The Two Things That Keep Families Together Despite Everything
DDr. Arthur Brooks
ParentingMarriageMental Health
Transcript
00:00:00I know zero conflict-free families including my own.
00:00:04We have lots and lots of arguments.
00:00:07My kids argue with each other.
00:00:10We argue with our kids.
00:00:11They argue with us.
00:00:13I very frequently don't vote the same way as my kids.
00:00:16I very frequently don't vote the same way as my wife, as a matter of fact.
00:00:19There have been times when I'm the only one in my whole family who voted in a particular
00:00:23way.
00:00:24They're all...because they're all so wrong sometimes.
00:00:26What can I tell you?
00:00:27The truth is that you got disagreements.
00:00:30The point is not not disagreeing.
00:00:32The point is how do you disagree and what do you do when you disagree is actually what
00:00:36it comes down to.
00:00:38What this means is that families that are reconciled or families that have never faced estrangement
00:00:42in the first place, if they're close at all and they have disagreements that are common
00:00:46inside families, that they've figured out how to get beyond schismatic disparities and love
00:00:52each other in spite of that.
00:00:54And that gets me to the two magic ingredients in the literature that you find of families
00:00:58that stay together despite the fact that sometimes they can't stand each other's choices or what
00:01:03they say.
00:01:04They do two things.
00:01:06And again, this is going to go back to the oldest ideas in the world.
00:01:09They tolerate disagreement.
00:01:10They don't love it necessarily, but they have a high, high, high degree of tolerance and they
00:01:16know how to forgive each other is what it comes down to.
00:01:19Now, I want to talk about that a little bit because sometimes...I mean, you'd expect in
00:01:23kin-based groups based on evolutionary biology that tolerance would be higher, but sometimes
00:01:27it isn't in our modern society.
00:01:30In a lot of ways, it's easier to be intolerant to people around you because you hold them to
00:01:34a higher standard.
00:01:35It's like, "How dare my wife vote differently than me?" said lots and lots of people in
00:01:40America in the last presidential election, right?
00:01:43Whereas the next door neighbor would be like, "Yeah, he's a little nutty, voted differently
00:01:47than me.
00:01:48Good guy.
00:01:49Good guy.
00:01:50Yeah, yeah.
00:01:51Sorry.
00:01:52I'm using his lawnmower right now."
00:01:52Right?
00:01:53I mean, the whole point is that you're less tolerant for the people for whom you should
00:01:56be more tolerant and you're less forgiving because it feels like a personal affront a lot more
00:02:02than a disagreement would be.
00:02:04Even a substantial disagreement or perhaps especially a substantial agreement would be with somebody
00:02:10with whom you're not a blood relation, you know, the stakes feel lower is the way that
00:02:15this actually works out.
00:02:17So what do I mean by tolerance?
00:02:19You know, it's funny that coexist bumper sticker that you actually see that has, you know, for
00:02:24all the letters and the words coexist and in the word coexist, they have, you know, they're
00:02:29turned into symbols from different religions and, you know, I love that.
00:02:32I do.
00:02:33I mean, it's like, I confess, I'm just, you know, I'm an old hippie in my heart and anybody
00:02:39who's a serious fan of the show or is followed by work, you know that I spent a lot of time
00:02:45studying other religions despite the fact that I'm a devoted Catholic.
00:02:48I love people who think in different ways, philosophically, spiritually, I just learn so
00:02:53much from other people, especially when their beliefs are based on love itself.
00:02:58It's fantastic.
00:02:59But it's very easy to not include people who think differently on some ideological or political
00:03:05things in that bumper sticker.
00:03:06And there's got to be a way to put mom in that coexist bumper sticker.
00:03:09There's got to be a way to, to have your families in that.
00:03:12You just, I mean, it's like, yeah, we're going to coexist.
00:03:14We're going to, we're going to walk into the future together.
00:03:16You're going to be at, I'm, one of us is going to be each other's funeral.
00:03:19I'm going to cry when you die or vice versa.
00:03:21That's the way it's going to go.
00:03:22And we're going to laugh at the reception after the funeral about how much we disagreed on
00:03:26politics.
00:03:26That kind of tolerance and coexistence is one that's fundamentally based on the idea
00:03:30that we're in it for life is what it comes down to.
