Worth another look…

If I dress my dog up to look like a duck and try to get everyone to believe it’s a duck, it would be foolish.  But every single day I work with kids who talk about how they have changed when in fact they have only temporarily modified their “appearance” and soon they will return to the same self-defeating behavior that caused the problems in the first place.  I remind them that the definition of behavior change is: when old behavior is gone forever and replaced with new behavior.  I tell them that when this has happened they won’t have to sell me or anyone.  We will all know…

Thousands of times I have heard these words: “If I knew what to do (to change), I would do it.”  This is not true.  There are many times we know exactly what to do and we do not do it.  Families (like individuals) are programmed to resist change.  The family thermostat is set at the “comfort zone”.  Any action, no matter how well intentioned, that pushes the family outside the zone is met with all kinds of elaborate defense systems, offensive weapons and plain and simple opposition.  “I cannot do what you suggest.  I am not powerful enough to change my kid’s behavior.  I’ve tried everything.  It must be a chemical imbalance.  You can’t just do things differently because someone tells you to.  His father and I just see it differently.  They will grow out of it.  It’s because of the divorce.”

If you could step outside the situation, just for a moment, you would see how nonsensical this is but at ground level it seems sort of reasonable.  All these well practiced assertions are designed to keep families in the comfort zone and justify the inability to change.  So family members are left to modify and then return to the same old self-defeating behavior.  At least it’s comfortable, right?

When parents finally get to parentwarrior, they have, more than likely, run the gamut of therapy for the children and themselves, medication trials, school interventions, self-help books and an assortment of other attempts and nothing has worked.  Nothing has changed the bad situation at home.  Their kids are still being pains in the ass and now they have run out of options or ideas about what to do next.  So, unfortunately, parentwarrior is like a last resort.  Did I mention that nothing had previously worked.

But even with all this on their plate, parents still want me to say things to them in some “normal way”.  Not only am I supposed to tell them what they want to hear, I am supposed to tell them in a way that is acceptable to them (so they are not offended, upset, confronted, forced to examine, made to switch gears, etc.).  And this is how family situations stay virus-ridden and sick.  Even though all the nonsense that came before did not work, parents still want the nonsense in some form or another that they can recognize.  Garbage recycling.

When I don’t give them what they want then they manipulate even harder to have the same crap recycled or they run away.  They feign commitment to change saying they will do anything.  I tell them it is a lie and they won’t just do anything.  They might try a few things that make sense to them while rejecting anything that is confusing, ambivalence-producing, outside their basic mindset or god-forbid might actually work.  Parents, who by their own admission have no answers, are still trying to dictate how the process will go.

The process of change is often just down and dirty and you get your nose figuratively bloodied and you are forced to deal with issues that you have avoided your whole life and you get shaken to your core.  Without rocking your world, how do you think someone could be of use to you?  That is what you need.

And if you are going to take on the kids - who are better manipulators than you will ever be - you damn well better be better prepared then you are now.  Welcome to my world.

You have this vision for how you want your family to be doing.  But you wake up one day and it hits you in the face that the family is off course.  The patterns may have shifted gradually and the changes were subtle.  One child is doing well and another, not so great.  The marriage is lukewarm and you want it to be hot!  You search for explanations and ask yourself “why” the vision is not being fulfilled?

We have this built-in mechanism that makes us look back as if we missed something and it can be discovered and then we can fix it.  It may be, though, that going back is a trap and sets us up for repeating the old stuff once again.

I know it is a lot of responsibility but I have always believed that mothers are the true North.  They are the fixed point by which we set our course.  Yikes, you say, another one of those blaming mothers.  If it sounds that way, I’m sorry.  It is really quite the opposite.  It is a statement about how much power you have.

Forget looking back.  Trust the vision.  Settle for nothing less.  Lead us into a new future…

You want to teach the kids the skills of time management, prioritizing, negotiation, anticipation, problem-solving, constructively getting their needs met and so on and so on.  It might be quicker and easier this way.

Parents tell their kids they will no longer respond to impulsive requests to do anything, go anywhere, buy things.   They tell the kids that without a reasonable request at least 24 hours in advance then the answer is “No” and will always be No.  And they mean it.  Rocket science, it’s not.  Simply and dramatically changing family patterns, it is.