Codes Of Love: How to Rethink Your Family and Remake Your Life - Hardcover

Mark Bryan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671036629 ISBN 13: 9780671036621

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1999

Synopsis

A guide to reinterpreting the signals and expressions within families shows readers how to find the hidden love and affection behind the seemingly negative and judgmental words of family members. 100,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Bryan is a Harvard-trained educator with a specialty in human development and psychology. He is the cofounder, with Julia Cameron, of the original Artist's Way Workshops, a creativity course that has helped more than a million people more effectively realize their potential. In addition to being the author of The Prodigal Father: Reuniting Fathers and Their Children (1997), he is lead author of The Artist's Way at Work (1998), a book that translates the theories and practices of The Artist's Way into corporate America. One of five "Change Your Life" experts who appeared regularly in 1999 on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bryan is currently director of the Father Project in Los Angeles, California, a private foundation that works to bridge the gap between fathers, mothers, and children of separated families. A member of Al Gore's National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families and a former member of the Massachusetts Governor's task force on father absence, Bryan has helped forge new family legislation in several states.

Reviews

Aiming at John Bradshaw's audience of adults seeking to reconcile relationships with their original families, Bryan's self-help program draws on sophisticated psychological and spiritual concepts and the work of such thinkers as Murray Bowen and James Hillman. Bryan (The Prodigal Father; coauthor of The Artist's Way at Work) believes that individuals can enhance present relationships and self-understanding by viewing family dynamics from a mature perspective, which he calls "changing the past." He teaches that understanding and forgiveness lie in reframing difficult experiences (short of real abuse) as sources of growth and strength. Offering numerous exercises to spur the process, he urges readers to map their family's "story line," to examine "codes" of communication and behavior and to fathom the motivations of other family members. (His useful checklist for going home for the holidays is bound to attract media attention.) Personal stories enliven the text, but none are as affecting as that of the author's own estrangement from his rural West Virginia family. Recalling a time in his 20s when he was desperate for money and his father refused to help, Bryan reframes the experience as a character-building lesson about resourcefulness and self-reliance. His approach is intelligent and compassionate, although his seriousness and the intensive process he espouses may overwhelm the general self-help reader. Agent, David Vigliano.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book is not another empty self-help book but a workbook for studious, quiet thought and analysis. Bryan (The Prodigal Father) draws on his personal struggles in his efforts to create a self-guided program of reflections for the reader. The director of the Father Project in Los Angeles and the product of a troubled family, Bryan offers a lot of insight into family conflict. "All those years I had been estranged," he muses, "my father and I had been speaking different languages but trying to say the same thing." He suggests four basic steps to help you see your way home: "Remember, Reflect, Re-frame, and Reconnect." Although these ideas have been espoused countless times in self-help literature, Bryan's thoughtful exercises and writing put a new spin on reframing relationships. Trying to answer the in-depth questions in the introduction alone could take a weekend of solitary reflection. For large public, academic, and specialized collections.
---Susan E. Burdick, MLS, Reading, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

In 1983 I had just begun building my life back and was living in the attic of a friend's house in Chicago, when I decided I had better go home for Christmas. Although I said "better" in tones of duty and dread, it is clear to me now that I was the one who wanted to be better for going home. I hadn't been back for the holidays in more than seven years and in that time my parents had split up. My sister, Paula, who now had four kids, and my mother were living in trailers on my grandma Minnie's property. My brothers, Jon and Jimmy, had ended up back in West Virginia, Jon working in the coal mines and Jimmy in high school. My father was living on the other side of the mountain, managing the local hospital. As I packed for the eight-hour trip home, I could picture Minnie's house just as I had seen it so many Christmases before, shabby but solid against the glistening snow and bare trees, warm yellow light glowing from the windows Uncle Bill had installed a few years back.

My feeling of home stopped at the front door of Minnie's house, because once I was inside, my mind went blank. Back then I had virtually no memories of childhood, only flash floods of emotions without the scenes that generated them. My brother Jon -- who, like my other brother and sister, says he has few childhood memories -- describes going home as "being in the box." Once you're in the box, everything goes dark.

This darkened lens on the family camera includes what I call our culture of suspicion. When family suspicion gets habitual, it can harden into what psychologists call a schema or gestalt: suspicion forms a lens through which we view all our family's actions, past and present. Peering through a suspicious lens, we may keep discovering aggressive and threatening acts, even plots and skul-duggery in seemingly ordinary gestures. It's a genre of personal historiography I call family noir.

