The Bigger Picture

Sometimes You Eat the Bear, Sometimes the Bear Eats You

Photo by aaron clinard on Unsplash

Difficult people are hard to love. This makes having healthy relationships with them challenging. Read as: a pain the ass, thorn in the side, fun as a sharp stick in the eye, or all of the above. Everyone has at least one difficult relationship. And probably the most challenging relationship is the one between parents and their adult children.

Hey Clay

Letter No. 6: How Do You Make Your Parents Feel Wanted But Not Needed?

Hey, Clay.

I have always been very independent from a young age. I was the child that my parents were always proud of and boasted about. They still do to this day and tell everybody, “Our child is living the dream life, we are so proud.” Unfortunately something is missing. We have never made the transition from parent-child relationship to parent-adult relationship. I’m having issues with this.

Hey Clay

Letter No. 2: What Forgiveness Looks Like

Hey, Clay.

As every family has it’s dysfunction, mine was pretty far on the dysfunctional spectrum, bordering chaotic. My parents had five children and they divorced when I was young. All five children had different relationships with my mom, varying from ones with firm boundaries to a rather enmeshed one my mom had with one sibling I’ll call Golden Child.

The Bigger Picture

An Encouraging Word: Why and How to Offer More Compliments

By Brett and Kate McKay, for The Art of Manliness.

“Idle words are characterless and die upon utterance. Evil words rankle for a while, make contentions, and then die. But the hopeful, kind, cheering word sinks into a man’s heart and goes on bearing fruit forever. How many beautiful written words—words in book and song and story—are still inspiring men and making the world fragrant with their beauty! It is just so with the words you write, not on paper, but on the hearts of men. I wish there were room to mention here the testimonies of great men to the power of some hopeful, encouraging word they had spoken to them in youth and in the days of struggle. But every autobiography records this thing. Booker T. Washington tells how the encouragement of General Armstrong saved the future for him. I know a young man who is to-day filling a large and useful place in the world, who was kept to his high purpose in a time of discouragement by just an encouraging word from a man he greatly admired. That man’s word will live and grow in the increasing influence of the younger man. This world is full of men bearing in their minds deathless words of inspiration heard in youth from lips now still forever. Speak hopeful words every chance you get. Always send your young friends from you bearing a word that they will take into the years and fulfill for you.”

—The Enlargement of Life (1903) By Frederick Henry Lynch