The Value of Keeping Your Cool

Stop trying to change your partner and own the role you play in keeping things the way they are.  Since you are the only person you can control, it is worth seriously considering how you feel about the way you act in any given situation.  Do you feel good about the way you handled yourself? Not did you get the result you wanted from your partner.  

Most people do not feel good about themselves when they lose control and act mean, aggressive, or spiteful in the heat of an argument.  While you cannot control your partner, you can control yourself.  The sentiment expressed by many a parents and teachers that, “It takes two to have a fight,” is true.  For example, if one partner is getting upset and starting raise their voice and become aggressive and the other partner rather than escalating the situation, can say something to the effect of, “Things seem to be getting revved up now.  Rather than continuing our old habit of being hurtful to one another, I’m going to take a walk.  Let’s try and talk calmly in an hour.”  By making this kind of statement change is happening on a number of fronts.  Ideally, it stops the escalation and the expression of hurtful sentiments for both partners. 

Perhaps most importantly, in being the person not “losing their cool,” you can feel better about yourself for staying true to essential decency and integrity.

Some Solutions for Addressing the Difficulty of Static Family Roles

What can be done when our family of origin expects us to maintain roles we have out grown or decided do not work for us as an adult?  Firstly, we can love, honor and accept who we have become and are becoming.  Know yourself and know that at the end of the day it is you who decides who you are through your words and deeds. 

There are two basic approaches, but the end the day it comes down to having boundaries.  That is, act in a manner that respects yourself and who you are becoming.  The first approach is to speak directly with people who you feel are treating you as if you are the role you had as a child or earlier in life.  Ideally they will be able to change their actions to recognize you for who you are now. 

This unfortunately, does not always happen.  Since the only person we can willing change is our self, sometimes we simply have to accept the limitations of others and understand that their limitations are not a reflection of us. 

Some Ideas about Why Visiting One’s Family of Origin Can Be Difficult

Roles are complicated because they serve a purpose to us and our families.  We are generally type casted early, good kid/ bad kid, social/antisocial, shy/ outgoing, athletic/ scholarly, etcetera. These roles are generally oversimplifications of a trait “needed” by the family and we are “rewarded” in some way or encouraged to keep the assigned role.

 But then we leave the nest in one way or another and redefine ourselves generally in a more expansive and dynamic manner.  Free to become coherent with our own ideals of who we are, and what we are becoming. 

Unfortunately, when we return to our families of origin we are expected to return to the role that we held prior to leaving the nest, one that is usually static and constricting.  It this experience of the incoherence between who we have become and are becoming and the expectation of us to play a static role, that causes many people to dread the holidays and visiting with their families of origin.