Healing From Family Rifts : Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off From a Family Member - Softcover

Sichel, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071412425 ISBN 13: 9780071412421

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2004

Synopsis

Ten steps to surviving a family rift, finding peace, and moving on

A family rift is one of the most traumatic experiences a person can face. It can have a profound effect on virtually every aspect of life, causing depression, relationship problems, and even physical illness. Healing From Family Rifts offers hope to those coping with a split in their families. Family therapist Mark Sichel addresses the pain and shame connected with family rifts and offers a way through the crisis and on toward healing and fulfillment. Uniquely, Sichel does not assume that every rift will or even should be mended. Instead, he offers ways to recover from any outcome, including:

• A 10-step process to come to terms with the family dynamics that led to the split
• Methods to find peace and personal reconciliation
• Skills that help to build a second family of people whose values are in line with one's own
• Techniques to fight feelings of guilt when faced with a family rift
• Includes inspiring and instructive stories drawn from the author's patients that help readers put their own situations in perspective.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Sichel (New York, NY) is a therapist and licensed clinical social worker who has counseled hundreds of clients who have suffered from family rifts. He is the founder and editor of the award-winning mental health website Psybersquare.com.

From the Back Cover

<p><b>Make peace with yourself and reclaim your life with Mark Sichel's powerful ten-step healing program</b></p><p>"<u>That's it. I've had it. I never want to see or hear from you again</u>." Those words may have caused great anguish, or great relief, at the moment they were spoken--depending on whether you were the giver or the receiver of the powerful punch. But now you're left with the nagging despair of losing a family member. The pain can be overwhelming, but there is a way out. Through the help of <u>Healing from Family Rifts</u>,<i> </i>you can find peace again and recover from the<i> </i>isolation of family exile.</p><p>Author and licensed clinical social worker Mark Sichel knows what it's like to suffer a family exile: his parents cut off all communication with him years ago. Now he's applying the steps used during his own recovery to help you overcome the heartbreak of your family rift. Through his powerful and proven ten-step program, along with the stories of other embattled survivors of family wars, you will achieve real, permanent, inner reconciliation, regardless of the cause of the rift--whether divorce, marriage outside your race or religion, emotional abuse, objections to sexual orientation, addictions, or any other reason.</p><p>From dealing with the shock of the rift to building your second-chance family, from recognizing the signs of acute stress disorder to learning from successful families, Mark Sichel's ten steps to healing will help you achieve serenity and contentment by learning how to make peace with yourself first<i>.</i></p><p><b>Review from <i>Library Journal</i></b></p><p>[This] self-help manual for adults seeking to better their family relationships emphasizes that readers can change only themselves and their own reactions-not the actions of others. A therapist and licensed clinical social worker, Sichel concentrates on relationships where one family member refuses contact with another, not limiting his discussion to parent-child rifts. Among other strategies, his ten steps lead readers to deal with their own trauma, learn to love themselves, understand family myths and roles, build supportive relationships with others (their "second-chance family"), and try to heal the break if possible. Drawing on stories from Sichel's patients and from personal experience (his father broke with him twice), this book is sure to be read eagerly by those in difficult family situations. -Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.</p> <p><b>Review from <i>The Chicago Tribune</i></b></p><p>"The empathetic Sichel, a clinical social worker, stresses that those cut off have the right to be happy and at peace....Perhaps what Sichel does best is encourage readers to make meaning out of life's experiences, whatever comes our way."</p><p><b>Mark Sichel </b>is a licensed clinical social worker who counsels individuals, couples, and families in New York City. He is the founder and editor of the award-winning website, www.psybersquare.com, has counseled hundreds of clients who have suffered family cutoffs, and has made it through his own family rift as well.</p>

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Healing from Family Rifts

Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off from a Family Member

By Mark Sichel

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 Mark Sichel
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-141242-1

