle. Most of the time, the depressed person cannot admit he or she needs help and rejects any help attempt. Those around them feel helpless and drained.

Gail was very creative in her attempts to help her husband. She went to the doctor and talked to him. She tried to make him go to the doctor, without success. She got him some vitamins and he refused to take them. She arranged holidays to make him happy, but he stayed depress.

Eventually, after 5 years of trying, Gail left home.