Family Counseling
The family can be a fragile thing. We have years of experience helping protect and heal it.
Chinese philosopher Lao Zi said that “the softest of all things prevails over the hardest”. Water flows around the edges of the mountain and wears it away. The great mountain is born from liquid, and is worn away by it. The pure, strong rock can break, all at once, or a grain of sand at a time.
The family, the solid rock of civilization, is similarly born from great heat, the mixing of elements; it forms the features and foundation of lives and living; yet it can be worn away by the heat of emotions, its brittleness yielding to cracks and quakes; it can be ground to sand by the steady flow of emotions and the tides of life. When passions cannot vent, when two unyielding sheets collide, what is inside explodes or breaks, and takes much of life with it.
Like the features of the land and the seabed, our lives and characters are formed by great forces, many of them painful. From this we get our uniqueness, our strengths and our fault lines. Whatever the substance – genes, flesh – it is molded and trained by the family.
Some families are normal and decent, but unpredictable factors push their way in. A parent becomes depressed, hides pain so as not to be “bad” to kids, or neglectful to a spouse. Maybe there is drinking or drugs. A child changes in a few months, from a happy kid to a self-destructive teen; someone dies or suffers something terrible and no one knows how to cope.
Sometimes generations teach the next one how to perfect the mistakes of the last – how to make even bigger mistakes, how to lose more money, beat each other up more efficiently, teach the children not to hope and not to imagine. To fear life.
Often, though, someone speaks up. Someone in the family says ENOUGH – we have to deal with this now, before it gets worse. Maybe the cheating didn’t ruin the love – there is something great to save. Maybe Mom or Dad decided one morning that they could not live with the shame of being as mean or silent to each other or to the kids as their parents were to each other and to them, when they were children.
At this moment of bravery and honesty, someone has imagined rightly that Things Can Be Fixed. And that the fixing, the healing, begins with communication. By using lifetimes of experience, the love that held the mountain in one piece for as long as possible, and the help of a caring, balanced and perceptive counselor, a kind of communication that some may never have thought possible can be achieved. Your flesh and blood are suddenly more like real people than you ever realized; tears can be shed; anger can be spoken, but without harm, and with the sense that this anger is cleansing and instructive, not disfiguring.
There are so many reasons a family may need help. There is no way to detail all or most of them here. The point is that the courage to listen, to share and to be aware of the habits and impulses that you swear will never spoil the lives of your loved ones and your legacy, can help your family find a new way.
It can be better. Give us a call, and lets talk about the details. The first call is on us; after that, we’ll make it as simple, manageable and rewarding as can be.
