How To Stay Calm When Your Parents Are Fighting

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If you are looking for a sign to write your story, this is it.

It truly feels like the U.S. is in the midst of an ugly divorce. As someone who has been divorced for twenty-six years, I can tell you it absolutely doesn’t help when your parents are talking bad about each other. It only makes you want to disconnect. I’ve seen it with my children. I’ve seen it with the children of friends. It’s exhausting to listen to people who are supposed to be your caregivers attack each other or play victim. It’s not just the adults fighting. It’s the extending family taking sides.

At this point, to live in the U.S. and stay sane requires a good therapist and a good nervous system, otherwise you may want to escape into drinking and drugs, something I witnessed my youngest son Charlie do to ease the pain of a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional society that blamed and shamed him for his coping choices instead of showing compassion and support. Right now in the U.S. we are living in the middle of a very dysfunctional family.

if a field of flowers

were drooping and toppled

after a rainstorm

we wouldn’t say to them

“pick yourselves up!”

—healing is collective, radical ritual deck by lucy griswold

Lucy and Betsy, 2019

In 2019, my daughter Lucy designed a ‘pull’ deck of cards called the radical ritual deck. She was in grad school and created the deck as a side hustle to earn money. (Before that, in college at University of Texas, Lucy was a popular face painter in Austin for parties and music festivals). Lucy noticed that I used ‘pull’ decks in my Qoya-inspired movement classes as a way to set sacred space and create community. I always offered the cards everyone picked in class as a gift they could keep. So Lucy went about creating a deck, designing both the art and the messages, but it ended up being much edgier than the spiritual decks that the Qoya teachers used. It now feels like she created a deck that was needed for the changing times ahead.

The radical ritual deck, released six years ago, is an invitation to heal in community. The idea is to use the cards to generate discussions, ground gatherings, and grow revolutions. During a time when self-help books and talks were popular, the radical ritual deck invited us to think about collective-help and collective-care. As every book told us to fix ourselves, the deck noted that “our society in its current iteration wasn’t built for human flourishing and that all the personal issues we face—be it sadness, financial, insecurity, or anxiety—started outside of us. Consequently, the resolution to these issues must not simply involve looking within, but also looking without.”

Right now, the best way to look outward for how to support community-care and community-healing is to do it from a place where we are calm, especially our nervous systems. When my kids were upset or disappointed about our divorce, the boys reached for music. Lucy reached for art and dance. Right now, I’m reaching for nature. What are you reaching for?

Thanks for being here. Just like my Qoya classes, for this week on Substack, I’m offering a card pull from the radical ritual deck. Respond to this email with your address and I’ll pull a card and put it in the mail to you. Let’s grow new families and new communities and new societies together.

The radical ritual decks sold-out in 2019 but we’ve just discovered a limited supply (a box that got buried in a closet!). If you are interested in owning a deck, see below.

Lucy has a limited amount of radical ritual decks being offered at a special price, $44 for two decks (normally $44 for one deck), plus free shipping. We are only shipping the decks in the US.

More information about Betsy’s books and films at betsybmurphy.com