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Acknowledge and Deal with the Shock
2 Start to Live, Laugh, and Be Happy Now: Taking Back Your Life
3 Discover Your Family Roles
4 Understand Your Family Myths
5 Learn from Successful Families
6 Let Go of Resentment
7 Make the First Move: Learn and Employ Active Measures to Reconcile with 
Your Family
8 Build Your Second-Chance Family
9 Cultivate Gratitude and Emotional Generosity
10 Make Meaning out of Your Experience
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Acknowledge and Deal with the Shock

Whether you've been cut off by your family, or you've cut off a family memberbecause of circumstances you find intolerable, you invariably undergo atraumatic shock. Certainly my father's wholesale rejection of me shook me to mycore—a trauma I've since learned had a number of stages I had first toacknowledge, and then to navigate. How I've managed to weather and overcome theworst of this trauma—and how my patients have similarly learned to prevailover what is often an initial indescribable agony of a family rift—offerthe substance of this first chapter, which describes the first step in healing.

A good deal of the shock for me came from the unnerving realization that myusual reliable approach to dealing with crisis—thinking my way through it,and reaching a sense of how to cope with it—just wasn't working here. Ideveloped symptoms of dysfunction that were uncharacteristic of me—I feltunanchored, cheated, disgusted, full of shame, self-doubt, sadness, guilt, andfear—toxic emotions that engendered a terrible sense of confusion andpowerlessness. Soon I was able to see that most of these symptoms signaled acutestress disorder, a diagnosis that ultimately suggested ways I could begin toheal.

Fortunately, one certainty born of my clinical experience and the lessons ofhaving dealt with other difficult situations in my life hadn't deserted me. Iknew that the initial level of toxic intensity and functional impairment I feltwould eventually pass. It always does when you do the right things for yourself.

Understanding the Trauma Is of Human Design

The first "right thing" was simply this: I needed to remind myself not totrivialize or attempt to minimize the effects of what I was goingthrough—I had instead to give it its full due. Family estrangement on somelevel seemed "logically" to be less catastrophic than some of the terriblethings going on in the world such as terrorist attacks, violent crime, naturaldisasters such as fire or earthquakes, or the actual physical death of a lovedone. However, it had a magnitude for me that, at least for the moment, farexceeded these catastrophes. I needed to accept this—and to be careful notto add to an already festering sense of shame and guilt (flip sides of my rageand hurt) that I was somehow "over-reacting"—that "it could be worse."Hypothetically, of course, there's always something that "could be worse," butthe impact of my father severing contact with me had, especially in the freshwake of the cutoff, subjected me to the worst emotional trauma I could rememberever undergoing. I couldn't underestimate the impact of this trauma—orchastise myself for overreacting. This wasn't the time to judge myfeelings—to attempt artificially to gloss over the pain. This wasn't thetime to blame myself for the sudden incapacities the trauma caused in my life.This was the time to let myself feel it, all of it—and acknowledge it.

Part of acknowledging it meant understanding that the trauma was so greatbecause it had been caused by human beings—it hadn't come from chance, oran act of God—it had come through human choice. All traumas are moremagnified and psychologically upsetting when human beings rather than naturecause them. Losing your home to a fire will certainly be traumatic, but losingit because arsonists caused the fire will almost always make the effects of theshock more severe. Similarly, the trauma of a family member physically dyingusually becomes less painful with time—it falls under the heading of anatural catastrophe from which the human psyche ultimately learns to heal.However, on two decades of evidence of the scores of my patients who've facedboth kinds of trauma, the psychological "death" of a family cutoff clearly tendsto remain torturous—and very much more emotionally damaging. Obviouslyfamily cutoffs are not the only devastating traumas we commonly face. Divorce,for example, can be every bit as disruptive. But unlike most family cutoffs,divorce has at least some social acceptance: it is talked about much morereadily than other cutoffs in the family tend to be.

