I heard from a good friend as a response to my last blog, that her group is her family. I thought about that, and thought how God really did put all the elements into our families that we need to grow emotionally. Unfortunately there is also always the potential to do harm as well. If we really could get a grip on the fact that this group is as committed a group as we may ever find in our lifetimes, even though for the first eighteen years or more of our lives, we may not be there by choice. However, what if we could choose to be there instead of fighting it?

Even though we can never see behind the curtains into what really goes on in a household, there are some families that come to mind when I think of how this might be true for a number of people I know. If we always hold the others in a safe and respectful place, there isn’t much that couldn’t be approached in that atmosphere. Living with others sometimes brings out the best and the worst in us.

As I read this I am watching a documentary on ADD (ADD and Loving It!…on PBS) and I think it is so well done that if it had been around when I was growing up, my family would have had a reference point for my behaviors and struggles, and we could have laughed more with me not always feeling like the brunt of the joke. I would also have been able to get started figuring out how to work with it rather than against it about forty years earlier. Might have saved me stepping into two marriages without much thought as to how that might go for me (and them!)

Wow, see even as I am writing this and totally absorbed, I am also not missing a word of the television program, proving one of the points they have just made! My poor family, they didn’t have a clue how to help me with something they really didn’t understand. No wonder I see ‘problems’ where other people don’t.  I am always trying to sort things that don’t seem out of place to many others. Now if I was only as concerned with the piles of magazines, books and assorted clutter in my home….:-)

This documentary has all the benefits of having ADD also, many of which you may notice in my blog! I hope so anyway. I know that all the people in my life help me appreciate my differences now and the long road it has taken me to get here. Thanks for being there and appreciating the differences!

As for my family, of origin and the one I created, I am going to get this DVD and we are all going to have some ah-ha moments over Christmas! Let the healing begin!