Now is not the right time… He knows how I feel… This is too hard to deal with… I need more time to think about how to approach her… It will mean too much conflict… He won’t love me anymore… I can deal with that later… I need to choose my words carefully… Tomorrow is another day… I don’t want to rock the boat… It’s not a good time to deal with this… Other things are more important… There will be another chance…

The list is endless. We have so many convenient explanations for procrastinating. And the goof-ball excuses that we use to justify inaction. But it could simply be arrogance. It is pretty damn arrogant to always believe I’m going to get a second chance to say or do what needs to be said and done.

Sometimes you just have to take a break, take some time out to enjoy each other and live to change another day. Be thankful that there will be other days to push the wave…

Steven called. He is a young man who I worked with six months ago. Wow, did we have some fantastic, heated confrontations - a few shouting matches, figurative head banging as we covered the continuum from existential terror to the exhilaration of high school graduation (which Steven thought would never happen). I accused him of masterful manipulation as he vacillated between victimizer and playing victim, using sadness and anger as a weapon and bargaining chip while flip flopping from arrogance and entitlement to insecurity. He cloaked fear with bluster and bravado and blamed others for not understanding him. I often had to smile at his tantrums, refusing to accept his raging young man act and instead nurturing the frightened child. He accused me of being confusing and I accused him of yet another maneuver in the chess game of who was going to control the dance. Anyway, Steven called to say thanks and to let me know he had just gotten a promotion and a raise.

The new Partnership for a Drug Free America ad: Mom rips open the shower curtain and harangues her teenage son about weed. He is mortified. She continues on. The tagline to parents is: “Don’t be a patsy”.

The way many parents talk it is as if there is some recipe book out there that dictates what they can or cannot do to get their kids’ attention. Fortunately, there is no recipe book and parents are recognizing that some of the so-called recipe books of the past are what has gotten us into this mess.

We are left to do whatever we think is necessary to save the lives of our children, raise them and prepare them to thrive in a world that is becoming more unforgiving with each day. The bottomline is that we need to do whatever works. If that means haranguing our kids in the shower so they understand that we are paying attention and are prepared to change them, then so be it.

A stock trader friend of mine was telling me about a crazy thing that happened to him the other day. Normally, like all good traders, he puts a stop loss on each trade. The stock will be automatically sold if it drops to that price. It is a safeguard in case the stock drops quickly and it protects the trader from the sometimes fantastical idea that a falling stock will magically rebound.

On this particular day, he bought a stock and did not put on a stop loss. As he told the story, he had this blank, empty look on his face. He had no explanation for violating his own rules and going against his instincts. The stock began to drop. He did nothing. It dropped further. As he tells it, not only did he do nothing but he started to believe that it would rebound. It continued to drop. All he had to do was push a button but instead it was like he was in suspended animation and he did not act. Needless to say, it was a bad decision.

As he told the story, I thought about the blank, shell-shocked look on his face. I have seen that look hundreds of times before on the face of parents who couldn’t believe that they had allowed the family situation to get so out of control. The look of helplessness, paralysis as they stand idly by allowing things to happen in the family that they know instinctively will lead to a bad outcome. Sometimes they do not know what to do but mostly they are in disbelief about their own inaction and then compound it with the belief that it will get better on its own. With a host of explanations, they convince themselves that the downward trend cannot last. It will magically turnaround.

They need a stop loss. They need to decide on a point beyond which they will not allow the family to fall. Here are a couple of stop loss points: 1) when parents allow their kids to act irresponsibly and instead of intervening they do nothing to avoid conflict. 2) when kids are taught that they are special but then are allowed to use this as a weapon to punish those who love them and are working in their best interest.

Hopefully, you will take action before it gets to this point. But there has to be a point beyond which you will not go. Decide now where that is. And then, push the button.

“Optimal motivation presupposes an alert readiness to be dissatisfied with things as they are and a freedom to confront one’s environment without excessive fear combined with the confidence in one’s capacities to persist in the face of obstacles.” That is a mouthful.

There are millions of parents who are knocking on this door. They are tired of how it is going at home. They do not like it. They are sick of being treated badly by the kids who they feed, clothe, shelter and love. Once freed from the myth that “there is nothing I can do”, they gather the strength to confront the behavior and tell their kids that this is going to stop. No longer fearful about “alienating the children”, “not being loved” and “being a bad parent”, they take action and gain confidence by changing how the family works.

These bold parents turn life at home right-side up. They talk to each other about a new way. They vow never to go back and just to make sure they blow up the bridge to old behavior. It is a revolution.

It was an encounter that changed my life. A couple of decades ago I was driving a well known family therapist to Chicago’s O’Hare airport. About halfway on the drive, he turned to me and said, “That Mike is a son-of-a-gun. He never listens to anyone.” Mike was his good friend and my supervisor and mentor.

From everything I had learned in my life up until then, I expected his next statement to be, “I wish he would listen better.” Instead he said, “I will be coming back in a month to do a second training. By the time I return, I will have figured out a way to get Mike to listen to me.”

It took me a minute to process what he said. In essence it was this: I am 100% responsible for my communications. The other person has no responsibility to get it. I cannot blame them. If I want someone to listen to me, I have to make it happen by using my own creativity, imagination and assertiveness. It’s up to me.

Think of the implications for relationships, family interactions, work situations. Each of us taking full responsibility for our communications. Never again blaming anyone for not understanding us. Welcome to a changed world.

You ask the kid a simple question. They stand there as if you do not exist, shrugging their shoulders, head kind of bowed and they mumble, “I dunno”. This continues multiple times where you get the same “I dunno” and the whatever shrugging. You didn’t ask them a quantum physics question but just whether they cleaned up their room. Frustrated, you give up and let them off the hook by never getting a straight answer. The result: they develop poor posture and a mumbling problem; and when they do this outside the family, people conclude they might not be so bright.

They make families sick. The negative behavior viruses are embedded in the software. They have camouflaged themselves and often avoid diagnosis. They are insidious and spread from family member to family member through seemingly insignificant interactions. Wrongheaded attempts at treatment often make the viruses stronger and more stealth.

A couple of examples: The family is out at a restaurant. The kids are treating the waitress badly and the parents do not tell them to knock it off. Are the parents unable to confront the inappropriate behavior? Their silence and inaction are taken as permission, acceptance, powerlessness? Are the parents oblivious to what is going on? If the parents were confronted about their lack of intervention, would they make excuses for the kids’ behavior, defend it, justify it as “a phase”? While this appears to be an innocent occurrence, it is not. It sets up multiple viruses and leads the kids to a false sense of reality and a bizarre belief in their own entitlement. And it renders parents impotent.

The teenager is confronted about a bad decision that has a host of negative consequences for him and the family. The kid’s response is, “It just happened.” And no one calls him on this insanity. He would have us believe that he is a random being with no control over what he does. Usually when kids answer my questions like this I tell them I will either have them arrested and locked up or committed to a psychiatric facility. If they do not know what will happen next and they cannot control it, they are by definition a potential danger to themselves and others. The explanation of randomness is a terrible virus. Letting someone get away with such an explanation is even worse.

Beware of the smart viruses. They quietly destroy from within.