Anywhere To Put It
Most families I've worked with didn't stop loving each other. They ran out of somewhere to put it.
I hear the same sentence in almost every family I’ve ever worked with. Doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in a court-ordered reconciliation session or a living room that costs more than most houses. Somewhere in that first hour, someone says it.
We used to be close.
I used to take that as a throwaway line. I don’t anymore. I think it’s one of the most real things anyone says in the whole session that can get bypassed and is usually the only thing nobody follows up on.
I think of a mother and her fifteen-year-old who’d stopped speaking directly to each other. Everything went through a caseworker or through a door closing hard enough to make the point. And I think of a father, brilliant, and could run a company of four hundred people without blinking, who told me once, almost as an aside, because it embarrassed him, that he’d rarely, if ever, had one real full day with his own son. Just days that happened to occur while his son was also in the house.
None of them lacked love for the others. I want to say that plainly because it’s the part people assume is broken, and in my experience it almost never is.
What’s missing is structure. Somewhere to actually land on each other, on purpose, without a crisis being the thing that finally gets everyone in the same room.
It honestly bothers me how much structure we build for everything except this. A company gets a meeting cadence. A team gets practice. We’ll defend a work calendar to the death and let the family calendar be whatever’s left over once everything else has taken its bite.
And something always takes the first bite. For the families the state sent to me, it was survival: the electric bill, the next emergency. For the families in community health, it was often the very systems meant to help them: a different caseworker for every problem, a different appointment for every kid, until the family had been sliced into pieces by people who were genuinely trying to be useful. For the families with money, I also watched it do the exact same thing. It just took longer for anyone to notice because providing looked so much like love from where they stood.
I don’t think any of them chose the distance. If you get each person alone, every single time, they’ll tell you they wanted more of each other, not less. What they didn’t have was anywhere to put that wanting.
A family runs on structure, whether anyone has ever studied family systems or not. Take the structure away, and the family doesn’t drift back toward warmth on its own. It organizes around whatever’s left in the gap instead. A screen. The next quarter. Nobody has to choose that. It just happens, the way water finds the low spot.
What actually moved something, in every one of these very different homes, had almost nothing to do with money. It looked like a normal day. Just protected the way we’d protect a work meeting. An actual hour, on the calendar, that happens whether or not anyone’s in the mood that week.
I keep coming back to that mother. Somewhere around the sixth or seventh Sunday of a dinner neither of them really wanted to be at, her daughter said something small and true across the table. The mother didn’t fix it. Didn’t reach for it. She just let it sit there a second, and then let the conversation move on. Nothing broke open. Nobody cried. She just came back again the next week.
That’s most of what I’ve actually seen work in that family, and in the ones with money, and everywhere between. Not some big breakthrough moment. A Sunday “meeting” was kept, over and over, until there was somewhere for them to actually be together again.
I don’t think we stopped loving each other. I think we ran out of anywhere to put it.
Where would you put yours if you started this week?