00:03:32And that's the attitude that families that stick together have, which is, this is it.
00:03:37We're stuck together.
00:03:38We're stuck together.
00:03:39That's the essence of coexistence.
00:03:40And that's kind of a beautiful stickiness, if you know what I mean.
00:03:44The second is forgiveness.
00:03:45And forgiveness can be really, really super hard because the injuries and slights are so important.
00:03:51It's funny.
00:03:51And I talk to couples a lot and, and, and Esther and I are, you know, we're doing a lot
00:03:56of work with couples.
00:03:57Now we, you know, we counsel couples on their way to getting married, you know, marriage prep
00:04:01and in a Catholic context, we're doing secular retreats now on, on how to fall in love and
00:04:07stay in love.
00:04:07And it's really important, but we know we've been married for almost 35 years.
00:04:11This is, this is our 35th wedding anniversary.
00:04:13And, and sometimes it's much, much harder to forgive the person who's closest to you because
00:04:17the slights are so, when your batteries are wired together, when you've got, when you're, when your
00:04:22love, when there's the, the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brain, which feels like an
00:04:27antenna to the divine, it's a delicate system that can be disturbed so easily.
00:04:31This is what families do.
00:04:32And so little slights get, you know, blown up into bigger things.
00:04:36And it's very important to have the same standard of forgiveness that you'd have for anybody.
00:04:41It's like, it's okay.
00:04:42It's okay.
00:04:42Um, I will do a show on how to forgive and actually how to do that because there's a whole
00:04:47algorithm.
00:04:48There's a whole set of techniques on how to forgive other people.
00:04:52Um, but the whole point is forgiveness is not least important.
00:04:55It's most important for the people who are in your kin because it's hardest for most people
00:05:00to actually do that and to have a, a culture, an overt culture, which many, many cohesive families
00:05:06have, which is, I promise you, I'm going to forgive you when you inevitably insult me,
00:05:11when you inevitably hurt my feelings and you promise to do the same thing as well and bring
00:05:15it and holding people to those overt promises, making it just implicit is really not good enough.
00:05:20One more thing to consider in our, in our current political and social environment,
00:05:24we are the product, my friends.
00:05:26And I've talked about this a lot on this show on how we've been productized by tech.
00:05:30Tech has productized us and making us addicted as we are to our devices.
00:05:34And so I've talked a lot about how to not to get rid of our devices, but to manage them.
00:05:38So we use them for learning and loving and laughing and, and really good things and not,
00:05:43you know, the scrolling and hyp, hypnosis and distraction, all the things that actually hurt us.
00:05:48And when we do the latter, we're being productized.
00:05:50We just are because somebody is making money from us.
00:05:54But the truth is ideologically, we're being productized as well.
00:05:57When you hate somebody that you actually should love, somebody's probably profiting.
00:06:02And not always, but a lot of times they are.
00:06:05And, and I know someone who isn't and it's you.
00:06:07And again, I'm, I'm ruling out the cases of overt abuse and you have to decide what abuse actually is.
00:06:14But in cases where you're told it is, and you're not quite sure,
00:06:17this is where we need to do a little bit of work.
00:06:20There might be influencers, politicians, media telling you to ditch your family members because
00:06:27they have mistaken values, bad ideas, or really vile politics.
00:06:34And in, and having those views that they don't love or, or care about you.
00:06:37But that's wrong.
00:06:38The ones who don't love and care about you are the people encouraging you to pull away from your family.
00:06:44This is especially in the case of political activism.
00:06:46And there's a lot of research on this.
00:06:47And I've talked about dark triad personalities and how they,
00:06:52they're so common in political activism today on both the political right and left.
00:06:57They use your misery to further their interests.
00:07:00People who don't know you, for example,
00:07:01they might make a case for cutting off your parents or your siblings or your kids.
00:07:05And it might sound appealing to you right now,
00:07:08but doing so is very likely to be a recipe for your loneliness and your depression
00:07:14and not a better world for all.
00:07:16And that's what we want is a better world for all.
00:07:19Maybe, just maybe, the people with whom you should have no contact
00:07:22are the people who are encouraging you to go no contact.
Community Posts
No posts yet. Be the first to write about this video!
Write about this video