Years ago, while at a local K-Mart, I bumped into one of my favorite veterinary clients, Annette. Annette was not only a wonderful pet owner but an extraordinarily devoted teacher. Like a Saint Bernard that magically turns up when needed, Annette consistently went above and beyond in her efforts to serve her students. Excited as always to make a difference in someone’s life (even at the local K-Mart), Annette gushed about an amazing seminar she’d just attended the previous weekend. Explaining that there was going to be another seminar in two weeks, she beseeched me to go. Based on how much I admired and respected Annette, I decided right then and there to go, bypassing all the typical doubts I would typically have about attending a seminar I knew nothing about.
The seminar was called “The Forum” and was hosted by Landmark Education. Never in a million years could I have imagined that a seminar would turn my world completely upside down. As it so happened, I’d been lugging around a very debilitating sadness inside of me for over a year as the result of a horrible family tragedy that had literally ripped my family to shreds. When one of the worst things that can happen to a family happened to my family, I was left at a complete loss as to how to deal with it. One of the unfortunate fallouts from the tragedy concerned my sister as I held her partly responsible for what had happened. I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year and I was terribly conflicted and torn. This was the state of mind I was in as I headed to the Forum.
The Forum was a three-day affair held in a spacious amphitheater in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. One hundred and twenty-five people attended. There was a palpable sense of anticipation and excitement percolating through the crowd making the event feel a bit like a church revival (especially considering that many of us were there for some degree of salvation and redemption!)
When I arrived at the seminar, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire that would help me to clarify the issues I hoped to address over the weekend. Naturally, I didn’t say a thing about the gigantic elephant in the middle of my life (i.e.the wreaked relationship with my sister.) Instead, I wrote about some “self-esteem” issues I had, such as my concerns about my weight, blah, blah, blah. What a crock! It only took until noon of that first day for me to realize that the entire seminar was going to be about my sister and what had happened to our family.
At the end of that first day, we were all were assigned some homework. Our assignment was to write a letter in which we were to ask someone for forgiveness. I instantly thought that there was no way in Hell that I was going to ask my sister for forgiveness! I simply wasn’t there yet. Still, I did try to write a letter of some sort to my sister that night though I eventually had to give up as I couldn’t get past the conviction that it was my sister who owed me an apology and not the other way around. The best that I could come up with were some accusatory statements along the lines of: “I might be able to forgive you if you hadn’t been such a blankity-blank and hadn’t done suchity-such!” Clearly, I was completely blinded by my version of what had happened.
When the seminar resumed the following morning, I slouched down as far as possible in my seat and kept my eyes on the floor in the hopes that the seminar leader wouldn’t call on me. The last thing I wanted to read the pathetic letter I’d written as it was laced with much more anger than forgiveness. Thankfully, I was rescued from that fate when a young Hispanic man volunteered to read his letter.
The young man rose from his seat and, after allowing himself a few deep breaths, he straightened his papers and began to read. I remember being instantly impressed with the eloquence of his words and the manner in which he spoke, thinking to myself that he must be a college student who was majoring in English or Theater.
The young man had written his letter to his younger sister, a girl of ten who, he explained, had been killed in a tragic car accident five years previously. He was actually speaking to his sister in his letter and the heart-wrenching way with which he confessed his shame and guilt was so raw and remorseful that I felt as if I was eavesdropping on someone in a private confessional. There was not the least amount of embarrassment as he openly begged his sister to forgive him. Every word contained so much anguish that I couldn’t keep myself from crying.
The young man’s letter was centered on the last Christmas they’d spent together. Apparently, his sister had gotten it into her head that she desperately wanted to knit him a scarf despite the fact that she’d never done any knitting before. With the help of their mother, though, she secretly slaved on the scarf for multiple weeks leading up to Christmas. With the typical innocence and naivety of a ten year old girl, his sister was not only confident that she’d get the scarf done in time for Christmas but she was certain that it was going to be a masterpiece. Yet, a few days before Christmas, she realized with a horrible sense of doom that she wasn’t going to get the scarf done in time. Devastated as only a pre-teen girl can be when her hopes have been crushed, she was inconsolable all day Christmas day.
