Stop Trying to Save Your Family

How one mistake at work made me realise that I had to let my family go

My company was due to exhibit at a big tradeshow in Canada. We were based in London, UK, and I was handling all the logistics. I had to make sure we had the right tickets, hotels, transfers and equipment.

This sort of thing triggered my anxiety in a big way, which ruined my focus. When that happened, I made mistakes.

I used to book flights for the wrong day, forgot laptops, mislaid my passport. All because I find the process too anxiety-inducing to tackle properly.

So the Canada trip was booked and arranged. But there was something gnawing at me..

Sure enough, my colleague noticed that I had booked our flights and hotels on the wrong side of the country entirely. An easy mistake to make as the cities had similar names. But this was about to be a catastrophic waste of money if I couldn’t rebook.

The cold sweats followed the realisation that all my anxieties were coming to life. What a total disaster.

I managed to rebook everything in the correct city, but at a significant additional cost. I had failed – and my inner voices rejoiced at my abject stupidity.

When I returned home after the conference I recruited a therapist to help me to understand the source of this anxiety.

I was hoping for a silver bullet. A quick solution that would cure me of the knot that formed in my gut whenever I had to plan anything.

“What are your parents like?”

The conversation with my therapist always seemed to come back to my mother and father, but not about my childhood.

Instead she was interested to know why I feel like it is my role to keep my extended family together.

And it made me wonder too. And what does it have to do with my anxiety?

My parents’ relationship was on the rocks long before they divorced. Early on I felt that it was my responsibility to somehow help them mend their relationship. It obviously didn’t work.

After their marriage broke down my parents each fell into a depression, but primarily my father. I lived with him for a while until he found a new relationship.

He fell out with my brother. My brother fell out with my mother. I fell out with my brother. It was chaos for a few years.

Throughout the divorce and subsequent struggles within the family I would have recurring dreams in which we were all riding an inflatable kayak down a rough river. Every so often a family member would fall out, and I would be forced to choose who to save.

For about 10 years I worked hard to keep my family together, even when my father re-married and I started a family of my own.

Every argument between my parents and siblings became my job to fix, as though I could bring us back to 2003 when all was still OK.

But this was impossible.

It turns out over the last decade or so since my parents divorce I have cultivated a feeling of complete helplessness in many aspects of my life.

Nothing I did could solve my family’s problems. So I just assumed that anything else I did in life was also doomed not to succeed.

This, it appears, is one root cause of my anxiety.

“Stop trying to fix your family. Let them go.” said my Therapist.

This realisation was like a 1 tonne weight lifted from my shoulders.

I no longer cared what they said to each other when I wasn’t there. Their fighting became boring and predictable, rather than hurtful and damaging.

It made me smile as I left the therapist that day.

But that is not the end.

I now have to work out how to build my confidence again. And I plan to do that by goal setting and investing my time into projects that I love. Writing, running and playing music.

Oh, and my beautiful wife and son who truly deserve the best of me.

I haven’t made any big mistakes at work recently- let’s hope this anxiety has fucked off for good this time.