This week I’m working as one of the trainers in an organizational-development training program for leaders of not-for-profit organizations. When the trainers got together last weekend, we went around the room and said what we do in our “day jobs.” I said that I’m a therapist who works with couples and individuals, and mentioned that I also work with teenagers and their parents on various problems, most notably substance abuse. I added that I found this work highly enjoyable.

Today one of the trainers asked me, “Why is it fun for you to work with teenagers, particularly teenagers who are smoking pot or abusing other drugs?” Aside from the possibility that I’m just weird that way, here’s my answer:

Teens and their parents are a great example of culture clash and its impact on relationships. If the parents (or sole parent) finds herself in a power struggle with her pot-smoking teenage son, I help them work on their relationship first, whether or not the teenager ends up giving up marijuana. If you’re a parent of a young adult, you know full well that there is precious little control you have over many decisions and choices your son or daughter makes. This is particularly true when we’re talking about marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs.

But you do have control (some control, that is) over your relationship with your children. If your teenager is smoking pot, failing classes, breaking curfew (what curfew?!), and generally driving you crazy, you can experiment with the following changes to your approach:

1. Take care of yourself, move at a walking pace, and try not to overreact to your child’s behavior.
2. Notice the behaviors and comments your child is offering–behaviors and comments you like–and respond to them gracefully. Don’t overdo it: teenagers tend to distrust and dislike compliments, even though they need plenty of validation from others; you’ll have to figure out how to support them “under the radar” so that they receive the praise without necessarily knowing they received it.
3. Be a visible part of the good experiences your child is having. Tie all rewards (allowance, privileges, etc.) to specific behaviors your son or daughter has done, and tell them about it. For example, you could say, “I’m giving you this part of your allowance because you came home by 11:00 last night,” or “I’m letting you go camping with your friends because you asked me so respectfully.” Make ordinary, ho-hum statements like this (avoid excessive enthusiasm!) and be consistent. Soon your child will understand that it pays to do what you want!
4. Get in touch with your “philosophy of parenting,” that is, your whole reason for being a parent in the first place. Take time to reflect on your motivations for playing this role, and how you can live out your motivations in your relationship with your child.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good sample of the things I work on when parents and teenage men and women come in for counseling. We don’t always solve every problem, but improved relationships are incredibly powerful.

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Ever since my mother died in June 1996, I haven’t been a fan of Mother’s Day. I expect you understand. Even before her death, it wasn’t a major day because my mother never expressed very much enthusiasm about it. But I do keep the day, in various ways. I know other mothers in my life, and sometimes I honor them (SC and SL, it’s your turn this year!). And I think about mothering itself—about generativity, creativity, giving birth to things. And I think about my own mother.

I read two essays on Mother’s Day this morning in slate.com, and they’re both great. The first is closer to my experience: a person in early-middle life who misses her mother and muses on Mother’s Day. (The “Deathbed Menu” line is terrific!) And the second article is even more fun: a lesbian mom who wants the day all to herself and has to tussle with her partner for the honors of motherhood in the life of their young daughter.

Whoever you are, and whoever (or wherever in the universe) your mother is, I hope you can enjoy these spring days of birth, nurturing, and new life. Happy Mother’s Day.

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I’ve worked with lots of clients who belong to blended families—both parents and kids. These days, it seems blended families are the new normal. If “The Brady Bunch” were televised today, it would hardly be a surprising premise. Two people, both of whom have kids from previous marriages, hook up. *Yawn* But in its day, I suppose, “The Brady Bunch” was radical.

Too bad it was a simplistic fantasy of a blended family, nothing like the real thing.

When blended families form, often enough the people involved don’t know how complicated the relationships can be. If you and I get married, and we both already have kids, you are not automatically going to be recognized as a parent by my kids. (And vice versa.) And in many ways, you shouldn’t. They already know who their parents are, or were. To the best of my recollection, “The Brady Bunch” never let its viewers know what happened to the girls’ dad or the boys’ mom. They just hooked up as an intact family and never looked back. But we all know it can’t be this simple. “You’re not my real dad!” you can imagine Jan saying to the befuddled Mike Brady. And she’s right: he’s not. Let’s have some respect for the perspectives of kids in blended families who know in their bones that parenting relationships in these situations need to be negotiated.

