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American Families in Crisis

Fr. Jack Rathschmidt

(Excerpted from 1982 Jan/Feb Worldwide Family Spirit magazine)

Mary Ann was 42 when Artie was murdered. One minute she was sitting with him. The next minute he was dead. Snatched from her and her five children by kids needing money for drugs and dumped on a street corner with too many stab wounds to count.

Mary Ann is my friend and so was Artie. They were powerful people who did the best they could to make a good life with their kids. When Artie was murdered she showed her inner strength. Those who came to console her left feeling consoled. Those who had no faith began to believe again.

But Mary Ann is no god. She was dying inside like everyone else who loses someone to death. She had a thousand questions and almost no answers. She lived on instinct for awhile and then when that ran out she ran herself. But the haunting questions of death and dying wouldn't leave her alone.

Today Mary Ann still knows the loneliness of things never being the same, but now she recognizes what's happening to her even if she doesn't know why.

Mary Ann is a great lady and a little bit of her is inside all of us. The loneliness she feels is the same loneliness all of us feel as we struggle to make sense of a society that too often worships things and ignores its children.

The American family is in crisis and the root of the crisis is loneliness. We're dying as families and unless we recognize and accept this horror we won't be able to do anything about it.

Jesus said that the sick need physicians. The healthy don't. We're all sick and must seek healing if we want our lives to be different.

Mary Ann's horror is more typical than any of us want to admit and her story can teach us all a lot about ourselves.

No one who hasn't experienced the death of someone who was like your own skin can know the terror of being left alone physically, emotionally and spiritually. But all of us have known the loneliness of not being who we thought we were even though we hide it and deny it.

Loneliness masquerades as lots of other things because as Harry Stack Sullivan says, it's: "So terrible that it baffles recall." Or as Erich Fromm reminds us: "Loneliness is such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically anything to avoid it."

How we avoid loneliness and so deepen the crisis of the American family will be the subject of the first part of this article. How we can respond to loneliness will be the second.

Loneliness has a pattern. That's important to know. Patterns mean that we can predict what might happen next and knowing what might be coming can help us to cope much more effectively with life.

Not only does loneliness have a pattern but it also effects every member of our families. For our purposes let's consider how loneliness manifests itself in a marriage relationship.

Almost everyone who has lived for awhile has known more than a few moments of depression. Depression is anger turned inward and touches all of us when we least expect it. Married folks especially know the emptiness of

When Bill comes home from work after a day of unusual failure and frustration he's hoping for a few warm fuzzies from the woman he married even if he hasn't been especially warm himself for awhile. When he's met with a question about why he's late he tries to watch his tongue but the first stirrings of depression start to surface.

Bill wonders what he's doing wrong but instead of making himself vulnerable to his wife by asking to be with him he heads for the refrigerator and a can of beer. Or two.

Mary watches him sip his beer as she grows restless with thoughts of resentment about Bill's job becoming more important than she. She's been trying to respond to four kids' unending demands all day.

Even worse, Danny, their oldest boy, has done poorly in school again and she's reluctant to tell his father who's a stickler for hard work and good grades. Mary wonders what has happened to her plans for a perfect marriage and family. Her depression slowly creeps all over her.

Bill and Mary's family meal is begging to become a disaster. Unless they face the anger and hurt inside of them their kids will be drawn into the atmosphere of loneliness that's building.

Loneliness is all over the place and it's masquerading as depression. The American family is being eaten away by conflicting value systems and unfaced feelings. And depression is only the beginning.

Bill and Mary will probably make an effort to ignore or put aside the confusion they feel. That's their first mistake. Depression that's denied will more than likely turn into anxiety and anxiety can be terrible.

If you or I, sitting in our living rooms, feel uptight and fearful like being dangled from a bridge and we don't know why-that's anxiety. It's a gnawing kind of feeling that often won't go away and can begin to make us think we're losing our minds. Anxiety is only another way that loneliness tries to hide itself. It might sound like this.

Bill's depression leaves him tired and irritable the next morning. Someone at work suggests that his performance has been falling off lately. When he sits down for lunch the fact that he's never going to see forty again grips his mind and makes a meal stick in his throat. A call from home that comes just after he gets back to his desk tells him that one of his kids has an ear infection.

Out of no place a fear seems to envelop Bill and no matter what he does the rest of his workday it won't leave. Someplace in the back of his mind a small voice suggests that he is a failure. He tries to push it away but it won't budge. When Bill gets home he doesn't even pause to say hello to his family before taking a long swallow of beer.

When Mary asks Bill to call the kids for dinner he snaps at her about the kids being her responsibility. Bill is terribly lonely and doesn't know how to say it. Even if he could, he wouldn't. How do you tell your wife that you're lonely? What would she think if she knew how uptight he was?

Mary, unfortunately, is no help. She was stung by Bill's remarks about the kids being hers and rather then responding to Bill she begins to prepare herself for a long night of arguing about how the children are doing in school. Both of them will try to win the argument and both of them will lose the war.

Loneliness is hiding again and anxiety and drinking follow each other like kids in a candy store. Bill continues to drink and Mary goes to bed in tears telling him that he's becoming an alcoholic.

Loneliness is hiding on the living room couch as Mary sleeps alone in a queen sized bed.

Bill's neck is stiff when he awakes the next morning and he's bitter. The couch wasn't big enough to hold him and neither was Mary. Bill is determined to do something about his life but has no idea where to begin.

For the first time since he got married he considers separation and divorce. The loneliness that's eating away at the fabric of his life and family is still not recognized. The bitterness that he feels is the next step in the pattern that is so clearly emerging.