The young man, who was just a teenager himself, teased her and joked good-naturedly about her tears. He assured her that it wasn’t a big deal, that she could simply give him the scarf when she finished it. He just couldn’t comprehend at the time how much of his sister’s love had been invested in making that scarf for him. Not able to understand how big of a deal it was to his sister, the young man brushed off her devastation as he was much more occupied with all the activities he had planned with his friends over the Christmas break.
When his sister was killed, though, her distress that last Christmas began to haunt him. He’d always known that his little sister worshiped him considering he was her older brother. He knew that any token of affection he ever tossed her way always made her day and never failed to fill her little heart with gratitude and joy. But, with his own youth and immaturity, he just hadn’t been able to grasp just how much making that scarf had meant to her.
After his sister died, the young man became increasingly depressed and withdrawn as he obsessed over the feelings he had that he’d let his sister down. He became convinced that no one would ever love him as much as his sister had loved him and, because he’d shamelessly taken her love for granted, he wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love.
I was so devastated by the young man’s story that my body was taken over by huge spasming, snotty-nosed sobs that I couldn’t control. His letter ripped open the wound that I’d been unsuccessfully trying to ignore after the family tragedy that had destroyed the relationship my sister. As I listened to the young man peel back layer after layer of his heartache, I recognized just how much I missed my sister and how cowardly and selfish my own letter of forgiveness had been.
The final assignment for the seminar was that we take the final step in our request for forgiveness and actually call the person we’d written our letter to and directly ask them for forgiveness. Before I could give myself a chance to chicken out, I found a quiet place and dug my cell phone out of my purse. With waves of fear rolling over me as I dialed my sister’s number, I felt I was inside someone else’s body as I heard the phone begin to ring. I was actually calling my sister who I hadn’t spoken to for over a year. Staring at the phone, wishing I could just hang up before she answered, I held my breath waiting for the sound of her voice. I could feel my throat starting to close up as my breaths became increasingly short and ragged. The instant I heard my sister’s “hello,” I started to sob. Though I hadn’t said a word, she knew it was me and, in a panicked tone of voice, she asked, “Julie, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Are the girls okay? What is it? What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t speak as I felt the full weight of how much I’d missed her push down on me. I was so ashamed that I’d let our estrangement go this far. It felt like an eternity but I finally managed to blurt out, “I’m sorry.” My sister didn’t say a word. I don’t know if she was in shock or just leery. But, once I found my voice, the words started spilling out: “I’m so so sorry. I’ve been completely trapped inside my own misery and I wasn’t able to think of how much you’d been hurt by everything that had happened, that this had been a nightmare for you as well as for me. Can you ever forgive me? Please forgive me for being so stubborn and unforgiving. I love you so much and I’ve missed you more than you’ll ever know.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, my sister said, “I’ve missed you! And, I love you, too! Of course, I’ll forgive you but can you forgive me? I was so wrong to have said the things I said. I was just so freaked out by everything that happened that I think I just lost my mind. Never could I have imagined that something so terrible like this would happen to us. I’m the one who should be sorry and I just hope that you can forgive me.”
That moment on the phone with my sister was the most redemptive thing I’ve ever experienced. Even more amazing was the fact that, like a snap of the fingers, the whole nightmare between us was over. For whatever reason, we were able to just let it go. Maybe it had to do with our coming together in such a sincere and authentic way. Somehow, we were able to simply forgive each other and move on. I’ll never completely understand it because the tragedy that caused our upset was momentally horrible. Yet, after that day, we never once spoke about the tragedy for years. And, even years later, when we did decide to try and talk about it, we were so cautious to carefully tiptoe around the subject because we knew it was a minefield and neither of us wanted to take a wrong step that could possibly blow our relationship apart again.
The Landmark Forum was the first place I’d ever heard the phrase “the more you resist something, the more it persists.” At first, it sounded to me like some kind of psychobabble, some silly riddle that made absolutely no sense to me. But, the more I heard it, the more the meaning of it started to sink in. It was simply a way of saying that ignoring our problems won’t make them go away. In reality, the more we bury something that hurts us, the more it festers.
