Bully Bystanders

“And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”  - Audre Lorde

The relative number of people who are being bullied at any given time, is staggering. 1-6 people are bullied in their place of employment. 1-5 children are bullied in their schools. According to The Center for Health and Gender Equity, around the world, 1-3 women have been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in their lifetime.

There are no statistics which accurately measure how many people experience bullying by family members – but for those of us who work with families, especially in the area of family estrangement, we know bullying is frequently raised as an issue of great concern. The odds are good that even if you have never been a target of bullying yourself, someone that you know or care about, has been or will be in the future.

Obviously for those who are directly targeted by bullying behaviour, these statistics matter. However, they don’t just matter for targets, they also matter for those who witness bullying and abuse. It is estimated that over 80% of people who are being bullied are not silent. They do make effort to tell someone about their bullying and they do seek support from friends, family members and the wider community such as doctors, teachers, work colleagues, unions, clergy, mental health practitioners, social workers and police. Despite all this ” telling’ many people who experience bullying also report the second-hand betrayal and trauma of not being heard, believed or supported.

” Everyone knew our mother was a first rate bully but nobody said anything. They didn’t want to be next.” 

” I told my mother that my brother was bullying me and she told me that couldn’t be happening.” 

” When I fought the bullying, the rest of the family shut me out. I didn’t have to deal with the bully, but I didn’t have a family after that.” 

So what is going on for bystanders?

1. Sometimes they don’t see the bullying and are unable to truly appreciate the negative effects experienced by those who are targeted.
2. Sometimes they minimize the bullying or believe that a certain amount of bullying is ” natural” and a fact of life. Targets are accused of being ” overly sensitive” and advised that they need to ” toughen up”  and “get used to” the ” real world”.
3. Sometimes they are legitimately concerned that if they speak up they will become targets themselves. They opt for silence and withdrawal and hope that the situation will resolve itself.
4. Sometimes they feel powerless to respond or help.
5. Sometimes they are unwilling to lose the perceived ” benefits” of maintaining relationship with the bully and so will not speak out against the bullying.

Many bystanders will retreat to denial and avoidance to manage their own feelings of discomfort and fear of getting involved. This is invariably perceived as a betrayal by the person who is being targeted by the bully and who has taken the risk to speak out about what is happening to them.

Bullying persists because it can.  It persists because we explicitly or implicitly allow it to. A behaviour which is rewarded, will continue. By reward I am not only referring to the immediate benefits to the bully ie. power and control, I am also referring to the simple fact that they get away with their poor behaviour.

So what can we do as a bystander?

1. We can refuse to be a bystander. We can get involved and be an ally and a supporter.
2. We can know that that there is NEVER an excuse for abuse, ever. Bullying is deliberate, disrespectful and harmful and is NEVER okay.
3. We can make sure that we do not minimize, rationalize or justify bullying or the impact of bullying.
4. We can educate ourselves about bulling and the impact and effects of bullying. We can encourage and support the person who is being bullied to take all the necessary steps to safeguard their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. We can encourage their self care and for them to seek professional support and guidance as necessary.
5. We can make a substantial difference to the problem of bullying simply by being willing to listen, to believe and to care when people we care about disclose what is happening or has happened to them.
6. We can make a commitment to keeping the onus of responsibility for bullying where it belongs ON THE BULLY. It is not the target’s responsibility to figure out a way to manage the bully’ s behaviour, or why the bully is bullying.
7. We can refuse to make excuses for the bully’s behaviour. Bullying is not about bad childhoods, stressful or busy lives, or personal insecurity. It is conscious, deliberate and disrespectful behaviour. It is a CHOICE.
8. We can encourage and support the person who is being bullied to take swift and immediate steps to protect themselves.
9. We can use our voice to support the person who is being bullied. Collective voice is a powerful voice. Where the voice of one can be overlooked or ignored, the voices of many will not be.

