16
 Relating to Relatives

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family . . . in another city.

George Burns1

Your kids are perfect,” we’d often hear from their friends’ parents. “They’re so polite and well-behaved. You must be so proud!”

We were thinking, Whose kids are they talking about? Our kids were awesome and still are. But parents see their kids at their best and at their worst. When they’re visiting others, they often want to make a good impression. At home, they relax. We see their good side, but we also see the relaxed side. It’s not always pretty.

We often tend to be nicer to strangers than to the people we live with. We’re polite. We talk to them about what’s happening in their lives. If they’ve invited us over for dinner, we might bring a small gift. Even if we don’t care for what they serve, we eat it anyway and compliment them on the meal. The next day we send them a simple thank-you note, text, or email telling them what a great time we had.

These are common courtesies. We treat people with respect not because they’re perfect but because they’re human. We’re just exercising the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12 NIV). This is how people live and work well together in society.

When it comes to family, we sometimes forget the Golden Rule. We rewrite it to read, “Do unto others as we think they deserve.”

When the Honeymoon Is Over

Everything new goes through a honeymoon period. Whether a new relationship, a new job, a new house, or a new car, it starts with excitement. But over time, the newness wears off. The new car smell is gone, and there’s a rattle we can’t identify. The new job becomes mundane, the new house gets dirty, and the new relationships get comfortable. In all cases, there’s a temptation to turn it in for a newer model.

“New” is good and exciting in a relationship. But when the honeymoon is over, we need a level of commitment to maintain the relationship. We tend to take our relationships for granted when they become comfortable. Comfort is good, because it allows us to relax and be ourselves. But even in the midst of that comfort, we need to treat each other with civility and respect.

What would it be like if we went to someone’s home for dinner and acted the way we sometimes do in our own house? We might walk in without greeting the host, plop down on a chair, and say, “What’s for dinner?” We might complain about our day, talk about how tired we are, and tell them all the things that went wrong. We might focus on our problems and never ask about theirs. If we don’t like the dinner, we might say, “I guess your oven timer isn’t working, right?” We leave without saying thank you and show up unannounced the next day to go through the process again.

Sure, we’re tired at the end of the day. Whether we were in a corporate setting, working from a home office, or running a household, we used up a lot of energy. It’s easy to take family members for granted because they’re probably not going anywhere. Customers do business somewhere else if we don’t treat them well, but family members tend to stick around anyway.

I heard a psychologist say years ago that after listening to people all day long, the last thing he wanted to do was help his sixth-grade daughter with her math. But when he pulled in the driveway at the end of the day, he would shut off the engine and sit quietly for a few moments before going in the house. He would remind himself that he was about to do the most important work of his day with the most important people in his life.

If we take family members for granted, they may not move away physically—but they move away emotionally. We need a place to be ourselves and to be comfortable, a place to relax and unwind. But the other people in our house need the same thing. The family needs to be comfortable for them, not just us.

Before my wife and I were married, we went through premarital counseling. There was one phrase the counselor used repeatedly that stuck in our minds: “Home should be a place with open arms and bread in the oven.” His point was that the goal of our relationship was to make a place of safety when the rest of the world felt unsafe. Some people might interpret it in terms of roles, where one person is out working while the other is home making dinner. But that’s not the point. The point is that everyone needs to know, while they can get beat up in the world, they can come home, where they know they’re loved (open arms) and their basic needs will be met (warm bread in the oven).

This sense of safety doesn’t mean there will never be strong emotions or tough conversations. But we will have created a place of unconditional acceptance where people value each other and treat each other with respect. If we can build our home into a place of safety and honesty, it becomes a place where honest, tough conversations can take place.

That’s the goal. No family is perfect, and we all have plenty of room to grow. The most dysfunctional family situation might seem hopeless, and we might need professional help to start building those safety systems. But we can still begin treating others in our family with respect, no matter how they treat us. We might need tough conversations, but when we conduct them with respect, we can begin influencing others. If we do the maintenance ourselves and practice the Golden Rule, we’ll begin influencing those important relationships—no matter how unhealthy they are right now.

“But What if They Don’t Cooperate?”

After I wrote People Can’t Drive You Crazy if You Don’t Give Them the Keys,2 most people told me that their biggest aha from the book was that we can’t fix other people. If our happiness depends on how another person behaves, we’ll spend most of our lives frustrated. Freedom comes when we work on the one person we have control over: ourselves. I’m responsible for what I do, not for what you do.

We can’t force people to change, but we can influence them. How? By changing ourselves. When we change, others tend to react differently to us, either positively or negatively.

Let’s say I get irritated with you, but I don’t say anything. Every time you say something, I respond with sarcastic, cutting remarks. At first, they might seem like casual comments. But over time, you get tired of them. You try to get me to stop, but I keep going. You feel attacked and eventually build up a wall between us because you have to protect yourself from getting hurt.

I respond negatively because it’s painful to live with a barrier between us. I start getting bitter toward you because you never listen. I begin to nag you about your need to change. That makes the situation worse, because you’re focused on my need to change. We both feel hopeless, because we assume there’s no hope for anything getting better until the other person changes. So the wall gets taller and thicker, and we continue to reinforce it.

