Talking About What Matters - The Wound That Heals

Family comes in all shapes and sizes.  Some family, you're born with; some people become family.  Twelve years ago, I became part of a group of people who joined together to teach Collaborative Practice to other professionals.  We were, and are, an interesting group of people.  These folks are amazing.  They are some of the smartest, deepest thinking people I know.  You should see the amazing trainings these folks create - they take your breath away.  OK, I also had a role in creating one or two trainings, but every group of smart folks needs a worker bee like me.

When we started as a group, we had plenty of growing pains.  It looks us all a while to let down our guards (OK, it took me a while to do that).  We got to know each other gradually, over the course of quarterly meetings over the years and multi-day trainings where we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together.  We became friends and then a family of sorts.  Unfortunately, as wonderful and supportive family can be, it can also be a little bit dysfunctional.

Here's the deal with family.  Over time, the members stop putting the effort into the relationship like they did in the early days. The members forget to tell each other how they feel.  They forget to tell them how much they appreciate them.  They stop talking about the things that matter.  They say thoughtless things that hurt.  The wounded party doesn't feel they can say how they feel and why.  What happens next is that everyone develops their own internal dialogue about the relationship in which they make assumptions about everyone's motivations.  Those assumptions are almost always wrong, but because no one is talking about what matters, the wound festers. Sometimes, that wound is fatal to the relationship when it isn't debrided, cleaned and exposed to the air.

You would think that when a relationship is important enough, people would do anything to repair it. If you ask most people, that's what they would tell you. The problem is that debriding a wound is uncomfortable, painful even.  It also makes them vulnerable.  People don't love pain and they avoid vulnerability at almost all costs.  They especially don't love experiencing it willingly.  So, they avoid it, even if it means a relationship dies.  We see it all the time in the Trenches.  We've had a little bit of that in our training group.  Even though we're collaborative professionals, we're still people, and sometimes we forget to talk about the things that matter too, and recently we discovered that there were things we should have talked about and feelings we should have acknowledged, but didn't.

Once a family gets to that point, they need help to talk about the things that matter.  Most of the time, when they come into the Trenches, they don't get that help.  Instead, the professionals involved erect more walls, create more distance and reopen old wounds.  The family relationship gets worse and not better.  Of course, the family still has to interact, so that's not helpful.  Or perhaps, they decide to no longer interact, ending the relationship, and that's not helpful either.  What if, when a family came into the Trenches, all of the professionals were committed to helping them communicate, to say what needs to be said, and to find a way through the hurt, misunderstandings and move forward with a better relationship into the future?  What if those professionals guided them to reconnect with their common purpose and goals, instead of focusing on the things that drove them apart?  The family would stay together, probably not in the same house, but they would be able to be there to support each other as they move on their separate paths.  That's Collaborative Practice.  So much better than drawing battle lines and staying in armed camps.  It's what our training group is doing with each other because our relationship matters.  Here in the Trenches.