When it comes to the unresolved issues in our lives, most of us have discovered that, if we don’t deal with those issues, they’ll simply keep popping up when we least expect it. Unresolved issues refused to be ignored and they’ll keep tripping us up until we finally make peace with them. They have a way of muddying up each and every relationship we have, including the one with ourselves. Every problem we resist is going to stubbornly persist (sabotaging our happiness all the while) until we finally confront it and make peace with it.
The truth of this hit home for me a second time when I was attending another Landmark Education course on Intimacy. I’d been struggling and struggling, unable to make sense of why my two marriages had failed on top of all the other relationships I’d had. Adding to my frustration was the fact that, every time I’d ask the seminar leader a question about my past relationships, he’d persistently ask me about my relationship with my dad.
I’d spent years trying to unravel the tangled knot that was my family. I’d availed myself of various counselors and therapists but, somehow, I always walked away feeling more lost and confused than when I’d arrived. At some point, I’d decided that I needed to accept the fact that my dad was a promise-breaking, womanizing alcoholic.
Yet, as the seminar leader seemed hell-bent on wearing me down, I decided that it wouldn’t kill me to take another look at my relationship with my dad. I explained to the seminar leader that things had started out wonderfully with my dad as both him and my mom were ecstatic when I was born because they’d had a hard time conceiving me. They made a complete fuss over me as a baby. Until I was twelve or thirteen, my dad appeared over the moon as far as I was concerned: always laughing at everything I did, taking me everywhere he went and constantly telling stories about all the silly things I’d do (like eating and swallowing a whole pack of bubble gum.) Being a tomboy, nothing intimidated me and, as a result, I did everything full out. My dad seemed to get a real kick out of my brazenness and, as long as he was enamored with me, I was a very content and happy girl.
But, when I reached the age of eleven or twelve, something shifted in my dad’s attitude. He became increasingly annoyed and irritated with me. I’d always been a mouthy kid who was a bit too quick to talk back but my dad had always seemed to think it was an endearing aspect of my personality when I was younger. He obviously didn’t think so anymore. More and more my dad became a stranger to me. He laid down countless rules and doled out tyrannical punishments (grounding me and refusing to let me spend the night at my friends’ houses.) Ever so gradually, my world started to tilt on its axis and, before long, I was knocked out of my previously happy orbit. Confused and angry, I started blaming myself for the relationship between my dad and me going so terribly wrong.
As I talked about these feelings with the seminar leader, it became more and more apparent that, even though I was a grown woman, I was still devastated over losing my dad’s affection when I was twelve years old. I’d never really gotten over it and I’d been blaming myself ever since. All this time, I’d been trapped inside in the emotional black hole of a pre-teen. Now, whenever I interacted with my dad, I’d automatically revert back to behaving like a confused twelve-year old. Any perceived indifference or irritation on his part could still bring me to tears even in my thirties and forties. I actually remember bursting into tears at a McDonald’s one time over something he said to me when we’d taken my daughters out to lunch. I was a mess!
When I’d moved away from home to go to college, my dad and I gradually spoke less and less until we were lucky to talk maybe three or four times a year. Somewhere along the line, I gave up hope that we’d ever be close again. While I was at college, the primary connection I had to my dad was through my mom. My mom would tell me about their latest fights and all the things he did to upset her. It was while I was away at college that my dad decided to leave my mom for a younger woman. I couldn’t help but think that this would be the final nail in the coffin that was now our relationship.
Even as a little girl, I’d known that my dad was a womanizer. As my mom never kept anything a secret, all of his affairs were a very open part of our family history. My dad owned a construction company and all the men who worked for him were alcoholics just as he was. They’d all go to bars after work and the womanizing was seemingly a natural consequence of hanging out at bars night after night.
A big part of my mom’s role in the relationship she had with my dad was being the watch dog. But, try as she may, she couldn’t manage to keep up with my dad’s comings and goings. Throughout my childhood, my dad would periodically vanish for a week or more at a time, most consistently during the holidays (you could count on him being gone for Christmas.) My mom always assumed he was with a woman so, when he’d finally come home, she’d give him Hell and around and around they’d go as she accused and he denied.