So if you’re a member of a blended family, and feel frustrated that your spouse—or your child, or your spouse’s child—is behaving badly, take a step back and give everyone (including yourself) a break. Blended families need time to negotiate the new relationships and make sense of a very unfamiliar new family structure.

(Having said all that, I confess I enjoyed “The Brady Bunch” when I saw it in reruns in the seventies. If only because they made a trip to Hawaii look awesome!)

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For a long time I worked primarily as a child-and-family therapist, mostly in South King County, but also in Puyallup and Tacoma. These days I’m primarily a couples therapist, though I also work with individuals (and love to do so!). I made the switch for a few reasons, and one of them was that I am not a parent. This hasn’t been a game-changing problem for me, because I know a lot of children (I have, let’s see, twenty-one nieces and nephews!), I have been a child myself, and I certainly have a lot of personal grounding as a member of a family. (Two families!) But I felt some genuine tension about being a child/family therapist and not being a parent. I felt that there were times when my resonance with parents wasn’t all it could be. Since I’m a member of a couple (ten years and counting), my resonance with couples is deep and broad.

Having said all that, I’ve experienced “resonance” (I’m using air quotes because I don’t know exactly what I mean when I use that word) in a deep, broad way recently with a couple of new parents, friends of mine who adopted a baby last week. Here’s their website.

Basically, I’m just thrilled. This is the first time I’ve had such an up-close view of an adopted-baby experience, and I’m surprised at my strong feelings about it. My friends have had a long journey in their quest to become parents, and just recently suffered a significant setback (the baby they thought was theirs turned out not to be), and now I receive photos of the new baby and just stare at them, taking in every detail.

I love my nieces and nephews, and since, oh, 1989, I’ve held them, received pictures of them, hung out with them, and (even though I live across the country) tried to savor their delightful lives as much as I can. And yet, this time, there’s an added whattayacallit, a mysterious something that’s going in inside me. Maybe it’s that the process was so different–and challenging in such different ways–that captures my imagination. Maybe it’s my unique friendship with these people (especially mom). Whatever it is, this is a fun ride.

I invite you to take a moment to reflect on new life in your life. Sometimes it’s surprising–it catches you off guard with a wave of delight you never expected. Other times it’s just sweet, or deeply satisfying, or quietly pleasant. But how is new life emerging for you? Especially this time of year, when our natural surroundings are darkening and dying?

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I think I’m on a roll. This is my second political post in a row. I made it through all of 2008–a huge political year!–without talking politics on this blog, but this summer there are too many crucial issues being debated for me to stay silent. The first was the White House being inconsistent and unhelpful regarding DOMA and DADT. And the second is Referendum 71.

I’ve found out that it’s hard to get information about Referendum 71 and how it came into being. This webpage gives you a lot of different takes on the complicated story. But the basics are these:

1) the Washington State Legislature passed–and Governor Chris Gregoire signed–a measure expanding the rights of registered domestic partners in the state of Washington;

2) registered domestic partners are not only same-sex couples, but also heterosexual persons who live as domestic partners, are not romantically involved, and do not want to marry because they would lose government-funded health benefits if their marital status changed;

3) a group of citizens tried to collect enough signatures to put this law–written and signed, as noted above, by the people’s duly-elected representatives–up to a public vote; and finally,

4) a yes vote will preserve the original law, and by extension the rights of domestic partners across the state. (And by “rights” I mean decidedly non-radical things like the right to visit your partner in the hospital, or the right to decide who gets your stuff when you die.)

Oh, and I should mention that there are legal actions being taken that call into question the validity of many of the signatures that got Ref-71 onto the ballot in the first place.