Is someone you know and care about being bullied? What will you do about it? Remember, in the words of Edmund Burke, “ All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Betrayal

“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
- Freud

I have often found it interesting how little information has been written about betrayal. The subject is a common theme in stories and movies, yet doesn’t seem to translate well to a more open discourse. Most of us can identify a time and relationship where we have experienced betrayal, and for many of us who are managing family estrangement issues, betrayal has been an intimate and impactful experience.

So what is betrayal, why is it so damaging, and how come no one wants to talk about it?

At the most basic level, betrayal involves the breaking or violation of an agreed or assumed trust or confidence. Often betrayal is seen as the act of supporting a rival person or group at the expense of another person or group. We believe our family will accept and value us ” no matter what”, we trust that our partner will be faithful, we assume that our friends will have our backs and seek mutually beneficial outcomes, we believe our work place is healthy and that our jobs are safe, we trust our wider social systems to protect us and support us when we need them to.

When our trust is broken, we experience betrayal – a substantial psychological and emotional dissonance, which occurs within a relationship between individuals, within families, organizations or even larger social and political systems. Betrayal is often unexpected but even when we have suspicions, discovering betrayal is psychologically and emotionally shattering and involves shock, disbelief, disappointment and the re-evaluation of one’s relationship(s) and belief system. As the Freud quote above suggests, the more we care or trust, the more vulnerable to betrayal we become because, generally speaking, the greater the trust that one puts in another person, the greater the impact the betrayal has. In addition, the more we rely or depend upon a relationship and the greater it’s sphere of influence in our lives, the more profoundly we will experience betrayal. Because family is deeply primal and the place where we first learn about trust and belonging, if we have experienced betrayal in those relationships, we may carry fear and distrust forward with us into our other relationships too. We are also likely to have these deep primal betrayals re-triggered by later ones.

The aftershocks of betrayal are anger, despair, fear, revulsion for the lack of integrity and loyalty demonstrated by the person who has betrayed us and a pervasive sense of helplessness or powerlessness. Discovering we have been betrayed is devastating because it strikes so deeply at the core of who we are. Betrayal causes us to doubt ourselves and to doubt our ability to make sound judgments about other people. Betrayal shakes up our belief in the fundamental goodness of people, of groups, of organizations and of the world. When we have been significantly betrayed we may fear that we cannot trust anything, or anyone and we may begin to perceive even the sturdiest of relationships as dangerous and unsafe.

Betrayal is an experience that causes us to question ourselves, devalues our self worth and erodes our self confidence. In the wake of betrayal, we may find ourselves socially isolated and silenced because not surprisingly, betrayal also leads to shame. Yet going it alone and silence are not our friends when we have been so deeply wounded. This is the time we must seek out trusted relationships with those who have consistently been present for us. This is not the time for fair weather friends, this is the time for those who will walk the hard yards beside us. If we find we are without people who we feel we can trust, we can trust ourselves and we can enlist the support of a professional to help repair the damage done to our sense of self and self-worth, and to help resolve any feelings of vulnerability we carry with us.

The opposite of betrayal is loyalty. Both exist and there is no point pretending otherwise. Building and establishing trustworthy relationships is a journey and so too is getting to the other side of betrayal. The important thing to remember is we can do it and we are worth it.

How Much Loyalty Is Too Much Loyalty?

“Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you don’t expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.”

- Russel Banks

Earlier this week I wrote a post, How Much Is Enough Loyalty,  about how much loyalty is enough. I spoke about the need to consider that loyalty is something that people may perceive differently and as such, we need to communicate effectively to discover what loyalty looks like and feels like for the people in our lives. Of course, we also need to have a pretty good idea what loyalty looks like and feels like for us.

If we don’t know what loyalty looks like and feels like for us, the odds are good that we won’t experience it – even when it is being offered. We won’t know how to guide the people in our lives to meet our needs for loyalty (how can we ask someone to give us something when we don’t even know what the something is or how it looks like in action?) Most importantly, we need to know what loyalty looks like for us, so that we are capable of making informed, healthy choices about the relationships that we are in. Just as we need to be conscious and accountable for the way we demonstrate our loyalty to others, we also need to be accountable for our loyalty to ourselves.

