Can You Handle The Truth?
The Baby Boomers: From Black and White To Color
Before the 1960’s, most people watched television in black and white. Looking back at what society was like 50 years ago, it seems like people looked at life in terms of black and white also. Things were either right or they were wrong. There wasn’t too much in between. Some of the things we viewed as wrong were disrespectful children, smoking pot, and sex before marriage. Some of the things society viewed as right were children not talking back to their parents or teachers and conservative dress. If you want to look back and see exactly what society viewed as right versus wrong, just watch some retro television and you’ll get the picture.
After WWII a new kind of generation was born in the United States. Because of the after effects of the War the United States experienced an economical boom, which resulted in high income jobs, (relevant to the time in history) with unemployment rates being almost non-existent. Education was also enhanced by the government with universities and colleges prompting people to get a college degree. Education was cheap, and was readily available. In fact, many took college courses to open up higher paying job opportunities and because of this lifestyle many people became financially secure. This financial freedom allowed people have more children and there was a significant increase in birth rates. People who were born during this period are called baby boomers and were born between the years of 1946-1964.
To me it seems like things really changed during this generation. Dr Spock came along, and his book became a child rearing bible for many people. Parents changed their approach to raising their children. It started to become in vogue for parents to be less authoritarian and more liberal in terms of discipline. The result; the baby boomers themselves took this to an extreme when they began to have children of their own. They took this more liberal mentality and kicked it up a huge notch. Baby boomer parents believed that their children had the right to decide everything. This included when they got fed, what they wanted to eat, what they wanted to wear, and what they wanted to say and do and it became the idea that at three years old children were asked to do things rather than being told.
For baby boomer children things were no longer black and white. Nothing was totally wrong anymore, and everything was a combination of colors. Parents couldn’t establish rules in black and white because it might hurt their child’s self esteem and kids began to feel good about who they were becoming for no apparent reason. The idea came into popularity that parents have to “respect” their children. The concept of respect is wonderful, but it was taken to a ridiculous extreme. Respect for children came to mean allowing them to say and do anything they wanted. Baby boomer children no longer learned self control in words and actions. This actually resulted in them not showing respect for anyone else but themselves. Basically, baby boomer children became extremely selfish, self-indulgent, arrogant, and demanding. Everything was about feeling good no matter what the cost. The end result, baby boomers have the highest debt and the poorest health with largest waistlines. The way they deal with relationships is if you don’t agree with me I am not talking to you and that means if we are married or not with the divorce rate being higher than what is reported. The research points to the fact that baby boomers get divorced later in their marriage. Their parents stayed together at all cost while the boomers hung on until their kids were grown.
We are now dealing with the children of baby boomers. They are being referred to as the millennial generation. Only time will tell what their problems will be. One thing that seems for sure, that the days of right and wrong and black and white are gone forever.
ACOA or ACOA +
My dad and mom owned a bar so at a very early age it became very easy for me to be around people who drank all the time. From the time I was a kid I thought that the whole world drank and got drunk. My dad was a binge drinker and he would go of on a bender every six months or so. He would be gone from one to three days. I always asked my mom where dad slept when he was gone and she would say in the car. I wasn’t sure who drove who crazier, mom or dad. Dad would drink and drive mom nuts, but when dad was sober mom would say things to dad to get under his skin. So I wasn’t sure if mom drove dad to drink or dad’s drinking drove my mom to make those comments. I didn’t really drink as a teenager but started to drink when I go married the first time. I drank a lot during the summer, and when I bar tended at a restaurant in Belmar NJ. As I became unhappy in my marriage I drank more and more until my drinking got a little out of control and I became frightened of my own behavior and my thoughts. If you want to discover a whole lot about an illness or a condition all you have to do is get it or think that you have it and you will start to read all there is to read about it in books, magazines, online or any place you can find the info. I came across this acronym in a book, ACOA. What the hell does this mean? Well it means Adult Child of an Alcoholic. I read more and discovered that somebody hooked a bunch of symptoms to the conditions, 13 to be exact. What an unlucky number. Let me enumerate them here:
ACOA’s
1. Guess at what normal is.
2. Have difficulty in following a project through from beginning to end.
3. Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.
4. Judge themselves without mercy.
5. Have difficulty having fun.
6. Take themselves very seriously.
7. Have difficulty with intimate relationships.
8. Overreact to changes over which they have no control.
9. Constantly seek approval and affirmation.
10. Feel that they are different from other people.
11. Are either super responsible or super irresponsible.
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.
