The Two Things That Keep Families Together Despite Everything

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