Haim Omer, the psychologist that designed the program that I used to restore peace and order in my house, makes the point that the issue is not with the child, or with the parent but is, in itself, a separate entity.  It took me a long time to stop pointing my blame finger, to stop trying to prove that the issue was The Boy.

I am not sure when I came up with a visual for it, and for my relationship with The Boy but once I did it was easier to make sense of all of our interactions.

Human relationships are live Venn diagrams.  That wiki is lengthy and a little over complicated for the thing I am trying to explain so…

Venn diagram. (věn) A diagram that uses circles to represent sets, in which the relations between the sets are indicated by the arrangement of the circles. 

The overlapping space is our relationship.  I am aware that this is an incredibly over simplified version of human relationships but bear with me.

The Space Between Us is that overlap.  It is the connection we share.  It is common language.  It is shared interests.  It is shared interest.

When things were at their worst, when I was lost and had no connections anywhere, there was no overlap.  There was no shared space.  When there was no connection there was no way for either of us to feel heard.

No matter what he said, I couldn’t hear him.  No matter what I said, he couldn’t hear me.  We had no shared language.  We each thought we were making perfect sense and that the other person JUST WASN’T GETTING IT!  At that point he may as well have been speaking Korean while I was speaking Aramaic.

Connection is the Universal Translator. It is the thing that allows you to hear what the other person is saying, even if you don’t know what all the words mean exactly.  It is the thing that allows you to say “I don’t understand what you mean, will you help me understand?” and have it land as “I am here.  I care.”

For me, the hardest part of connection was getting from the Null Set (the image above) to something, anything.

It was like going from sitting on the couch to taking a 10 mile walk.  That transition was huge and I had no idea how to do it.  So we coloured.  We did number puzzles.  I read to him.  I set up a box of age appropriate table-top activities.  We didn’t have to go anywhere, we didn’t have to spend money.  We just needed something that would keep us in the same space for long enough that we could do something TOGETHER.

It was hard work.  It took hours of just being there.  Hours of my presence saying “I am here.  I care.”  He didn’t trust me.  He didn’t trust that I would come back tomorrow and do it all over again.  Heck, he didn’t trust that if he had had a hard day I would still show up that evening.  That was hard for me.  Sometimes I showed up with hurt feelings, sometimes I showed up so tired I couldn’t see straight, sometimes I showed up hating my life so much I could hardly breathe.  They weren’t great evenings, but I showed up, I put in my best effort which often wasn’t as great as I wanted it to be, but I was there.

VERY VERY slowly the space between us grew.  As it grew it was easier to grow.  It required less input to maintain it and very little to grow it but of course it is now significantly easier to maintain and grow so we are both more inclined to put in the effort.

Everything is easier now that our connection is strong.  We have more grace, more forgiveness, more understanding.  We can have a bad interaction and bounce back out of it with ease (and an apology).