Support4Change Blog

June 16, 2009
By Renee Payan Wong, Webmaster, Support4Change.com

Arlene will be on hiatus from the Support4Change Blog, while working on the Better Tomorrows Program. In the meantime, I will provide you with what I think of as Arlene’s “Greatest Hits.” This article is from the Support4Change website.

How what we “carry” with us impacts our ability to establish and maintain healthy relations.

What does a backpack have to do with healing relationships? Let me begin by using a metaphor to help explain why people get stuck in bad relationships, why they can’t figure out how to improve a bad relationship, or how to get out of one that isn’t healthy for them.

This metaphor is one I use in my latest book, Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life. It goes like this:

All of us are born into a home fashioned from our parents’, or other caregivers’, dreams, traditions, beliefs, education, and experience. The foundation for this home was built by the culture in which our parents grew up and the age in which they lived. Not knowing anything else, we accepted our lives as the way things should be. Even if there was discord in our family, it was home. It was familiar.

It is important to note that no matter what kind of atmosphere there was within the homes where we began our lives that, metaphorically speaking, each room had a window. The windows faced north, south, east, or west. And while corner rooms might provide a view in two directions, our parents, like most people, tended to use some rooms more than others and to like the view in only one or two directions. They encouraged us to like that view of life as well. This doesn’t mean that what our parents were looking at was wrong, it was just limited.

When we went outside, even though our horizons were expanded, we were encouraged to focus on some parts of the world to the exclusion of others. So we were taken to some places and not others. We attended one church but not another. We went to one school rather than another. We played with one group of children and not another. This selective experience of the outside world felt most natural to us. After all, our parents’ beliefs worked for them. Why shouldn’t they work for us?

When we were allowed to leave the house by ourselves, our parents tried to make certain that we would continue to accept their ideas on how we should live. They did this by creating a “container” into which they stuffed all their beliefs, injunctions, instructions, and hopes for us. I think of this container of parents’ dreams and goals as an invisible, highly stretchable “backpack” we carried with us wherever we went as children — and continue to carry today.

The figure at the top of this page is the way my backpack felt when I first began to struggle with an adult son who was estranged from us for several years.

It was through my healing of that relationship, which has taken many years, that I discovered the steps of moving beyond a relationship in which we’re stuck because we can’t get the other person to behave in the way we want them to behave. Using my own experience and that of my clients, in 1994 I wrote my first book, which is titled Letting Go of Our Adult Children: When What We Do Is Never Enough.

Gradually, step by step, I was able to first sort through the heavy bundle I carried wherever I went, and then discard that which no longer fit and gradually eliminate a lot of beliefs and behaviors that didn’t work for me anymore. I kept what was valuable, and now, today, my backpack is little bit more like the fanny pack at the end of the page, or at least more like the one before it.

I still find I carry my perfectionism, which always adds weight, but all-in-all, I feel freer and more are peace. And certainly my heart is much lighter than it had been for many years when I was trying to get my son to change.

The Better Tomorrows Program is an outgrowth of what I’ve learned about the process of repairing and healing relationships, and sometimes needing to let them go. And this metaphor of a backpack illustrates why our past can cause so much trouble for so many people.

First, it helps to understand a little more about how the contents of our backpacks were assembled.

In the backpacks our parents fashioned for us, we could find our parents’ rules for how to treat others, the kind of education we should have, the religion we should follow, the foods that are best for us to eat, the books we should or shouldn’t read, the kind of job that would allow us to reach the potential our parents saw in us, the kind of friends we should have, and the kind of person we should marry. These are the shoulds, ought-tos, and musts that parents want their children to remember.

Then as we ventured farther out into the world, we came into contact with relatives, neighbors, friends, preachers, teachers, pundits, experts, celebrities, and even authors of self-help books who added their opinions to our backpack. This is how you should vote. This is what you should wear. These are the beliefs you should hold. These are the charities you should support. Everyone is only too willing to tell us how to change the way we live if we are unhappy, and how to live even if we are happy with our lives. What is important to note is that accepting, without careful examination, someone else’s opinion of how we should live adds more weight than is necessary in this bundle we bring with us everywhere.

Not only is our backpack filled with the opinions and exhortations of others, of course, but we add to it our own dreams, accomplishments, whatever self-assurance we’ve picked up along the way, values we try to live by, skills, accomplishments, and strengths, all influenced by our temperament. Then too, we wouldn’t want to leave out our failures, resentments, regrets, jealousies, guilt, fears, the memory of traumas and the residue of illness. And we make certain to keep a list of every possession we buy, especially those to which we are attached.

The problem is, with so much accumulated over the years, we’ve come to believe that the contents of this backpack define us. By claiming that what we believe, what we own, what we say, and what we do is our “identity,” we attempt, mostly unconsciously, to guarantee our place in the world, for no two backpacks are the same.

The ego, whose job it is to protect our identity, has bought into the idea that the contents of the backpack determine our identity. Thus the ego makes certain that the pronouns of “me,” “mine,” and “I” are sprinkled liberally throughout our conversations. Consequently, the contents of the backpack are very important to our ego.

But what happens to the ego, and the backpack, when a relationship becomes unsatisfactory? What happens when your relationship with your parents, partner, adult children, sibling, friend, co-worker, or anyone else causes pain and discomfort? How can you get the relationship back on track? How can your ego be encouraged to work for not only your best interests, but for the best interests of the other person as well?

The Better Tomorrows Program shows you how. This self-paced multi-media course is broken down into nine modules. It helps you take off the backpack and examine the contents to explore whether the admonitions and beliefs you’ve been carrying all these years still apply to your life.

Look at the Better Tomorrows Program page to learn how you can participate in this unique and powerful program.

Also, read Welcome to Better Tomorrows for a description of the formation of the program.

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