Family Heaven - Family Hell
	Read this article: If you dread family events You wish you could handle them better You’d like to enjoy your family more   “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”  George Burns   Ever come away from a family get-together feeling utterly deflated, angry, frustrated or just fed up with some of the antics of your family members?  The last Sunday lunch you went to, or wedding or birthday party may very well have been a disaster with the usual squabbles, sibling rivalry, petty sensitivities that played themselves out the way they've always played themselves out.   Your stomach may sink when you think about the next family gathering and spending time with family members you simply don't get on with and have to pretend you do.  Indeed, getting together with your family can be hazardous to your health.   Well, help is at hand with a new book that I, Jo Ellen Grzyb, have written, called Family Heaven Family Hell - How to Survive the Family Get Together.  This is a vital guide to help you cope with even the most difficult family scenarios.   It's no joke when I say that family gatherings can be hazardous to your health:  the stress, depression, angst and misery that can be the result of unhappy get togethers can have a direct impact on your well-being.  Because we want so much from our families that is so often not forthcoming, the result of all that longing and disappointment over a long period of time can cause ill health; mental and emotional as well as physical.   A lot of the material in the book is actually based on my own family difficulties and when I sat down to write it I imagined what I would have liked to have known when I was going through the worst of my family dramas.    You see, in my family, most of us siblings don't seem to have moved on from our teenage selves and the dynamics when we get together seem to plunge us right back to door-slamming, shouting mode, even though our ages range from 45 to 62.  Our last big kafuffle happened back in 1997 and the ripples are still being felt with various siblings still not talking to other various siblings.   How ridiculous!   And yet this is something I hear about time and time again:  behaviour among families can be both infantile and deeply painful and it seems very hard to change old patterns for new, more adult ones.   For most people change is extremely difficult and habits of a lifetime can seem cemented into place, which is why I wrote Family Heaven Family Hell in such a way as to make change simpler and gentler.  That way you have more chance of making real changes than just fantasising about them.   It is important to note, before I carry on, that there are heavenly families out there.  You may even be part of one, or perhaps just part of your family may be on the heavenly side.  The thing to remember about heavenly families is that they have all the same problems that hellish ones have except the way in which they deal with those difficulties.   They still have sibling rivalry and impossible in-laws, but the real difference is that they have a willingness and an ability to sort out their issues rather than letting them fester.  They don’t have perfect relationships, but they do have evolving ones.   In hellish families, relationships don’t tend to evolve; they tend to stagnate and get worse, with old dramas revisited time and time again and resentments stoked up and fed on a regular basis.   There are many case studies in the book, but just since it's been published, I've had many people add their stories to the stockpile.  Here are a couple of common ones:   Jan is a 30something mother of two, who works part time as an admin clerk, but feels very responsible about being at home when the children get back from school.  She considers herself a dependable mum and wife and feels quite confident juggling her many roles.  That is, until either her mother or mother-in-law come on the scene.  She feels judged and criticised and feels that both women try to interfere with the way she's bringing up her children, the way she cooks, whether she should be working or not.   Her confidence gets shot to hell and she can never find the right, snappy thing to say to get them to back off.  She also feels unsupported by her husband when it comes to her mother-in-law and unsupported by her father when it comes to her own mother.  She absolutely dreads any kind of family get-together because she knows she's just going to get an earful about what she isn't doing right, and she feels about 10 years old getting a dressing down for not being good enough.   I can't tell you the number of times I've heard something similar to this scenario, where the 'protagonist' feels criticised and feels helpless to change it, just as they did when they were a little person.   Here's another common one:   Sarah is 60 and could retire this year from teaching if she chose.  Her big concerns are the demands she feels are already being made upon her by her aged parents and her two children, both of whom have little ones and are eyeing up the free babysitting service that could be coming on stream any day now.   Every time the family gets together, one or another of Sarah's nearest and dearest (sic!) start in on what her plans are, how much free time she'll have, and without really waiting for any answer start making their own plans based on the assumption that she'll fit right in as chief care-taker and child-minder.  She, too, dreads the family gatherings because she simply doesn't know how to get them to leave her alone.  She'd love to retire but the thought of all that nannying fills her with depression and rage.   Although this scenario is different from the first one, our 'protagonist' still feels helpless in the face of someone else's agenda and unable to change the family dynamic.   And family dynamics are what all these stories are about:  people get trapped in old family dynamics and although other areas of their lives may work perfectly well, when they get together with their families they seem unable to break the 'spell' of how they all behave towards each other.   One reason, if not the most consistent one, that people don't take action to change the family dynamics is that that they think that somehow it will all come right without having to actually do anything about it.  