The Bullshit Detector….Just another reason family is so damned hard.

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you get that I think it all comes down to attachment. When you love someone, sleep with them, touch them, break bread with them, they become family. And no one makes you crazy like family does.

Kids make you crazy. Partners make you crazy. And no matter how grown you think you are, your siblings and your parents can still jerk your chain. Because they matter, matter not like a nice idea but matter like oxygen matters.

We want to feel secure and heard and honored and seen and our tolerance for less is limited. If we are raised beautifully by really healthy people without drama…like maybe in Mr Roger’s Neighborhood, we get to be secure adults who trust and tolerate and are authentic and vulnerable.

Some of us grew up in messy human families whose neighborhoods resemble South Park, where vulnerable and authentic is dangerous. So we cover up and fake it and hide stuff and say we’re fine and don’t mention things that bug us and lie about who we are.  And then it pisses us off when the people we love see right through us.

You can’t hide stuff from kids. They know everything. They know we make mistakes. They know we are unhappy or scared or frustrated. They get that there is tension between us and that we have no idea what we’re doing.

Our partners know us. They know when things are just a bit off. “What’s the matter?…Nothing, I’m fine” is how Minnesota’s start most fights. We are the masters of stoic denial. But we just can’t figure out how to fool the people who love us the most.

The research says that people who love us can see our emotions on our face and hear it in our voices even before we have a chance to experience (and often squelch) the feelings ourselves.

This is how that works- you get frustrated with your kids and want to scream, then we suck our teeth and say “darling please don’t pull the cat’s tail”. Toddlers burst into tears, big kids say “stop yelling at me”…. We get no credit for not yelling at them…because they know…they saw it.

With our partners we wrap our frustration and insecurities in polite distance and then say “Nothings wrong, I’m just tired.”
I’m sorry that most of us were raised in South Park instead of Mr Roger’s Neighborhood and I believe that most of us are raising kids who will be safe to have feelings and share concerns and be genuine. In the meantime, we have to unlearn some stuff. We have to stop lying. We have to be willing to dance in the messiness of feelings and conflict. We have to remember that deep down we know that we are safe and that our kids and our partners are our best emotional coaches…if we just let them be.