But the spirit was such that we were very open. We started talking about our appliances in Hawaii, and I said, “I know you would probably prefer Frigidaire.”
“I would,” she agreed, “but these seem to be working out fine.” Then she began to open up. She said that as a young girl, she realized that her father worked very hard to support his family. He worked as a high school history teacher and coach for years, and to help make ends meet, he went into the appliance business. One of the main brands he carried in the store was Frigidaire. When he returned home after a full day of teaching and working late into the evening at the appliance store, he would lie on the couch and she would rub his feet and sing to him. It was a beautiful time they enjoyed together almost daily for years. Often during this time he would talk through his worries and concerns about the business, and he shared with Sandra his deep appreciation for Frigidaire. During an economic downturn, he had experienced serious financial difficulties, and the only thing that had enabled him to stay in business was that Frigidaire financed his inventory.
As Sandra shared these things, there were long pauses. I knew that she was tearing up. This was a deeply emotional thing for her. The communication between father and daughter had taken place spontaneously and naturally, when the most powerful kind of scripting takes place. And perhaps Sandra had forgotten about all this until the safety of our year of communication, when it could also come out in very natural and spontaneous ways.
My eyes began to tear as well. I finally started to understand. I had never made it safe for her to talk about it. I had never empathized. I had simply judged. I had just moved in with my logic and my counsel and my condemnation and never even made an effort to really understand. But as Blaise Pascal has said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.”
We spent a long time in the cane fields that day. And when we finally did arrive at the beach, we felt so renewed, so bonded to each other, so reaffirmed in the preciousness of our relationship, that we just held each other. We didn’t even need to talk.
There’s no way to have rich, rewarding family relationships without real understanding. Relationships can be superficial. They can be functional. They can be transactional. But they can’t be transformational—and deeply satisfying—unless they’re built on a foundation of genuine understanding.
In fact, at the heart of most of the real pain in families is misunderstanding.
A short time ago a father shared with me the experience of punishing his young son who kept disobeying him by constantly going around the corner. Each time he did so, the father would punish him and tell him not to go around the corner again. But the little boy kept doing it. Finally, after one such punishment, this boy looked at his father with tear-filled eyes and said, “What does ‘corner’ mean, Daddy?”
Catherine (daughter):
For quite a while I couldn’t figure out why our three-year-old son would not go over to his friend’s house to play. The friend would come over several times a week and play at our house, and they got along well. Then this friend would invite our son to play in his yard, which had a big sand pile, swing sets, trees, and a large green lawn. Each time he said he would go, but after walking halfway there, he would always come running back with tears in his eyes.
After I listened to him and tried to discover what his fears were, he finally opened up and told me that he was afraid to go to the bathroom at his friend’s house. He didn’t know where it was. He was afraid he might accidentally wet his pants.
I took him by the hand, and we walked together over to the friend’s house. We talked to his mother, and she showed our son where the bathroom was and how to open the door. She offered to help him find it if he was in need. Feeling greatly relieved, he decided to stay and play, and hasn’t had a problem since.
One of our neighbors related an experience he had had with one of his daughters who was in grade school. All of their other children were very bright, and school was easy for them. He was surprised when this daughter started doing poorly in math. The class was studying subtraction, and she just didn’t seem to get it. She would come home frustrated and in tears.
This father decided to spend an evening with his daughter and get to the bottom of the problem. He carefully explained the concept of subtraction and let her try a few problems. She still wasn’t making the connection. She just didn’t understand.
He patiently lined up five shiny red apples in a row. He took away two apples. All of a sudden her face lit up. It was as if a light had gone on inside her. She blurted out, “Oh, nobody told me we were doing take away.” No one had realized that she had no idea that “subtraction” meant “take away.”
From that moment on, she understood. With young children we have to understand where they are coming from, what they are thinking, because they usually don’t have the words to explain it.
Most mistakes with our children, with our spouses, with all family members are not the result of bad intent. It’s just that we really don’t understand. We don’t see clearly into one another’s hearts.
If we did—if an entire family could develop the kind of openness we’re talking about—over 90 percent of the difficulties and problems could be resolved.
A Flood of Witnesses
People have begun to realize that much of the pain in families is caused by lack of understanding. And if you take a look at the best-selling family books on the market today, you can get an idea of how significant this pain and this growing awareness are.
Books such as Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand and John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus have become tremendously popular because they touch on this pain. And these books come on the crest of a wave of recognition of the problem. In the recent past there have been many other writers on the family, including Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, and Haim Ginott, who have recognized and attempted to deal with this issue. They provide a flood of witnesses who affirm the vital importance of seeking to understand.1
The fact that these books, programs, and movements have had enduring value illustrates how much people hunger to feel understood.
Satisfactions and Judgments Surround Expectations
Perhaps the greatest contribution of these materials is in helping us realize that by understanding the differences between people, we can learn to take them into account and adjust our expectations accordingly. Much of the material focuses on gender differences, but there are also other powerful dimensions that create differences, such as past and present experiences in the family and on the job. By understanding these differences we can adjust our expectations.
Basically, our satisfactions come from our expectations. So if we’re aware of our expectations, we can adjust them accordingly and—in a very real sense—adjust our satisfactions as well. To illustrate: I knew of one couple who came into marriage with totally different expectations. She expected everything to be sunshine, daffodils, and “happily ever after.” When the realities of marriage and family life hit, she spent much of her time feeling disappointed, frustrated, and dissatisfied. He, on the other hand, anticipated having to deal with the challenges of marriage and family life. And every moment of joy was a wonderful, happy surprise to him, for which he was deeply grateful.
As Gordon B. Hinckley, a wise leader, commented:
Of course all of marriage is not bliss. Stormy weather occasionally hits every household. Connected inevitably with the whole process is much of pain—physical, mental, and emotional. There is much of stress and struggle, of fear and worry. For most there is the ever haunting battle of economics. There seems never to be enough money to cover the needs of the family. Sickness strikes periodically. Accidents happen. The hand of death may reach in and with dread stealth to take a precious one. But all of this seems to be part of the processes of family life. Few indeed are those who get along without experiencing some of it.2
To understand that reality—and to adjust expectations accordingly—is, to a great extent, to control our own satisfaction.
Our expectations are also the basis for our judgments. If you knew, for example, that children in a growth stage of around six or seven had a very strong tendency to exaggerate, you wouldn’t overreact to that behavior because you would understand. That’s why it is so important to understand growth stages and unmet emotional needs, as well as what changes are taking place in the environment that stir up emotional needs and lead to particular behavior. Most child experts agree that almost all “acting out” can be explained in terms of growth stages, unmet emotional needs, environmental changes, just plain ignorance, or a combination.