Loyalty to self is just a really, really important idea. We not only can be loyal to ourselves – we must be loyal to ourselves. If we are not loyal to us, how can we expect anyone else to be loyal to us? We need to know our boundaries, what is acceptable to us, and what is not. No rules or laws or religions can tell us exactly what this looks like … only we can know. Our loyalty to ourselves informs our integrity, our ethics and even our morality if you want to jump onto that slippery slope. If we have no personal loyalty, it is questionable whether we can sustain our integrity.

Loyalty to self means we view ourselves as worthy of love and respect. We believe in our right to be healthy, cared for, loved and nurtured. Because we believe we are worthy of this – loyalty means we don’t settle. We don’t indulge in misguided loyalty … that is to say, loyalty to another person which comes at deep expense to our own safety, well-being and happiness.

“I raised three children with a man who beat me, had affairs, drank us into bankruptcy. No matter what he did, I stood by him. I married him. I thought it was expected of me. No one told me I could be loyal to me even if it meant I couldn’t be loyal to him any more.”

“I love my daughter and I am sure she loves me. However, she consistently maintains relationships with people who are despicable to me. Her loyalty becomes questionable when she will sit and watch other family members treat me with no regard or respect and make not the slightest movement to intervene. It took a long time for me to realize my loyalty to someone, even if she is my own daughter, who has so little regard for my safety, well-being and happiness – was a misguided loyalty.“

“My sister talks about me behind my back. She invites others to do it too. I know this. Actually lots of people know this about her. She talks shit, not just about me, about everyone really. However no one confronts her, everyone lets her get away with it. This erosion of person-hood is too much hurt, frustration, anger and disloyalty for me to live with.”

“He is my brother but he treats me so poorly. He has lied to me, stolen from me, failed to show up when he promised he would. These are not one off things. They happen over and over and over again. I must be a really slow learner to keep putting myself back in his line of fire. I am loyal to him, he is definitely not loyal to me.”

Loyalty can make protecting and caring for self really difficult. Of course we want to have trusting and trusted relationships with the people who are close to us. We may feel doggedly determined to stand up for or fight for people who would not do the same for us if the chips were down. We may even stand firm and committed to people who have treated us very poorly indeed.

Ask yourself, who is more deserving of your loyalty, people who are mistreating, abusing or manipulating you? Or are you more deserving of your loyalty? Love doesn’t mean turning yourself into a walking target for family members to take aim. Loyalty doesn’t mean you have to stand still and be wounded again and again.

When we maintain loyalty to another person, at significant and grave personal cost; despite evidence that the loyalty is neither reciprocated or valued  – that loyalty is too much.

How Much Is Enough Loyalty?

“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Reader Question: “How much loyalty does a daughter owe her mother?

Usual Answer: How much loyalty would the daughter like to see from her mother?

This example is the Golden Rule in action. However, maybe the Golden Rule doesn’t take the issue of loyalty far enough. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, is a great start, unless of course, you have low expectations for yourself or completely different expectations than the other person.

Do unto others as they would like you to do, could be the Silver Rule.

The Golden Rule is focused on our perceptions, our ideas, ideals and needs – what we want.

The Silver Rule on the other hand, asks us to step out of our bubble and walk a mile in another person’s shoes. If you think you are wonderfully loyal, but the other person questions your loyalty – who is right? Well, maybe both. You may truly feel you are being loyal. However, the other person may truly feel that you are not.

Loyalty is perceptual – we all have different measures and ideas about how loyalty looks. It’s like the classic example of how we show love, which is variable. So consider a wife who only truly feels loved when she is told she is loved …. often …. and a husband who believes that love is something demonstrated through actions,  not words … there is going to be a disconnect somewhere down the track. The wife is not going to feel loved, and the husband is not going to feel his efforts are appreciated. In addition, we tend to demonstrate love the way we would like to receive it. So in this example the wife is likely to tell her husband all the time how much she loves him, but if the husband doesn’t see the action, her words are going to feel very insubstantial to him. Sadly, the wife is going to feel that all her efforts to let her husband know she loves him, are unheard and unvalued. The end result – two miserable people who don’t feel loved. Here’s the kicker:  Neither the husband or the wife will feel loved even though their partner does love and want them to feel loved.

