Lessons of Love

by Joseph Shaub

A few years ago, at the annual AAMFT^[1] conference, I attended a workshop put on by the faculty at LIOS^[2] over at Bastyr University. Their topic, as I recall it, was "Presenting the Family of Origin in the Workplace."

"Why in the world," you might ask, "would you present such a profoundly unbusiness subject in a business environment?" Well, that was my question, in any event. Suffice it to say, that their presentation was so persuasive that when I conducted my next law firm retreat some months later, in California, I flew up to Bellevue and conferred with Brenda Kerr about their approach. As per her prediction, it turned out to be remarkably compatible with the transition stress being experienced by the law firm I was facilitating.

How do you deal with stress? What role do you play in your firm? Are there types of rewards and frustrations with your work that are pretty unique to you? How do you get along with colleagues or staff? Do you feel that others tend to look at you as an asset in your organization or as a talented liability? Are you told by others that you tend to sabotage yourself or that you don’t perform to your capabilities? Do you, or other particular individuals always seem to rise to the top in organizations – from law school to your present firm?

While it is natural for attorneys to answer such questions in terms of personal will, discipline or God-given talent, such explanations are fraught with the risks of categorization; judgment or a sense of predetermination, which themselves tend to foster rigidity and resistance to beneficial change and growth. By contrast, exploration of influences from our families of origin opens up an enormously rich storehouse of information that bears directly on our behavior in the business environment.

What does this have to do with love? Well, for starters, our family of origin is the first place in our lives we learn about ourselves in our world – and the lessons imparted stay with us, often deeply embedded in our psyches long into adulthood – usually to end of our days….lessons about many things, including the meaning of love in our lives.

This is the first place, for example, that we learned the impact we have on others. What do we say about ourselves, inside, about this continuing impact? Some of us were first-borns, came after a loss of another child, looked remarkably similar to a parent or beloved relative^[3] or had a parent who placed a huge investment in our accomplishments for their own vicarious needs. It is almost certain that those of us with such experiences developed an early knowledge and acceptance of their ability to impact their environment – for better or for worse. Self-assuredness or pressure not to disappoint that leads to "Type A" driven personalities may be the legacies of such early lessons.

Of course, this describes the achievers, the hyper-competent among us. These people predominate in the legal community. There are also those who believe that they are born into this life to struggle. Their initial lessons about their impact on their environment may have been learned from overworked and overburdened parents who did not have the emotional strength to respond to needy children. Perhaps a mother was depressed and unresponsive, or a father was insecure and competitive with his own child. Maybe the emotional capital that was available was expended on a sibling because of their birth order or gender. Whatever the reason, these people may have learned that their impact on their world was negligible. Maybe these people came to believe that only destructive (or self-destructive) behavior could impact others. (Maybe some of our own kids are developing that perspective right now – but that’s for another column and another day.)

Our family of origin is the source of our earliest lessons in life. It’s the first place we learn what is right and what is wrong and how things ought to be. If we take a moment and reflect on our present beliefs about these issues, we will likely hear reverberations which span the years to our earliest memories. Any parent knows (or for goodness sake, should know) that children pick up on pretty much everything. Parental figures are teaching their children every moment they are in their presence. Intentional or not, the lessons are indelible...and for this very reason, the lessons - and resulting world view - are buried deep beneath our conscious awareness. Yet, these beliefs inform our most important decisions in adult life. They also form the basis of our strongest judgments of others (whether expressed or harbored within).

What does it mean to be a "winner" in life? A loser? Does "he who dies with the most toys" win? Does she who has touched the most lives win? Does the person with the most billable hours win? By your own definition of winning, is it even possible for you to "win?" Must you be perfect, or nearly so, to avoid being a "loser?" What kinds of adversity or failure is tolerable in your life, or in the lives of your spouse or children, if you have a family of your own?

Marriage is the ideal environment to see how this plays out in our adult lives. Carl Whittaker, one of the giants in the field of family systems theory, spoke about marriage in terms of two families sending out scouts, in the persons of the betrothed, to sort of feel the other family out. Marriage is a collision (sometimes benign and sometimes violent) of two cultures and deeply imbedded world views. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in how partners deal with conflict.
Our family of origin is the source of our earliest lessons about conflict. How was conflict handled in your family growing up? Was it safe? Was it suppressed? Did we see our parents holler at each other, make up and move on? Are you someone who says, "I never saw my parents argue"? Since intimate relationships (and that includes close business partnerships) cannot avoid the reality of conflict, how each of us handles conflict is absolutely predictive of the stability and longevity of the relationship.

Returning to the topic of this KKBB issue, what did you learn about love in your family of origin? Was love equated to money....or to time and attention? Is love something you can depend on? Do you feel you need to do certain things - accomplish certain things - to be deserving of love? Are you comfortable expressing love? (I have a friend, a very sweet man, whose 30-year old daughter told me recently that the only way he can say "I love you" is to buy a Hallmark card with those words in it and underline them twice.)

I guess the whole point here is that we can never get enough love in our lives. Love shields us from the harshness of this world - and particularly from the work that we do. There are so many lessons we absorbed in our earliest days about how we seek love, how we express love and how we reciprocate love. Some draw what we need into our lives and others serve to promote isolation. Where we stand within that spectrum of experience will either protect and support us, or deny us that vital support we need in order to accomplish our plans and our dreams.