The twentieth century, as well as psychotherapy in general, has taken its philosophical lead from Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, not three of the happiest campers in the woods, I sometimes joke. Let's face it, the Freudian picture of family leaves a lot to be desired. Psychology's emphasis on the causality of adult symptoms from childhood experiences has repeatedly had to be modified as the theory has proven limited. This belief that the cause of adult problems is born in childhood parenting has had all of us snooping into the past with a magnifying glass looking for any evidence of wrongdoing by those closest to us.

When revolutionary psychologist James Hillman says that psychology's emphasis on causality disrupts our connection to "the great chain of generations," he is referring to the links to the positive and deeply symbolic aspects of our shared human past. The point here is that too many of us are looking at the world through this filter of suspicion and searching for our victimhood under every childhood bed. I had this same filter as I approached my childhood home.

How would Minnie look? How had the years treated my mom, my siblings? What did their kids look like? Would Minnie remember to make my favorite fudge just as she had all the Christmases before I lost contact with my family? What gap would there be with my father gone? I could see the house, but I couldn't picture the people in it any more than I could imagine myself there. My last memory of that house had been the day many years before when my grandfather Arnie told me that he didn't have a job for me there, that I wasn't welcome: "We don't hire your kind here." My kind were the longhaired hippies of the sixties.

Still I better go home, better bring my better self home, the self I had been constructing since I had my moment of grace and woke up. I'd gotten a job as a clerk at the Chicago Board of Trade and remade my wardrobe accordingly. I'd bought a black cashmere coat at a thrift store for eight dollars, which I was always careful to toss just so on the back of a chair so that the one-hundred-percent-cashmere label caught your eye. At the same thrift store I'd uncovered a cache of a rich man's dress shirts with monogrammed cuffs. On my way into work on the El, I adjusted the sleeves of my one-hundred-percent-cashmere facade so someone else's initials peeked over the top. I might be sleeping in a frigid attic on a mattress on the floor straight out of some Appalachian nightmare, but I was determined to disguise my poverty. I was destined for better things. The dream lived on. This was the self I was driving home for Christmas in a rented Lincoln Town Car with a trunk stuffed full of presents I couldn't afford.

I sped through the Midwest in high style with an occasional glance at my sacred garment on the seat next to me. But as I turned off the interstate onto the state road and began my climb up the mountains, my thoughts turned dark. What were they saying about me right now as the women stood in the kitchen preparing Christmas dinner? I bet none of them believed I'd really changed my ways.

The hopelessness of all of it hit me as I passed the increasingly more spindly shacks at the side of the road, the poverty here so deep it practically ran through the veins of coal under the hillside.

Part of what had made me want to come home was my nostalgia for my West Virginia relatives: images of hunting with the other kids for crawdads in the river, shooting BB guns, and running after a wild boar. if I could be that child again -- capture just a moment of that playfulness and innocence -- maybe I could reclaim my optimism.

Those memories escaped as I climbed the mountain back to Minnie's, noting the abandoned cars hard by the rusting doublewide trailers that dotted the hillsides and the tumble-down general stores that hadn't seen a coat of paint in twenty years. My heart was pounding high in my throat. I hoped they weren't all still expecting me to save them from this, as if they ever had.

The first sight of Minnie's was jarring. Everything the same, everything different. The state had replaced the swinging wooden bridge over the ravine with a sturdy concrete and metal one that forever changed the feel of the place. The good part was I could pull the Lincoln right up to the front of Minnie's for my entrance. As I donned my coat and went to the trunk to gather some presents, my family poured out of the front door to welcome me. I released a huge sigh from my spirit as my mother and I embraced and my brothers' and sister's hands touched me on my back and shoulders as they exclaimed welcomes. That same touch I craved shrunk my soul as I anticipated all that might happen after this loving moment of reunion. I looked over my mother's shoulder at the Lincoln for reassurance. It was mud-splattered and as dreary to me now as the other battered old beaters in the front yard.

POISONOUS SUSPICION

Okay, let's stop the movie right here. Of course, my elaborate preparations for my return home couldn't have made for weaker armor. I was edgy, wary, and hyperalert to any sign my family wasn't fooled by the grand trappings. I suspected they could already see I was an impostor. I suspected they had parts of their own lives they were hiding from me. On top of all that, I suspected that everyone secretly dreaded my return. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas.

To be wary and mistrustful in a new situation is part of our survival instinct. In more intimate settings suspicion becomes a hunting instinct. Suspicious people are sure to find what they are looking for. If you suspect that your lover is cheating on you, a stray thread or a discarded phone number suddenly becomes a world of hurt. The suspicious person is way past observable doubt, focused only on proving the case: total inference without any evidence.

I think not enough has been written about the poisonous effect of suspicion in the family, mainly because it is mislabeled as guil

Edition details

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671036629
• ISBN 13: 9780671036621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 291