Loyalty works the same way.

If we truly value and care about someone, it doesn’t matter if we think we are demonstrating loyalty. What matters is whether or not the other person thinks we are and vice versa.

Loyalty conflict occurs when there is no effort to apply the Silver Rule, while the Golden Rule is used to judge another person’s efforts as unworthy.

The Circle Of Trust

“In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone. “

~Sophie Kinsella

What do we do when members of our family treat us poorly, talk smack about us, shatter our trust or maybe even actively seek to bring us harm? Of course we can estrange – simply turn our backs on such individuals and never see them again. Still, when such people are members of our family, we might also seek alternatives that will not cause such grave repercussions across the entire family system, bearing in mind that family estrangement never stays between two people.  Creating our circle of trust is one such alternative.

The circle of trust is a metaphor for how we manage our relationships. You probably do this relationship management without even thinking about it, however I am going to make the process more explicit.

In our lives we have all sorts of relationships with all sorts of people. Some of them we are very close to, say our partner, or our best friend. Some of these relationships we enjoy immensely at a social level, yet do not share any deeply personal information. We may have people in our lives who we will be very close to and connect with intensely for a time, but then allow the relationship to drift or let go of altogether. For instance, people we went to high school with , or who we went through our pregnancies or our cancer treatment with … We manage our professional or work relationships with a variety of people, some who we intutively recognize as comrades, others who we have indifferent relationships with and maybe even a few  people we outright don’t get on with. We know how to manage these relationships. We assign them appropriate positions in our circle of trust.

The circle of trust can be visualized as concentric circles, radiating outward from the center, which is where you stand. The circle that is closest to you is your inner circle. In our inner circle of trust will be the relationships that we consistently rely on for support, nurturing and caring. These are relationships that over time, sometimes a great deal of time, have shown themselves worthy of our trust. We share of ourselves most deeply, care most, love hardest in these relationships. From there we will have ever widening circles of relationship which surround us. The circles will go from the relationships which we are most engaged with, trust the most, to the circles where we hold relationships which are far more distant, that we give far less of our time, energy, trust or love to. Some relationships we maintain because we intensely love and care. Some we maintain as they contribute to our welfare and well-being in a myriad of ways. Some we maintain because they are of mutual benefit and it is a relationship based purely on exchange.  Some we will maintain because even though they may drive us crazy, they are our family. Each of these people will be located somewhere in our circle of trust.

We are often not nearly as good with managing our family relationships as we are in other relationships in our lives. Very often in our family we see only two levels of trust; all the way in, or all the way out. This is reinforced by social constructions of family, which lead us to believe blood is thicker than water, and that family is to be trusted without question.  Social constructions don’t help us to realistically appraise where people in our family belong in our circle of trust. When we believe our family members are trustworthy beyond questioning, we leave ourselves wide open to repeated injury. Of course we need to question, think and decide how much trust or connection to give, even to family members! We may find that we are either heavily involved or even enmeshed with “difficult” family members or avoiding or estranging from them. This on/off, hot/cold  connection is a good indication that we are in reaction to a level of relational intensity we are unable to manage or tolerate. We need to learn how to regulate our relationships within our family, the same as we do everywhere else in our lives.

Circles of trust allow for possibility. They allow for someone who is unhealthy, or in reaction, or immature  to get better, become more considered, or to grow up (whether the person who needs to do that is someone else, or ourselves). The circles allow us to move someone who is hurting us to a more distant circle. But the circles also allow us to pull someone closer if things improve or change. The circles allow us to establish healthy boundaries and protect ourselves, without terminating significant relationships or damaging the wider family.  The circle of trust allows us to maintain open lines of communication, even if they are less frequent, or constrained. The circles allow us to be responsible for figuring out who is trustworthy in our lives and who is less trustworthy and for ensuring that we are investing appropriate amounts of time, energy, caring and love accordingly.   It is no one’s fault but our own if we keep relationships which should be placed in our outer circle, too close.