This suggests what compounds the problem: the terrible secrecy that usuallyattends family cutoffs—and the related fact that there is very littleformal help offered to people who've undergone them. Many family members feelself-imposed pressure to go on as if their lives were still normal; thus,avenues for healing and recovery become even more elusive. After all, thistrauma isn't only of human design—it's the design of members of your ownfamily: the very people you thought loved you most in the world. That isn'tsomething you're likely to broadcast—or even tell most of your bestfriends in private.

However, you need to talk right now, and to recognize that the task of healingfrom your family rift will take a much greater effort than you probably haveever previously brought to emotional distress in your life. With the rightattitude of self-compassion, and by employing tactics you will learn in thisbook, it is fortunately an effort immeasurably worth taking.

You Don't Have to Fix or Resolve Anything Today

It's normal to want closure after something as terrible as a familyrift—indeed, our impulse may be to do anything possible to make the paingo away, whether it involves abject and inappropriate apologies (amounting togroveling to keep the peace) or resorting to drugs or alcohol to help you escapethe pain. However, a necessary corollary to understanding that you're dealingwith trauma of a completely different order than you have probably faced beforeis understanding that this healing is going to take time. There are no quickfixes here: there couldn't be, given our natural human aversion to ambiguity anduncertainty coupled with what are generally the lifelong roots of dysfunctionthat led to your family rift in the first place. In short, now's the time togive yourself permission to go slow. You don't have to fix or resolve anythingtoday.

This means having compassion for yourself—and especially for the impetusthat makes you crave quick closure: the inability to tolerate mixed feelings oflove, hate, longing, rage, sadness, and vengeance. A family cutoff is initiallya phenomenally confusing time for all concerned; this degree of uncertainty isnot easy for anyone. However, I can tell you from years of practicingpsychotherapy that, as uncomfortable as it is, confusion is actually necessaryfor growth. It's out of the flux of life that we're often able to question oldself-limiting assumptions and begin the journey to changing our attitudes andbehavior—to begin, in other words, to heal, even from something asdevastating as a family rift.

When It Feels like You've Been Buried Alive

"Buried alive" isn't invariably the phrase used by people who undergo the traumaof a family cutoff—sometimes it's more along the lines of "It's like somemajor part of me has gone dead," or "I feel shattered by this—like I don'tknow what's real anymore." But "buried alive" is a good way of summing up thefeeling of dissociation you often feel after the family rift. Being cut off fromthe family so often devolves into feeling cut off from something central inyourself.

Lori offers a typical example. She came into therapy initially to get over theeffects of a devastating divorce. Married for ten years, Lori finally summonedup the courage to walk away from her husband when his abuse—which hadcrossed the line from verbal to physical—became dangerous to her and theirsix-year-old son Ryan. Over some months, she had managed to build her strengthand confidence back to the point where she could begin to understand why she hadput up with her violent husband's treatment. As with many battered spouses, shehad put up with similar treatment as a child from her father, and realized shewas caught in a repetition of seeking out a man whose unpredictably fierytemperament mirrored her father's. "It's the old story," she said. "It was theonly kind of attention from a man I knew, so I obviously sought it out again."She had also begun to develop patience with herself about how long it would taketo change course and heal more completely from the effects of violence in herfamily life.

She sent her son to a child psychiatrist for treatment as well—a therapistrecommended to her by her younger sister Arlene, to whom she felt indebted forthis show of concern and support, especially since growing up they had neverbeen close. "Arlene had been the favorite—my father never punished her theway he punished me. And yet somehow she'd always been jealous ofme—especially because she wanted to get married and have kids, and it justhadn't worked out for her. I always felt after Ryan was born that this envy justincreased—she wanted a 'Ryan' too. So her helping me right now withgetting Ryan help after the divorce gave me hope that maybe she'd gotten overher feelings of resentment."

Then came a new, and in many ways far more terrible, shock. Her sister andmother kidnapped Ryan and brought him to live with her ex-husband after learningthat Ryan's psychiatrist had reported her to the Bureau of Children's ProtectiveServices, charging that Lori was clinically depressed, abusing drugs, and unableto be a fit mother.

