When Family and Friends Don’t Get It
admin April 11th, 2012
One of my biggest disappointments in trying to live simply has been having some family and friends not get the whole idea. One of the readers of the blog asked for suggestions on how to handle this issue yesterday and I decided it was definitely worth a post rather than just a reply.
As I’ve pointed out on our web pages, it really helps to have a community of people, or at least a supportive group around us to help pursue simple living. It gives us strength and courage as well as ideas and tools for living simply and with joy.
Conversely, having people close to us who don’t get it or actively oppose our effort is a serious drag. It takes so much more energy to even attempt living simply, and it can just take the joy out of it, not to mention creating doubts about our own motivation and effort. And when the doubters are spouses and friends it can make it very difficult indeed.
Of course there is also the more important issue of having those close to us not being able to benefit from this liberating way of life as well as, to put it uncharitably, continuing to be a drag on the world rather than a help.
So what do you do when those who are important to you don’t get it?
Well, my response for quite a while was to be frustrated, defensive, hurt, and angry. I wondered how anyone could be so unenlightened. How could anyone deny reality, the data, the Bible, and simple logic? To not immediately grasp the ultimate truth of simple living seemed to me to be the hallmark of a knuckle-dragger!
Never mind that Jesus taught us not to put people down and to be compassionate even to our enemies. Oh, yes I did manage to hide many of my true feelings when I ran into “non-believers” and I tried to be understanding, but my emotions were on a tear each time, so you can imagine that my responses to skeptics or critics was less than effective, and my feelings afterwards were usually as bad as they were before the encounter.
I was too bound up with my own ideas and feelings. I was not remembering my own past when I would have been a doubter or antagonist myself even if I had known about the concept of simple living back then. But after a while I figured out that I would have to begin by deeply appreciating where the doubters were coming from, i.e., the same place I had come from. I needed to revisit my own consumer addict past in a loving and forgiving way, and apply that to the folks I was talking to. I had to begin these discussions by forgiving myself and understanding the other person as well.
Tough to do, but with practice it sure beats being defensive.
My suggestion is to listen to, and really appreciate what a doubter has to say, listening for the underlying messages that he or she may not even be aware of themselves.
I certainly was not very aware of my own motives and feelings before I became familiar with the notion of simple living. Now-days I find it helpful, rather than telling someone why they are wrong, to simply tell them a few snippets from my own journey from consumer addict to simple liver. It tells the other person that I’ve had the same attitudes and desires they have, so we’re both starting from the same place rather than at opposite ends of the field – and I’m not judging them. The message is that we aren’t very different from each other and that I can comfortably understand a doubter’s position.
I don’t think the transaction should be like a salesperson trying to ‘sell’ a potential customer. Rather it is two people who need to understand each other more deeply – knowing that when the conversation is over both of us may still hold the same attitudes, and that’s really OK. What has changed is that we know each other better and perhaps we are more accepting of each other. That is sometimes, but not always, the beginning of attitude change. It takes time. It took me a long time. I need to give the other person a break too.
For instance, I clearly remember having some of these thoughts and feelings in the past:
Most important, I learned how deeply these acquisitive desires were embedded in my soul. I didn’t realize how much a part of my identity they were until I started doing without things I wanted. All our lives we have been taught verbally and by example by nearly everyone around us that having money, power, and stuff makes you successful and admired – something we all want. Not having them seemed to mean that we will be seen as failures. I have never been able to entirely vanquish that feeling which lives somewhere down in the pit of my stomach. It became an important part of who I was.
Getting rid of those ancient personal psychological/physiological bonds is extremely difficult. It’s a little like using a hunting knife to take out our own appendix, inflamed and painful as it might be.
The people who simply don’t care about simple living, who doubt us, who think we’re off the deep end, or that we’re un-American or un-Christian, ALL have these same feelings for the same reasons we do. Sharing our gut-wrenching personal journey through them and how the Gospel helped us do it may help some of these folks begin to deal with their own, and over time (and it may take a long time) they may begin to appreciate our passion for simplicity. But it sometimes does take an astonishing amount of patience. That’s where learning compassion comes in real handy. Patience with others demands compassion.
I’m sure that lots of readers have their own ways of dealing with this, so please post comments regarding your experiences with folks who don’t get it. What worked and what didn’t?
