Friday, October 9, 2020

Rebuilding Bridges

Family is important.  Sadly it’s easy to get completely absorbed with taking care of your immediate family of your spouse and kids and dealing with issues of career, home ownership, finances and all of the other worries of life that so often we lose touch with old friends and sometime family.  The outcome is that many of us reach retirement and then do inventory of their life, they realize that their relationship with old friends and or family including, brothers or sisters, cousins is not what you want or need it to be now.

There are many reasons, some good some bad that cause us to lose contact with family and friends. One of those reason is you married, have kids got busy and forgot to stay in touch. Another reason could be that there was a dispute or a perceived or actual insult that was not resolved and as the years went by it became harder and harder to resolve the issue.  If the latter is the case, it’s easy to feel remorse and a desire to “bury the hatchet” and rebuild those bridges.

Easier said then done, I am lucky my family is close (within three hours) and I can see them when I need to, (not now of course due to COVID). I know in my family my grandmother and her sisters did not speak for over 45 years and only made up when one of them was dying. It is sad not to have family close, but how to go about making things right with your siblings? If you don’t exchange greetings even at the holidays and if you have not seen each other in years, this effort to reconnect with family before it’s too late is going to take courage to put past resentments and broken relationships behind you and make things right again.

Here are some ideas, first, if you are lucky enough to have a relationship with a spouse of the sibling reach out and try to connect. One of my younger brothers believed that when we were young I had treated him badly so over the years, I understand, he became more withdrawn and I was not aware of any issues. One day his wife phoned me and told me of his concerns. I was shocked as I did not believe I had treated him any worse or better than I had my other brother. I was smart enough to listen to her story. She also told me that he did not know she was talking to me. So, the next time I talked to my brother, I brought up stories of our youth and I also talked about how much I respected what he had done with his life. I also talked about how over the years I may have been harder on him than I should have been. I also talked about love and forgiveness and we parted on better terms, and have been closer in the past few years then we were prior to my understanding and apologising for my poor treatment of him in our youth.

If you have don't want to start a conversation right away, and you have an address, or email or a phone number of your siblings, that is a great start.  Perhaps the best way to “ease into” rekindling those relationships is with an email or a greeting card. I did not ease into the reconciliation because we already had a fair relationship and we could talk, but many do not have even that.  Just buy a nice card with a pleasant or funny greeting message in it and write one or two lines in there when you send one to the sibling with whom you wish to reconnect. 

That or email card will come “out of the blue” to your sibling so the next step is to give it some time for that gesture to be absorbed.  Make sure the card has your current mailing address, your phone number and email address somewhere on it.  Your sibling may not have that information handy and you want to make it easy for them to respond to your gesture of reconciliation.

If your sibling writes, emails or calls and it seems your gesture was well received, you are off on the right foot.  Now you can kick it up a notch with another card but this time with a personal letter enclosed with more verbiage about life and what is going on with you.  This is also a great place to retell some favourite story from childhood such as when the dog pulled over the Christmas tree or when dad did that church skit in drag to get your sibling remembering the good times when you were kids and thinking of anecdotes from your childhood to remind you of.

You may wonder when the time will be right for the “big apology” and the emotional release of all those resentments.  Well keep building that bridge.  You cannot cross a bridge until it is built.  Keep that correspondence going and kick it to the next level with a once a month phone call.  Again, keep those calls light, social, funny and warm.   Catch up with each other and send your love through your sibling to their spouse and children.  This extends the act of reconciliation to your sibling’s family who can be a powerful force to help the process along.

Finally arrange a visit.  And it will be during that visit, after some nice times together, some hugs and laughter with his or her spouse and kids and maybe a couple glasses of wine that you and your brother or sister can bring up the hurt feelings and put those resentments to rest once and for all.  You will feel 30 pounds lighter when you are no longer carrying those hard feelings.  And by going into your retirement years with your relationships restored and bridges rebuilt, you are going a long way toward guaranteeing yourself a happy and peaceful life in your golden years.

Thursday, October 8, 2020

3 More Ways to Deal with the Uncertainty of School Reopening

 1. Re frame Your Internal Dialogue

“The best approach to uncertainty about change and all of the uncomfortable feelings that come with it is to accept it. While it may feel like up until now, everything has been stable and predictable, life is constantly in flux. Change happens regardless of our thoughts and feelings about it.

Parents can practice acceptance through simple techniques. These include saying, to themselves or out loud, ‘I accept this change to school and my feelings of uncertainty. I can’t control it. I don’t have to like it, but I can accept that this year is different and that there will be change.’

Parents can also do this through mindfulness practices. These serve to give the brain a break and help us refocus. These practices can include setting aside one minute in the day to focus solely on breathing or focusing on the experience of drinking a cup of coffee. They can also work to identify any thoughts that may make uncertainty more stressful and work to gently reframe them.

Parents need to have compassion for themselves and others. We’ve never lived through a global pandemic before. We are uncertain. It’s OK. We’re all trying our best.” — Jessica Macdonald, clinical psychologist, North Carolina

2. Build a Strong Community of Support with Other Families

“Working with marriages and teens, I’ve seen the anxiety that comes with planning for a school year in which none of us know what to expect. The first thing parents need to do is to figure out the stance of the school district — to understand the district’s priorities in how they’ll provide school this year. If you have stayed connected with district board meetings or read the transcripts from these meetings, awesome!