13. Have money dysfunction, such as hiding it or being disorganized with it.
After reading this list and the article associated with the list I concluded that I was an ACOA, dysfunctional, needed therapy, was warped, hated my parents, and had no business being married to a girl that I had known for ten years. Great, so now what? Well now I come up with a lot of excuses for my behavior, acted more like an idiot than ever before, get into therapy, and divorced my wife. I began to walk around and wonder if every move I made was related to me being an ACOA. I began to argue for my own weaknesses and became more and more irresponsible. This went on for about five years until I started to learn the benefits of my time in history and my up bringing. There are benefits to our up bringing. Too often we look at the downside of how we were raised. I was a baby-boomer as was everyone else in my age bracket and I would bet that many of us have looked back at their life and began to wonder how did I ever get this way. I figured that I could go on hating my life or I could look at what benefit this up bringing did for me and I could use my past to help improve the future. Now I started to take a better look at things when I was about 36 years old (in case you’re wondering I am 60 now) and when my youngest daughter Grace was about 8 years old and I was about 49 I started to realize that this ACOA thing is not an emotional death sentence but rather an opportunity that everybody has to really put things in perspective for themselves and for their own children.
One day about three years ago I was riding around in the car with my daughter Grace and I told her a story about my dad that we both found very amusing and we laughed to tears. I had always told Grace stories about my dad as a matter of fact she started to ask me to tell her a story so we could both laugh really hard. One day she came to me with a list of stories, there were 12 of them about my dad that she kept track of on paper. All of the stories that I told her were stories that came out of that dreaded ACOA environment that I lived in. You know the place that screwed me up. They were so funny now that it didn’t matter that my dad had the personality of an alcoholic, all Grace knows is that I don’t, and she and I can laugh together about all of the insanity that I went through as a kid. How great is that.
10 Ways To Build Any Relationship
1. Listen without Interrupting
2. Speak without Accusing
3. Give without Sparing
4. Confront without Condemning
5. Answer without Arguing
6. Share without Pretending
7. Enjoy without Complaining
8. Trust without Wavering
9. Forgive without Punishing
10. Promising without Forgetting
Well there they are 10 great ways to build any relationship. That is to build; I mean this stuff doesn’t happen over night. We may like things to happen fast but when it comes down to people expectations are always a problem, and what we expect we never get in whole and the parts that we get are never really enough. We have to learn to be patient with those that are family members, loved ones, and co-workers. We can’t keep pulling up the flowers to see how the roots are doing, and we can’t count on others to do these things for us. So, we have to take the time to work on these things and model them ourselves. They require self awareness, empathy, respect, kindness, and at times the ability to be truthful with our own shortcomings. So, let’s take a look at these and work through the process one at a time. For me writing this article is almost like therapy because what I have discovered is that more often then not I have failed at many of them.
Listen Without Interrupting
There are five types of listening: Ignoring, pretend listening, selective listening, attentive listening, and empathic listening. Most people listen to respond and don’t truly try to understand what another is saying. Their minds can be on another planet that is buried under their own problems and headaches. They are always looking to get a word in and are always there with some type of advice or backyard psychology. They pretend and select and only connect to what is familiar to them. Good listeners have empathy, and can put themselves in the shoes of the speaker. They truly work to understand and can make every word that comes out of the mouth of the speaker the most important words they will ever hear. The ability to listen and understand in empathic way is so important to our children, our spouses, and our loved ones and for some reason they seem to always get the short end of the stick. We fight, we argue, and we ignore those that are closest to us and we want to appear to be good listeners to those that are casual acquaintances, or co-workers. Try and just listen to the people that are closest to you and build a relationship with them first, then listening to others without interrupting will become part of who you are and it will become second nature.
Speak Without Accusing
“What have you done NOW!” or “NOT AGAIN.” These are two phrases that we want to eliminate from our conversations. Now and Again; it almost sounds like a candy bar. But, in reality what they communicate is not very sweet at all. The word NOW communicates that you are fed up with persistent behavior that just aggravates and insights you to anger and the word AGAIN communicates that I told you I didn’t like what you said or did in the past and you just are not listening to me. Our words need to be seasoned with salt and spoken in a manner that shows the same patience that we would like to have shown to us. Often the lack of patience that we have with ourselves is mirrored to others and we accuse them of a poor attitude, when in reality it us with the problem. People never do things to us without our permission. When we accuse someone of making us angry or upset, we have allowed it. This just gives us an excuse for our own poor attitude.
Give Without Sparing
Can we ever give enough? I don’t just mean money; I mean time, love, and effort. At times these things can mean more to a relationship than money. They also can be harder to give. You can give your son or your daughter a $10 bill, but how about 10 minutes. You can say I love you but how about doing the dinner dishes. You can say I am proud of your performance but how about being there to watch a game or an award ceremony. At home, on the job, or in life in general talk is cheap and money is easier to give than our time, love, or effort. Going the extra mile on our job and not looking for something in return can be a tall order but it communicates to our employer and to others that we care, we are consistent, and we don’t cut corners.