"I thought going through a divorce was hard, but now I've really been brought tomy knees by what my sister and mother did to me. It turned out the support Ithought I was getting from Arlene was anything but. It was a setup—she wasdetermined to get my son away from me, as some crazy act of vengeance. I justcan't understand the charges—what could they have been thinking? They knewI had gone on an antidepressant as part of therapy, but I was hardly a drugaddict. All I can think is that whatever distress signals Ryan was sending outto the psychiatrist must somehow have been embellished and twisted by Arlene,who also even convinced my mother that I was 'unfit.'"

Almost as bad as losing Ryan was the feeling that her family literally wantedLori dead. "They couldn't have hurt me more if they'd just aimed a gun at myheart and pulled the trigger. It's like whatever world of family safety Ithought I was in shattered." Lori reported a dream she'd had shortly after thisdebacle that patently arose from these feelings of being gunned down. "I dreamedthat I was being shot, executioner style. I was on my knees, facing away fromthe executioner. I heard the gun explode—but instead of bullets shootinginto me, I was hit by a siege of beads, the kind used for costume jewelry."Lori's mother owned a bead, sequin, and fashion accessory company in the garmentdistrict of New York. "The beads stung me," Lori said, "but they didn't kill me.I remember in the dream feeling terribly upset—but knowing somehow I wouldbe okay. I woke up, however, terror-struck. I got no sleep for the rest of thenight. I'm still exhausted, scared, confused, angry. Even though I know mymother's 'beads' won't kill me, the fact that she and Arlene have gone throughthe motions of executing me is just intolerable. In a way, I feel like I wasshot out of a gun, and landed somewhere, alone, terribly remote from anything Ithought I knew."

Acute Stress Disorder

Lori's story, while different in specifics, resonates strongly with othervictims of family rifts I've worked with, and with my own experience. I too feltthat my family war would kill me, and it took some work to know I'd survive andbe fine. Here's the flag of reassurance—one that Lori's dream had alsoexplicitly offered her (she was shot by beads, not bullets: hurt but notkilled): You are not having a life-threatening emergency, as you might feel. Youare more than likely suffering from acute stress disorder. I had it, Lori hadit, and you probably have or have had it.

Remember that, like the people you will read about in this book, you too willsurvive and, at the end of working on these steps, find ways to heal fromwhatever blows the family rift has caused you. The stakes often feel like lifeor death, but they aren't. If you know you're doing everything in your power tomend the situation, it can't kill you. In fact, grappling with the trauma canbreathe new hope and strength into your life in many unsuspected ways.

"At Least I'm Not Going Crazy ..."

Jason's experience is an interesting case-in-point: learning not only that wecan survive the terrible toxicity of a family cutoff, but that in the very seedsof what we often feel has nearly destroyed our hearts and senses of self areclues about the real situation we face (as opposed to the killing nightmare itmay at first seem to us)—clues even about how to heal from it.

However, as Jason would be the first to tell you, this ability to feel hope inthe midst of despair can be a long time coming. The oldest of three sons, Jasonhad always been the light of his parents' life—an accomplished athlete,magna cum laude graduate of an Ivy League school, and now a successfulcopywriter at a major advertising agency. His two younger brothers hadfloundered by comparison: one struggled with intermittent drug problems, theother with chronic depression. "I knew my poor brothers constantly felt comparedto me—a sort of 'why can't you be more like Jason?' thing that my parentsconstantly subjected them to. It made me feel really uncomfortable. Especiallysince I wasn't quite the person my parents believed I was."

Unbeknownst to his parents, Jason is gay. And now, in his late thirties, he wastired of hiding it. "I'd felt so much family pressure to be the Perfect Childthat I didn't dare let my parents know about my sexuality. I guess I didn'trealize how much I had invested in keeping up appearances with them. They'reboth super-conservative and I knew how they would likely feel about finding outone of their sons was gay. But it was finally taking way too much of a toll onme. So when I met my partner Oliver, and the relationship deepened to the pointthat we knew we wanted to get as close to married as society would allow us, Ifinally made the decision to 'fess up to my family."

