The Family Who Doesn’t Understand
A love letter to black sheep everywhere.
I’m on book deadline for two weeks. While I’m frantically editing, I thought I’d share a few popular posts from my main blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. I’ve been writing there since 2008.
The first post in this series is about one of the most frequently recurring conversations I’ve had with readers over the years: how their family doesn’t understand them, and what to do about it. Please like and share if you enjoy it. 💚
Several times on my 63-city tour for The Art of Non-Conformity, people came up to me with extra copies of my book for signing. “My family doesn’t understand me,” they said, “So I’m giving them your book.”
“Thanks,” I always said… although I worried a little about signing books for people who didn’t necessarily want them. I learned to invent a specific inscription for these copies:
“To Barbara: I’m not sure you’ll like this book, but your daughter isn’t crazy.”
“Barbara” could have been “Mom and Dad” or someone’s partner or brother or protective cousin, who loves their family member dearly, but sometimes loves them a little too much to let them have their own life. To be fair, sometimes the generational gap is reversed, and it’s the kids who worry about their parents.
Guess what? I don’t think that reading my book, or anyone’s book, can change a perspective like that. That’s the bad news: it’s rarely that simple to change someone’s mind. To those on the outside, examples of successful non-conformists aren’t very persuasive, because they’ll always find reasons why someone else’s success is a special case.
But thankfully, there’s also some good news. If you want to influence your family, you can lead the way through your own actions. They’re not going to change their worldview by something you post online, but when they see you following through on your big dreams, they can’t help but notice.
The challenge you face, therefore, is to be courageous in the face of opposition from those who love you.
This is no small challenge, since you would much rather fight dragons or vampires or something that is clearly evil. Your family isn’t evil and you probably can’t ignore them, but you also can’t ignore your dreams for very long without letting them die.
Some battles are better won by example than by persuasion. You can talk forever about the adventure you’d like to take, why you want to study a subject you’re interested in instead of one they think would lead to better career options, or whatever. And by following this well-trod path, you may make marginally incremental progress in the form of compromise.
Or you can put it in perspective for them: I’m doing this because it is important to me. I’m willing to give up other things to make it work.
More often than not, they’ll get used to it over time. You may always be thought of as the black sheep, the strange one, the outlier. But you’ll eventually earn your right to freedom, and maybe even some grudging respect.
Then they’ll say, oh, there goes _____ again. That’s just what she does. Or they’ll think, _____ has another crazy idea… but the last one worked out pretty well for him.
And once in a while, a funny thing happens: they’ll learn from the decisions you made, and how you stepped out and faced down your fears. (They may or may not realize that some of your fears had to do with them, but by then, it won’t matter.)
So for anyone in a culture where non-conformity is implicitly misunderstood, or who just feels pressured to be like those around them, it’s up to you to lead by example. Who knows—maybe some of your family will end up changing with you. Wouldn’t that be something?
Love this. At 65 I finally started pushing past the limits I’d put on myself to conform to what I thought was acceptable - I finally realized that it wasn’t all acceptable to ME. Which explains the recent nose piercing and the tattoo I’m getting in a few weeks (my first), which will say, “ Unapologetically Me”. It’s about time.
Psychopathy and Entrepreneurship
Nothing is all good or all bad. Not even psychopathy.
The good: I come from a family of entrepreneurs dating back to the turn of the last century on both sides of my family.
My great-great grandfather on my dad’s side sold real estate in New York City before World War I. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather on my mom’s side owned a bakery and then a cafe in Walnut Creek, Iowa, enabling them to put their son through college during the Great Depression.
My grandfather on my dad’s side built up and bankrupted a dairy empire called Garden State Farms. My mom owned a dress shop called “The Daisy.” She was also a realtor and self-employed aesthetician. My dad was a freelance food technology consultant, from Lithuania to China, ultimately dying in Columbia from the combination of COPD, undetected lung cancer (lifetime of smoking) and the high altitude.
In my family, doing what you want to do — pursuing your entrepreneurial non-conformist dreams — is the norm. From childhood, me, my brother and sister were encouraged and supported to listen to what we were interested in, and do that. Poetry? Reading? Art? No problem. I never lacked for books or specialized education for writing and poetry. My brother never lacked for art classes. He now owns a tile store in Charlottesville, Virginia —Sarisand Tile. He designs kitchens and bathrooms and uses tiles as his method of artistic expression. I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire adult life, first as a private tutor and now as an Internal Family Systems life coach and teacher.
The bad: I come from a family of profound mental illness. All my pathbreaking, non-confirming ancestors were profoundly personality disordered. I won’t go into the gnarly details here, but there’s a reason I’ve done over 7,000 hours of psychotherapy on myself as a result of the Mt. Everest of trauma they perpetrated. The very same inner freedom and capacity to go against social structures that enabled them to build businesses is the inner freedom and capacity they had to also destroy the children around them. It was a swinging door: no adhering to social rules publicly = business creation; no adhering to social rules privately = interpersonal destruction.
In an ideal world, our parents would encourage us to be rule-breakers and non-conformists without also embodying the very, very dark side of those qualities. I am living proof that the gift of having parents who support non-conformity is not what it looks like on the outside, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many people who were given the gift of non-conformist parents also experience the very extreme shadow side of that.
Some of us have to face the demons of parents who don’t encourage non-conformity. Some of us have to face the demons of parents who are non-conformists but alas, in a far too out-of-control way.
No matter what our challenge, the path of listening to our truths and our deepest callings, remains.
Here’s to living lives of fierce authenticity and embodying non-conformity in a way that’s generative and life-giving, not chaotic and destructive.