I have at least two problems with Ref-71, and I suppose at this point in the post you know what they are! The first is the basic question of justice and fairness. My partner and I are registered as domestic partners, and while certain people might like you to think that this means we’re dangerous radicals, all it really means is that we enjoy all of the rights of married heterosexual couples, with the exception of saying that we are “married.” As citizens of this state, and of this nation, we simply enjoy the right to choose our kin, the right to manage any health crisis we might suffer, the right to decide what happens after one of us dies.

And now, because of fear, misunderstanding and ignorance, those rights are in jeopardy.

But that’s not all. My second concern has to do with the fact that a certain number of citizens are trying to second-guess a law written, passed, and signed by the elected representatives who were sent to Olympia by all of us. It’s not the second-guessing itself that I object to: please understand, I think that dissent is a crucial part of a healthy democracy. It’s that they’re trying to do an end run around the system. They know they don’t have the votes in the Legislature, and they know Gov. Gregoire doesn’t share their views. Unseating all the public servants who oppose them would take a long time, and be very hard to do. So they’re trying to bring down this law using the undemocratic method of a referendum.

It’s clever, really. A referendum seems to be democratic. What could be more democratic than having every citizen participate in a state-wide show of hands? But it’s not. For more on why it’s undemocratic, go here. But I’ll say briefly (because this post is pretty long already, and maybe starting to sound like a rant!) that we don’t live in a pure democracy. We live in a democratic republic. And only in a democratic republic do all the voices have a forum in which to be heard. Minority rights aren’t protected in a pure democracy. In a pure democracy, whoever motivates 51% of the crowd wins. That’s why our forbears took such trouble to construct a form of government that functions more fairly, and with more stability.

So I encourage you to vote “yes” on Referendum 71. The next rights to be questioned and denied could be your own.

(And thanks for listening to my rant!)

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These days, I mostly work with adult individuals and couples. But I occasionally work with adolescents, and often I work with parents who are grappling with the adventures (and misadventures) of their children. And one bumper-sticker phrase I like to use in my work with them is, “You’re not raising kids. You’re raising adults.”

What I mean is, you’re raising your son or daughter to be an adult, not a child. So limit-setting, boundaries, the occasional “no” answer, and (maybe most painfully) exposure to the difficult, dangerous world is all part of normal human growth and development. It’s natural to want to protect your child from the world–to create an ideal environment, a lock-and-key universe that prevents all bad things from happening to your child, everything from inappropriate TV shows to unkind neighbors to summer camp. And it’s also natural to fear that when something bad does happen to your child, your child is permanently damaged by the trauma. Sometimes the damage can be severe, but most of the time the bumps and bruises of life are essential for the developing human in your care to become a functional adult.

So if you as a parent are afflicted by this kind of anxiety, take a deep breath. Remember that you’re raising a child to become an adult, and therefore the young person in your care is an adult-in-progress, an adult-under-construction. Do all you can to provide safety, security, and a generally right-side-up world. But don’t sweat it. When things go haywire, that’s often enough a key dimension of your child’s developing story as a resilient, competent adult.

And because it’s Friday, sunny, and summertime, I’ll close in a silly way. Right now I’m not raising a human child, but rather a dog who currently happens to be a 12-week-old puppy. And today I thought to myself, “I’m raising a dog, not a puppy,” because today Hoku’s ears started sticking up permanently (or semi-permanently… they still flop down now and again). It’s one of those tiny little losses you suffer. No more floppy ears! But it feels right all the same. We’re raising an adult dog, and he’ll need strong, alert ears! Click on the photo for a closer look, and happy Friday.

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In American popular culture we hear lots of therapy buzzwords, or buzz phrases. After a school shooting a reporter will announce, “The families are gathering in the gym tonight for a candlelight vigil to begin the healing process.” Then, a year or so later, that same reporter will return to the scene of the tragedy and talk about how the victims’ families have “gotten closure.”

