Scary Close Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

Children learn what’s worth living for and what’s worth dying for by the stories they watch us live. I want to teach our children how to get scary close, and more, how to be brave. I want to teach them that love is worth what it costs.

Love is not a game any of us can win, it’s just a story we can live and enjoy.

I'd rather earn the money than win the lottery because there's no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story.

What else changes a person but the living of a story? And what is a story but the wanting for something difficult and the willingness to work for it?

…perhaps, at times, we accidentally tear a little hole in the fabric of reality so sommething on the other side shines through, exposing the darkness of our routine existence.

Oddly, Hendrix argues, the more a partner exhibits the negative characteristics of our primary caretakers the more passion we will experience in the relationship. At first I found this to be a sad reality but truthfully, in time, I started to see the deception inherent in the primal emotion we often mistake for love.

Hendrix believes when we meet somebody later in life who exhibits some of the negative characteristics of those early foundational personalities, our subconscious recognizes them as the Mommy or Daddy with whom we have unfinished business. Literally, our brains become attached to this random person thinking if we could just fix some of those negative qualities in ourselves, we could have security and never worry about food, shelter, or love again.

Essentially he argues that on a subconscious level we are drawn to the negative characteristics of our primary caretakers. What he means is that when we were children we had parents and older siblings and grandparents and perhaps even teachers with whom we associated our basic needs for survival. In other words, if we didn't please our parents and grandparents, our food, shelter, and love were under threat.

Of course we will stand and make promises to each other at our wedding but even then, even with a spouse, I've come to believe a person's love for you can't grow unless you hold that person loosely.

He said if we took the logs from the fire and separated themm out in the field, they'd go out within an hour. They'd just lie there cold. He said for some reason the logs needed each other to burn, to stay warm. I dont think he meant anything other than to talk about the fire, but looking across the field back toward the house, I realized how beautiful what he and his wife had built was and how hard they'd worked to keep the fire going. I wanted to build a fire like that of my own.

I used to have a tennis coach in college whod remind us, every time we practiced, that if you're coasting you're going downhill. What he meant was unless we're practicing we're getting worse. And I think something like that is true in relationships too. I think We can fall into reactionary patterns in relationships rather than understanding they're things We build and nurture and grow.

"Don, all relationships are teleological." I asked him what the word teleologica! meant. "It means they're going somewhere," Al said. "All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something…”

Frankl went on to say it wasn't pleasure mankind was looking for, that men only sought pleasure when they couldn't find meaning. If a man has no sense of meaning, Frankl argued, he will numb himself with pleasure.

…I'm starting to wonder if that's not the whole point of life, to be thankful for it and to live in such a way others are thankful for theirs as well.

It was a struggle to think about David and compare his life to mine. More people knew my name, but far more people knew him. I wondered. which was better: to have all the stuff we think will make people love us or have love itself? David had love.

It was actually what he called the oscillating family narrative that is the true story about how the family both succeeds and fails and yet stays together regardless.

It turns out Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University, went looking for common themes of healthy families. His wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities noticed something about her students: "The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges". The article went on to explain about their family history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned." In fact, the "How much do you know about your family?" scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children's emotional health and happiness.

"Oh," Mark chuckled. hat wasn't easy. But it was this single decision I made early on: I decided I wouldn't judge my kids. No matter what they told me, I wouldn't judge them. I might have to discipline them, but I wouldn't make them feel like lesser people for their mistakes…”

“You know, Don, there's a difference between apologizing and asking forgiveness," he said. "An apology is a statement, as informal as a press release, but asking forgiveness involves giving power to the person you're seeking forgiveness from. I had to give my kids the power to choose whether they wanted intimacy with me, they whether they wanted to forgive me. That's a terrifying and clarifying moment.”

It’s as though their family was a refuge, place where everybody could be themselves with no fear of being judged.

If you think about it, parents who are open and honest with their kids create an environment in which children are allowed to be human. And, sadly, parents who hide their flaws unknowingly create an environment where kids feel the need to hide. And feeling the need to hide our true selves from the world is rarely healthy.

Sadly, I’ve noticed the opposite is true too. Ive noticed parents who don't admit their faults have children who are troubled and emotionally restless as though they secretly want to be free from their families so they can be themselves

It's as though vulnerability and openness act as the soil that fosters security.

The characteristic is this: kids with parents who are honest about their shortcomings seem to do better in life.