In the past, my dad would eventually give up whichever woman he currently happened to be with at the time and my mom and him would somehow resume their bizarre relationship. But the affair he had with the woman while I was away at college was clearly different and not only did my dad move out of the home he shared with my mom but he actually made plans to divorce her.
My mom went absolutely nuts. Once she realized that my dad was actually going to leave her, she pulled out all the stops. She attempted suicide by intentionally swallowing an overdose of sedatives. After recovering from that, she was ruthless in her efforts to hunt my dad down at every bar and club in town. When she’d find him (as she frequently would), she’d physically attack him as she screamed and caused a scene. She broke into the other woman’s apartment and threatened both her and my dad with a gun. It was an extremely dangerous time for my family and I was terrified my mom was finally going to kill herself or my dad.
When my mom’s antics failed to get my dad to come back home, she fell into a deep depression, spending night and day on the couch, watching TV and mindlessly drinking alcohol and chain-smoking cigarettes. Alcohol was a contributing factor to a horrific car wreck she had during this period of time. In the middle of the night one night, my mom was speeding down a country road at eighty miles an hour slamming into a disabled car without ever hitting her brakes. The young man in the other car had just hit a horse that had run out on to the road and the force of the impact had spun his car around such that his car was perpendicular to the road with his headlights shining out into a walnut grove. My mom never saw him. She plowed, full-speed, with a drink in her hand, into the driver’s side of his car. The young man was tragically injured but somehow managed to survive.
It was the worst of times. Though my family had always teetered on the brink of disaster throughout my lifetime, it seemed that finally the bottom was truly falling out. After watching my parents all of these years, I came to some serious conclusions at this time. First of all, I promised myself that I would never, ever permit myself to be in a crazy relationship just because of something called “love.” If “love” was what my parents had and was the fuel for their bizarre relationship, I wanted none of it. I also concluded at this moment in my life that the majority of men were actually incapable of truly loving a woman in a faithful and enduring manner. I didn’t doubt that a man might want a woman for sex and to clean, cook and care for his children but I had seen enough to realize that, sooner or later, he would get bored or come across some available woman (most likely a much younger woman) and he’d be gone in a flash without ever looking back. I guess, with all that history surrounding my parents, it shouldn’t have been surprising that I’d had trouble with the men in my life!
Still, that was then and this was now. I somehow needed to figure out what I was going to do right now because no amount of recrimination was ever going to alter the past. It was time for me to make a choice: do I try to start fresh from this moment on or do I simply continue to allow the pain of the past keep me stymied and stagnant?
It was no surprise that I desperately wanted to start over but how in the world was I going to do that? What could I possibly do that would allow me to move forward with a clean slate? It actually turned out to be much more simple than I might have imagined. After much deliberation, I realized that what I needed at this moment in my life was the same thing I’d needed when I was twelve-years old: to have my dad tell me that he loved me.
After much hemming and hawing and some very helpful coaching from my seminar leader, I devised a plan to make that dream a reality. The first order of business I would have to do would be to re-establish some regular contact with my dad. I resolved to phone him every Sunday instead of every six or seven months. And, the challenging thing I promised myself that I’d do at the end of every one of those phone calls was to say what I hoped my dad would one day say to me: “I love you.” I was absolutely terrified but I truly believed that, sooner or later, he’d finally say those words back to me.
It took six months. Every week was sheer agony as I fretted over whether I’d be able to get myself to say those three little words. Every week, those three words burned inside my mouth as I waited for the right moment to spit them out. Every week, especially considering that I’d already sprung those words on him in my previous calls, I knew that my dad knew they were coming. I could hardly concentrate as we made small talk because all I could think was how I was going to have to say those three words again. Every week, I worried that this would be the week that I’d chicken out and wouldn’t be able to get myself to say what I so desperately wanted him to say to me. Yet, somehow, week after week after week, I somehow managed to do it.