Confront Without Condemning
Everyone seems to fear confrontations, when in reality a confrontation when done correctly can reveal the truth and strengthen any relationship. The problem is we tend to set our boundaries in anger. So, when a confrontation occurs it usually turns into a verbal free for all with words being spoken that do nothing but damage a relationship. Confrontations shouldn’t divide people they should bring them closer together. Families that have confrontations and fights at times could go years without speaking to each other. This creates such a gap that cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, and children become like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s feuding their entire lives. The blame game gets played and everyone fears the next wedding or maybe a funeral for fear of running into Uncle Charlie who they haven’t spoken to since that argument that they had ions ago. So let’s speak the truth for sure but always leave enough space in a conversation for a disagreement. And when we disagree do it right away without holding it in and ultimately holding a grudge. Remember the worst conversation that we can have is the one that we think we had. Revisit old conversation from time to time to clarify expectations and don’t spread rumors and gossip amongst family members or co-workers. Always confront but never condemn.
Answer Without Arguing
My dad owned a bar of which I spent a fair amount of time in talking to his customers. At 18 I started bartending there. I was taught never argue with a customer for all of the obvious reasons. On any given day one customer would make a statement another would disagree and an argument would break out. No one just answered a question. Oh, they did but they always seemed to follow their answer with their point of view and let the other guy know just how dumb he was. Needlessly to say some relationships were rather strained. In your home or on the job if a question gets asked just answer it. There really is no reason to start an argument. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even your children. Often when a question is asked our response might be “why are you asking” or “why do you feel that way” which does nothing more than open a can of worms and starts an argument. Just answer the question, and enjoy the conversation.
Share Without Pretending
Strings, oh those dreaded strings that always seem to be attached to the things we do for other people. We all try to share from the heart, but always feel slighted when the person we shared with doesn’t reciprocate in some way, shape, or form. After all I have done for you becomes the cry when we get fed up with getting nothing in return. The good feelings that we get from sharing should end there with no expectations attached. This is hard, very hard; especially with our children. We share unceasingly only to find out in the latter stages of our life our kids can’t stand seeing our name light up in the caller ID of their phone. We pretended that there were no strings, but in reality there were and when we feel unappreciated those strings are pulling on the wreckage of a broken heart. We can share our life on a job and then discover that the place that we worked can live with us or without us as we stand on the unemployment line. We can’t fake it or pretend but sharing with an open heart can make us very vulnerable and we have to be ready to be real in the things that we share.
Enjoy Without Complaining
Have you ever been asked to go somewhere that you didn’t really want to go? Or maybe you were asked to do something that you really didn’t want to do. Did you go, or did you do it anyway? Well, if you did what was your attitude like while you were going or doing? Often a wife will ask a husband to go or do things that he really doesn’t want to do, but he does it. But, it is done with such a rotten attitude that his wife wishes that he didn’t go or do. When we do things especially things for another person we should do our best to enjoy what we are doing and not complain about where we are our where we are going. Of course if you don’t want to do or go you should make it as clear as day with a loving attitude and the reasons why we may not want to participate. While we are doing and going we shouldn’t complain but enjoy the time spent with our loved ones, friends, or colleagues.
Trust Without Wavering
We can’t trust someone that is not trustworthy. That person has previously provided us with all of the evidence to support our belief and he/she should not be trusted. If we have been lied to in the past it is extremely tough to trust others, especially those that we are in a relationship with. A good rule of thumb though is to trust until you have the evidence not to trust. Oh, don’t get me wrong, don’t look for it, but try and not be suspicious. That suspicion can only lead to jealousy which can have a damaging influence on any relationship. In the final analysis the only person that we have control over is ourselves. So, always be a trustworthy person and you will set the example for those around you.
Forgive Without Punishing
We should all practice forgiveness, but how difficult is it to forget. Let’s face it unless we get amnesia we are not going to forget when we have been wronged or slighted in a relationship. So to say that we should forgive and forget is something that is very unrealistic to ask. What is true forgiveness though? True forgiveness is defined as: “Completely releasing an offender from the ongoing consequences of their actions.” When we say I accept your apology we do so full well knowing that the thoughts of the person’s actions will never leave our mind. We are the only one that is in charge of our own thoughts. Even after we forgive we should always be aware that the temptation to keep revisiting the hurt only keeps punishing and re-punishing our offender. If we have been offended by a family member, such as a spouse or our children their presence will be a constant reminder of their actions. If we have been offended by our boss or a co-worker our time at work will be all that more difficult. Gaining control of our own thoughts is the only way to practice forgiveness without punishing.
Promise Without Forgetting
Promises need to made very sparingly should never be made without understanding all of the variables that are related to the promise. Our children and even our loved ones may hang on our words and count on the promises that we make. If we say we are going to do something, and follow through with our actions we will build greater respect and trust in the relationships that we have with our significant others. If we say it we should do it, we should finish what we start, and we should be consistent. Talk is very cheap and we should remember what we say, because if we don’t others will.
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