Friday, October 2, 2015

My Kid is My Therapist

Hello my lovelies...and loveliers? Not sure how to make that sound more masculine, but all the same, hello again! I hope you've all been having a fabulous week! My week has been full of school, work, and laying in my bed every morning saying to myself, "If I don't go today, how much will it effect my grade?" Don't worry, I haven't skipped...yet. ;)

Anyway, so this week in my family relations class, we were talking a little bit about roles people have in their families, unspoken rules in the home, and patterns because we're talking about family systems theory and how the things we do affect our relatives down the line.

So first I think I'll start with roles. I'm not an expert on marriage by any means simply because I am not yet married, so please don't shoot me down. :) In class we talked about how family members often play a certain role and it got me thinking, what was my role growing up? Then I started thinking about the career I am aiming towards which is a family lawyer. In my mind, being a lawyer is basically it's like being the mediator, going in between the judge and the client, or simply just between clients. Whatever the situation calls for, I'm basically there to make sure nobody does anything stupid. And I was thinking, hey, I've basically been doing that my whole life. My siblings liked to use me as the person who went and asked mom a question or if we could do something because I was usually the one who was on mom's good side and so if I asked, she would usually say yes. I was also the person who would go to my siblings and kind of talk to them on a more personal level when they would get mad because otherwise they would probably do something dumb to get themselves grounded. Also I was the person my mom would go to if she wanted to talk about something, not like she didn't talk to my dad a lot, but I guess I was just "on her side" a lot of the time. I think this is fine in some instances, but I can see how it can be damaging because when I was home this past August, one of my dear siblings kindly informed me that I was one of the "feds" (this is a term meaning I am part of "the man" or the people in charge, something like that). Personally, I'm okay with this because I believe that if my siblings tell me something kind of concerning, I should inform my parent because I'm not really the person who should be helping my siblings, it should be my parents.

Nonetheless, it was still kind of awkward to be called a fed because it's like there was a divide in our family. I think a lot of the time, families can feel divided and there are alliances formed in order to back each other up. This can be damaging for a family because we're supposed to be able to talk to each other and be united, not tearing each other down (by the way, I'm quoting my mom here so mom if you're reading, hi, and I listened to you so don't worry). Still, I don't think I'm completely a fed, there are times when I'm just a sibling so I would count myself as a double agent. And what I said before about parents talking to children about issues, I think this is fine if the child is old enough to really understand what is going on, but I don't think it's okay to basically consider them to be a personal therapist. I had an experience when my dad was deployed when my mom really relied on me to basically be a second adult in the house and I remember thinking, "I'm only a kid! I'm not mature enough for this!" Parents, please tell us things and keep us in the loop, we want to be included, but if it's something that pertains to your marriage, please keep it to yourselves and work it out with a professional if necessary. Kids aren't supposed to be the therapist, we're not mature professionals who know what to say and do, plus it kinda divides the parents and makes the situation worse.

Secondly, rules. Now, at first my teacher was like "write down 10 unwritten rules in your family" and I thought this was going to be challenging, but once I started going, it was actually kind of funny to read what I'd written because they were rules that you basically had to live by or else you'd get your head taken off.  I don't want to go into too much detail and write all of them down, but a few that I wrote were, "Don't sass mom during family night, otherwise it leads to a lecture", "don't mess with Ben or he'll tattle which leads to another lecture", and "we expect you to practice the piano because we paid for lessons and if you don't you'll get a lecture about that, but don't practice when we're home because it annoys us because it's loud. So basically never." As you can see, most of the time we tried to avoid anything that led to a lecture because those could go on FORever.

Those might not be too big, but I just thought it was kind of funny to see what really shaped my point of view growing up, especially when it comes to living with roommates because it's tough to live with a bunch of people who grew up differently! Sometimes I wonder if I'll have these rules in my house, but I guess I'll just wait and see.

So I think that's enough of my rambling this week, I hope you all have a good weekend, happy October 3rd tomorrow (Mean Girls day), oh and if you're LDS or not LDS, watch General Conference this weekend! I am so excited to see who the new apostles will be and hear some council from prophets who have been called of God. If you're interested, the sessions are on Saturday from 10AM-12PM, 2PM-4PM and Sunday from 10AM-12PM, 2PM-4PM mountain standard time. Oh and there's also a priesthood session for the guys, but I have no idea what time it's at.

Here's a link if you're interested: https://www.lds.org/?lang=eng

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