Only we can choose who we will trust and how much we will invest into a relationship. Only we can sort out where our family fits into our circle of trust.

Loyalty: The Domino Effect

“It’s just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second.”

~Meg Rosoff

Loyalty conflicts in families never stay between two people. When we believe we are right and another person is wrong, we also tend to believe everyone with sound vision should be able to see what we see. We then continue on to believe that if they do see what we see, of course they would have to support us; our cause is righteous … right?

Let’s say we do get another family member onside.Once we have this other person onside, and they see what we see, and they support our cause … because now two people are in righteous alignment and that must mean the cause is righteous … right?

So they solicit the next person … who they believe must see what they see, and support them … and so on and so on and so on …

Let’s be frank, there are many people in estranged families, who play this game of alliances and allegiance as though their lives depended upon it.  Many of them play the game fully conscious of the harm it causes and yet choose to willfully disregard the follow on effect for others. Conflict becomes warfare, when allies are recruited through drama, gossiping, scapegoating, cold war or guerrilla warfare tactics. This way of navigating family conflict, is as damaging as the initial estrangement that kicks it off.

Family loyalty conflicts are never between two people. There is always collateral damage. Get enough momentum going and the whole stack of dominos will fall. Families are like that too.

Loyalty: Blocking

“The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.”

~Elizabeth Gilbert

Why do we do it? Why do we manufacture, create and perfect the means to shut out, block, close off from our family members? I know you are thinking of your story … all the wherefores and whys, about how it is in your family that there is no choice but to terminally block people. And maybe you are right. But you know what my research to date shows? Here are the reasons that people most often cite for blocking all contact with estranged family members.

1 – They don’t want to risk being hurt again, or see hurt come to their own children

2-  They don’t trust themselves to see or speak to the absent family member

3- They are punishing the absent family member, and nothing less than complete shunning will do

4 – They do not wish to be confronted by any evidence that challenges their story, their reasons, their history – in short, they are self righteous and feel justified in estrangement

I’m not suggesting you need to reconcile, or live happy ever with your family. If the reasons for estrangement are compelling, this is an unlikely scenario anyway. What I am here to say is that blocking someone doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t mend your wounds, propel you forward, or do a damn thing to sort your issues, and if you are estranging from your family, you do have issues. Yes, estrangement minimizes the opportunity for further hurt. It also minimizes the opportunity for things to move forward, for you to move forward. Yes, estrangement prevents you from having to navigate emotional and relational tension and complexity – but it doesn’t make that complexity or intensity go away. It still lives in you, unresolved. As long as you are blocking a family member you are stuck in your past. Because today … there is nothing worth blocking. No reason for you not to be present and getting on with your life. Consider the words of my client, Janet:

“My mother is estranged from most of us, except my baby sister. She zealously keeps us at arms length, insists that no information is shared in either direction and has threatened to cut my sister Carla off if she so much as mentions one of our names. My brother returns the favor. He is as bitter as she is. They are in a cold war. I was up and down with things. Then after some serious work on myself,  I realized there was nothing wrong with me. I had nothing to hide, no information that I wasn’t willing to have mother know or see. It’s her drama not mine. I don’t have a lot of warm feelings for mother, and I’m not seeking her out – but nor am I pretending she doesn’t exist. If I did, that would be my problem, my drama.“

In addition to the harm blocking a family member can create for us, it also opens up wider family drama as everyone else has to figure out where they sit, who they will speak to, be close to etc. The breach between one family member from another, calls the entire family system and network of loyalties into question. Lines are drawn in the family sand, and everyone, consciously or not, willingly or no, ends up on one side of the divide or the other. Ultimately forcing family into choosing sides is selfish and short sighted.  We believe there are only either or choices to be made in our families. That belief is false. I am not recommending reconciliation – I am encouraging you to let go of black and white thinking, and consider alternative solutions which are not as damaging to you or your wider family. It is possible to set appropriate boundaries to protect yourself, manage emotional and relational tension, without creating fractures, which split your family. Again, this is not about reconciliation – this is about a re-framing of options, choices and our own personal power. It’s about choosing to let go of the past, and move on.

