Heather Sellers experienced so much pain in her relationship with her father that she disconnected from him for decades. Then, in the last year of his life, when he was placed in a nursing home after a debilitating stroke, she began having weekly Skype calls with him: “Those conversations don’t cancel out the years of trauma and neglect. But neither does the bad cancel out those final moments of grace. Both are true. I hold both in my heart, and I am grateful. In the year before he died, I got to love my father—some.”

Heather’s poignant story, recounted in a recent New York Times Modern Love column, reminded me of a family I’ve been working with for the past year, helping them articulate and soothe deep pains that were formed over forty years ago and have been restimulated countless times since. The restorative process—which has involved individual, pair, and family empathy sessions—has been vulnerable for each of them. At the end of many family sessions, they say how hard this process is, and yet how “worth it” the experience has been. They’ve developed new understanding of each other’s feelings, needs, and perspectives, and a much greater capacity to speak and listen from their hearts. Whereas in our early sessions, the word “hate” was bandied about, now various family members will often interrupt a heated moment to say, loudly, desperately, “I love you!” Like Heather, they are getting to love each other—some. What could be more important in this life? [Read more…]