Cue the eyerolls. Healing process? Closure? Really? I don’t want to sound cynical–really, I don’t–but let’s have some respect for the complexity of human grief, the mystery of human relationships, and the difficulty of wrestling with an upsetting problem, or person, or situation.

This brings me to a useful but problematic word: ‘acceptance.’ What is it? In my work with clients, acceptance is a process one goes through to make sense of a situation, draw wisdom from it, and move forward in one’s life with the benefits of that wisdom. Please note:

Acceptance is not resigning yourself to an unjust situation (particularly a violent or abusive one)
Acceptance is not pretending you weren’t harmed, or pretending that you didn’t suffer a loss
Acceptance is not making up false (and trite) aphorisms that paper over your pain

In short, acceptance is not resignation. I may accept that my beloved died, but I don’t have to resign myself to that hard reality. When I accept that someone died, I accept that I am deeply sad; I accept that the person’s absence is painful; I accept that she or he brought both delight and difficulty to my life; I accept that–and this might be the hardest part!–I accept that I must move forward and even grow beyond that person, and live future chapters of my life without that person’s immediate presence. And finally, I accept that the person I miss will continue to have an influence–for good or ill–on my life. I may still draw insight and wisdom from my relationship with my beloved dead.

Here’s another way that acceptance is not the same as resignation: I may accept that my partner is, let’s say, emotionally volatile, or has a substance-use problem, or can’t get along with his/her family members. But I don’t have to resign myself to it. This means that if my partner is emotionally volatile, I may accept that as something that’s true about my partner, but also be clear with him about what I’m going to do when he’s flying off the handle. Or if my partner has an alcohol problem, I might accept that as something that’s true about my partner, but be clear with her that I’m not going to help her drink, or be with her when she’s binge-drinking. Or if my partner has a ‘crazy’ family, I might accept that but let my partner know that I’m not his go-to person for all the complaining he wants to do about his family. In all of these examples, acceptance looks very different from resignation.

Sometimes you may accept these situations, and your acceptance process leads you to end the relationship. That doesn’t mean you didn’t ‘accept’ the problem. It just means that as you worked through it, you concluded that ending the relationship was your best option. Other times, you stay. But you stay in a different way–you stay in such a way that you are not allowing your partner’s problem to become your own. And your partner may then choose to address the problem!

Acceptance is a living process, an ongoing path of discernment, self-confrontation, and action. As I said above, through acceptance you make sense of a situation, draw wisdom from it, and move forward in your life with the benefits of that wisdom. It is anything but passive!

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A friend of mine recently shared with me what she’s doing right now in her spiritual practice. She’s placing colored lentils on a tile in the shape of the Korean word ‘Han,’ a word and concept that is hard to translate. I’m not qualified to tell you very much about it, but I can say this: it reminded me of the value of ‘genuine forgiveness,’ a process of reconciliation and healing created by Janis Abrahms Spring, who wrote the best book I know about reconciliation.

‘Han’ can be understood (at least partially–I don’t pretend to fully understand it) this way: that the truest healing happens when both the offender and the wounded are reconciled. It’s not enough for one of them to make sense of what happened, work through it, and find acceptance and peace. (Though that’s not nothing!) It’s best if both of them can come together and do the hard work of reconciliation. My friend wrote, “In other words, individual salvation is selfish and narcissistic. If the wounded are not brought into the picture of salvation, that’s not much of a salvation.”

I would only add that this works both ways: if the offender is not brought into the picture of salvation, that’s not much of a salvation, either. If I harmed you, then something must be done to bring justice and peace back into your life. But something must also be done to bring justice and peace back into my life as well. It’s like the ancient notion that a curse goes in two directions: toward the one you’re cursing, and inward at yourself. Both the offender and the wounded are wounded.