None of those four reasons for blocking a family member I mentioned up there, is a  good enough reason. Not only because of what they do to other people (collateral damage) but because of what they do to you.

~* ~

Loyalty: No More Pretending

“That’s what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”

~Libba Bray

Sometimes pretending is a great, glorious romp – it’s fun.

Pretending that family estrangement is not happening, that people in your family are not hurting each other, and that your behavior might just have a role in keeping it going … is not fun, not fair and not useful. We need to stop letting people in our families off the hook for their often appalling and damaging behaviour. This doesn’t mean we have to pick sides, or gang up on one person, while we support or endorse another’s position. It means we don’t pretend that mean, spiteful things aren’t happening, if they are.

Estrangement happens for lots of reasons, some of them are good reasons, some of them are not. We don’t have to be the judge and jury, we do have to refuse to participate – and that includes participating by saying nothing, looking the other way, and acting all offended when other people are hurt by our refusal to acknowledge what is happening and how much it hurts them.  We don’t let the estrangement go under ground. We don’t make it okay.

I gave an example in my last post; Loyalty: Intention about Jill and her daughter and their situation on Facebook. Jill needs to be open with her daughter about the estrangements in the family and how much they impact and hurt her. She needs to let her daughter know that she struggles with loyalty conflicts when she sees her maintaining relationships with people who have been hurtful to her. Jill needs to make sure that she does not invite her daughter to be responsible for resolving the estrangement between Jill and other family members, which is also another way of creating loyalty conflicts.

Ideally Jill’s daughter will also be open and honest in her relationships. It will be useful if she is able to acknowledge her mother’s feelings about the estrangements and the way they play out on her facebook page. She hopefully will be able to listen with compassion and not make her mother feel guilty for noticing what is real and being open about it. Far too often the person who speaks most openly about estrangement, is the person who will be vilified. We need to make it okay for people to speak about what is – not punish them for it. It takes courage to call a spade and spade. It takes courage to own your feelings openly.

Jill’s daughter may also let the other parties know,” My mom is really hurt when she sees these one sided conversations on my facebook. It hurts me that she is hurt. I don’t like being in the middle of this estrangement.” We use the correct term for what is happening ESTRANGEMENT and we don’t flinch when we say it. Maybe she will come to a place where she decides that the criteria for including family on her facebook is that they have not blocked other family members from communication, even if they choose not to interact directly with each other on her facebook page. Adults can manage this, they really can.

This is not the only solution, but it is one which acknowledges the hurt being caused by estrangement, the relationships in play, the tension of the loyalty conflicts, and the unwillingness to participate in perpetuating or ignoring the pain.

“My brother is a drug addict and he left the family about 9 months ago. We’ve kept in close touch but my parents won’t speak to him as he stole money from them. He’s clean now and I know he is really sorry. I’ve tried to let my parents know, but they won’t even let me say his name. My father walks off in a huff and my mother rolls her eyes and says things like, Daniel? Daniel who? So for quite awhile I just stopped talking about him. But, everytime I visited my parents Daniel asked me, will they talk about me yet? It was breaking his heart and mine for him. I know he messed up, and he’s sorry. I started feeling furious with my parents, and heart broken around Daniel. Finally I sat my parents down and I said, if you don’t talk to me, you are going to be asking, Tara? Tara who? Because I will not pretend I don’t have a brother. It’s been a slow process, but I feel better for not indulging their madness.”

We stop pretending.

Loyalty: Intention

“If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.”

~Elizabeth Gilbert

When we think about the loyalty conflicts, which are an inevitable part of family estrangement, it is very easy to point fingers at other people and their actions and think very little about our own; breeches of loyalty are about things that other people do or did – not about what we do. Often in our interactions with family members, all we are truly aware of from reactive moment to reactive moment, is that we are hurt, angry, aggrieved, hard done by and we aren’t going to put up with it. We’re not thinking about what we want to grow with our words and our actions – which is actually the very thing we need to be thinking of!

