EB Family Day Blog

What are some other mental motivations that are influenced by guilt, resentment, and pain? How do these motivations contribute to the behaviors that plague us? Once you see how these work, it will be a lot easier to understand the different motivations for any major problem that you find yourself wrestling with . . . over and over again.

There are mechanisms you’ve developed to “survive your family.” The core workings of them are behind the behaviors you have and don’t like. The big three mechanisms are accommodation, rebellion, and mimicking. Once you understand why you’ve invited them into your life and made them so comfortable over the years, you’ll start seeing that you can also ask them to leave. Once gone, the behaviors that seemed impossible to change will change.

Accommodation

What’s another way of saying accommodation? Try this: placing your parent or sibling before you at your own expense. To maintain the important ties to our parents or siblings, to feel loved by them, we may accommodate to or comply with their reasonable expectations. That’s okay, right? Sure, but what about accommodating or complying with their serious flaws and damaging expectations? Not as “okay,” right? Too much accommodation causes us to ignore our own interests, goals, and destiny. If that were the case, why would we do this? Because their guilt-provoking words and deeds show us that they’re hurt when we don’t comply or accommodate.
Huh? Look at it like this: Say you become very obedient to a very controlling parent; you could easily become too submissive and you could quickly learn to squelch your own independent thinking. What happens if you don’t comply? Usually, this kind of parent becomes agitatedhe screams, she loses control, maybe they become violent. What does he scream? “You damn kid. You never listen. Do it now or I’m going to kill you!” Their insults, screaming, and other such behaviors are all clear evidence that your parents are fragile. You’ve wounded them. You’ve sent them right over the edge. So what’s a nice, well-meaning kid supposed to do? How about limiting his or her normal sense of independence?

Accommodation or compliance is very likely to cause you to suffer profoundly if your submissive behavior continues for the rest of your life. You’ll hate yourself for not asserting yourself and then you’ll find that people close to you can’t stand you for the very same reason. Maybe you’ll try to suppress it and it just comes out anyway. Every time you come in late for a meeting, stubbornly disagree with everyone around you, or even do an assignment with begrudging defiance, you’re revealing your resentment of your authoritarian parent.

Excerpted from Self-Help for Smarties: Secret Success Codes for Weight Loss, Love, Career and Parenting by Irwin Gootnick, M.D. (Penmarin Books, May 2006).

Tags: Accommodation, family, Gootnick, Survive

I’ve sat and watched the cursor blink on the clean white page for a week. What shall I write about? Yes, my daughters, even newsletter editors lack inspiration at times.

Having no direction, my mind wandered toward the family. Natural, eh? I killed time by skimming my genealogy page and whamo, the proverbial ton of bricks fell. Of course! With real people and events you can write about anything.

I picked up a few lines here and there and my goodness! I found a writer’s jackpot, and you all have one. It sits neatly among the limbs of your own Family Tree. Have you discovered it yet? Just think of the many genres and topics a good writer could pick up.

I found a Tudor diplomat, who worked along with Cardinal Woolsey and Erasmus. Richard was an official in the Church. He helped write the Kings James version of the Bible, working primarily on the Book of Psalms.

And, John the Jester – Brother of Richard

Although a scholar of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1539, and being a Master of the Arts, he was soon attached as the Jester in the household of the Duke of Norfolk before Henry VIII’s death, and in Elizabeth’s reign, he was transferred to the court.

That a man of education like Pace should have voluntarily assumed ‘the fool’s coat’ often excited hostile comment. To such criticism Pace’s friend, John Heywood, the epigrammatist, once answered that “It is better for the common weal for wise men to ‘go in fools’ coats’ than for fools to ‘go in wise men’s gowns’”
Camden, Remaines,ed.857 p314

Another Richard founded Paces’s Paines across the river from Jamestown

It took 112 years to get Priscilla’s hollyhock seed from Georgia to Oklahoma, according to John W. Allen, curator of history of Southern Illinois University Museum.

I found stories of Priscilla, a young girl of ten or eleven, who gathered the seeds of the hollyhock plant to take with her from Georgia (some versions say North Carolina) to her destination in Oklahoma during the tragic Trail of Tears era of 1838-39.

She was befriended and adopted by my husbands ancestor during a rest camp on Dutch Creek, in Illinois. Today, Priscilla Hollyhocks are known by their unusual red color and small size and cover the hills of certain areas.

What could be done with a story of a hanging that failed during a civil war raid? A relative was among those hauling supplies for Col. Mulligan at Lexington. He was alone that day and he wouldn’t talk, so the raiders hung him and left. The knot slipped, he fell to the ground and wormed his way up to a house where the rope was cut by a woman.

Way back in history I roamed and found reference to a family named Rolfe and Pocahontas.

The John Wayne movie, Rooster Cogburn, carries my mother’s family names and was set in Arkansas, her birthplace. I have an old picture in my album of a man with the name ‘Rooster Cogburn’ written across it. It isn’t old enough to be the original, but he carries the nick-name forward. The only claim I have to this reference, are the names. They all match and it’s fun.

I believe we each have so much history bound up in our family trees, we should never run out of ideas or inspiration. I’m lucky to have a genealogist brother to do all the searching and verifying, it’s more work than I could handle. http://www.rootsweb.com/ Thanks, Lee.

Go directly to the Message Boards and type in your family name. It’s free and it’s fun to read others looking for the same information – your family. This is not a site to do research unless you want to pay. If you do, it’s very good – one of the best. If you don’t have time to do a thorough search, just visit and search your family names. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, and you may decide to work on your own history.

Write your fictional story on true events but don’t worry about keeping them factual. That’s why you call it good fiction.

Harriet is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/
which is a site for Poetry. Her portfolio can be
found at http://www.Writing.Com/authors/storytime

Tags: family history, family trees, fiction, genealogy, inspiration, storyideas, writers block, writing ideas