What's that famous quote about insanity?  Something like:  "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."   For most people with hellish families they keep thinking it's going to get better, they don’t change anything they do; they do the same things over and over and fantasise that next time they'll get a different result.   Yup, that's pretty crazy.   Is that something you’re doing?  Are you living in fantasy-land when it comes to your family gatherings?  It can help change things if you actually confront your own illusions (or should I say delusions) and yearnings.  In a way, it’s kind of unfair to others to expect them to do all the changing just to comply with your wishes, isn’t it?  Yes, get-togethers might be a whole lot better if Uncle Ted didn’t get drunk or Cousin Louisa wasn’t such a gossip, but if you sit around waiting for others to change, you’ll be sitting around for a mighty long time.   Next is the next step in your reality check.  Take a calm look at your family dynamics and see reality for what it is, including your role as well.  In my book I spend a bit of time asking readers to identify the roles they play in their family (I'm the Human Buffer and The Rebel with A Cause, among many), and I believe it's crucial to have an idea of the roles that everyone has because so much of behaviour resides within those roles.   For instance, in my role as the Human Buffer, I would consciously and unconsciously try to ameliorate difficulties between other family members.  All well and good, you might say, a calm, neutral voice trying to find a calm meeting ground.  Well, maybe sometimes.    But it's only in retrospect having written this book, that I can see that many times it was a role that got in the way of changing things.  Other family members expected me to play the role because it took the heat off of them, but also I became a target for quite a bit of sibling rage because I did stick my neck out trying to calm things down.  Oh, how much better it would have been if I'd just sat back and kept my mouth shut and let them all get on with it - whatever it was at the time.   In Sarah’s case, I’m guessing she’s a ‘born’ Care-Taker and that’s the role everyone comes to expect of her because she’s been doing it most of her life and clearly doing it very well.    Jan, on the other hand, could very well be an Easy Mark, where for some reason other family members think it’s OK to criticise her because in some way she makes it easy for them to do so.   You, too, will have certain roles, as will other members of your family; in my view it really helps to identify those and see how they contribute to the family dynamics – do they help move things on or do they tend to keep things stuck?    In order to change the family dynamic you will have to do something different and one place to start is to identify other, more productive roles you could give a try.  They might feel awkward or uncomfortable at first, but that will usually be true of any behaviour change you undertake.   Taking on a new role could actually be a lot of fun!  What I’ve been doing of late is to be the Silent One.  Instead of opening my big mouth to try to ameliorate difficulties between family members, I keep it shut, bite my tongue and sit there without saying a word.  It has taken some practise, but one beneficial by-product has been that I have stopped feeling responsible for some of the nonsense that happens between my siblings.  You, too, may find that when you change roles, you have additional by-products as well.   Squabbles, whether they are petty or not, seem to crop up a lot and that’s usually an indicator that people have fallen into their usual roles with the usual stuff coming out of their mouths.   Here’s a challenge.  What do you think might happen if the next time one of these squabbles arose, you excused yourself and made a cup of tea, hid out in a bedroom or took a long loo break?  No fuss or dramatics, just absenting yourself for a while.  It’s amazing what getting yourself out of the line of fire can do; another chance to get yourself off the hook and not be responsible for other people’s behaviour.   And yet another challenge:  see if you can stop feeding the problem.  One of things I know happens in just about every family on the earth I bet, is how we all make alliances within the family.  We have a favourite sister or aunt or cousin with whom we off load, get things off our chests, moan to.  However, often some of that moaning tends to veer into collusion against others that you don’t get along with so well.    And it’s easy for this to happen.  It happens in my family and it happens in yours.  You moan to someone about someone else and they moan back and instead of looking at ways to resolve difficulties you get far more caught up in having an ally who agrees with you rather than using your two intelligent heads to find a solution.   Putting the breaks on feeding the problem can feel tough, but as with changing roles, it will make a difference.   I’ve only scratched the surface of some of the things you can do to help your family get-togethers be a bit more heavenly. One benchmark to be aware of is whether your behaviour is that of a mature adult or a stroppy teenager.  The more mature, the heavenly changes are there for the taking! Jo Ellen Grzyb is pleased to announce the publication of her book "Family Heaven FAMILY HELL How to Survive the Family Get-Together" Family Heaven Family Hell is a compassionate, sometimes humorous, sometimes intensive look at how families work and how to turn your family get-togethers - whatever they are - from hellish to somewhat more heavenly.   Available at all good bookstores or on-line at Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk orwww.visionpaperbacks.co.uk Robin Chandler and Jo Ellen Grzyb  have built a strong and thriving business with a clear ethos. It's called Impact Factory. Our description of what we offer is quite a mouthful - we're a professional personal development company, working with large multinationals, medium and small size British companies and Central and Local Government. But that's another story, and you can read loads more about us and what we do at: www.impactfactory.com    Does all this sound incredibly familiar?!  What’s it like in your family?  Tell us in the Forum.