5776 Today is Day Three of Week Two
of the Omer. That is Day Ten of the
Omer. The theme of the Week is Relationships.
Yesterday I wrote about how we often don’t grasp our own cultural
cues, much less those of others, and that can cause friction and conflict in
relationships: especially
marriages. But there are commonalities
that transcend cultures, that we also do not catch.
I’ll give an
example. One time I counselled a Korean
woman who was married to an American airman.
She sat down in my office and, in a long and winding narrative, told me
that her mother-in-law hated her because she was Asian. When someone came to me for pastoral
counselling, I always tried to keep an open mind to what the counselee was
telling me. In learning the ‘skill’ of
pastoral counselling, one is taught to treat the counselee’s view of reality,
as reality. But as I listened to this
woman’s ‘proof’ that her mother-in-law was racist and her husband was
indifferent to the ‘fact,’ I couldn’t help but smile inside.
Finally, when the
woman finished telling me her tale of woe, I told her: The good news is that your mother-in-law
doesn’t hate you because you’re Korean.
She hates you because you married her son. And then I explained to her a fact that exists
in every culture; no son’s mother was ever satisfied with her son’s choice of a
wife. I assured her that I’d seen this
play itself out time and again, including in my own family.
So what am I supposed to do? She wanted to
know.
I promised her that
her mother-in-law’s animosity would go away when she produced
grandchildren. Once she did, chances
were her husband’s wilder ways – which his mother surely knew well – would calm
down and he would become more civilised.
And daughter-in-law would get the credit. That aside, the mother-in-law would
understand that, in order to have access to the grandchildren, she would have
to learn to love her daughter-in-law.
And there was about a 90% chance that she would.
What about the other
10 percent? She wanted to know.
Nine percent, her
mother-in-law would simply pretend that she accepted her. And the other one percent? Well, there are always hopeless cases, but
they are rare.
I don’t know if I
helped her. But I never saw her
again. She either took my advice to
heart, and managed to find peace with her mother-in-law. Or else she decided the Rabbi was a crackpot...and went to another chaplain the next time.
Just out of curiosity, I did some
research as into those elements that are common to all cultures. As you can imagine, anthropology not being a
‘hard’ science, there are as many different lists as there are authors who have
published. None of them list
‘mothers-in-law putting their daughters-in-law through the mill,' but I suppose
that it would be too impolite to say even if the respective anthropologists
agreed! Personally, I stand by my
analysis based on anecdotal evidence.
But all this raises the
question: if there are absolutes
that are common to all cultures, why are we often clueless about them?
Tough question. But I think at its heart is that most of us
lack self-awareness. We go through life,
deluding ourselves into believing in the existence of an idealised version of
ourselves. And being idealised, that
view is way simplified. Because we like
to think of ourselves as transparent, as open and honest and
straightforward. Even when we’re
not. So in our idealised version of
ourselves, we do not allow for such complexities. When those around us cannot seem to read our
cues, we tend to blame them, since we know that we are nothing but forthright.
A few years ago, I took a year’s
sabbatical to study counselling in graduate school. It was an interesting experience. The academic part was relatively easy. By the time you’ve got as much education as I
have, you’ve mastered the techniques of studying, to acquire theoretical knowledge. What was far more difficult were the human
behavior labs. In them, the teachers put
us into situations calculated to goad us into dysfunctional behavior towards
one another. Often, they succeeded! The professor who was in charge of the lab
courses had a sort of mantra. If the
people around you think you’re screwed up, it’s because you are. The point being that, when we see
patterns in our interactions with multiple people, then almost by definition we are
the cause – not them. I never thought
about that before; it took me until my fifties to hear, and internalise this
essential truth.
I know I’m rambling a bit, but then
it’s my blog! But the point I’m
trying to make is that, despite the uniqueness that each person possesses, and
despite the cultural differences that make us behave in different ways, there
are constants that are true to the vast majority of people, with whom we come
in contact. Because of the constantness,
we are frequently unaware of these commonalities. If we work try harder to know ourselves, and
what motivates us, then we would be better able to understand others. And our relationships would not be troubled
with tensions stemming from unawareness of such obvious phenomena as the
mother-in-law / daughter-in-law equation!
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