We get absorbed by our hyper focus on our own story (often historical, not in the moment) and that of our immediate family. Even if we are conscious and aware, we still may have a very difficult time figuring out what we want to do. We need to find a way of navigating between the need to take care of ourselves in the immediate moment and considering the long term implications of whatever we decide to do. Loyalty isn’t just about other people and what they do, it is also very much about us and what we do. Being aware of our intention from moment to moment, situation to situation can be very powerful.

In short, intention is simply making a decision or commitment to what it is that you want to create, or see happen,  in any given situation or relationship. Intentions are the seeds of what we wish to grow.  In her brilliant book, Comfortable With Uncertainty, Pema Chodron describes the process of not habitually acting out impulsively, as refraining. She notes that habitual reaction occurs in the space between knowing something and doing something. The in-between space is one we often are uncomfortable with because maybe there is something there we do not want to experience or feel. And because we are so busy reacting, we never do experience it. Because we never experience it, we cannot possibly heal it, or learn from it. Intention helps us to slow down, attend to what arises in the in-between and navigate it …with more grace. We can set intention through prayer, meditatively, in a journal, or just with full awareness in our own hearts.

For instance. My highest intention with my own children is to do everything possible to ensure that the pattern of estrangement is not perpetuated.  This intention colors and covers any difficulty that can occur with and between my kids. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it is not. I have plenty of on-going loyalty conflicts in my family, lots of triangulation, one person pitted against the other. These are not only about people who don’t live in our house — they are about us too! These clashes of loyalty  impact me and they impact my kids. My kids look to me to set the standard for how we engage in our family. With two teens at home, a third daughter back in Canada and a whole heap of messed up relationships in-between, I need clear intentions! So might you.

Take for example the story recently shared by one of my readers, who I will call, Jill.

Jill’s daughter maintains relationships with people who treat Jill very poorly. So damaged are these relationships that although her daughter interacts with the individuals on facebook,  Jill is estranged from these individuals and has been blocked. Jill is connected to her daughter and visits her daughter’s facebook page.  She can therefore see one sided exchanges that she is not privy to the other side of. Jill’s feelings were deeply hurt. She was angry too! Not only because of the wider estrangement issues, but she also felt great upset, anger and sadness that her daughter was choosing to maintain relationships with people who were treating Jill poorly. Jill felt her daughter was being disloyal and she made a decision to block her daughter from her facebook.

Jill’s situation is far from unusual in family estrangement circles. It may be so usual that we miss the pain and the problems that Jill’s solution may bring.

Let’s borrow my intention: “to do everything possible to ensure that the pattern of estrangement is not perpetuated with or by my children” – and apply it to Jill’s situation. How would this intention change the elements of the situation that Jill focused on? How might the intention have changed Jill’s decision to block her daughter from her facebook? Would this intention be at all useful to guide Jill’s relationships with her children?

I can’t speak for Jill, but I know as a mother myself, my choice is to foster connection with and between my children. I know that breaking connection, however superficial or frivolous it might seem in the moment [it's  "just" facebook, right?]  are high estrangement risk activities. My primary concern would have been to engage directly, lovingly and honestly with my daughter, to build and strengthen our connection. I may have chosen to express my suffering, but in a way which did not put the onus of resolution on my daughter.

“I was looking at your facebook profile today, and noticed a couple of conversations that I have been blocked from. You know, no matter how much time has gone by, it still hurts me to see that. It makes me angry too! Then I realize that the important thing is our relationship. I’m so glad to have you in my life and so determined not to let estrangement be a part of our relationship.”

The conversation above is not denying the existence or the impact of estrangement or the pain Jill feels about being blocked, or how awful  it felt to see these communications on her daughter’s facebook. It also didn’t ask Jill’s daughter to fix it or make it better. It clearly stated the intention to be close to her daughter and strengthen their bond. We need clear intention to guide our choices. This isn’t all that needs to happen – but it is the start of what needs to happen.