My poor dad! He was completely discombobulated. Mostly, he’d just sit there on the other end of the line, always awkward and speechless after I’d blurted out “I love you”. In the silence, we’d wait, until one of us finally said managed to say goodbye and finally putting us out of our misery. The most my dad ever managed to say after I said “I love you” was “Ah, okay” or “Thank you.”
Then, six long, long months later, my dad blindsided me. I hadn’t anticipated anything different happening that day as he’d not yet said the words back to me so far. So, after I said “I love you”, I was completely floored when he said in response “I love you, too.” I was at a complete loss for words, in some kind of daze. Eventually, I managed to say goodbye and that I’d talk to him next week and then, ever so carefully, I replaced the phone into its cradle and fell on the floor weeping a river of joy.
Things got a dramatically better between my dad and I after that: some kind of wall that had existed between us seemed to just crumble. We had five amazing years from that pivotal moment before he died on April 1st, 2000. For the entirety of those years, we were at ease with each other in a way we hadn’t been for years, easily and eagerly expressing our love for one another. In fact, I was so enthralled by the incredible turn of events between us that I purchased a cassette recorder so that I could record and save all the sweet messages my dad would leave me when I wasn’t home. I have two wonderful cassette tapes full of my dad saying things like, “Hey, baby doll, just calling to chit chat. Call me when you can, love you.” Never, ever in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that my dad would call me baby doll. Something inside of me was truly healed because of it.
The most unanticipated blessing to come out of the transformed relationship between my dad and I was the change it made in my dad. I’d undertaken the quest to have my dad tell me that he loved me solely for my own benefit and healing. Never once had it occurred to me how it might affect my dad’s life. Before my dad died, he was not only at ease expressing his affection for me, but he was able to tell my daughters, my sister, my nephews, and multiple other people in his life just how much he loved them.
None of this would have happened if I hadn’t first given up my resistance to approaching my dad. If I’d simply continued to resist, convinced that our relationship was hopeless, I’d never have gotten to experience the amazing transformation we had before he died.
The quest to quit resisting is vital to ourselves and our ability to accept ourselves for who we are. The People Are Like Dogs philosophy is rooted in the importance of genetics and how it defines who we are. To be able to accept and be at peace with the individual breed(s) of dog (temperament) that we happen to be, it’s critical that we deal with any resistance we have to being who we are. Whether we’re a terrier, a working dog, a sporting dog, a hound, or a toy breed, eliminating our resistance to the individual that we were born to be is what ultimately frees us up to accept and to be ourselves. Once we quit resisting who we are and decide instead to accept and embrace ourselves as we were born to be, we can then move on to finding ways to modify and train ourselves in those areas where our temperament may not serve us.
If self-acceptance and being at peace with ourselves isn’t motivation enough to give up our resistance, maybe we can choose to do it as a way of positively impacting someone else in our lives (just as I did with my dad.) My dad experienced a transformation in his ability to say “I love you” because I quit resisting the notion that our relationship was hopeless. In the very same way that a stone tossed into a pond creates ripples far beyond what can be seen, conquering our own resistance inevitably affects everyone around us.
It’s important to remember that, even if we take on whatever it is that we’re resisting, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll have a happily-ever-after scenario. What happened between me and my dad was extremely fortunate but I definitely wasn’t as lucky in my attempts to heal the relationship between my mom and me. Some mountains can’t be moved no matter how hard we may try. Yet, I have managed to make peace on my own with who my mom is and I’ve accepted the limitations of our relationship though I can’t deny it still hurts my heart. My mom simply isn’t able to budge. But that doesn’t negate the importance of accepting and finding peace within ourselves as far as another person or situation is concerned. We can make peace with a problem or person even if the situation isn’t resolved to our satisfaction. The most important thing to know is that ignoring our problems won’t make them go away and it certainly won’t help us on our path to self-acceptance and peace. We have to find the courage to face what we’re resisting because only good things lie on the other side of that effort. It may not be perfect but it will at least free us up to accept what’s so..
In the next chapter, we’re going to explore how we can successfully modify and train ourselves in spite of our genetically inherited tendencies. Woof!