Healing From Family Rifts, Mark Sichel

[Starboard Song]

This book was our first aha! moment, about 2 1/2 years ago. It is a 10-step pathway for -- well, according to the title -- for healing from family rifts. What exactly the 10 steps are for is, I believe, a weakness in the book. He may seem to some to be playing bait and switch. The correct title may seem to be Mending Family Rifts, a thing that is not appropriate for those protecting themselves from, for instance, personality disordered family. I highly commend it, nonetheless, to everyone dealing with a rift, or who has gone NC or is considering it.

Steps 3 through 5 were our elixir: Discover Your Family Roles, Understand Your Family Myths, Learn from Successful Families.

In Discover Your Roles, Sichel provides a small number of archetypes. Among them is the Injustice Collector. Now, he never purports to be addressing personality disorders. He is not doing so. But I'll be damned if we didn't completely recognize the injustice collector in my MIL. And other dysfunctional roles just fall out from that one, and we saw all our parts.

The Family Myths section was also recognizable. When you break a myth, it is a lot like what we see as feeding narcissistic rage. Maybe a PD thinks that this is how it is: "on Christmas, everyone piles into mothers' house and sleeps on pull-out couches or whatever. We all love to wake up together on Christmas morning." When you tell her you are going to stay at your own home, just 3 miles away, and will be back over in the morning, you shatter that myth and create rage.

In Successful Families, Sichel provides checklists of sorts: the attributes of a healthy family and everyone's rights in the family. These were so illuminating. After reading this book, we still didn't know about PDs, but we were clear that what we were experiencing was not an ordinary conflict. We understood that, while we were not alone, neither was this a common, routine matter at which we had failed.

Now, if you are not in the PD world, healing from a rift is easiest to do by not just healing, but mending the damn rift! Of course we ought to mend the rift, right?!? Well, as we here on this forum know, the answer is not that clear. There are many cases when actually mending the rift is not in the cards, and ought not be. And Mark Sichel knows this, too, though he doesn't like to emphasize it. There are little phrases dropped in here and there -- almost in the margins. They are little escape valves. Little loopholes. He lets you know through such fine devices as that, that maybe mending is not in your future, only healing.

Two sections are semi-quasi-psuedo about mending. Letting Go of Resentment is one, and something we all should do. But if, like me, you are NC and mean it, you get the feeling that a magician has lowered a curtain and you are about to be bamboozled. His language is soooo kind and loving, it is so lacking in judgment, that you get that queezy feeling that you are about to be invited to a church you weren't interested in, or something. And then you turn to section 7: Making the First Move.

And Making the First Move is brilliant, and it is right for most people. If you are a normal family full of strong and sometimes conflicting personalities, you should hold that blood is thicker than water. You should, when you are ready, let bygones by bygones, and make a strong outreach, well-engineered to succeed. But in this section, Sichel drops nary a word about that fact that maybe this section isn't for you. He speaks as though everyone should do this. As if it is one required step in a fixed set of 10.

But don't give up!

Steps eight through ten are classics that even the denizens of this forum can put their back into: Building a Family of Choice, Learning From Your Experience, and Making Meaning from it. My FOC is stronger than before our crisis. I am more emotionally aware than I was before. I once yelled out (to a friend) that "emotions are for amateurs!" and I believed it. I have developed a far more careful assessment of the interplay between raw facts and the emotions that drive us. So I learned. And in many ways big and small I have dedicated myself, since our crisis, to ensuring that (1) this situation never invades our peace again, that (2) nothing like this ever again impacts my family, and (3) that to the best of my ability I help others in need. I have made meaning of the suffering.

Sichel should amend his book in two ways. He should forthrightly address the many situations that are righteous counter-indications to Step 7: signs that you may be better off never making that "first move." And among the situations he should enumerate are drug addictions, criminal proclivities, psychological problems, and personality disorders. By not doing so, Steps 6 and 7 are alienating to many of us.

But read it anyway! By dealing with a PD in our lives, we did not earn a lifetime pass to the Comfort Zone.

We all of us, I think, can benefit by reading about letting go of resentment. And by reading about the renewal of a relationship. By seeing how healthy people can do that, even after a terrible falling out. And we all stop and sigh in disbelief, or discovery: healthy families can do that. And if we cannot, that's OK.

If we are not yet strong enough to affirm without being told that not mending is OK, we may find Sichel's book a little triggering. But we should have as a goal to get there: to be so strong and secure, that we can read Step 7 with calm comfort. We can read about a son calling his mother to say "enough now. I love you and want us to be family again." And we can admire that strength, and love that beauty, and we can close the book and, with a wistful sigh think, "that's not me, but it is very very beautiful." My life is a different path. I have no step 7, but I will cherish my family of choice, I will indulge love and friendship, I will find meaning in all that I have faced down. This Sichel fellow is writing for many other people, and I wish them well.

That's where I want to be.

[all4peace]

Hello Starboard_song--I'm very thankful that I read this book, per your footnoted list of recommended reading. I actually ordered my own copy, it had that many good contributions. I love your caveats, and share your view of them. I would agree that some of the messages in this book are vital, and that a person may need to be fairly far along in their healing journey to read them without being triggered.

Had I read this book 4 months ago, it would have been hard for me to process. Reading it now, I can wistfully (as you state) appreciate the strength and grace to reach out to a difficult family member, and I can also remember how many times we have done so, how it has gone, and accept that we need more time before considering doing so again, if ever.

The family myth section was so eye-opening that I read it aloud to my DH. The lists of human rights was eye-opening. This book is densely packed with easily readable, easily understandable and highly useful information about what our rights are, what healthy families do, how it impacts us to have a tearing of the family fabric, and how we can heal regardless if we are able to heal our relationships with our families.

As someone whose children are both now nearly adults, I absolutely cherished the chapter on learning from successful families. I plan to take a lot of the valuable information in this book and weave it into the fabric of the family DH and I have created together. The threads in our FOOs may be troubling and frayed, but we can and are doing better. I felt validated and reassured to see that we have intuitively take many of the steps in this book--including finding joy NOW and creating a second-chance family.

One more trigger warning--for me, the Injustice Collector could be very easily describing me IF one isn't careful. My attachment style leads me to accept WAY too much bad behavior from another person, to hold on until I am so battle-scarred that I can barely function. One strategy I had to develop with time IS TO REMEMBER those awful behaviors, over time, the long-standing patterns. I don't do this to hold onto resentment or hate; I don't do this to keep score or throw bad behavior in someone's face. I do this because otherwise I am far too likely to go back, to forget, to keep being abused.

In my marriage, I don't do this. In my relationship with my children, I don't do this. In my relationships with friends, coworkers and my community, I don't do this. But with our PD parents, I do this. It is the only way I could step away, is to look at the long-term patterns that describe to me their character. So, please don't get triggered if you see echoes of Injustice Collector and get worried that you have the trait of a PD person. You may simply need to hold onto the pattern to give yourself permission to step away, heal, let go of anger and resentment.

Thank you for the recommendation and thoughtful review, Starboard

[Starboard Song]

Please don't get triggered if you see echoes of Injustice Collector and get worried that you have the trait of a PD person. You may simply need to hold onto the pattern to give yourself permission to step away, heal, let go of anger and resentment.

Good point. To me, there is a big difference between remembering and collecting. But it is absolutely true that I get super-angry at my in-laws routinely, despite having spoken to them only once in over 2 years. So yeah, I could easily get confused and think either that I am an Injustice Collector, or that it is a matter of moral equivalence: a pox on all our houses!

Thanks for adding another caveat.