When Bill gets to work that morning he's met by a concerned colleague who suggests they have lunch. Sally is the most sensitive person whom Bill has met this week and the seeds of a disastrous relationship are being planted.

Bill feels better after lunching with Sally and the two glasses of wine have allayed his uptight feeling. Perhaps, he begins to think, his life can have some meaning again.

As soon as the effects of the wine wear off Bill realizes that he has to go home. Although he tells himself that he's done nothing wrong, his conscience won't leave him alone. If only Mary could understand. He's anxious to talk with his wife but she's left his supper warming in the oven with a note telling him that she's at young Bill's baseball game.

The loneliness he feels batters Bill and it will take more than a couple of beers to change his sense of abandonment.

Mary feels no better at the baseball game so she decides to stop and see her sister for a cup of coffee on the way home. The talk they share is helpful but goes no place when Mary comes home to find Bill already asleep on the sofa.

What can Bill and Mary do? The depression they've felt has led to anxiety and drinking. The bitterness that's inside them has pushed them toward relationships outside their marriage. The loneliness that's underneath or behind or in back of everything that's happening to them hasn't even been recognized, much less faced.

Bill and Mary have some decisions to make and their deliberations will be the stuff of their future together. Either they will begin again to find ways to express the love they have for each other or their relationship will continue to break down and with it the American family.

It goes without saying that their decisions will be important for their own lives as well as thousands of couples like them.

Loneliness is an insidious disease. It eats away at everything we do and everything we hope to be. In order to combat it we must get behind the faces it wears and reach for solutions that attack the disease itself. Somehow we must find ways to be more present to each other, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The biggest mistake most of us make is not recognizing that we are facing a deadly enemy. There is no lack of clinical medical evidence that loneliness can kill. Husbands and wives especially must face the reality of loneliness in their lives together.

In my experience as a counselor the only lasting response to loneliness that seems to be effective is a good relationship. This does not mean that people who support one another in good relationships won't have lonely moments. It does mean that good relationships help make loneliness a sometime thing and not a way of life.

Let's take sometime, then, to examine what makes relationships "good" in the hope of acknowledging, accepting and going past the loneliness that all of us sometimes feel.

The most fundamental dimension of any good relationship is presence. We have to be with each other frequently and consistently. This sounds so obvious that we often go right past it in our consideration of what makes a relationship good.

There is no substitute for presence. Anyone who has ever had to move from one neighborhood or city to another knows what I mean. No matter how hard we might try to keep our relationships the same even after a move, they change.

Marriage and family life are no different. Just because several people live in the same house doesn't mean that they're really with each other.

Presence means more than taking up space under the same roof. It means listening actively to one another with the hope that we will be able to put aside our own needs and desires in order to be with the other.

The second thing that makes a relationship grow is the effort on each person's part to pay more attention to the other than to him/herself . Because life can be so difficult for some, especially those who suffer from mental torture, this aspect of a relationship is often forgotten. Still, it remains a paradoxical key for all those seeking a way out of loneliness.

How ironic it is to realize that the best way to put aside our own troubles is to listen to someone else's heart. This step in a developing relationship also allows us to realize that the hurt we sometimes feel in a relationship is not so much a rejection of us but the poor self image of the one inflicting the hurt showing itself.

Too often, when we are thinking poorly of ourselves we tend to lash out at those around us without even realizing that we are angry at ourselves. Paying attention to someone else is one of the healthiest ways of reaching for mental health and spiritual growth.

Certainly, Bill and Mary would have a much easier time of their life together if they could really reach past their own hurt and confusion to listen to the other.

Another way of helping a relationship grow and loneliness go is to develop common interests. Doing things together as a married couple and as a family allows us to see aspects of the other's personality that never surface in the family unit alone.

It's a fascinating experience for parents to see their children perform in front of others. The gentleness they never see at home bursts out when their kids minister to the aging or little ones. The good humor that is too often absent from the family meal shows itself at community parties and get togethers.

In the same way young people have a chance to see their parents live out their values when everyone is engaged in family activities that go beyond the immediate household. Even working with our hands on a family project can enable father and son or mother and daughter to talk to each other without the formality of a meal or family discussion.

I have an old uncle who disagrees with me on just about everything. Politics, religion, even sports are occasions for heated discussions. Still, that man loves me very deeply and that love enables us to listen more to each other than to the issues that divide us.

If we allowed every difference of opinion to separate us we'd both be pretty lonely people. Both of us know that the other person is more important than any issue.

That's another way we can respond to loneliness and the crisis of the American family. We belong to each other. No matter how deeply the differences in our passion might go we have to remember that we are family and that nothing ought to separate us.

Families that forget that they are flesh of each other's flesh and bone of each other's bones will surely experience a kind of killing loneliness that is very hard to heal.

The last and perhaps the most effective response to loneliness is the willingness to develop a common vision. Pluralism has become a way of life in our society and although no one can quarrel with the desire to broaden our perspectives, at the same time we run the risk of losing our identity.

Saying who we are and what we believe as Catholic families in America does not mean that we have to be rigid and unbending.

We have a need to re-establish our identity and so give our young people clearly stated and attainable goals for a new society.

The gospel continually calls us to unity with God and one another. Nothing heals loneliness like family unity and communication. The more we strive to make the gospel a way of life, the more we can speak to our society and to the world about the vision of Christ that "all might be one."

No one ever said that being family was always going to be easy. Jesus does promise us, however, that all things are possible. Loneliness doesn't have to kill the American family if only we'll believe that our relationships with one another are the foundation of happy and peaceful lives.

Nothing can take the place of one person. The more we live what we speak, the sooner we'll end the crisis that threatens the fabric of our lives together.

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