One day, I realize that I’m playing a big part in the problem. Instead of waiting for you to make the first move, I decide to stop making sarcastic responses. I consciously determine to think about each thing I say before I say it. I learn to honestly express my feelings in a way that isn’t mean or degrading to you.

Are you going to be suspicious? Absolutely. You’ll wonder what I’m up to, what my underlying motive is, or how long this new approach will last. But if that approach continues over time, you’ll start to believe I’ve changed. There’s no guarantee you’ll come around, because the damage already done to the relationship might be deep. But you’ll feel less of a need to lash out because I’ve taken the pressure off.

My motives in changing have to be genuine, though. I can’t simply pretend to be nicer while avoiding the real issues, hoping you’ll respond differently. Fake sincerity shows through over time, especially because you’ll be looking for it. I need to treat you with respect because it’s the right thing to do, no matter how you respond. If my personal happiness and comfort are dependent on you, I’ve given away control over my emotions.

Here’s the bottom line: if I genuinely change, there’s a good chance you’ll change in response. But the only way to begin healing is to work on me, not you. My behavior is the only place I can truly make a difference.

Handling the Herd

One-on-one relationships can be challenging, but things get even tougher when relatives get together. Family gatherings tend to bring out both the best and the worst in people, especially at holidays. We often have expectations that our holidays will look like a Thomas Kinkade painting, with doves cooing on the windowsill and everyone sipping apple cider while they laugh warmly at funny stories. We know better, but we’ve seen enough Hallmark commercials to make us hopeful.

Reality sets in pretty quickly during those family events. In a dysfunctional family, everyone is talking, nobody is listening, and everybody is waiting to see where the first confrontation will take place. In a functional family, there’s a foundation of trust. But every family has a stray family member or two who puts everyone on edge. The best celebrations have the potential to fall apart when expectations are high and communication skills are lacking.

Most of us love the music, the lights, and the decorations of holidays and special events. But on the day the family gathers, we stress about the event, and our emotions can be wrung out for days afterward. How can we enjoy the celebration?

The Reality of Bandwidth

I’m always amazed at people who have to rent an auditorium or a park for their family reunion. They might have one hundred people or more coming, and coordinating the event is like putting on a major conference.

My family isn’t that big. Our last (and only) family reunion happened at my brother’s house and consisted of my brother, my sister, and myself. Three people. We considered using name tags with our pictures on them but decided they would raise the cost of the event too much. (Attendance would have quadrupled if our spouses and kids had been there.)

No matter how big a family is, there’s not enough time to give everyone the same amount of attention. That’s tough, because many people feel the need to treat every member equally. “After all, they’re family. Don’t they deserve to get our best attention?”

Actually, no. We have only so much time and energy, and we need to budget where we invest them. When we spend time with one person, we are automatically not spending that time with anyone else. This doesn’t mean some people are more important or valuable than others. It means we don’t want to shortchange our key relationships for the sake of the peripheral ones.

It’s a matter of bandwidth. An internet connection with low bandwidth is like a small-diameter garden hose. Only so much water (data) can go through it at one time. A bigger garden hose can handle more water at a time, and a bigger internet connection can handle more data at a time.

We have a limited bandwidth for relationships. That’s why we can’t meet everyone’s needs. Strange as it sounds, we need to prioritize our relationships. We need to decide which family members get the most attention and which ones get the least, not because some are more valuable but because we don’t want to shortchange the people in our lives we have the most commitment to.

I think of my family as a series of concentric circles—a target. The inner circles represent my immediate family relationships. For me, that means my wife gets top priority. She’s in the bull’s-eye of my personal radar, which means she’ll always get more attention than anyone else. If I want my marriage to last a long time, I need to invest the time and energy in it to make that happen.

My kids are next. They have their own lives and families, but I want to invest in those relationships because they’re permanent relationships. My grandkids are part of that circle, because grandparents have the opportunity to build different things into their grandkids’ lives than their parents can. I’m committed to them for life.

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As the circles expand away from the center, they include in-laws, siblings, and other extended family. I value those relationships greatly and become closer to some of those people than others. I invest in those relationships but not at the expense of the inner circles.

When my bandwidth reaches capacity, I don’t want to sacrifice the inner circles for the outer circles. My energy always gets focused from the inside out.

Sometimes the outer circles provide less drama than the inner circles because I don’t see those people as often. It’s easy to gravitate toward them, because they’re easier and more fun when tough things are happening in the inner circles. That’s when I need to reaffirm my commitment to the valuable relationships in the center, giving them the focus and energy they deserve.

Staying Focused

The key to effective family relationships is to be intentional about them. It’s easy to take them for granted and ignore the maintenance. But the more value something has, the more it needs to be taken care of.

Family provides the greatest opportunity for pleasure or pain. In healthy relationships, there will be a good helping of both.

Marriage vows promise commitment “for better or for worse.” Can we adapt that mind-set to all our family members? Certainly. We don’t wait for them to change before we treat them with respect. It’s something we do, regardless of what they do.

We can’t change our relatives. We can only change ourselves and then see how others respond. That’s the key to thriving in a family.