Dr. Judith Landau and Daria Tolstoy | 5 compassionate strategies any leader can use to to combat family challenges
Dr. Judith Landau
Drama at home can derail any leader in his or her effort to be present, aware, selfless, and compassionate at work and in life.
Take the following two case studies, for example.
Daria Tolstoy
A congresswoman—working on key legislation—learns that her drug-addicted brother has conned their elderly father into loaning him yet another sum. Or, the CEO—closing a deal while on a business trip—learns that his 11-year old son used a hammer to destroy the kitchen countertops and now threatens his mother, because she confiscated the video game controls and sweets.
Whether biological or chosen, our families are important. They provide a sense of belonging and of being loved. Research shows that people in strong families are healthier, get their needs met and express their values more often than people in struggling families. People in strong families are less likely to be filled with self-doubt. Knowing our family is there gives us the courage to take calculated risks needed to succeed professionally and personally.
During difficult times, such as when there is illness, estrangement, abuse, divorce or death, the whole family suffers.
For any leader who wants to address the family challenges that may be holding them back, personally and professionally, here are five strategies that can help.
1. Find our own meaning
The best way to deal with a difficult family member who may have hurt us, says Dr. Judith Landau, world-renowned child, family and community neuropsychiatrist, is “by finding our own meaning and purpose in life, and by resolving whatever it is.”
The work of restoring—if possible—any relationships with our spouse, our parents, or our relatives and fixing anything unresolved or negative with our children is only possible if we focus on our purpose.
There are many forms of purpose besides the altruistic kind, including survival, religion, accumulating wealth and fame, personal and spiritual development and creativity.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about purpose in his book Man’s Search for Meaning and observed that those fellow inmates who survived were those who felt they had a purpose. He concluded that meaning or purpose can be found in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".
To do the work of finding one’s purpose, Laudau advises asking the help of a therapist, a pastor, a philosopher, or a spiritual guide.
2. Choose our language wisely
Words matter. They can be wise, or they can be weaponized. And within the family, diplomacy is preferable to warfare. When talking about family members and other people, it is crucial that we choose our language wisely.
Landau says:
“Negative words are static, not mobile. When one uses the word ‘toxic,’ how do you recover from that? Isn’t it better to use ‘someone who’s survived trauma’? This gives room for change. Even ‘dysfunctional’ is better as it implies that that person has the capacity to drop the ‘dys’ under different circumstances.”
Landau is weary of the popular use of the term narcissist. “People usually use those terms because they don’t like somebody or they don’t like their behavior. It’s a diagnosis and shouldn’t be used loosely. Some people who behave in a narcissistic way are simply deeply injured. Their maturity may have been compromised. They are acting as smaller children, or more immature people,” she says.
3. Understand where they’re coming from
Restoring difficult family relationships can be hard. Family members are human beings who are, by their nature, imperfect. Coming to terms may just be enough.
“It may require taking a broader perspective and understanding why that person became abusive,” Landau says.
Understanding the origin of the abusive behavior is necessary.
“Sometimes the origin of behavior is just sheer wicked. I am thinking of people who are really egocentric… Every bully and liar I have ever treated has had to lie to an unforgiving parent because they did not accept them as they were, which could have been because they didn’t have the intellectual capacity or they weren’t able to play a sport or they had learning challenges. They learned to cover up and to bully to gain control and to lie to please the parent. If we can get to the core meaning of that behavior and it’s there, rather than a sociopath with horrible intentions, for the most part one can understand and forgive. Forgiveness is so much at the heart of moving forward.”
But what if we’ve got someone in the family who is a sociopath?
“You have to get to a point of acceptance and distancing,” Landau advises. “Find whether there is anything of meaning within the relationship and if it’s a family member, do they have any redeeming qualities that you can enjoy or not?”
Does it mean cutting them out entirely?
“It’s not realistic with family,” Landau says. “We can’t move beyond. We have to find a way of coming to terms, even if it’s just forgiveness. Yes, he’s a sociopath; he behaves abominably. I make a choice. I will not participate in bad behavior. I will not participate in wrongdoing, but there is a blood connection. There is a part of him that still cares for his mother or his child, and I will only interact with him around this good quality. It’s not even forgiveness. It’s developing the capacity for tolerance and understanding.”
According to Landau, we need to separate the person from the behavior, and we need to start doing it with our children when they are young. For instance, saying the following is crucial: “I love you, but I do not like what you just did.”
“We start with our kids when they are very little to separate out the core of the human from the behavior. We have to do this with ‘badly behaved’ family members,” Landau says.
How do we support and love a family member who is struggling?
“You just love and support them. It’s a huge question. That’s all you can do! Let them know you love them but you don’t love their behavior,” she says.
4. Set boundaries
Setting boundaries “is absolutely essential to being able to live with other people,” says Landau.“We need boundaries at every level of our lives to feel safe.”
Landau often sees young children who become increasingly violent due to over-permissive parenting and lack of boundaries. Examples she gives are the 10-14-year old patients she has treated who have done thousands of dollars of damage to their homes because they were never told: “This is the limit.”
“We all have to know what is our limit,” Landau says. “If you think of a cardboard box, and little kids start pushing against those walls, if they fall down, they will feel unsafe and they will push further and further.”
Landau sees this in people who occupy positions of power, such as dictators or CEOs, who continue unchallenged and unstopped.
5. Pass on the right behaviors to our kids
For any leader who has had a difficult upbringing, a central question emerges when they decide to have kids of their own: how can we avoid replicating past patterns and passing on dysfunction to our own children?
“When there is conflict, it's never in isolation, says Daria Tolstoy, a systemic therapist and executive coach working in Lausanne, Switzerland. “When something in the family is not functioning right, the child will show it. Children are often stigmatized. If the couple has problems, the child will start to act out."
According to Tolstoy, fixing things and making sure that we are passing the right behaviors on to our kids requires an attitude of choice rather than obligation.
“Otherwise our kids will doubt our love,” Tolstoy says.
“Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself,” says Tolstoy, quoting author Astrid Lingreen, author of Pippi Longstocking. “I really like that. Often, parents love their children, but struggle to show it. Often there are double binds. Kids start to ask themselves, ‘do my parents really love me?’ It is more important to love for just being, rather than doing. Parents can be too anxious. Let children live. There's a balance. Constantly have a natural connection with your children. I don't agree with the quality over quantity. You can't squeeze quality into a small amount of time. Parents need to walk the talk.”
Being the loving parent and the disciplinarian is key. Landau adds that if discipline is part of loving in child raising, “you never have the dichotomy and the extreme discipline needed.”
But what if discipline didn’t begin when they were young? “You need family therapy and parenting classes,” Landau says.
Disciplining children is about being assertive. Tolstoy advises saying: “You know the rules in the family. This is what I want." (Don't focus on what you don't want.)
How do we deal with distractions and detractors, such as kids playing too many video games? Tolstoy says: “Gaming addiction is linked to pleasure. There are other pleasures. Young girls, who are anorexic, are another example. There is no pleasure in their lives. Invite them to come along to something else that gives pleasure.”
“Take things step-by-step over a long time and think long term,” Tolstoy says. “We are so tired and fed-up, we want to fix things now, but just because you've dealt with something for 10 years, doesn’t mean it will go away overnight but it will not take 10 years to fix it.”
In order to be effective, leaders need to be mindful of their personal relationship dynamics and how that is shaping them. Seeking out the help of experts is key if one is to strengthen one’s family.
