How ‘Family’ Shapes You For Life. Continued.

Unspoken Family Rule №2: — Build connections, not power struggles.

If you’re keeping up with this series, you’ll be familiar with the concept of ‘winning a seat at the table’ and what it means to have justice present in the home.

Okay so what’s next? — figuring out how to not feel like that picture of wilted flowers I inserted above.

I’m no family expert, let’s set that straight.

Contrary to what my blog may suggest, I’m learning everything as we go. I don’t have years of experience in family counselling, and I’ve never awkwardly sat on the opposite sofa to a couple asking them “and how does this really make you feel?”. — My nervous response to ‘tumbleweed passing through the room’ situations could never handle it, unfortunately.

Public confrontations have never been my forte.

I would end up giving in, sobbing, and apologising for my earthly existence.

However, I am very conscious of the problems we face as households within our communities. This is why everything I write comes raw from what I know or what I see of the situations of those around me.

You’ll find these stories often filled with anecdotes and personal references but all with the sincere intention of making this much more relatable and… closer to home.

See what I did there? ‘Closer to home’, do you get it?

Okay, forget it. I just cringed as hard you did.

Family Rule №2

I’m going to try everything in my power to do this topic justice so let’s get straight into it…

When you walk through the door, don’t forget to smile.

How often do we do it?

How often do we mistreat the people closest and dearest to us, and then pour our best efforts and charms into people we barely ever interact with?

All the time, right?

I mean, I can be pretty guilty of this.

I can come home being moody, irritated and not care to give the right people my attention because I’ve drained all my energy and ‘niceness’ on the outside world.

But why do we do it? How do we allow ourselves, so easily, to hurt/ ignore the people we claim as ‘our everything’?

What’s my assumption? — Well, we love them, right?

We love our families, our siblings, our spouses, our parents, our pets, our children and our bestest of friends. Our love for them runs so deeply beyond what we can comprehend but that’s it. That’s the issue.

• We know them so well, sometimes better than what we can understand of ourselves.
• We have spent, sometimes, years building strong alliances with the humans closest to us and therefore we find it no bother to dump our emotions, our harsh words, our frustration, and anger onto them.
• We become so ‘used’ to these people, especially those within our household, that no matter how we treat them, we are accustomed to thinking ‘that person will always be there’.

This is what our brain tells us — No matter how far we cross the line, that sibling will still be my sibling, my Mum will still be my Mum, and my child will still be my child.

We take a rain check on being passive and find ourselves making a straight bee-line for being directly harsh with the cover up of “I’m just expressing myself”.

It’s become so effortless for us to push all the limits in the world, forget all the boundaries that should be in place, and throw any tone their way depending on how WE feel in that moment, simply because that person can ‘handle it’.

I would hear so many scenarios of where people, maybe an older sibling or parent, may act one way to the world and be recognised as something so different to what their ‘home personality’ suggests of them.

Maybe the worst sides of our character and our ‘not-so-nice habits’ come out the most when we’re at home because it’s where we feel the most safe.

It’s where we feel the least judged.

It’s where we know we can just off-load any emotion, no matter how harmful it may be to our internal environment.

We are conditioned to believe that the loyalties of our household members should run so deep that it should silence them and make them overlook it all.

— this is not okay.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

Being yourself at home is something I’m all here for. Feelings shouldn’t be suppressed.

After all, we have just fake-smiled our way through the day, kissed up to our bosses who so easily have deposited their grievances onto us, and may have just not gotten a space on the train we waited 12 minutes for.

It’s okay to want to come home and unload. Communication needs to be present, I agree.

My point is, there’s a healthy way of doing it.

Doing this in a manner that doesn’t create a continuous harmful environment in the house, to the point that your presence is becoming more and more undesired by your loved ones.

Just because we’ve faced, and most likely lost, some power struggles when it comes to the workplace, outside relatives, or even that annoying driver who caused you some serious road rage during your travels, we need to stop feeling the need to then create fear in the home in order to feel so tall.

I get that the world is full of testing situations and we may feel small and defeated in a few of our daily affairs. But trying to then feel dominant and untouchable when walking through our front door, via destructive mannerisms, is just not the answer. I promise you.

If anything, dealing with the tug of wars that the outside world forces you to compete in should actually make us more inclined to creating an abode of peace and mutual respect for one another.

If the world can remain cruel, it’s about finding ways to eliminate that where you have control, starting with the home.

What happens when you win a tug of war? — Yep, everyone else falls down.

It’s extremely common for us to replicate the emotions of those we love. We hold this natural sense of empathy as humans.

So imagine if we return home and we’re filled with ammunition to be cold and irritable, we are unconsciously changing the whole mood of the house, and what’s the result of this? — No-one feeling confident enough to communicate.

I promise you, if this notion doesn’t end, the cycle continues and has such a ripple effect into how those around us perceive every relationship they later come to form.

How to reflect on the Sunnah when attaining happiness in the home.

Abu Huraira reported: Al-Aqra’ ibn Habis saw the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, kissing his grandson Al-Hasan. He said, “I have ten children and I do not kiss any of them.” The Prophet said, “Verily, whoever does not show mercy will not receive mercy.”

Take this, one of many, hadith that exemplifies the absolute need for being merciful and kind. We are taught so strongly to emulate the Sunnah when it comes to the treatment of our families and to invite the characteristics of gentleness, tolerance and forgiveness into the home.

The courage to be kind.

Embodying a warmer, more accommodating, and less impatient character isn’t a framework that illustrates weakness.

In fact, it’s the complete opposite.

It actually exhibits absolute strength and moral direction.

So find the inner courage to be kinder when coming home, to be a source of comfort for your loved ones, and display higher levels of affection through words as well as actions. And watch how your mindset begins to shift to a more positive one, even when it comes to those ‘outside world power struggles’ we find may find ourselves in.

Anonymously,

Zara