Our family members are complex combos of positivity and negativity

 Family relationships are complicated because people are complicated — they aren’t black and white. Nor are they gray. Rather they are a rainbow of colors a combination of shades and subtle complexities.

Take you and me for example: we have our special strengths our unresolved issues our fears and our weak points; we have our love our anger our joy and our bad moods; we have our enormous capacity for change and our stubborn rigidity. And that’s just the beginning. It’s amazing that anyone can live with us and equally amazing that we can live with them.

Slicing Reality

Children can never be sure which parent will greet them in the morning. Will it be the cool and calm Mom or the sleep-deprived Wicked Witch of the West? What about Dad? One day he’s warm and loving and the next he’s barking at everyone. How can kids make sense of the discrepancies?

They have some tricks to help them process. Kids can compartmentalize engage in black-and-white thinking and even dissociate. All of these terms represent different ways of organizing reality so that it is easier to deal with. A child who sees one parent as the disciplinarian and the other as the nurturer eventually ignores the attempts of the nurturer to discipline and discounts the attempts of the disciplinarian to show warmth. The child wants everyone to stay in character. The youngster can form images of a “good parent” and a “bad parent” — a strategy that is much easier on the brain than having to work with ambivalent confusing and overwhelming emotional experiences. A child can virtually “not see” certain aspects of a parent in order not to have to deal with those aspects.

Tunnel Vision

The coping strategies of childhood work well for children but they tend to be counterproductive when employed in adulthood. Adults who fail to see the whole picture lack the information they need in order to be effective problem-solvers. For instance once a person decides that his or her spouse is “bad” he or she may stop working on the relationship.

Shifra for instance believes that her husband Daniel is emotionally abusive because he’s often unpleasant in his dealings with her. Having thus diagnosed him Shifra takes the victim position: he’s a bad man and she must spend all her energy defending herself against him. The problem with this position is that the simple black-white assessment cannot possibly capture the complexity of the human being that is Shifra’s spouse.

Let’s assume that Daniel has some personality and/or behavioral issues that require serious improvement. Even so it is far more likely statistically speaking that he is in the category of “average man” than in the category of “evil.” This means that he also has plenty of good points none of which can be nurtured by Shifra because she is not looking for them not finding them and not seeing them. Indeed Daniel’s good points are wiped out by his glaring faults.

Moreover Shifra’s brain like everyone else’s suffers from a strong negativity bias — that is a strong tendency to see problems. This human habit reduces not only our perception and understanding but also our gratitude appreciation and joy. The negativity bias makes it hard for Shifra to acquire and maintain the positive energy she needs in order to strengthen her marital relationship.

The Good with the Bad

In life we have to accept the bad with the good. But even more important we have to learn to accept the good with the bad! We have to look for the good particularly when the bad seems to be blocking out all the light. When we find it we have to focus our attention on it and nurture it allowing it to expand. Then we can draw on its energy in order to accomplish our life’s goals including improving our most important relationships.

For instance suppose Shifra rejects her own limited caricature of her husband expanding her consciousness to include an awareness of his positive traits along with her understanding of his deficits. Seeing him in a more accurate fuller way now restores her hope. She can nurture his strong points initiating a positive cycle within the marriage. That positivity can slowly step by step take the couple on a journey toward peace and wholeness.

Being open to the wholeness of one’s spouse fosters the wholeness of marriage itself.