This is a single example of intention at work and you can agree with it or not, adopt it for yourself or choose a different intention of your own.  Intentions are personal. As the Elizabeth Gilbert quote above says so beautifully, if we don’t have a clearly posed and well-considered intention … our desires are without power. For another example of intention in action, see my post Choose Joy.

When we enter into difficult situations or relationship interactions, we can begin by taking a moment to set our intention in advance of engaging.

1 – What is my highest intention for this interaction/situation?

2-  What are my habitual ways of engaging? Know your go-to’s, those almost auto pilot reactions, that come up in similar situations or interactions. Remain mindful!

3 – Ask yourself frequently, is what I am saying, doing, thinking, feeling …  in alignment with my intention for this interaction? If the answer is no – STOP, take a break, re-align with your intention.

We want loyalty? We start by learning to be impeccable with our intention to be loyal.When we move with intention, we are not only doing so for that moment, and that relationship. We are taking a concrete, pragmatic stand that is for all of our family, now and forever.

Theme of the Week: Loyalty

“The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.”

~Alain De Botton

Family estrangement doesn’t begin and end with one person taking their leave from the family stage. The decision to close off contact with one person in a family can leave massive disruptions across an entire family system, which reverberates endlessly. Estrangement is not a disconnection between one person in a family and another, because it calls into question every relationship in the family.

*   “My mother is an abusive bitch, who estranged from my eldest daughter and from me. She still speaks to another of my children, while a third is left completely in the cold through no fault of her own. I struggle to have a relationship with my daughter, while she maintains a relationship with the woman who has worked, continues to work,  so tirelessly to hurt me and my other children.“

*   “I am estranged from my father who abused me as a child, but miss my mother very much. She has to sneak to talk to me. It hurts so much I find it easier to stay away from her too.

*  “I can’t remember any of my grandfather’s family. They didn’t want anything to do with him for whatever reason, and by default it meant we didn’t get a relationship with them either. All that loyalty crap.”

Family estrangements leave open, tender wounds. They are not resolved, finite issues. We can be re-triggered in so many ways; a family event … we’re not invited. A family event we are invited, but someone else we love and care about is not. Someone we are estranged from dies, we can’t attend the funeral because other estranged family members trump our right to be there. A new baby is born that we cannot rightly welcome or love, even though we do. A sick member of the family is out of our reach because of the dynamics of estrangement. An achieving member of the family goes without our heartfelt  best wishes, for the same dynamics. Our heart breaks as we move through our lives unable to touch or be touched by our family – even when we chose not to have them there. Our tribe is absent…. but not all of them are absent. We are absent from our tribe… but not all of our tribe …

We can find ourselves endlessly tip toeing around the political minefield that we call family. The strain of managing these tensions can result in further estrangements simply because it can be emotionally exhausting to try to figure out and manage the complexity. Better no family relationships than perpetually chaotic ones. Right?

Then why does giving up on these relationships hurt so much? If letting go is such a great solution, why are we reading a family estrangement blog? Why do we understand the hurt of estrangement, yet fall into it as a way of managing further relational tensions? Most importantly, what can we do differently?

In my experience personally and professionally these tensions will not magically resolve themselves with time. We cannot control others; their behavior, their feelings, their choices and trying to do so can create even more damage and hurt for ourselves.  We are left with the stark reality of having to figure out how we will look after ourselves and our existing or remaining relationships in the wake of incredibly complex, broken relationships.

Let’s start with becoming peaceful and moving away from reaction.

We don’t have to make decisions about relationships in haste or with urgency as a way of relieving emotional tension or anxiety. We don’t need to have an immediate answer about what to do, and we don’t need to give immediate answers either. We can become still. We can wait until we are centered and peaceful. We can wait for clarity. We can make our own decisions. We can be aware there are a range of choices open to us. Relationships are not either/or, engaged or estranged.  We do not have to follow along with the reactions, dramas, intensities or insensitivity of others. Just because this person doesn’t speak with that person, doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t. We don’t have to take one person’s word about another person at face value. This is called gossip.  We can take our time and really consider what is happening. We can retain our own integrity even in the wake of a tsunami of intra-familial disloyalty.

We start with ourselves. We go slowly.