The biggest factor in managing the uncertainty will be in having a strong support system outside of your family. You need a community of other people who are with you on this ride, whether it is choosing to homeschool or following the distance learning plans. These people will be able to connect with you in the suffering and uncertainty. But be careful not to choose people who just wallow in the suffering and play victim to their circumstances. That will not help. What you need are people who want support and to support others.” — Alisha Sweyd, marriage & family therapist, California

3. Acknowledge the Circumstances and Maintain a Schedule at Home

“The first thing to do, which is very important, is to acknowledge that it’s going to be an unusual year. Be honest. Help kids understand what they are walking into and reinforce that the new environment is intended to keep everyone safe and healthy. Explain that things may change — and that’s OK. Explain that everyone will need to be flexible and accepting.

Maintain a schedule at home. Children thrive on a routine: Make sure they are getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet and getting physical activity every day. Recognize that both children and adults may feel worried and stressed, but model positivity and reassure yourself and children that it will be OK.” — Zubair Khan, child psychiatrist, Bronx, NY


Wednesday, October 7, 2020

2 Ways to Deal with the Uncertainty of School Reopening

My grandson in Australia has been out of school for a while as the lockdown in his State continues. My grandchildren in BC are going back to school when the numbers of COVID are increasing and anxiety is building in their parents and in us. How do we face and deal with the anxiety is a problem all parents have currently? Here is some advice that may help taken from the magazine “Fatherly”

Identify Your Feelings and Say Them Out Loud

“This ongoing uncertainty is unsettling, which leads to a lot of parental anxiety. The problem with unchecked parental anxiety is that our kids pick up on it and take it with them. Kids often don’t know how to maneuver their own abstract feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. They don’t have the words or concepts for how to figure out what and how they feel. So, they take it with them. This unchecked anxiety in kids often looks quite different compared to adults. It can show up as a ‘bad attitude,’ irritability, tantrums or meltdowns, withdrawal or isolation, or depression.

COVID adds a whole other level of uncertainty. It’s hard to make plans, to reassure ourselves and our kids, and to move forward because there seems to be no end in sight. The good news is that it will end. Things will get better eventually. We need to believe this, live it out, and model that for our children. They look to us for comfort and safety.

The best way to handle uncertainty in general is to identify the feelings and say them out loud. That initial awareness will go a long way. Once you identify how you feel, it’s important to show compassion for yourself and to be gentle with yourself and others. Have an ongoing conversation about their feelings. Connection helps with feelings of uncertainty and other uncomfortable emotions. Kids may act like they don’t need you, but they do.— Ann-Louise Lockhart, clinical psychologist and parenting coach, San Antonio

 2. Focus on What’s Within Your Control

 “Parenting is incredibly hard and emotional under normal circumstances, but we’re now asking parents to do impossible tasks, such as working full-time while homeschooling full-time or having to choose whether or not to send their kids to a school that cannot guarantee safety. These unprecedented challenges are consuming parents. We cannot minimize how difficult this situation is or how valid the anxiety is.

 Get support from those around you. Talk to other parents going through the same things. Being able to share and normalize a difficult experience with others provides comfort and peace and a safe space to externalize the anxiety and fear.

 And focus on what’s within your control. So much of life feels out of control at the moment. Think about even little things that you can control such as how much water you drink a day, eating regularly, getting enough sleep.” — Jessica Small, family therapist, Denver

 

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

What Boomers want in retirement 2

The authors are clear, however, that one-size does not fit all. They divide us into four categories, which may help understand how society may change.

There are “Ageless Explorers, who see retirement as a time of opportunity, adventure, exploration, and personal reinvention”. This is the group that bends the rules and march to the tune of their own drummer.

 And then there are the “Comfortably Contents,” who “approach retirement with a more traditional, less driven view that retirement is a reward for a life of conscientious work. They tend to be well-educated and their work provided a good income. They are less likely to work in retirement. Their focus is on recreation, fun, and relaxation.”

 Next, the “Live for Todays” who “seek continued personal growth and want to keep reinventing themselves. They have the biggest list of things they’d like to do and would ideally like their retirement to be an extension of their free-spirited lives,” according to the authors.

 Finally, there are the” Worried Strugglers,” who “have fewer financial resources and fewer hopes and dreams for what they’d like to do. They report being more worried, less active, less healthy, and less happy because they did relatively little planning and preparation.

The act of retiring is the 4th box of life. The first box we lived was with our immediate family, from age 0 to 6. At age 6 we entered the second box of life, which was school, and we stayed until about age 18. At age 18 some of us entered the third box of life which was working while others continued at school a few more years. However, by the age of between 22 and 25 we all were in the third box of life which was working.  

When we moved through the first boxes of life, we followed rituals and were prepared for the next step. Retiring is a sequence of shifts over time, and for most of the changes in our lives there is ritual, in high school, when you contemplated college, you visited campuses. When it comes to retirement, people are basically told ‘good luck, have a good time, there is no formal preparation or help.  I think retirement is scary because it is a transitional period, and many people feel unsettled, anxious or bored, but eventually they realize that ‘I can be fresh. I can be new, or they drift away and die.