Jason says he realizes his way of doing this probably wasn't the wisest coursehe could have taken, but as he also says, "It felt like diving into a pool. Youeither dive or you don't. I guess I wanted to be absolutely clear—and givethem the news without mincing words. So, without warning, I sent my parents aninvitation to the commitment ceremony Oliver and I planned—in other words,I invited them to their firstborn son's gay wedding."

Jason will always remember the phone call he received in response. "My father'svoice was trembling with rage and hurt. 'As far as your mother and I areconcerned,' he said in the scariest voice I'd ever heard him use, 'we do nothave three sons. We have two. Unless you get help to become a normal man, wewill have nothing to do with you.'" Jason visibly pales as he recounts this."Then my mother got on the line. I couldn't believe the abuse she hurled atme—in a way it was much worse even than my father's abrupt dismissal.Homosexuality was reprehensible, a sin against God—the whole conservativeBible Belt nine yards. She said I was doomed to hell unless I sought help."

Jason was a mess for weeks after this. "Thank God I had Oliver and a family ofclose friends to help get me through that time. Oliver especially was amazing.It was he who really pushed me to seek therapy—he could feel how damaged Ifelt inside, and he knew it was an emotional emergency. Sort of like I neededtriage that he knew even his great love for me wasn't equipped to provide. Hesaid, 'It's like they cut off one of your arms. All I could think of was, youneeded to go to a psychological ER. I couldn't stand to watch you bleed likethat.'" Hence, Oliver's suggestion that Jason come to me. But Jason did not cometo me primarily for help with rage and hurt. It was his sudden inability to feelanything at all.

"I feel like I'm dead," Jason said. "I wish I could cry or scream or something.But actually right now I don't know what I feel. It's like I'm wrapped up like amummy against my feelings—like there's some huge open wound that goes sodeep and is so far gone with nerve damage that the patient doesn't feel anypain. I've tried to break through this numbness with my old resolve to 'act.'After I couldn't sleep last night, I decided—ridiculously—to get upearly this morning and go running, thinking that it would clear my head.

"I could see, distantly, it was a beautiful morning, but I couldn't feel it. AsI ran—exhausted, sleepless—all I could do was replay that phone callin my head, going over every word of it, wondering what I might have saiddifferently, scouring their invective for some clue about what had happened andwhy they had withdrawn their love for me so violently. I thought these thingsrather than felt them. Like some terrible compulsion, I went over and over andover it, and got nowhere. I swung wildly from thinking they were monsters tothinking I was a monster. Then I tried to make contact with my feelings forOliver—but even that seemed so remote now. In the middle of the compulsivebuzz in my head, I just couldn't feel anything."

Symptoms of Acute Stress Disorder

The rat-in-a-cage emotional rut that Jason describes is a strikingly commonreaction to the violence of a family cutoff, as is Jason's inability to feel therage and hurt and terror he distantly knows is somewhere in him. "This buzz ofwords in my head, but no real feeling attached to them—it's like hell," hesaid. Exhausted from his run and sleepless night, Jason then pushed himselfthrough a day at work. "The buzz just wouldn't let up. I tried to make how myparents had treated me square with who I thought—I guess hoped—theyreally were. That disjunction permeates everything in my life now—it'slike I've lost trust in anyone who says they love me. Even sometimes Oliver ...It's like there's suddenly this whole new awful negative identity that hasblocked everything in me I used to be so proud and happy about. When I tried toconcentrate on work, it was all a blur. It's as if I had been hacked to pieces,which had been scattered all around me, and I couldn't imagine how to bring themall back, how to be whole again."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Healing from Family Rifts by Mark Sichel. Copyright © 2004 by Mark Sichel. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0071412425
• ISBN 13: 9780071412421
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272