Sometimes, of course, this is not possible, or easy. Perhaps the offender died, or the wounded refuses to include the offender in the process of healing. Or perhaps it’s a situation in which it would only lead to further harm of the pair were to come back into contact. That’s why I won’t say that genuine forgiveness is the only way. But it’s worth pondering. If you have harmed someone and truly want to work through what you’ve done and find peace, then the best way would be to invite that person into a healing dialogue about what happened, a dialogue in which you truly hold yourself accountable and challenge yourself to make whatever amends you can.

And if you have been harmed and truly want to work through what happened, you may want to challenge yourself to allow the person who harmed you back into your life for the purpose of this shared process of genuine forgiveness.

Again–and I can’t say this enough–genuine forgiveness of this kind is not the only way. There truly is a way to work through your pain without it. But the Korean people, like so many others around the globe, have known for thousands of years about the power of Han.

*Note: this article was slightly edited for clarification and accuracy.

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Lots of times I work with clients who think they’re lazy, or think their partner is lazy, or think their son or daughter is lazy. And often enough that seems like a reasonable explanation. Why doesn’t he help with the dishes? Because he’s lazy! Why doesn’t she get up and make it to work on time? Because she’s lazy!

But I have a couple of problems with this. For one thing, if I’m “lazy,” what am I supposed to do about it? It’s either a personality trait, which would make it very hard to change, or it’s a chosen behavior, which means I’m being a little bit of a jerk. Whatever it is, it’s not pretty.

So I propose this: there is no such thing as ‘laziness.’ It’s not a true human condition. No, you are not avoiding work because you’re lazy. And your partner is not ducking out of vacuuming the living room because she’s lazy. And your son is not blowing off his homework because he’s lazy. There are five reasons why you (or someone you love who frustrates you) is not doing something:

1) Exhaustion. Don’t underestimate the power (and prevalence) of exhaustion. Most of us are doing the best we can despite being really tired, really strung out. All the other mammals on earth, after they’ve eaten and found shelter, reward themselves with a long nap. Humans are less fortunate in this regard!

2) You don’t want to do the task. This is obvious I suppose, but your failure to fold the laundry is mostly about the simple fact that you think folding laundry is a drag. And–

3) The cost of your failure to do the task is low. Maybe you know you won’t get punished too severely for not doing something. Or maybe it’s not such an important task after all. Or maybe (and parents, listen up here) the authority figures around you are not setting up a situation that would lead to serious consequences if you fail to do the task. Or–

4) The reward for doing the task is low. There isn’t a nice upside to doing it. For example, you’re not being recognized very much for your efforts, or paid very much, or being thanked. And you know what? Being thanked is important. It’s not selfish or small or petty of you to appreciate (and expect) the gratitude of others. And finally–

5) You are not confident you can do the task well. When your daughter is not doing homework, or your partner is not talking to you about his feelings, or you yourself are procrastinating yet again, it could very well be that you simply don’t feel confident in the task that has been set before you. You’re not lazy. You’re just insecure in this particular situation. Your partner is not lazy. She just thinks you’re better at cooking, or cleaning. Or maybe she’s being passive-aggressive! But she’s not being lazy.

So beware of the concept of ‘laziness.’ It’s a dead-end. It labels someone but doesn’t accomplish much more than that. The five reasons I’ve described above invite you to work on the issue with the goal of changing behavior, improving relationships, and building both competence and confidence. That’s all good, right?!

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Okay, it happened. Someone I know read my own written work, so of course I’m in big trouble! (Well, at least a little trouble. Or at least I am being heavily teased.) A member of my own family read this post, and now I have some explaining to do.

So here goes.

When I was writing about family dynamics around the holidays, I was of course not writing about my own family, which is a wonderful group of kind, generous, emotionally mature, and physically attractive people.

Okay, I didn’t manage to write that whole sentence without rolling my eyes and laughing. And since I’m just digging the hole deeper, I should probably just give up and say this:

1) If you are suffering the misfortune of being a member of my family, please know that I love coming home for the holidays, even though sometimes we do have a crazy dynamic; and

2) It’s all the other family members who are crazy, not you and me!!

*sigh* I deserve everything I get!

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